Welcome back to another recap of The Last of Us season two. It’s the big one, folks. Please leave all your golf clubs at the door on your way in so as not to impart any more emotional damage to your fellow readers. Get your “Fore!” or “birdie” jokes out of your system. Anyone who played The Last of Us Part II knew what was coming, but there’s still a lot to unpack in how HBO’s live-action show adapts one of the most harrowing moments in the series.
A never-ending nightmare
We start with Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) walking through a dark hallway, the very same hallway that Joel (Pedro Pascal) walked down to save Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in season one, unknowingly sealing his fate. At first, it seems like she’s alone, but then we hear another voice. Well, it’s her own voice, but from another version of her who knows what awaits her if she presses on. She tries to tell her to turn back, even going as far as to tell her that “his” brains are on the floor in an attempt to scare her off. But Abby doesn’t believe her other self and heads in anyway, and we hear her crying as she finds the scene on the other side. She then wakes up on the cold floor of an abandoned cabin outside of Jackson. It was all a dream. A nightmare, really.
Abby walking down that hallway in her nightmares is a recurring sequence throughout The Last of Us Part II. Every time she does it, there’s something slightly different to illustrate her mental state. The major difference in the show is the presence of this second Abby, who tries to steer her away from the door at the end. Whereas in the game Abby’s motivations aren’t revealed until much later, the show makes it clear almost immediately that she’s an ex-Firefly with very personal reasons for wanting to kill Joel for what he did at the end of season one. I’m still baffled by this choice, when withholding these details from us was a key source of narrative tension in The Last of Us Part II.
After season two’s first episode premiered, I saw several people online echoing this sentiment. The Last of Us laying everything bare this early isn’t just an embellishment of the sort you might see in most adaptations; it fundamentally undermines the core dissonance of the story it’s recreating for a new audience, without offering anything new to replace it. Abby is a divisive character by design. The game forces you to play as her, do things you might not agree with, and then it tells you how she got to this point. The show, meanwhile, seems uninterested in maintaining that suspense. It would rather skip to the end and tell you that Abby is a sympathetic figure without giving you a chance to believe anything else.
In fairness, the internet has made this story and Abby’s place in it a dumpster fire to engage with. Game actor Laura Bailey received threats to her family for playing the role, and the show beefed up security for Dever when she shot her scenes this season. I understand the inclination to try and mitigate any of the backlash, but this is one of the most regrettable examples of The Last of Us show feeling shaped by discourse rather than being the daring narrative trailblazer the games were.
As Abby wakes up, she finds Owen (Spencer Lord) has already been up and scouting out Jackson while everyone else has been sleeping. He’s discovered the town is heavily guarded and nearly impossible to infiltrate. But patrols are coming in and out of the enclosure, and Abby suggests they find one of them and threaten them into revealing where Joel is. Mel (Ariela Barer) immediately objects. The plan was to take out Joel and no one else. Abby backtracks and says her threats would be bluffs, but it’s clear her bloodlust outpaces everyone else’s. Owen breaks the tension by saying he has a concept of a plan that he’s working on, but Abby can’t just stand around and goes to keep watch with an assault rifle in hand. Wherever she and her friends are coming from, they’re heavily armed.
Owen’s plan, however, doesn’t end in Joel’s death. It ends with the group heading back to wherever they came from by convincing Abby to abandon this vendetta. The rift between Abby and her friends was apparent last episode, in which everyone else was more concerned with their survival while Abby was solely fixated on revenge. But will the fact that not everybody is as gung-ho about killing Joel at any cost be enough to pull Abby out of this blood rage?
Bridges mended(?)
We now see Ellie’s hut in Joel’s backyard, and the camera notably lingers on her acoustic guitar. The last time we saw the instrument, Joel was playing it on his back porch as Ellie walked past him, and now it’s back in her home. Put a pin in that for a few paragraphs. Jesse (Young Mazino) is here to collect Ellie for her patrol and also give her a hard time for her kiss with Dina (Isabela Merced) the night before. As the two head to get their horses, Jackson is gearing up for something big. Infected are showing more signs of intelligence, including using their own dead as insulation against the cold weather and as a decoy to draw in prey. Between this and the Stalker Ellie encountered last episode, Jackson is on high alert for infected, and not even considering what other dangers might be lurking outside the wall.
