‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Memories, Revelations and Broken Promises

A few years before “The Last of Us Part II” was released, franchise co-creator Neil Druckmann famously said the sequel is “about hate.” The finished game lived up to that promise. But is “The Last of Us” Season 2 about that as well? There have been moments when it has seemed to be, particularly in its explorations of the war between the Washington Liberation Front (W.L.F.) and the Seraphites, a.k.a. Scars, and both Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are characters meant to be driven by their hatred. In recent episodes, though, this season has struggled to communicate the levels of Ellie’s depression and rage — partly because it still wants her to be a wise-cracking, lovestruck young girl, which is one impulse that “The Last of Us Part II” pointedly does not indulge.

It is fitting and, from a creative perspective, wise then that “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 6 shifts the theme away from irrational hate and back toward love — namely, the ways in which we can, sometimes without even realizing it, harm the ones we love. That idea is introduced in the episode’s opening scene, which follows a teenage Joel (Andrew Diaz) taking the fall for a younger Tommy (David Miranda) and putting himself at the mercy of their abusive, police officer father (a surprise, welcome Tony Dalton). “You’re not going to hurt him,” Joel says through gritted teeth after his father systematically pokes holes in Joel’s alibi. Rather than hitting Joel or Tommy, though, their father sits down at the dinner table with Joel and tells him a story about the time his father hit him so hard over stealing a candy bar that his jaw had to be wired shut for two months. 

“If you know what it feels like, then why?” Joel asks. “I’ve hit you, and I’ve hit Tommy. But never like that,” his father responds. It is a lame excuse, but it paves the way for the central idea of this latest installment of “The Last of Us.” “I’m doing a little better than my father did,” Joel’s dad says. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.” He pats his son’s shoulder goodbye just long enough for viewers to see the watch on his wrist, which looks a whole lot like the one Joel was given years later by his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker). This scene, beautifully performed by Dalton, effectively sets up a flashback-dominant episode that explores how Joel definitely did better with Ellie than his father did with him, yet still hurt her in his own, selfish ways.

Days of you and me

Sunday’s episode, directed by Druckmann and written by him, showrunner Craig Mazin and “The Last of Us Part II” co-writer Halley Gross, catches back up after its opening credits with Pedro Pascal’s adult Joel two months after he and Ellie permanently relocated to Jackson. He trades a bag of LEGOs with Seth (Robert John Burke) in exchange for a 15th birthday cake for Ellie, who gets back to their home high off painkillers after purposefully burning the bite mark on her arm. “I just really wanted to wear short sleeves again,” she explains in a moment of honesty that visibly breaks Joel’s heart. When she wakes up hours later, she dives fist-first into her cake and gets her present from Joel: a handmade guitar with a moth, inspired by some of her drawings, engraved on its neck.

Ellie asks Joel to play a song for her on the guitar and he — albeit reluctantly — does. “If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself,” he sings, covering Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.” “I believe, cause I can see, our future days… days of you and me.” It is on the nose and yet still moving, just like it is in “The Last of Us Part II,” which concludes its prologue with Joel’s rendition of the song. (In last week’s “Feel Her Love,” Ellie sang just one line of “Future Days” in the Seattle theater where her and Dina (Isabela Merced) have taken refuge.) This scene, patiently performed and edited, reaffirms one of the facts that has haunted “The Last of Us” for several weeks now: The onscreen connection between Pascal’s Joel and Ramsey’s Ellie is still the strongest thing the HBO series has ever had to offer.

From there, “The Last of Us” cuts ahead to Ellie’s 16th birthday. She and Joel walk through some woods near Jackson until they arrive at Ellie’s birthday present: An abandoned Wyoming museum Joel found during one of his patrols. Ellie excitedly scales the stone dinosaur outside the museum, before being led inside by Joel. The celebration reaches its peak when Joel helps Ellie inside the museum’s recovered Apollo 15 space capsule, has her put on an astronaut helmet and then listen to a tape recording of an actual space mission while she sits inside it. As Ellie listens to the recording with her eyes closed, Druckmann remixes the most memorable visual moment from “The Last of Us Part II” by having Ellie’s world shake and transform around her — bringing her full imagination to life onscreen.

At the end of it all, Joel asks whether he’s done a good job, and tears silently stream down his face as he watches Ellie’s face beam with the joy. However, during their trek back to Jackson, Ellie briefly pauses — her eyes lingering on a group of fireflies lighting up the nearby empty space. It is a moment that, while slightly different from a similar beat in “The Last of Us Part II,” reminds Ellie of the traumatic lie that sits unaddressed between her and Joel. It is a part of their past that, as much as they both may not want to, demands to be acknowledged.

