‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 1 Recap: A Stalker, a Therapist and a Kiss
An opening note to readers: I have played both “The Last of Us” and “The Last of Us Part II.” I will keep these recaps as spoiler free as possible in the coming weeks for show-only readers, though, and will only discuss the changes that the HBO adaptation makes to its source material as they come.
“The Last of Us” Season 2 begins in territory both familiar and not.
The first thing we hear in its premiere, titled “Future Days,” is the same demand Ellie (Bella Ramsey) made of Joel (Pedro Pascal) at the end of “The Last of Us” Season 1. “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true,” she says, teeing up the “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere’s sudden return to the outskirts of the same Salt Lake City hospital where Joel decimated the Fireflies to stop them from performing a life-ending brain surgery on an unconscious Ellie. Once back there, the season premiere introduces us to a group of young, surviving Fireflies: Manny (Danny Ramirez), Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever).
Manny, Nora and Mel speculate about why Joel would turn on them — rumors about Ellie’s immunity hanging unspoken in the air — while Dever’s Abby insists that they go after him. Owen talks her down, but promises they will help her find and kill Joel one day. Satisfied for the moment, Abby kneels in front of one of the Firefly graves buried next to the group and vows that she will kill Joel “slowly” once they finally get their hands on him. This scene is, notably, an original creation, and it delivers the information about Abby’s Firefly past far sooner than “The Last of Us Part II” does. That game makes players wait hours to learn the reasons for Abby and her friends’ actions, which is just one of the many reasons it has been criticized — both rightly and wrongly — over the years.
Abby’s vow of violence serves as a fitting lead-in to the “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere’s five year time jump, which brings viewers stumbling into the middle of a fight between an older Ellie and a bigger man that ends when she ignores his taps for relief and nearly breaks one of his arms. (This moment, like Ellie’s slow killing of a trapped zombie in “The Last of Us” Season 1, is part of showrunner Craig Mazin’s ongoing effort to clue viewers into the staggeringly violent capacity of Ramsey’s young survivor.) From there, “Future Days” reintroduces viewers to the fenced-in Jackson, Wyo., sanctuary partly overseen by Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley).
Therapy at the End of the World
Ellie gets into a friendly disagreement with Jesse (Young Mazino), one of the younger heads of Jackson’s armed patrol team, while other members of the community try to fix an underground sewer line, which is revealed to be filled with roots. Pascal’s Joel returns when Dina (immediate scene-stealer Isabela Merced) asks for his help clearing the line and ends up getting a quick lesson in fixing a circuit breaker. Dina uses her moment with Joel to ask him why Ellie is “angry” with him, only for him to feign ignorance. “I figure it’s normal. Her being 19 and me being her … what I am,” Joel initially responds, before asking, “The thing is, I try. I know I’m a hard-ass, and maybe overprotective, and she’s her, but … I mean, what did I do?”
Joel leaves Dina to meet with Maria, who urges him, much to his annoyance, to renovate Jackson faster to accommodate the community’s increasing number of refugees. He goes from there to a therapy session with Gail (a welcome Catherine O’Hara), a psychotherapist who gives Joel one-hour sessions in exchange for weed. Their session starts off normally enough, with Joel venting more about his recent disconnect with Ellie and wishing that she treated him the way Dina does. “That one treats me like a human being. She talks to me, says, ‘Hello,’ gives me a smile, looks up to me, makes me feel like a good guy, which I am,” he says. Gail, however, cuts him off.
She tells him to try something new, like “not pretending you have the most boring problem in the world.” When Joel pushes back, she responds, “You’re lying to me, and it’s exhausting.” She urges him to just say whatever he’s hiding (in this case, his lie to Ellie about what he did to the Fireflies). “You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud,” she murmurs. To prove her point, she tells Joel that today — her first birthday in 41 years without her husband Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) — she does not just resent him, but hates him for killing her spouse. “I know you had no choice. I know that. I know I should forgive you,” Gail says. “I’ve tried, and I can’t, because of how you did it.”
