Spoilers below.
Ellie Williams might be immune to the Cordyceps fungus that’s turned most of her fellow humans into zombies—sorry, infected—but she’s still just as susceptible to daddy issues as the rest of us. The highly anticipated second season of The Last of Us makes that clear from the jump, as the first scene of the premiere flashes back to the season 1 finale, in which the aging smuggler Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) lies to the 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) about their latest near-death escape. Her face betrays her doubts. She already suspects what the audience knows: Her newfound father figure is hiding something.
As a long-time fan of the franchise and someone who’s played both The Last of Us: Part I and The Last of Us: Part II PlayStation games, I was delighted by the HBO adaptation’s first season, which brought a loyal but fresh perspective to Joel and Ellie’s post-apocalyptic cross-country journey from Boston to Salt Lake City. As those who have watched the season 1 finale will recall, Joel escorts Ellie to the ravaged Utah capital in order to meet the Fireflies, a rebel group who resisted the authoritarian government agency FEDRA and now seek to develop a cure to the Cordyceps outbreak from Ellie’s brain tissue. But when Joel learns the surgery will result in Ellie’s death, he can’t bear the thought of losing another child—not after his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), was killed in the early hours of the infection, years ago. And so he massacres the Fireflies; scoops an unconscious Ellie off the OR table; and drives her to Jackson, Wyoming, where his brother has helped set up a small survivalist civilization.
HBO
In the early scenes of the season 2 premiere, “Future Days,” a five-year time jump reintroduces us to Jackson, where Joel and Ellie have settled into a routine that at least brushes up against the notion of “normal.” Joel has just enough time away from his work as a foreman to fit in sessions with his therapist, Gail (a fantastic Catherine O’Hara), and Ellie has fallen in with a group of fellow teens and 20-somethings, including Jesse (Young Mazino) and Dina (Isabela Merced), with whom she engages in sparring lessons and patrols the Jackson perimeter for wandering infected. The only problem with this postcard image—I mean, apart from the zombies and the rising demand for refugee housing—is that Joel and Ellie aren’t on speaking terms.
Joel figures they’re going through the usual rough patches inherent to adolescence, but deep down, he knows their issues run deeper than hormones, and so does his therapist. Gail knows Ellie isn’t Joel’s biological daughter, and she knows he’s lying during their sessions. “You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud,” she says, as much to herself as to her patient, whom she finally admits she blames for the death of her husband, Eugene. We don’t get a flashback to confirm this (yet), but according to Gail, Joel recently shot and killed Eugene. We can’t be sure why, but Gail confirms he “didn’t have a choice,” which leads me to suspect Eugene was bitten and infected. I’m sure a future episode will confirm or deny that theory.
Either way, Gail uses the admission to clear the air between herself and Joel, and to invite him to say the thing he’s afraid to say. On the brink of tears, Joel almost reveals the secret he, Ellie, and his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), have all sworn to take to their graves—that Ellie is immune to Cordyceps, and that Joel erased any would-be chance of a cure. Instead, Joel’s expression hardens, and as he stands up to leave, he tells Gail another version of the truth: “I saved her.”
The next morning, Ellie disobeys Joel’s wishes and heads out on a patrol with Dina. It’s immediately obvious Ellie’s harboring a crush on her friend, whose on-again, off-again relationship with Jesse seems liable to threaten their own burgeoning flirtation. But the chemistry between them is undeniable, especially as their youthful innocence and goofiness contrasts with their thirst for a thrill (and the violent reality of the world around them). When they stumble upon a trail of blood in the snow, they abandon the rest of their patrol group to stake out the source inside an abandoned supermarket. There, they take out a blind clicker before Ellie falls through a hole in the floor and encounters her first stalker, a variation of infected capable of hunting its prey.
Director (and series co-creator) Craig Mazin does a good job drawing out the tension in this scene, re-creating the foreboding that was so viscerally realized in the video game whenever an enemy was within spotting distance. Even pre-prepared for a jump scare, I flinched when the stalker burst from its hiding place to chomp at Ellie’s torso. (A death blow, for anyone other than Ellie herself.) After killing the creature, Ellie and Dinah present their unexpected scientific discovery to the Jackson council leadership. Tommy and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), find this new breed of infected aptly worrisome, but not enough to waylay their planned New Year’s festivities. Ellie then slices up her stalker wound to obscure its tell-tale teeth marks, while Joel, in a desperate attempt to connect with his adoptive daughter, resolves to get new strings for her guitar.
HBO
Later, they all converge at the New Year’s celebration, a near frame-for-frame re-creation of a beloved scene from TLOU: Part II, down to the outfits, the mannerisms, the interior design, the dialogue, and even the soundtrack. (The songs are “Little Sadie” and “Ecstasy” by Crooked Still, for those wondering.) Mazin knows how much the scene means to fans of the game, and his efforts to respect it are precise and impactful. These efforts ultimately present us with Ellie and Dina’s first kiss—and a hefty dose of foreshadowing to go with it. Slow-dancing with Dina in the center of Jackson’s church-turned-auditorium, Ellie comments that the men in the room are staring. Dina suggests they might be jealous, and Ellie replies, baffled, “I’m not a threat.” Dina disagrees, leaning back to give her friend a proper appraisal as she says, “Oh, Ellie. I think they should be terrified of you.” And indeed, they should.
Still, as it so often does in real life, homophobia ruins the fun. Watching Ellie and Dina as their kiss deepens, a man named Seth protests their behavior at this “family event,” then, after Dina begrudgingly apologizes, opts to call them both slurs. Daddy Joel does not take kindly to this. He appears out of nowhere, ramming into the frame to throw Seth to the floor of the church, demanding he “get the hell out of here.” Dina and Ellie can only stand back and watch, both gaping.
Ellie, who has spent the bulk of this episode trying to prove her independence from Joel—for reasons that might have something to do with the events in Utah—does not interpret his intervention as heroism. “I don’t need your fucking help,” she spits at him. Chastened, confused, and hurt in equal measure, the man who delivered her more than halfway across the country gives a curt “right” and retreats.
Later, Ellie throws away yet another opportunity for reconciliation when she sees Joel sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch, playing his guitar. (This will be another familiar tableau for fans of the game.) Instead of pausing to hash things out, Ellie marches directly past him to her garage bedroom. It’s downright heartbreaking to watch Pascal’s weathered face fall.
HBO
Of course, they can’t remain in this stalemate forever. Something will inevitably bring them together again, whether nature or nurture—and in a world ravaged by Cordyceps, nature seems the likelier answer. Mazin seems to confirm this hypothesis with a last-minute shot of the clay pipes Dina and her crew cracked open earlier in the episode, back when Joel was playing hooky from his foreman duties to fix some electronics. As the camera zooms in on the sticks and branches that obstruct the pipes, we see that some of them are moving of their own accord. But dead sticks and branches don’t move. Cordyceps tendrils do. The threat, it would seem, is coming from inside the house.
But Mazin doesn’t leave us to dread that danger alone. He ends the episode with a cut to a group of young people trudging through the snow-covered forests around Jackson, their eyes fixed on the beacon of light ahead. As the episode established in its opening scenes, this quintet is comprised of former Fireflies by the name of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and Manny (Danny Ramirez). They’ve waited five years to get their revenge against the man who killed their comrades in Salt Lake City, and Abby, in particular, seems driven by a personal loss. She wants to kill Joel, “slowly,” she emphasizes. That’s only if the infected don’t get to him first.
Prepare for a doozy of an episode next week, friends. The battle has come to Jackson.