Ellie attempts to get away from Jesse’s older-brother condescension by saying that she wants to do a patrol with Joel instead. This sets off alarm bells for Jesse, as the last time anyone saw the two interacting, it was with Ellie screaming at him in front of a crowd of drunken townsfolk. Ellie puts her foot down and tells Jesse that everyone in Jackson can stop whispering about her tense relationship with her father figure because they’re working shit out. It’s a notable departure from Part II, in which Ellie only gestures at this reconciliation in a brief exchange with Dina, where she says she’s thinking about having a movie night and watching some Curtis and Viper, Joel’s favorite action flick. But this is HBO’s The Last of Us, in which subtext must be written out in giant neon signs for an audience the show doesn’t trust to follow along. With Ellie trying to go on a patrol with Joel, expressing to Jesse that their relationship is complicated but they’re working it out, and the guitar he was re-stringing being returned to her room, it’s clear something positive happened between them, but the only mystery that’s left is the specifics. It’s typical of how The Last of Us shows its cards without much consideration for how doing so cuts off the story it’s adapting at the knees, but what else is new? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as Joel has already left with Dina for his patrol.
Ellie and Jesse head into one of the town’s restaurants and find Tommy (Gabriel Luna) preparing to run a drill with Jackson’s civilians for what to do if an infected horde comes a-knockin’. And as people head to their battle stations, Maria (Rutina Wesley) pulls Ellie aside for an unpleasant interaction. Seth (Robert John Burke) wants to apologize for his homophobic outburst at the dance. Or maybe Maria is forcing him to, who’s to say? Ellie wants no part of it, but Maria forces her to stand there while he says he’s sorry and hands Ellie some sandwiches. Ellie rightfully refuses to pick them up, so Maria does for her.
The Last of Us’ handling of the homophobia that has persisted through the apocalypse has always fascinated me because, depending on which interaction you’re examining, it can come off as either meaningful worldbuilding or as if showrunner Craig Mazin is kinda just winging it like a well-meaning dad trying to illustrate the struggle in ways that are often more tragic and don’t make quite as much sense as the games’ take on the subject. (The Bill and Frank episode, with all its themes of growing old in a post-AIDS crisis world, is an example of Mazin’s take on the series getting it right.) We’ll get to examples of the latter down the line, but this scene between Seth, Ellie, and Maria that originates from Part II is so true to life that I and plenty of other queer people have experienced the dynamic it depicts. Maria cares less about Ellie’s righteous anger than she does about keeping the peace in Jackson. Forcing your surrogate niece to stand there and listen to a bigot who, not nine hours ago, called you and your friend a slur in front of god and everyone, is now pulling out a flimsy excuse for his behavior, is the opposite of allyship. It’s the same feeling as when your homophobic uncle says some bullshit at Thanksgiving dinner and your parents expect you to grin and bear it so you don’t ruin the holiday. No wonder this version of Ellie is so jaded at the notion of Jackson’s “community” when, at every turn, she’s being undermined by those claiming to be protecting her.
As Ellie and Jesse head out on their patrol, they see a snowstorm in the distance. They’re not concerned that it will reach Jackson, though; it should stay in the mountains. Good thing no one lives there for them to worry about, right?
The wolf circles her prey
Back in the mountains that are supposed to be uninhabited, Abby shivers as she keeps watch. Just as the cold is finally getting to her and she starts to head back, she hears a horse neighing in the distance. If that horse had shut the fuck up, maybe she would have turned around and went home and we could end the season here. But no. Abby sees a pair of Jackson civilians on patrol and heads in to get a closer look.
The snowstorm may not have reached Jackson proper, but it’s still interfering with the town’s radio signals. Tommy orders the patrols to come back, but Ellie and Jesse are too far out to head back through the blizzard. The pair takes shelter in an abandoned 7-Eleven once occupied by Eugene, Gail’s late husband. It’s full of weed and Firefly paraphernalia. Eugene was apparently part of the resistance group in its early days, but left when he grew tired of all the violence it entailed. We still don’t hear much about Eugene here, but Jesse does lament that Joel had to “put him down” and that he “couldn’t be saved.” All signs point to Eugene maybe having been infected, but considering Gail’s conversation with Joel last episode, it must be more complicated than that. Ellie doesn’t protest too much, but it’s clear the situation affected her. Whatever it was.
Back with our heavy-artillery-sporting queen, Abby is still tracking the Jackson patrol pair below the mountains. At one point she tries to scale the side of the mountain with nothing to grab onto, further driving home that she’s perhaps too committed to this mission, even at the risk of her own safety. For her recklessness, she tumbles down into a pile of frozen infected, just like the ones Jesse was warning Ellie about. Now hundreds of these fuckers are chasing her down the side of the mountain, eventually pinning her down underneath a broken fence. This scene is genuinely terrifying, and manages to capture the claustrophobia of the game’s setpiece to a fucking tee. All that tension is broken by a gunshot as an unknown gunman saves Abby from an infected that has her pinned down. Then that tension is immediately replaced by a new one as it’s revealed that Joel has unknowingly saved a woman hellbent on killing him.