The Thing You’re Afraid to Say
“There it is. I’ve said it. I’m ashamed. But it’s in the air, and I can’t take it back,” Gail says after taking a small breath. “Your turn. Say the thing you’re afraid to say. I can help you. Say it out loud.” When Gail pushes Joel harder for the truth, his resolve eventually steels and he stands. “I saved her,” he says, which is objectively true, but also ignores how he (and, I will forever contend, the Fireflies) cut Ellie out of the most important decision of her life. Pascal’s performance in this scene is titanic — a reminder that his turn as Joel has been the best thing about HBO’s “Last of Us” since it premiered. He finds a formidable scene partner in O’Hara, who locks so immediately into the emotions of her debut scene that she becomes impossible to look away from.
Gail’s speech is, like the character herself, original to the show, but its thematic resonance to the story of “The Last of Us” Season 2 can not be — without spoiling anything — understated. Its source material is extremely preoccupied with the power of irrational hate, of hating someone for the pain they have caused you even if, as Gail acknowledges, the pain itself was incidental or unavoidable. Based on this scene alone, it seems as though “The Last of Us” Season 2 is going to thoroughly explore that subject as well.
Gail, of course, follows her own advice. She acknowledges out loud both the hatred she feels toward Joel and the irrationality of it. Joel does only the former — sharing his frustrations while failing to acknowledge his role in the fracturing of his and Ellie’s relationship. (He is not the only character moving forward who will fail to productively address their response to profound loss and trauma.) Without raving too much about this scene, it is also worth noting the brilliance of O’Hara once again, who flinches when Pascal stands at the end of their conversation. It is not only a deeply human response but also a signal to the audience that underneath Joel’s loving, older man exterior still lies a terrifying killer.
A New Breed
Elsewhere, Ellie heads out on a reconnaissance patrol with Dina, and the two stumble along with the rest of their scout group on the corpse of a slaughtered bear. Ellie lives up to her increasingly reckless reputation by pressuring Dina into venturing into an abandoned supermarket with her to kill the infected clickers roaming inside. The sequence that follows feels intentionally pulled out of one of the “Last of Us” games — right down to Ramsey’s use of an empty beer bottle to distract a nearby clicker. It’s all going pretty well, too, until Ellie falls through one of the building’s rotted floors and ends up trapped alone with a stalker — a horrifying variant of the infected introduced in “The Last of Us Part II” that stalks and surprise-attacks its human prey rather than just rabidly charging at them at their first noise.
Ellie survives the encounter, but gets bit on her stomach. She covers it up before Dina notices and the two girls report the incident to Maria, Tommy and the rest of the Jackson town council. Afterward, Ellie returns to Joel’s garage, which she has converted into her own place, and cuts her fresh bite mark to make it look like nothing more than a knife scar. As she’s writing in her journal (another nod to “The Last of Us Part II”), Joel interrupts to check on her. The meeting is awkward and strained, and it ends with Joel promising to restring her guitar — his thumb briefly passing over the iconic, ripped-from-the-game moth engraving on its neck.
Ellie then goes to Jackson’s New Year’s Dance in a scene that is almost a shot-for-shot, line-for-line recreation of the same sequence from “The Last of Us Part II.” “The Last of Us” composer Gustavo Santaolalla cameos as one of the dance’s musical performers, and Dina ropes Ellie into slow-dancing with her. She makes some not-so-subtle moves on Ellie before finally kissing her, but the two girls are interrupted by Seth (Robert John Burke), a drunk man who homophobically chastises them for kissing in a church. Before Ellie can defend herself, Joel shoves Seth to the ground. Ellie responds with embarrassment and anger, telling her adoptive parent, “I don’t need your f—king help.” O’Hara’s Gail silently watches the entire altercation, and Ellie pours further salt in the wound when she walks past Joel when he is later waiting on his front porch with her guitar.
New Year, New Problems
“Future Days” subsequently ends on a pair of ominous, foreboding images. A partying Jackson resident drops a sparkler by the exposed sewage line that was cracked open near the start of the episode. The firework offers enough light for viewers to see an infected fungus tendril curling its way through the pipe’s roots — opening the door for a potential infected breakout in Jackson. The “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere then cuts away to the mountains overlooking Jackson just as Abby and the rest of her rifle-carrying ex-Firefly friends stop to look down on the lights of the nearby town.
These troubling moments wrap up “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 1, which proves to be a quieter, more table-setting kind of premiere than fans may have expected. Mazin has purposefully set the episode one day earlier than where “The Last of Us Part II” begins, though — offering viewers a brief period to catch their breaths in what is destined to only be the calm before a brutal, punishing storm.
“The Last of Us” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
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