Summary
Episode 2 is undeniably the showpiece hour of The Last of Us Season 2, and it’s brilliantly constructed TV of an epic scale. For me and presumably some other fans of the game, though, it makes some changes that considerably lack the original version’s depth.
Only rarely will you see pre-release hype for a single hour of television as vigorous as what HBO was pushing for “Through the Valley”. Episode 2 is the big one as far as The Last of Us Season 2 is concerned. It’s the one with that moment, the thing that game fans knew about and have been waiting for TV fans to be blindsided by. It’s the one with action sequences — including one completely invented for the show — of genuinely extraordinary scale and quality. It’s big-budget AAA prestige television of a real distinguished vintage.
But as someone already familiar with this story in its original form, I found it oddly confounding. Some of the changes don’t make a great deal of sense to me, and in a one-to-one comparison, despite how similarly certain sequences are staged, the show can’t match the depth of feeling that characterizes the game. I already expressed some of these reservations in my recap of the premiere, but the nitpicking only intensified during “Through the Valley”.
The problem is that pissed-off gamers don’t want to hear the praise, and TV fans don’t want to hear the irrelevant moaning, so at the risk of annoying literally everyone who might be reading this, let’s try and break it all down as even-handedly as possible.
The Siege of Jackson
A lot of “Through the Valley” stays fairly true to the game’s early portions, though in a slightly different composition (which we’ll get to). But the centrepiece of the episode is a siege on the community of Jackson by the hordes of undead that have remained cryogenically frozen under the snow of a Wyoming winter, which puts Tommy amid the most expansive use of HBO’s budget since, I suspect, Game of Thrones.
This entire thing is exclusively for the show. It’s an interesting choice, since everything involving Joel and Abby is very similar, but this is a completely new backdrop that occupies a lot of focus. And I think it works. You could quibble about the logistics of the siege all you like, but fundamentally it’s an exciting, impressive-looking stretch of TV that interacts with what’s going on elsewhere pretty well. Tommy burns a Bloater with a flamethrower. A bunch of dogs rip out of the throats of the infected. It’s all good stuff.
It also gives Tommy more leadership responsibility and heroic focus than he’s afforded in the game, which is an interesting choice, but it also leads to some changes elsewhere that I think are less effective.
Rutina Wesley in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
This Ellie Needs to Grow Up
A lot has been made of Bella Ramsey as The Last of Us Part II‘s Ellie, a lot of it mean-spirited and unnecessarily harsh. I loved Ramsey in Season 1, even though the decision to cast an adult as a 15-year-old was probably shortsighted. Ellie doesn’t look any older this season, despite five very formative years having passed, and the performance hasn’t really evolved either. In the early portions of The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2, Ellie acts a lot like a petulant kid.
You see this in her interactions with Jesse and especially with Seth, who tries to apologize for his unnecessary bigotry during the dance scene in the premiere. Ellie’s right, it’s worth pointing out, that having a bit too much to drink doesn’t make you blurt out things you haven’t thought previously, but the performance is still a bit pouty. Game Ellie wasn’t really like that. She was sullen and a bit haunted, but she came across as older than her years, not younger.
Pairing Ellie up with Jesse here doesn’t help either. In the game, she goes out on patrol with Dina, and they both take shelter in Eugene’s weed grow to ride out the storm. But this stretch is really fundamental in Ellie and Dina’s romantic relationship. It’s a sensitive stretch of scenes between two characters who are figuring out themselves and their attraction to each other. Ellie doesn’t have any of that romantic chemistry with Jesse, so they literally just sit around until Ellie realizes Joel isn’t responding to radio hails and sets out to find him.
Abby Should Hit the Gym
“Through the Valley” opens with a dream sequence in which Abby relives the moment her younger self discovered her father’s body among the pile of Joel’s victims following the hospital raid in the Season 1 finale. She’s cautioned by her older, present-day self not to go inside the room, not to look, because Older Abby knows what she’s going to see, and how much it’ll haunt her.
In the game, Abby looks like she eats steroids for breakfast. A lot was made of this at the time, too. But in hindsight, it mattered that Abby looked like that. Anyone with any media literacy at all picked up on the clues that Abby’s grief had caused her to obsessively train her body for violence. It created a clear, visual before-and-after effect in any scene that featured her younger self. It made her intimidating.
This Abby, who’s tiny even by the standards of her own crew, doesn’t have the same vibe. It isn’t a huge issue, but it does matter, and it is noticeable. It takes something away from the character. But it isn’t the worst change.
Kaitlyn Dever in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
Joel’s Death Hits Different
I’m comfortable now in saying that it was a mistake to frontload Abby’s motivations for killing Joel. In the game, her getting caught short by the infected rising out of the snow — which looks great, by the way — and running into Joel by accident happens in almost shot-for-shot the same way, with the notable difference that Joel is with Tommy instead of Dina. But in the game, we have no idea who Abby is, what she wants, or what she’s planning. We can tell that Joel’s name is significant to her, but we don’t know why. Neither does Joel when he’s eventually lured back to the lodge.
This ambiguity is vital. The whiplash effect of Joel saving someone’s life only to be brutally murdered by her immediately afterward is part of the reason why his death was so impactful the first time around. How little Ellie and Dina know about the precise circumstances of the event when they set out for Seattle creates an investigatory quality to the journey, where the audience is learning alongside them what they’re up against. And then the player-character switch to Abby — which, granted, isn’t really possible in a TV show — allows us to see her point of view gradually develop.
The game’s fanbase never quite got over their hatred of Abby, even in its original form. I have no idea how the show fans are going to cope here, given how boringly cliche Abby feels as a villain, monologuing her motivations out loud just for the benefit of the audience. It all feels so lacking in comparison to the game, despite being authentically staged and brilliantly acted. Bella Ramsey is superb in the final few minutes, and I hope that the more scarred version of the character that emerges in the aftermath of Joel’s death suits her. I think it will. But for the time being, it’s disappointing to have such a brilliantly constructed episode of television feel so irritating.
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