Summary
The Last of Us Season 2 hits its high point in Episode 6 with a wrenching, intimate chapter that makes key changes from the game… and they might even improve that story’s crowning moments.
I’m one of those insufferable fans of The Last of Us Part II who thinks it’s a work of towering genius, and I’ve done nothing throughout these recaps but moan about all the ways in which Season 2 of the HBO adaptation has made changes to it. Episode 6 puts me an in awkward position, then, since it makes some changes to the game’s most iconic individual scene, as well as deploying it much earlier than you’d think (it’s the game’s closer, literally our goodbye to Ellie and Joel; this is the penultimate episode of a season that only constitutes half of the story). And yet those changes – this in a bit of whisper – improve that scene, providing it with more texture and resonance, and it’s the payoff to a string of superbly recreated and sometimes brilliantly imagined original moments of intimate, complex pseudo-father-daughter relationship-building that echo the highs of Season 1.
Look, I’m as surprised as you are. This season has missed this beauty and restraint so much because it has been too busy fumbling through a story that has often seemed too complex and ambitious to adapt properly. Here, the fact that so much of what we see is totally new, dreamed up by series co-creator Craig Mazin and directed by Neil Druckmann himself, frees the show from its obligations to adapt each key moment one-to-one or justify the changes when it doesn’t. It revels in the tenderness and difficulty of Ellie and Joel’s relationship but bolsters it with the original scenes and subplots. It’s really very good.
A History of Violence
As teased at the end of the previous episode, this one is all flashbacks centring on Ellie’s relationship with Joel. Most of the scenes are set on Ellie’s various birthdays, each one year removed from the last, showing the evolving – or perhaps I should say devolving – relationship between her and her surrogate father figure. But the cold open is different, since it’s set pre-pandemic and finds Joel and Tommy as children, fearing a licking from their stern cop patriarch, played by Tony Dalton.
This is important because it establishes some things about Joel and Tommy’s long-standing relationship – Joel already had a martyr complex back then, willing to take the blame for Tommy trying to buy drugs, which resulted in a fight Joel had to end in his usual manner – and it also gets directly at the story’s themes of generational violence, abuse, and trauma.
See, Joel and Tommy are both petrified of the old man because he’s prone to hitting them. As Tony Dalton explains to young Joel, that’s because his own father hit him, hard enough to need his jaw wired shut. He explains it thusly:
“I’ve hit you. And I’ve hit Tommy. But never like that. Not even close. I mean, maybe I go too far. I just… I don’t know. But I’m doing a little better than my father did. And you know, when it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”
Remember those words.
Growing Up Fast
The first couple of flashbacks find Ellie closer in age to the version of her we met in Season 1, which many would argue is the version that Bella Ramsey has been detrimentally playing throughout most of this season. She and Joel are settling nicely into Jackson. Sure, Ellie’s pining to be given a little more freedom and be allowed out on patrols, but Joel is trying desperately to cling to her youth. They still bond over music – Joel plays a cover of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” – and little father-daughter excursions, including one to the Wyoming Museum.
This is many people’s favourite scene from the game, a totally playable and jeopardy-free flashback calling back to more innocent times when Joel was alive and Ellie wasn’t a rage-filled revenge monster. Druckmann directs the whole thing with a just-right sentiment, finding all the moments of hope and wonder and letting Ellie’s remaining innocence trickle away through them. This is the adaptation at its most honest and accurate, totally free from embellishment.
From here, it’s clear that nothing will quite be the same again. The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6 leaves this scene, this version of Ellie, and this version of her relationship with Joel behind for good.
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
Growing Up Too Fast
By Ellie’s seventeenth birthday, she is fully off the rails, smoking pot, fumbling around with girls, getting tattoos, and having decided to live on her own in a garage rather than in the child-like shrine of her bedroom in Joel’s house. It’s important to note here that she has already begun to suspect what happened back in Salt Lake City with Joel and the Fireflies. And that secret, along with the usual hormonal issues – teenage girls aren’t exactly known for being reasonable – are creating more and more distance between them.
But cleverly, what really causes the fracture is what happened with Eugene. Ever since the premiere, we’ve known that Joel killed Gail’s husband, Eugene, but not why. Here we see that play out. It’s Ellie’s first patrol, her seventeenth birthday present. Eugene fell foul of an infected. He has been bitten, and he’s dying. His final wish is to be taken back to Jackson so he can see Gail one more time before he dies, which is against protocol. Joel wants to play by the book and shoot Eugene outright. Ellie wants to grant him his final wish.
In an echo of the past, Joel pretends to Ellie that he’ll take Eugene back to Jackson and sends her to fetch the horses, then he leads Eugene to a cliff overlooking the lake and shoots him in the back of the head. Joe Pantoliano plays Eugene and is wrenching in this sequence, as he resigns himself to his fate and conjures an image of his wife in his mind before Joel blows his mind out through his forehead. Ellie is horrified, not just at the death, but at the deception; Joel had promised. Just like last time.
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia
The Truth and the Porch
Ellie rats Joel out to Gail, which is the cause of their general present-day antipathy. The ease with which Joel lies is frightening but understandable; he’s a guy who can make the hard calls but can’t navigate the hard conversations around them. This happens not long before the New Year’s Eve party in the premiere, where Joel pushes Seth over for being bigoted to Ellie, and Ellie berates Joel for interfering. It’s at this point that Joel retires to his porch to nurse his coffee and play guitar.
We knew that Ellie was lying to Gail about not having spoken to Joel that night. She did. This is the infamous “porch scene”, the one that ends the game. It’s the moment when Ellie and Joel finally have a conversation about what happened in Salt Lake City. In the game, Ellie had travelled back to the hospital on her own and confirmed her theory for herself. Here, it’s more of a hunch, but seeing the similarities in how Joel lied about Eugene confirms that hunch. When she demands that Joel tell her the truth about what happened, he does. He confirms that there were no other immune people, no raiders, that he killed everyone, and that doing so robbed the world of a cure and Ellie’s life of meaning.
Ellie’s understandably devastated about this confession. Joel’s response is almost word-for-word what he says in the game, with some additional I-love-you for good measure: “If somehow I had a second chance at that moment, I would do it all over again.” It’s the most honest and loving thing he can say to Ellie in that moment; that no matter how much it hurts her, how much it will ruin their relationship, how much it’s selfish, he’ll do anything to protect her.
But the next bit’s new. Calling back to the cold open, Joel says, “But if that day should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then… I hope you do a little better than me.”
The game isn’t about forgiveness, even though Ellie’s last words to Joel were that she would try to forgive him. It’s about ending a cycle that has been perpetuated through generations, sometimes well-meaningly and sometimes less so. It’s about doing better each time. This little line adds a great deal of significance to what will ultimately be the outcome of Ellie and Abby’s story, but we’re a ways away from that yet. As if to remind us, The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6 ends in the present day, with Ellie in the lashing Seattle rain, fresh from having bashed Nora’s brains in, heading towards Abby.
Towards her chance to do better.
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