The trade-off in the show revealing Abby’s intentions before this moment is that this segment is now dripping with the dread of knowing that Joel has no idea what he’s gotten himself into. Abby hears Dina call out his name, and it all clicks. Even in her adrenaline rush, she can assess the danger in front of her rather than whipping out her gun and popping a cap in her target. Instead, she takes advantage of the infected banging on the door of their shelter to lure Joel into a more secure location: the lodge where her friends are waiting.
It’s kind of a bummer that the audience watching this show already knows who Abby is, because the entire thing reads as overtly sinister in a way that you would otherwise only catch on a second viewing. When you’re playing this segment in the game, Abby is still an unknown, disorienting addition the game refuses to explain. The adrenaline is pumping, and you might not catch on to the little hints of her intentions. It makes what comes next a true gut punch. But here you’re just screaming at the TV for Joel not to go into the dark closet, which is fun in its own morbid way, but it’s at odds with the story at large. We’ll get more into this as we go through the season, but large swaths of The Last of Us’ second season lack the mystery that made the story compelling, and made dragging yourself through some heinous acts of violence to see it through worthwhile. By the end of this episode, you’re fully aware of the dynamics at play that led to this moment, and you knew it was inevitable last episode. So much of the season just ends up making you watch the brutal aftermath of something you already saw coming rather than a tangled web of grief, anger, and forgiveness to unravel and dissect as Abby and Ellie exact their pounds of flesh. I’m sad that new fans who haven’t played the games are being denied the mystery of Abby’s motivations and the speculation this allowed for, but HBO probably didn’t want to leave all those questions unanswered for the years between seasons, when people who played the game lost their minds because they had to wait a couple dozen hours.
Danger approaches
Tommy’s retreat order has made it to every patrol except Joel and Dina’s, prompting him to tell Jackson’s radio tower to dedicate all their resources to finding them. I appreciate the brotherly love, Tommy, but you’re about to have a way bigger problem on your hands than a missing patrol. In their efforts to reach Joel, the Jackson crew starts contacting other patrols to see if there’s been any sign of them. Once Jesse and Ellie hear that those two are missing, they don’t hesitate to get on their own horses to start searching. Jackson, meanwhile, has finally found active cordyceps tendrils in its piping, and there’s a massive horde just outside the town’s perimeter. This town is about to get hit from multiple angles, and none of them have any idea.
Meanwhile, Joel, Abby, and Dina are still trying to outrun the horde on their horses, but the crowd of infected is gaining on them. That is, until the tendrils in Jackson start signaling to their pursuers, who then lose all interest in pursuing Joel and company and break off to converge with another group and head toward the town. Time to see if all of Tommy’s drills could prepare Jackson for a threat of this scale.
Citizens hunker down in underground cellars as anyone who can hold a firearm prepares to face the infected. We saw Jackson mobilize to fight bandits in The Last of Us Part I, but the show goes out of its way to show you just how coordinated and militarized this town of survivors can be when they’re not hosting dances or throwing slurs at the local gays. The Last of Us is usually so focused on intimate acts of violence carried out by the player, so it’s not often that the series shows a whole community coming together to fight the infected. This is probably the largest battle ever shown in this universe, and a lot of Jackson’s defenses are made up of whatever the citizens could piece together, like makeshift barricades of heavy pickup trucks and tractors, and gasoline barrels that get pushed down rusty slides.
Something I’ve always loved is how the contrast between Jackson and the Washington Liberation Front, Abby’s faction back in Seattle, also spotlights how different The Last of Us Part II’s leads are. Ellie’s kit is made up of ramshackle traps and the kind of firearms you’d expect the average gun nut to have kept around their house before the world went to shit, whereas Abby has military-grade weaponry that would shred through infected without much effort. Even when society has collapsed, The Last of Us has signifiers of status and wealth, it just manifests itself in militarized weaponry rather than a hastily made nail bomb. Seeing Jackson have to make do with whatever it has on hand while Abby and her crew are carrying around killing machines on their backs is an early reminder of the disparity between these two women that only becomes more clear when you play as them. I’m curious to see how else the show can make those different approaches to violence and survival these two women have been taught clear when we’re only able to watch them rather than inhabit them.
