Major deaths on TV shows are nothing new. Soap operas have been deploying them for years, Grey’s Anatomy and The Walking Dead practically built a brand around the idea, and Game Of Thrones proved that even main characters aren’t safe from annihilation. But the death of Joel Miller is different. Joel wasn’t just the main character of The Last Of Us; he was one half of a two-hander show. The entire premise of The Last Of Us was Joel and Ellie surviving the apocalypse together—to the point where I don’t think a single other character recurred in more than two or three episodes last season.
That’s why it was such a shock not just to lose him, but to lose him so soon. Though Joel’s death comes early in The Last Of Us Part II video game as well, even gamers may have expected the show to kick it down the road for as long as possible—especially since HBO is dividing the second game across two seasons. There was a world where the show changed the storytelling flow to keep Joel around until the season finale. Personally, I thought he’d make it through at least episode three or four. But the series stuck to its guns (well, golf clubs), and here we are in a brand-new future. The Last Of Us we were watching before is gone, and now a new version of the show is rising up to take its place.
Writer and co-creator Craig Mazin clearly realizes how big of a deal that is, which is why he follows up last week’s harrowing installment with a gentle, transitional episode. If last week was all action with little space for processing, this episode is all-processing (well, kind of) with no action. Outside of the briefest glimpse of last week’s climactic moment, there are no flashbacks to Joel and no sign of what Abby is up to. This is the calm before the storm of whatever comes next. And the fact that it all feels a tad aimless is both intentional and also a bit worrying.
As the episode begins, we only get a few moments to experience the immediate aftermath of Joel’s death. Tommy washes his brother’s arm and whispers a heartbreaking goodbye. (“Give Sarah my love.”) Ellie wakes up in the hospital screaming, to the point where she needs to be sedated. The infected are still burning outside Jackson’s gates, even as the winter winds howl. But the episode doesn’t linger too long on that initial trauma.
Instead, it jumps three months into the future, where spring has sprung and Jackson has largely rebuilt after the New Year’s Day attack. It’s the most calm and colorful we’ve seen The Last Of Us outside of Bill and Frank’s flashbacks, which is an encouraging sign that all hope isn’t lost. There’s a version of this story where the attack would’ve wiped Jackson off the map entirely. (It feels like that’s what would’ve happened on The Walking Dead.) But here the community proves strong enough to not just “endure and survive” but “rebuild and thrive” too.
Although this is first and foremost an episode about Ellie, I’m fascinated by the idea of what “normal” looks like in Jackson. On the one hand, there’s medical bureaucracy, little-league baseball games, and coolers full of beer. On the other hand, the town casually calls a meeting to discuss whether they should send 16 people to execute a group of strangers. Two decades into the apocalypse, “normal” is a relative term.
That’s also true for Ellie, who finally gets to leave the hospital after a three-month stay for her rib injuries. (That seems a bit long, right?) Having been raised in FEDRA schools for her entire childhood, Ellie knows just what she needs to say to pass Gail’s mental-health assessment—faux processing her grief to suggest she’s shipshape and ready to go. But her cool, calm, and collected demeanor may not entirely be an act either.
Last week, I suggested that Joel and Ellie’s New Year’s Eve fight was the last time they spoke to each other. But when Gail asks if that was the case, it seems pretty clear Ellie is lying. Indeed, I missed it last week, but when Jesse came to wake Ellie up for their doomed patrol mission, the moth guitar was back in her room. That means she and Joel must have had another interaction after she got back from the dance. What they said and where they actually left their relationship is still yet to be revealed. But that inevitable flashback will be crucial to understanding where Ellie’s head is truly at this season. As Gail reminds her, your final moment with someone shouldn’t define your entire time with them—but it often does.
Whatever they said, Ellie keeps it to herself for now. And if she suspects that Joel’s murder had anything to do with what happened in Salt Lake City, she keeps that close to her chest as well. After all, it weakens the case she makes at the Jackson town council meeting: that hunting down Joel’s killers is a fair form of justice that will reaffirm Jackson’s community bonds.