False promises

A year later, Joel’s usual birthday-cake surprise is disrupted when he catches Ellie making out with Kat (Noah Lamanna), which is only further complicated when he realizes they were also smoking weed and that Kat has given Ellie a tattoo. “So, all the teenage shit at once, huh?” Joel asks and, in a strange moment entirely original to the HBO series, reacts with minor notes of bigotry when Ellie pushes back on his remark that she is “experimenting with girls.” This fight leads Ellie to decide she wants to move into their garage, which Joel agrees to. In the same scene, Joel asks why Ellie is so drawn to moths. He incorrectly assumes they represent “change and growth,” but Gail (Catherine O’Hara) corrects him the next day, telling him they actually represent death.

Ellie is living in Joel’s garage when “The Last of Us” catches back up with her two years later for her 19th birthday. Sitting alone, Ellie rehearses some questions for Joel that tear apart his hastily-assembled story about what really happened with the Fireflies, signaling to viewers that the mystery has, indeed, been bugging her all this time. Before she gets the chance to ask them, Joel surprises her with her birthday present: Her first armed patrol. The adventure starts off well enough, but it is quickly derailed when a radio call comes in asking them to help Gail’s husband, Eugene (Joe Pantoliano), who has been ambushed on his patrol by infected. By the time they reach him, Eugene’s patrol partner is dead and he has already been bitten. Before Joel can shoot him, Eugene pleads for his life, begging them to tie him up and take him to the outskirts of Jackson so that he can see Gail one last time and say goodbye to her.

Ellie makes Joel swear he will help her take Eugene back to Jackson, which he does. He tells Ellie to go fetch their horses and that he will meet her on the path home. But, rather than leading Eugene there, Joel takes him to the shore of a beautiful lake. He points his gun at the back of Eugene’s head and does not back down when Eugene says he needs to see his wife’s face again. “Please, let that be the last thing I see,” he begs. (Pantoliano, for the record, aces this scene.) Joel clearly struggles with his decision, but he tells Eugene, his voice cracking along the way, “If you love someone, you can always see their face.” He gives Eugene enough time to conjure Gail’s face in his mind, before finally killing him.

Ellie and Joel carry Eugene’s body back to Jackson, dragging his covered corpse behind them in a moment intentionally designed to mirror the return of Joel’s body at the end of “Through the Valley.” His betrayal proves to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ellie tells a grief-stricken Gail the truth about what Joel did to Eugene, prompting the therapist to slap and scream at him. When a confused Joel turns to look back at her, an enraged Ellie simply tells him, “You swore.” Nine months later, Joel watches Ellie, their relationship now estranged, as she dances with Dina during Jackson’s New Year’s dance.

The truth, too late

Everything plays out exactly as viewers saw in the “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere. However, the episode reveals that Ellie actually did speak with Joel on his front porch after the dance. She tells him that she knows he’s lying about the Fireflies because he gave her the same look when he swore about the veracity of that story that he did when he promised he would take Eugene back to Jackson. She gives him one last chance to finally tell her the truth — and he does. “I was supposed to die! That was my purpose. My life would have f—king mattered! But you took that from me,” a heartbroken Ellie shouts at him. “Yes, and I’ll pay the price, because you’re going to turn away from me,” Joel replies, telling Ellie that, even if he got a second chance at that pivotal moment, he would do the same thing all over again.

“Because you’re selfish,” Ellie hisses. “Because I love you, in a way you can’t understand,” Joel responds, in an out-of-character instance of vulnerability, before echoing his father’s words from years earlier. “If you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me.” This scene is, notably, a mash-up of two separate scenes from “The Last of Us Part II,” and it is not as effective as either, if only because it makes the mistake of asking Ellie to learn the truth about what Joel did and accept it within the span of seconds. It nonetheless arrives at the same point that “The Last of Us Part II” does, with Ellie telling Joel, “I don’t think I can forgive you for this… But I would like to try.”

Ellie never got the chance to do that, which is why this week’s “Last of Us” cuts in its closing moments from her and Joel’s final conversation together to her walking through the rain in the present-day back to her and Dina’s theater shelter — Nora’s (Tati Gabrielle) blood still on her hands. Her grief has been compounded by the fact that she never got to find true resolution in her relationship with Joel. But, much like his decision to save Ellie and then lie to her, she has put herself on a path that seems destined to cause just as much harm as good — if not more.

“The Last of Us” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

The post ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Memories, Revelations and Broken Promises appeared first on TheWrap.