This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, which is now streaming on Max.
When Season Two of The Last of Us begins, we are right back where we left Joel and Ellie, with him lying to her about what happened when she was unconscious, and claiming that the Fireflies will be able to cure cordyceps without her. Ellie doesn’t believe him, but also needs to believe him, because he’s Joel and she’s Ellie, and all they have is each other. So she makes herself accept the thing she so obviously knows is a lie. Then the action cuts back to Salt Lake City, where we see a group of Firefly survivors vowing to get revenge on Joel by any means necessary. As this small group’s leader Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) puts it, “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”
As we go into the opening credits(*), it seems that perhaps the plan is to stick in that rough time frame. Though two years have passed in the real world, Bella Ramsey doesn’t look substantially older (it helps that they were already in their late teens while playing a 14-year-old last time), so it could be done. But that’s not where the second game goes(**), and thus it is not where Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have chosen to take Season Two.
(*) On the screeners, at least, it’s the same title sequence as last season, which is disappointing. It’s part of a recent plague of TV show intros (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is another big offender) that are just long, slow CGI montages set to ominous music. It’s not interesting to watch more than once (if that), and says little about the show. Either come up with something compelling, or just do a quick title card and save the credits for after the show.
(**) As a reminder, these recaps are being written by someone who has never played either game. I know that this season is largely faithful to the first half of The Last of Us Part II, but I’m approaching it entirely as a TV show, rather than dealing with how it is and isn’t consistent with the game.
Instead, we jump forward five years (which means the show now takes place slightly in the future). Joel and Ellie have gone back to Jackson to be with Tommy, Maria, their son Benjy, and a community that is getting bigger and seemingly more prosperous by the day. Joel seems mostly past his action hero days, instead using his contractor skills to help secure the town’s infrastructure. (His hair is also grayer, and he wears readers to do his work.) Ellie’s 19 and a fixture on patrols, with a new partner in zombie-killing: her best friend and obvious crush Dina (Isabela Merced). She’s having a fine old time doing that, and getting fight training from Dina’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Jesse (Young Mazino), but she wants very little to do with Joel, for reasons we can assume but don’t know about for sure.
For a good chunk of the premiere, that’s the chief conflict, and mystery. We get hints here and there, particularly when Joel goes for a therapy session with Gail (Catherine O’Hara, so good playing against type in a mostly understated, dramatic role). He laments that he’s closer to Dina than to his own surrogate daughter, noting that Dina treats him like a good guy, “which I am” — the kind of willful self-denial that’s necessary to go on functioning after committing mass murder of a group of people whose crime was trying to provide a cure for the plague that has wrecked the world. Gail tries nudging him to say out loud what he did that has Ellie so upset — and Pedro Pascal continues to prove just how much he can say with just a faint change in expression, as we watch Joel’s face lightly twitch under her questioning — but all he will admit is that he didn’t hurt her. “I saved her,” he insists. Even if she didn’t want to be saved under that circumstance — which, somewhere deep down, Joel knows but can’t admit to himself. He can’t admit that he damned the world to make himself feel better.
Joel’s determination to be Ellie’s uninvited protector continues on a smaller scale when, later in the episode, he catches a homophobic townie, Seth (Robert John Burke), scolding Ellie and Dina for kissing each other at a New Year’s Eve dance, and calling them an anti-lesbian slur. Joel rushes in, like he always does, to knock Seth down, which only embarrasses and upsets Ellie further — both for what’s just happened, and for what she on some level seems to know that it symbolizes about Salt Lake City.
While Ellie and Tommy are out killing infected with a sniper rifle in an earlier scene, he’s annoyed that she can’t stop herself from loudly talking about her cordyceps immunity, and quips, “I swear, you and my brother: same goddamn fuckin’ person.” But we don’t know what Joel was like as a teenager. And for all of Ellie’s headstrong ways, she’s still young and developing emotionally, and her shields are all the way down when it comes to her uncontrollable attraction to Dina. It feels like the TV is loudly humming whenever Ellie looks at her, and Ramsey has rarely played the character as terrified as they do whenever Ellie and Dina are in close physical proximity. Dina’s more overtly romantic behavior at the dance happens to come when she’s had a few too many, and the moment is instantly ruined by Seth and Joel both behaving like jackasses, so it’s hard for Ellie to know how much of the kiss was real — which only makes it worse that Joel stepped into the middle of this confusing moment for her.
But despite Ellie’s roiling emotions, she and Dina also make an excellent — if easily amused (and amusing) — team when it comes to taking out infected. Things don’t go as planned when the two climb into an abandoned store, since Ellie falls through the rotting floor to a lower level, and then discovers an infected that is… smart. Or, at least, is able to hunt strategically, rather than just relentlessly pursuing anything it can hear. And if this isn’t an isolated incident, then this presents a huge problem for the remnants of humanity, most of whom have survived through a mixture of luck and simply being able to outthink these single-minded creatures.
Late in the hour, we also see that some cordyceps has infiltrated the pipes at the construction site Joel was overseeing, suggesting that even places that feel relatively safe really aren’t. To underline this point, the hour closes with the revelation that Abby’s group has finally tracked down its quarry, and are very close to Jackson.
For much of the premiere, Jackson feels as close to paradise as it’s possible to be in a postapocalyptic world. But this isn’t a show — and Ellie and Joel aren’t people — built for paradise. Trouble was always coming for them, and it’s already here.
From Rolling Stone US.
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