The death of Joel (Pedro Pascal) hangs heavy over all of “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 3. Picking up just hours after where last week’s “Through the Valley” ended, this Sunday’s “Last of Us” begins in Jackson’s makeshift morgue. There, a distraught Tommy (Gabriel Luna) enters to finally look upon the dead body of his brother. As he begins to wash Joel’s arm, Tommy’s hand and eyes get caught on the broken watch that Joel never took off, the same one given to him by his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker). Gazing at his brother’s covered face, Tommy whispers, “Give Sarah my love.”
This moment of quiet grief and reflection is followed by another, much louder one. Hooked up to tubes in Jackson’s bustling, crowded hospital, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) awakens only to immediately have Joel’s murder at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) flash before her eyes again. She screams and sobs until Maria (Rutina Wesley) has her put back to sleep. From there, “The Last of Us” flashes forward three months. The episode, which is directed by Peter Hoar (who also helmed Season 1 standout “Long, Long Time”), finds Ellie fully healed and recuperated, physically at least. Before she is released, however, she must first convince Gail (Catherine O’Hara) that she has recovered enough emotionally to return to everyday life.
Gail asks Ellie about the last moment she saw Joel. “When I got home, he was on the porch, and I should’ve talked to him, but I didn’t,” Ellie says, remembering her return home after Jackson’s New Year’s dance. While Ellie says she is not going to let one final regret define her entire relationship with Joel, Gail is unconvinced. “In my last moment with Joel, he said he wronged you. Maybe bad,” Gail says, and Ellie does not cover up her surprise well. “What is it that he said that he did?” she asks. “Well, that’s the thing. It didn’t really make sense,” Gail responds. “He said, ‘I saved her.’” “He saved me a lot of times,” Ellie counters. She is lying, of course, when she pretends not to feel wronged or know what Gail is talking about, but the therapist lets her walk away nonetheless.
My Gun, It Comforts Me
As soon as Ellie exits her hospital room, her tough facade fades. She returns to Joel’s home and finds a box on his bed. In it, she discovers his broken watch, as well as his signature revolver, which she takes. Her tearful sobs into one of Joel’s coats are interrupted by Dina (Isabela Merced), who arrives with cookies and a confession that she not only knows the names of most of Abby’s crew, but also that they are members of Seattle’s Washington Liberation Front (W.L.F.). “It occurred to me, if you wanna find someone, and the only thing you know about them is where they’re gonna end up, maybe let them get there,” Dina says, defending her decision to withhold this information until now.
The two girls go to Tommy to ask for his help seeking out Joel’s killers. While he offers his support, he tells them it is not up to just him. He and the rest of the Jackson town council, including a newly inducted Jesse (Young Mazino), hold a meeting to vote on assembling a posse to avenge Joel. Most of the town is against it. One citizen preaches that Jackson should treat its enemies with mercy, while another declares that they do not have the resources to avenge just one person. Seth (Robert John Burke) is the only dissenting voice. He insists that Jackson can not set a precedent of letting its attackers walk away unpunished. Ellie, for her part, tells everyone in a prepared speech that she does not want to go after Abby and her friends because she wants revenge, but “justice.” As impassioned as her speech is, it’s not successful. The Jackson council votes 8-3 against avenging Joel.
In the wake of that development, Tommy seeks out Gail. “I just don’t want her to go down the paths Joel did,” he says. “Comin’ up with justifications and such. All he was really doing was lashing out.” Gail tells him that’s not a concern he should have because of Joel. “Turns out nurture can only do so much. The rest is nature,” she argues. “If she’s on a path, it’s not one that Joel put her on. No. No, I think they were walking side-by-side from the very start.” She concludes that “some people just can’t be saved,” reinforcing “Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin’s ongoing effort to convince viewers of a natural darkness within Ellie that apparently puts her beyond most people’s reach.
Scars, New and Old
Tommy’s concerns are justified when Ellie is next shown cleaning Joel’s revolver and preparing to go with it and a whole lot of other guns on a solo mission to kill Abby and her fellow Wolves. She is interrupted by Dina, who helps Ellie plan her journey to Seattle and tells her that she will be coming with to avenge Joel, too. The pair meets up with Seth on the outskirts of Jackson, who gives them a bag full of medical supplies and trades Ellie her rifle for his “better” one. In one of the most cinematic and visually striking moments that “The Last of Us” has ever achieved, Ellie spends the episode’s following minutes visiting Joel’s grave at sunrise. With its golden light and yellow plains, this scene establishes a Western vibe that the rest of “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 3 delivers on, especially in its subsequent montage of Ellie and Dina traveling to Seattle on horseback.
One night, the two take cover from the rain in a shared tent. Before they fall asleep, Dina asks Ellie about their kiss at Jackson’s New Year’s dance. “You were super high,” Ellie says. “And you were super drunk,” Dina responds. When Dina asks Ellie to rate her kissing skills, Ellie gives her a six out of 10, much to Dina’s displeasure. “You asked, and I told you. You can go on back to Jesse,” Ellie concludes. “I already did,” Dina counters with a grin, just in case any “Last of Us Part II” players had started to hope the HBO series would cut out that game’s worst storyline. Dina, a natural-born flirt, then ends the conversation by telling Ellie, “I wasn’t that high,” when they kissed. As fun as this scene is, it falls short of the pair’s basement make-out sesh from “The Last of Us Part II,” which a lot of gamers were not happy was cut from “Through the Valley.”
As Dina and Ellie get closer to Seattle, they pause to inspect the dead bodies of an entire group of bow-and-arrow and sword-carrying, religious worshippers with matching facial scars known as Seraphites, a.k.a. Scars, who were introduced earlier in the episode. While Ellie and Dina believe their quest will be easy, the final scenes of this Sunday’s “Last of Us” prove otherwise. As the two ride slowly into Seattle, the episode cuts to Manny (Danny Ramirez), who communicates via radio with another W.L.F. soldier from the top of the Space Needle. The episode’s final image of dozens of marching soldiers then reveals the truth of the post-apocalyptic Seattle that Ellie and Dina have wandered into. They do not just have a pack of Wolves waiting for them in the city, but an entire army of them.
The Land of Wolves
Thus ends an episode of “The Last of Us” that, in its interest in post-apocalyptic factions like Jackson, the Scars and the W.L.F., feels more like an installment of “The Walking Dead” than any of the HBO drama’s past chapters. (It does not help that a scene like the Scars’ introduction is ultimately little more than a clunky kind of exposition dump.) With all that in mind, it seems fair to say that “The Last of Us” has an uphill climb ahead of it, now that Pascal’s Joel is dead.
The only thing previously separating “The Last of Us” from other, lesser zombie shows like “The Walking Dead” has always been its high-level, cinematic budget, and the star power of actors like Pascal. “The Last of Us” Season 1 was compelling not because of its human and infected villains, but because of the deeply felt, believable relationship that grew throughout it between Pascal’s Joel and Ramsey’s Ellie. With the loss of Pascal, “The Last of Us” has lost a lot of its star power, and it has also lost the central relationship that elevated it and made it seem distinct in the first place.
Moving forward, viewers are going to have to decide for themselves what it was that they found intriguing about the end of “The Last of Us” Season 1. Was it that both Joel and the Fireflies took Ellie’s agency away from her in the moment when it mattered most — and that Joel subsequently lied to her out of a selfish fear of losing her? Or was it the violence that Joel unleashed in his quest to save Ellie? The question, in other words, is what is more interesting: Physical violence or personal, emotional betrayal? Plenty of the former is still to come, but it does not seem like there is going to be as much of the latter from here on out.
“The Last of Us” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
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