As Joel sees the carnage surrounding Jackson from a distance, he nearly turns back to help with the fight before Abby once again lures him away with the promise of ammunition and manpower to take to the infected. They sure could use their help down there as the horde breaks through the defenses thanks to a giant bloater joining the pack. The infected assault on Jackson is pretty disheartening to witness, as they tear through one of the only known functioning civilizations we’ve seen in this world. Buildings that were just full of people are torn asunder, and people who were ready to defend the community run away in fear, taking valuable weapons with them. By the time Tommy manages to peel off the bloater from the horde it feels desperate, a last-ditch effort to save anything in what starts to feel like a lost cause. As the giant infected endured an endless stream from Tommy’s flamethrower, for a moment I thought the show might take a big swing and kill Joel’s brother in a tragic big hero moment, but eventually the infected succumbed to the fire, and Benji still gets to have a dad. Hey, at least someone gets to have one in this story, am I right?
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Back at the lodge, Abby’s friends are searching for their missing leader, only for her to show up on horseback with her prey in tow. She ushers the group inside the shelter and attempts to warm herself. Mel gets a chance to show off her medical skills by helping Dina with some frostbite. Even as she’s being treated, Dina keeps her wits about her and realizes she doesn’t know where any of these people came from. They have wolf patches on their gear with a “W.L.F.” logo, but when Dina asks who they are, Abby offers no explanation beyond their names. When she tells the room that these two are Dina and Joel, the temperature manages to drop below the freezing cold of the blizzard outside. Joel is too preoccupied with trying to reach Jackson to notice the tension in the room until Manny (Danny Ramirez) puts a gun to Dina’s head. Abby says no harm will come to her if Joel cooperates. She orders Mel to drug Dina to put her to sleep, and when the doctor shows hesitation, Abby says she’ll “smash [Dina] in the fucking head” if she doesn’t. Mel promises the panicking Dina that this will only put her to sleep for an hour, and then she even looks to Joel to reassure him. This group came to Jackson intending to kill Joel, and everything else this has required of them was not part of the plan. Except for Abby, that is.
Nora (Tati Gabrielle) disarms Joel, and as a brief aside, her shaved head in the present day makes her look pretty much identical to her character Jordan from Naughty Dog’s upcoming PS5 game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. That’s brand synergy if I’ve ever seen it. Hopefully, Intergalactic’s writing has some of the subtlety of the Last of Us games because my god, the way this whole scene just lays it all out is so tiresome. Joel pieces together that Abby’s crew isn’t a group of common raiders; they’re military, but they’re also Fireflies. Well, ex-Fireflies, as Abby clarifies. The resistance group pretty much dissolved after Joel did mass murder in Salt Lake City last season, and now we get Abby whipping out a villain’s monologue to tell Joel about everything he put her through when he decided to kill dozens of people to save Ellie’s life.
She verifies every part of the description she was given five years ago, including reminding everyone in the room that Joel is “pretty handsome.” At this point, I’m convinced that line is part of Pascal’s contract because why is Abby saying this shit to the man who killed her father? I admit I’m nitpicking this line, but it’s just a microcosm of my biggest problem with how this scene drags out what was a vicious, unrelenting moment in the source material. Abby had no desire to explain herself to Joel in Part II, and it felt pretty meaningful that even by the time that game was over, Joel and Ellie didn’t know who she was or why this vendetta was so important to her. But again, that’s not speaking intention into the camera, and that kind of unspoken storytelling has no place in HBO’s The Last of Us. Instead, we get dramatic theatrics so Dever has more lines to read and everyone is on the same page about what we’re supposed to feel.
As Abby continues monologuing, she finally gets a confession out of Joel for what he did in Salt Lake City, and then she gets to work. She shoots him in the leg with a shotgun, knocking him to the ground, and demands that Mel tourniquet his leg and stop the bleeding. Mel once again hesitates. This is far beyond what she signed up for, but Owen tells her to just do what they came here to do. Abby gets in close here and tells Joel what her damage is. Her father was the surgeon who was supposed to operate on Ellie before Joel’s violent intervention. Then she fills us in on what she’s been doing for the last five years: living in Seattle as part of the Washington Liberation Front. There, she and the other soldiers have a code not to kill people who cannot defend themselves. But what Joel did was wrong, and so the code goes out the window.
In the 12 years since The Last of Us launched in 2013, I have always found Ellie to be the character I related to most. She’s an angry queer nerd who has a fraught relationship with her family, has had so many things she wanted in her life denied to her, and is more or less dragging herself through life in hopes that one day she will find meaning again. That being said, even with all those parallels between me and her, I have never resonated more with a Last of Us character than when Joel told Abby to “just shut the fuck up and do it already.” All this theater and undoing of what made the original story compelling, and for what? Easy answers spoon-fed to the audience like they’re babies eating slop? What a shame. I’m so disappointed that this will be the version of this scene so many people will see first, if they even go looking at the original, that is.
