‘The Last of Us’ season 2, episode 2 recap: no going back
With one major character now out of the picture, how will the video game adaptation sustain its audience?
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This story contains spoilers from this episode of The Last of Us.
LAST WEEK, when we published our first recap on The Last of Us season 2, a friend read it and told me with a big grin that he knew what was coming. As someone who usually knows the source material of adapted IP, this was new for me. (Because if a spoiler already exists somewhere out there, is it still a spoiler?) And as a non-gamer, I wasn’t too fussed about watching a televisual adaptation of a video game – though I hear TLoU is doing very well in the game-to-small-screen department. Rather, I was walking into this as a casual viewer because it was simply good TV.
Which brings me to watching this week’s episode. As the progress bar at the bottom of my screen neared its end, I started to worry about Joel’s fate. He and Dina had been lured into the lodge after rescuing Abby from a hoard of Infected. Fast on her feet, Abby promised ammunition and reinforcement to save the besieged Jackson; her W.LF. comrades laid in wait at the lodge. A part of me thought, She’s gotta spare him, he just saved her life! There was no way Joel and Dina could get out of this one fast enough. Abby got her exacting “slow” revenge on the man who killed all the Salt Lake City Fireflies and the one doctor, who is revealed to be her father. Joel was beat to a pulp, and there were 10 minutes left.
Of course, the only way to drive Joel’s death home was to have Ellie present. Pinned immediately to the ground, she watched as Abby drove the broken half of a golf club into Joel’s neck. There was no score to swell emotions, just Ellie’s harrowing POV.
What happens to The Last of Us after THAT?
The last time I had to pick my jaw off the floor was when Logan Roy died mid-flight, midway through the final season of Succession. Or the earliest being the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, which was what TLoU showrunner Craig Mazin was going for with this shocker, even enlisting GoT director Mark Mylod – a cliffhanger pro – for the full effect. “We’re used to television shows hurting the people we love,” he said in a recent interview with Esquire after the season premiere. “Game of Thrones knocked everyone on their ass when Sean Bean died and then two seasons later knocked everybody out on their ass again when they did the Red Wedding. If it’s done correctly, if it’s purposeful, if the deaths impact the story around them and change things permanently in with the characters we care about, then we understand why it happened.
“I’m hoping that as people encounter the event of the show, that they will encounter them as we intended. There are lots of upsetting things that happen. We’re a show that started with killing a little kid. Bad stuff happens, but also beautiful things happen, too. I’m hopeful that people take it as it was intended.”
In what will alter the course of the series going forward, what Abby may not have accounted for was Ellie – and she should be very afraid of this teenager. I was very engaged with the ‘Joel going to therapy’ storyline, but even more so for the themes of parenthood Mazin wanted to explore this season, considering no one in Jackson knows how Joel saved Ellie. “There is a particular kind of love that a child has for a parent that isn’t really the same as the love they have for anyone else,” Mazin continued. “Joel has experienced both kinds of love, but Ellie’s only experienced one. The same goes for Abby. As their story advances, we begin to come back around to the notion of what it means to become a parent.”
By killing off a major character (and one of the busiest actors in Hollywood right now), exploring the theme through Abby and Ellie will perhaps sustain us to continue on. Abby is the perfect counterpoint to mirror where Ellie’s relationship with her adoptive father was; during the massacre of the Fireflies, Abby said she was 19, the same age Ellie is now. Age isn’t the pretence, but more so to say that the two are not too dissimilar. Without Joel, the theme of parenthood will persist in the five remaining episodes with how Ellie pursues Abby and the W.L.F.
With all this said and done, Mazin left the interview with some food for thought: “For Neil and for me and for HBO, it is incredibly important that by the time you get to the end of a season, you feel deeply satisfied. You may not be happy or sad. You will be satisfied. In our streaming era, there is a tendency to just kind of fill the space you’re in a little bit, like a gas. More than anything, I just want people to know we keep them in mind. When you get to the end of a season, I want you to sit back with a full heart and a full mind.
“It doesn’t end here with the season, but we think about the audience all the time. Even though we like to provoke thought and we like to explore these deep themes, we believe in entertaining in the truest sense of the word. We hope people feel engaged.”
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