Summary
The Last of Us Season 2 gets lost in a mire of contrivance and odd decision-making in Episode 5, hitting the key story beats but fundamentally missing what makes so many of them work in the game.
It was always going to be difficult to adapt The Last of Us Part II, which is a game that relies on the fundamental expectations of video games as a medium to tell a pretty complex story about grief, revenge, and various other attendant matters, none of them particularly positive. HBO’s The Last of Us got away with it the first time, but Season 2 is falling apart before our eyes. Episode 5, “Feel Her Love”, is a grab-bag of story elements that have been vaguely introduced in the last few episodes, knitted together by several remarkable coincidences and what seems like a complete misunderstanding of why any of these individual elements worked in their original form.
On the one hand, I do get it. The game was controversial because it was formally daring, making you play as the character who bludgeoned the first game’s fan-favourite father-figure to death for hours before eventually revealing who she was and what she was up to. Revealing that out of the gate was the first and probably most significant of this show’s many errors, but I understand that in TV, you don’t have the luxury of this player-character switch to fulfill the same narrative function. But there has to be a better way of organizing the rest of it.
It’s In the Air!
Take spores, as an example. It sometimes takes an effort to remember this since they’re so nonchalantly integral to the game, but the first season completely did away with the idea of the Cordyceps outbreak spreading via airborne spores. It was an odd change since the iconography of gas masks and overgrown fungus belching toxins into the air was pretty central to the series in my mind, but it was acceptable in Season 1, where most of the drama revolved around bites anyway. At some point it was obviously decided that certain key moments in The Last of Us Part II – such as, for instance, the Ellie/Nora stand-off at the end of this episode – wouldn’t function the same without the spores, so “Feel Her Love” is put to the task of introducing them.
Bizarrely, the way this is accomplished is via a flashback sequence to earlier in the Seattle timeline, with the WLF and the Seraphites still in an uneasy truce. W.L.F. leader Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), whom we met briefly in the previous episode, interviews Sergeant Park (Hettienne Park) about why she seemingly consigned several of her own squad, including her son, to their deaths. Basically, while exploring the bowels of a hospital, the team discovered the existence of spores, all became infected, and then insisted that the infection was contained by sealing off the floor. This scene only exists to square away some logistics for a later one.
There’s a lot of this going on here. At one point, Ellie once again picks up a guitar, strums a few chords, and becomes too upset to continue. Those who haven’t played the game wouldn’t know this necessarily, but that’s setting up another later moment involving Ellie and a guitar. The reiteration is really obviously intended to keep certain visuals and ideas in our minds, and it’s clunky, but arguably necessary (in the game there are several guitars that Ellie can find and strum in a similar way, triggering a little mini-game, but you can’t have that in the show because it’d be really weird.)
Laine MacNeil in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
True Romance
I didn’t mind the changes to Ellie and Dina first “getting together” in the previous episode, because it felt like a logical consequence of the changes made to facilitate the battle to defend Jackson against the infected in Episode 2. Quibbles about lines like “I’m going to be a dad” notwithstanding, it wasn’t the worst change. But the chickens come home to roost a little bit in The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 5, since Ellie and Dina still frequently slip into jokey, flirtatious newly-intimate mode at a point in the story when the drama is supposed to be ramping up.
This creates a number of weird interactions. Again, in the game, Ellie and Dina have spent several real-time hours together, and all of that time is peppered with small conversations that gradually reveal more about their backstories and depict the growth of their relationship in a more organic way. Here, the two of them have to lurch between various arch modes at a moment’s notice – they’re post-coitally playful, then Ellie’s concerned about Dina being pregnant again, then they have to stand still for an expository monologue about why Dina is determined to seek revenge for Joel, and then they’re in mortal peril. It doesn’t so much build intimacy as imply these two have only just met.
When the action kicks in – there’s an extended sequence involving many more of the stalkers that Ellie first encountered in the premiere – it feels totally at odds with the jokey teen-romance stuff. The fact that the two of them have to be saved by Jesse, who was able to follow them because they left the map they were using back at the theatre (having presumably consigned it to memory, I guess), doesn’t do much to establish their badass survivor bona fides. And this becomes a problem again later.
Cross Pollination
Changes to the particulars of the game’s narrative don’t bother me too much. I was mostly right, for instance, not to worry a great deal about Ellie and Dina leaving Jackson before Tommy, since Jesse and Tommy apparently sneaked out just after and everyone ended up in the same place, more or less. It’s not quite as engaging as the original version, but whatever.
But the big structural changes remain an issue in myriad ways. As mentioned, the game is divided up into two distinct but thematically unified perspectives and plays out very specifically, alternating between Ellie and Abby for extended periods of time. The show largely chose to do away with that by revealing Abby’s motivations immediately and also introducing other characters and ideas – like Isaac and the Seraphites – that are generally speaking more relevant to Abby’s storyline than Ellie’s. What this means in “Feel Her Love” is that right after their escape from the stalkers, Ellie, Dina, and Jesse just so happen to run into a Seraphite priest ritually disembowelling someone so that Dina can take an arrow to the leg and be carried away by Jesse, leaving Ellie alone.
These are minor changes, but they’re important because they create a feeling of artificiality that isn’t present in the game, so much of which relies on the audience having no idea who certain groups are or what’s going on. We learn things gradually, in tandem with the characters. At this point, we’ve already had multiple reiterations of how the Seraphites operate, so there’s nothing to really “discover” in these moments. They just feel like contrivances.
Tati Gabrielle in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
Hospital Visit
It’s worth reminding people that this is fundamentally a story about cyclical violence and how the trauma of loss can compel ostensibly decent people to behave in increasingly monstrous ways. You don’t get much of a sense of that in the show, since it can’t stop every few minutes for extended combat sequences in which Ellie murders swathes of WLF troops and Seraphites. The infected are fair game, which is why the show uses them so much, but it means that Show Ellie doesn’t have the demented ruthlessness of Game Ellie. And you can really feel that in the hospital sequence.
Here, Ellie chases Abby’s ally, Nora, through the hospital and eventually down into the spore-filled basement that was teased in the cold open. It’s pretty close to the game’s version of events, but wildly sanitized. Because the show doesn’t want Ellie sneaking through the hospital and slashing the throats of everyone she meets, she just kind of stumbles upon Nora without incident. During the chase, she avoids a lot of Stormtrooper-like inaccurate gunfire from soldiers who seem to wink out of existence the second she leaves the room. And then she ambles through the spores without a concern while Nora chokes to death as the infection takes hold, realizing with horror that Ellie is the immune girl who Joel butchered the Fireflies – including Abby’s father – to save in the Season 1 finale.
In the show Ellie has never encountered the spores before, so it comes across a little weird how confident she is about them posing no danger to her (in the games it’s already established at this point that she can’t be infected in this manner either. It’s a minor thing, but this is the kind of stuff I think about.) This is also the moment when it’s revealed that Ellie knew what Joel did at the hospital before he died; the next episode, based on the last-minute Pedro Pascal jump-scare, will likely be a flashback explaining how she found out, and how that revelation led to the breakdown in Joel and Ellie’s relationship.
But you don’t need me to tell you why this is important, since it completely recontextualizes Ellie’s revenge mission. She isn’t campaigning on behalf of a man she thought was innocent. She knows what he did and, as she says, she doesn’t care — she’s still happy to beat Abby’s whereabouts out of Nora using a metal bar. But Show Ellie has displayed very little to indicate this is where her head is at, while in the game, it’s really obvious. This fundamental contradiction really gets to the heart of why this season isn’t working, and why, sadly, it’ll probably continue to not work as things get even more grim.
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