I’m probably going to keep pontificating about the goals of video game adaptations in these weekly recaps because The Last of Us remains one of the oddest case studies in the growing, lucrative business of repurposing video game stories for other media. All the claims that The Last of Us is a no-brainer for a TV or film adaptation often boil the games down to the cutscenes, as if all the hours between those moments weren’t adding anything to it all. If there was nothing to be gained by actually playing out Joel, Ellie, and Abby’s actions, then what purpose would there have been in making it a video game to begin with? The Last of Us is so preoccupied with recounting plot points like a Wikipedia summary that it lacks any real insight into why those events were arranged in a way that made them meaningful to play through.
Maybe you can’t completely recreate the sense of betrayal the player experiences when Abby blows out Joel’s knee because it feels so personal. After all, you were made to inhabit that role without knowing where it would lead. The quickness with which it happens is disorienting and you’re left with no answers, only a lingering sense of shock and deception, and you have to sit with it for hours of game time before you’re given any explanation. Sure, that’s not easily translated to a TV show, but you can replicate some of that uncomfortable dissonance by keeping viewers in the dark in the same way you did players. Watching Ellie slaughter people who, unbeknownst to her, were also grieving someone they cared about, and only later revealing the truth of Abby’s motivations might not evoke the same guilt and complicity that the game attempts to by making you play out those actions, but it can still approximate the crucial elements of how the story was constructed rather than haphazardly telling a new audience the chronological events with no real vision.
That’s lost here, however, as Abby tells Joel everything she’s been feeling for five years, and it makes me wonder what Mazin thinks The Last of Us games were. Are they just a series of events that happened that you could watch with a controller in your hand, or were they a crafted experience meant to invoke specific feelings about our connections to the characters as whom we play? Yeah, maybe you can’t imitate that feeling exactly in passive media, but you sure as hell don’t have to pretend it was a negligible part of what made the story effective. The Last of Us Part II is a thorny, divisive tale because it’s a video game, not despite it. But in this moment, I don’t believe the team behind the show views it that way. This kind of translation feels like they view the attachment (or, in some cases, the deliberately cultivated distance) between player and protagonist as a fun bonus rather than something integral to its DNA; almost like they didn’t even think it was worth attempting to emulate for viewers.
“If I ever were to lose you…”
Ellie finally happens upon the lodge and notices Joel and Dina’s horses outside. As she enters, she hears screams from the upper floor and walks upstairs with her gun at the ready. But as she enters, she’s shocked by the bloody sight in front of her and doesn’t notice Manny at the door. He knocks the gun out of her hand and throws her to the ground, but she does get in a good cut with her switchblade before she’s restrained. She calls out to Joel to get up, but all he can do is watch her from across the room. Owen, clearly shaken by how slowly Abby has dragged this out, tells her to end it. Ellie begs for Joel’s life, but Abby uses the now-broken golf club to stab him in the back of the neck. It doesn’t have quite the impact of her caving his skull in with the club, but it gets the job done, I suppose. Part of me wonders if this is just a tweak made to avoid showing Pedro Pascal’s head caved in, but he was already bloody and swollen at this point. Or maybe it was an attempt to make sure the golf memes don’t break containment for the general audience. Either way, weird deviation.
As Ellie’s ears start ringing from the adrenaline flowing through her veins, Owen and Manny argue about something, but we can’t hear what. Ellie shouts to the room that she’s going to kill all of them, prompting Manny to kick her in the chest and knock the wind out of her. She crawls to Joel’s corpse as the group leaves. They said they were only here to kill Joel, and despite everything, that seems to be true. When she reaches him, she removes the broken club from his neck and then cuddles up against him, which is when I raised my eyebrows and laughed uncomfortably to no one. Again, it feels like this show cannot just let a moment or feeling be expressed without laying it on thick, even if it starts to feel morbid and performative.
Then, like an angel descending from the heavens to remind me that a better version of this story exists, original Ellie actor Ashley Johnson’s cover of “Through the Valley” plays over the final scene. Abby and her crew silently walk away, presumably back to their home in Seattle; the people of Jackson slowly pick off the remaining infected; and Jesse arrives at the lodge to help bring Joel’s body back to Jackson.
When I played this segment for the first time in The Last of Us Part II back in 2020, I bawled in the way that leaves you feeling like shit the next morning. When I watched HBO recreate it, I couldn’t stop laughing. Maybe this is one of those things that will always just be poisoned by me having such a vivid recollection of the original scene. If this is your first time finding out about what Abby did to Joel, I hope it still hits for you. For me, it was just another succinct reminder that this show doesn’t have a strong understanding of the work it’s adapting.
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