‘The Last of Us’ Episode 6: The Way We Were

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, now streaming on Max. 

In its first season, The Last of Us took a detour from Joel and Ellie’s adventures to present the beautiful postapocalyptic love story of Bill and Frank. It was the most acclaimed episode of the show’s first year, despite barely featuring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. But no matter how much people loved it, no one was clamoring for the series to abandon its lead characters in favor of more of Joel’s old friends. 

The penultimate chapter of Season Two is a different sort of departure episode: a look back at what happened in the five-year gap between the seasons, and a throwback to when the series revolved entirely around Joel and Ellie’s relationship. But where “Long Long Time” felt like a complete story about Bill and Frank that required no follow-up, the chance to watch Pascal and Ramsey together again only reinforces the sense that the series — if not the game before it — chose poorly in killing off Joel to send Ellie and Dina on a pointless and self-destructive revenge mission. 

The episode is meant to underline the reason Ellie has committed to this course of action, by reminding us of how much Joel mattered to her, and by finally showing us the argument they had about his actions in Salt Lake City. But it does its job almost too well; as the end of the hour drew near, all I wanted was more material set in Jackson during those missing five years, rather than to head back to Seattle to watch Ellie continue to pursue Abby. 

Removed from the messier context of Season Two, though, this was a spectacular episode of television, and one that very much lived up to the standard set by “Long Long Time.” 

We open not within the five-year gap, but in Austin in 1983, when Joel was a teenager. He and Tommy live in fear of their policeman father, superbly played by Better Call Saul alum Tony Dalton, and when the boys get into a fight because Tommy was trying to buy drugs, Joel decides to take the fall, knowing he can handle a beating more ably than his kid brother. But when their dad comes home to clean up this mess, he isn’t full of rage. He’s just tired, and sad, especially when he tells Joel about his own father, who was far more abusive than he’s ever been to Joel and Tommy. He describes the time his dad broke his jaw for stealing a candy bar when he was 10, and admits that yes, he’s hit his own sons, “But never like that.” As he tells the story, he’s not the terrifying man that Joel knows, but the terrified 10-year-old boy whose jaw had to be wired shut for two months. It’s an incredible moment, and one where Dalton seems uncannily like Pascal. Hurt people hurt people, and sometimes the best you can manage is to hurt the next generation a bit less than the previous generation hurt you. 

From there, we pick up two months after Joel and Ellie returned to Jackson from Salt Lake City. At this point, the episode begins backfilling various details that were alluded to earlier in the series. Seth, for instance, is an ex-cop from Milwaukee, and we see Ellie on the day that she deliberately burned her arm so she could wear short sleeves without anyone recognizing her bite marks. Joel customizes Ellie’s guitar for her as the first of this episode’s many wonderful birthday presents, and even plays Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” for her, which she performed in the Seattle theater earlier this season(*). As he sings, we are reminded that Ellie looking at Joel with pure, unfiltered, overwhelming love was always the series’ biggest superpower, which helps justify the terrible turn she’s taken as a result of his loss, but mostly just seems like a waste of resources to have to do without it. 

(*) The song is from a 2013 album. In the show’s timeline, the cordyceps plague began in 2003. So now we have to wonder what else is different in the series’ reality versus ours. Did the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino in the Nineties? Was there at least one season of Mad Men before the world ended?    

The next year’s present is even more impressive: a trip to a nearby museum where Endeavour, the command module from Apollo 15 was on display when the apocalypse happened(*). Ellie’s nerdy devotion(**) to all things related to the space race remains endearing, and here we see that it makes her imagination powerful enough that she can feel like she’s actually blasting off into orbit, and beyond. 

(*) In our world, you have to make a trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to see it.

(**) She’s not too nerdy, however, to have a problem with wearing a Gemini space helmet inside an Apollo spacecraft.  

That birthday suggests that Joel hasn’t yet realized that Ellie is queer, and when he later catches her fooling around with tattoo artist Kat, he dismisses the whole thing as “experimenting,” and insists that Ellie doesn’t know what she’s saying when she insists that this is who she is. The season premiere was vague enough about the reasons for Ellie and Joel’s estrangement that it was easy to assume that she moved out of the main house(*) over the events of Salt Lake City. Instead, it turns out to be over this fight, which in turns provides some more context to why Joel so badly overreacted to Seth hurling a homophobic slur at Ellie and Dina in the premiere. 

(*) As she’s packing up, we see that her record collection includes an album by Zamfir, master of the pan flute. In the post-apocalypse, sometimes you’ve gotta take what you can musically get. 

Another time jump takes us to Ellie’s 19th birthday, where Ellie has finally worked up the courage to confront Joel about what she implicitly understands about Salt Lake City, even if he’s never outright told her. Before that, though, Joel’s gift this year is to take Ellie on her first patrol, which goes much less swimmingly than their museum field trip. The season premiere established that Joel had killed Gail’s husband Eugene, and here we see Eugene in the fleshy form of the great character actor Joe Pantoliano. Eugene was once a firefly, but now he’s just an old man who wants to get home to his wife, if only he hadn’t been infected while out and about. He pleads with Joel to let him go back to Jackson to say goodbye to Gail before they execute him, and Ellie begs Joel to do it. But Joel will always put protecting Ellie ahead of everything else in the world — the fate of the world itself included — and the risk of letting Eugene turn before they get to their destination is more than he wants to chance. He sends Ellie away, then leads Eugene towards his execution. Like Dalton earlier in the episode, Joey Pants is able to convey an entire life that his character has lived in only a few minutes of screen time, so that when he tries to picture Gail’s face one more time before Joel kills him, it’s like we’re seeing exactly what he’s seeing, even before he says, “I see her” right before the bullet comes. Joel tries to lie to Gail, but a bitter Ellie blurts out the truth, and we’re reminded that another of Bella Ramsey’s superpowers is the way their face seems to change shape when Ellie feels betrayed by someone she trusted. 

Our final jump is less than a year, to the events of the season premiere, which we now see from different angles. The most significant new addition is the episode’s conclusion, where it turns out that after Ellie breezed past Joel when she got home, she later came back out to talk to him. She finally gets him to talk about Salt Lake City, and she’s understandably furious when he tries to justify his actions by saying that the cure would have killed her. “Then I was supposed to die!” she tells him. “That was my purpose. My life would have fucking mattered! But you took that from me! You took it from everyone!” And it’s here that we return to the lesson of the opening scene, as Joel suggests that if Ellie ever has a kid, she’ll understand his choice, and adds, “I hope you do a little better than me.”  

Both performers are at their absolute best here, particularly Pascal when Joel begins to cry. And the scene reframes what happened after. At the time, it seemed as if Ellie lost Joel at a moment when they weren’t speaking, and thus she had no emotional closure with him. Instead, we see that they did have this final conversation, that they did hash things out about the biggest source of tension between them, and even that this difficult talk ended on a hopeful note, with Ellie saying, “I don’t think I can forgive you for this. But I would like to try.” 

This is the first episode of the season directed by Neil Druckmann, who gets exceptional work from all his actors, including Catherine O’Hara in the moment when Ellie tells the truth and breaks her heart. With this season, he and Craig Mazin are following the choice Druckmann already made with The Last of Us Part II. When the creator of source material is involved in running the adaptation, it’s not a surprise that they would try to be as faithful to the original as possible. But every second of Joel and Ellie this week seems to be screaming for Druckmann, Mazin, and company to have looked at the show they were making and decided it made no sense to follow the familiar path. 

It’s simultaneously the high point of this season of The Last of Us and a repudiation of much of the rest of it. 

From Rolling Stone US.