Indeed, Ellie is keeping just about everything close to the chest this week. When she’s alone, she does briefly allow herself the chance to truly grieve Joel—reading the tribute letters the town left outside their home and quietly crying while she rubs her fingers against his signature brown jacket. Watching little 19-year-old Ellie come home to an empty house is one of the most quietly devastating moments of the series, a reminder that though she’s technically old enough to be considered an adult, she’s still such a kid. But Ellie doesn’t feel like she can share that emotionally vulnerable side of herself with anyone, even Dina, who’s also mourning Joel’s loss.
Bella Ramsey is tremendous at capturing both Ellie’s grief and how she tamps down that grief in various ways. There’s a lot of symbolism to the fact that when faced with a box of Joel’s things, Ellie leaves his beloved watch and takes his gun instead. She’s not truly ready to process his death—she just wants vengeance. So when Dina reveals that she knows the names and homebase of Joel’s killers, that’s all Ellie needs to hear to find her new purpose in life.
Ironically, however, we know the last thing Joel would want would be for Ellie to put herself in danger to avenge him. He killed a whole hospital full of people just for the chance to give her a normal life, and now that act is tragically the very thing pulling her back into danger. Gail and Tommy discuss nature vs. nurture, and there’s an intriguing push-pull to the ways in which Joel and Ellie are similar and different. They both have a capacity for violence, but Ellie seems to relish it in a way Joel never did. She wants to become her image of Joel as an idealized protector, without fully understanding the trauma and regret that forged him.
I love the moment when Tommy calls out Ellie for her limited understanding of Joel. Sure, Joel would fight like hell to save the people he loved, but he wasn’t one for lingering on revenge. “Don’t talk to me like I didn’t know him,” Tommy snaps. “When we lost people, it would just break him like it was his fault.” Indeed, we even saw that in action last season. When Tess died, Joel basically just refused to ever say her name again.
Ellie copes and represses in different ways, however. And when the Jackson council (very understandably!) refuses to send a full hit squad to Seattle, she and Dina take off on their own, thus setting up the actual arc of this season—a mirrored version of season one in which Ellie is the stoic, interior protector and Dina is the funny, vivacious sidekick. The fact that they’re two young women who may or may not be in love with each other makes their two-hander dynamic different than the one we had last season. But positioning Ellie as the new Joel and Dina as the new Ellie is an interesting starting point.
What I’m a little less sold on is the dynamics they’ll find in Seattle. While these past three episodes have done a stellar job building out the world of Jackson so that it feels lived-in and nuanced, we’ve now got a new world to adjust to as well. On one side is Abby’s Washington Liberation Front, a small anti-FEDRA resistance group that has seemingly grown into a massive paramilitary organization over the years. (Ellie and Dina have never seemed more youthfully naïve than when they convince themselves that the W.L.F. “wolves” must be a small enough group that they can take them out on their own.)
On the other side is a curious clan of forest-wandering nomads we briefly glimpse about a third of the way into the episode. It’s a compelling but oddly placed scene (I wonder if it would have worked better as a cold open?) that also feels ported over from a different type of series. We saw a religious cult in last season’s harrowing penultimate episode, but that group felt anchored in a recognizable form of patriarchal American Christianity. These whistling, hammer-carrying, prophet-worshipping, ritually scarred nomads seem more like something out of Star Trek.
Obviously, it’s far too early to make a full judgement call yet. And to the episode’s credit, it was genuinely upsetting to watch Ellie and Dina stumble upon the dead bodies of the group—including the sweet little red-haired girl Constance, who worried that demons were coming. But it’s another example of this season taking the show into uncharted waters in potentially destabilizing ways.
We’ve got Ellie and Dina on their mission, Abby and her crew in Seattle, two bigger groups in conflict, and all the people back at Jackson we now care about too. While last season offered the dependable rhythm of Joel and Ellie moving across the country and facing a new threat each week, the shape of this season is much more nebulous. I have no idea whether we’ll be cutting back and forth between all those players or keeping our perspective more limited. And when and how will we learn more about all the lingering mysteries between Joel and Ellie? In some ways, not knowing is exciting. In other ways, however, it’s a big adjustment. The thing we signed up to watch is no longer here. Hopefully something just as compelling will rise in its wake.
Stray observations
- • There’s so much great tension to that scene between Ellie and Dina in the tent! While Dina continues to read a touch manic pixie dream girl to me at times (especially with how perfectly she plans the whole Seattle trip), I like when the show leans into the idea that she’s a bit manipulative and self-centered when it comes to romance. She pointedly reaffirms that she’s straight but then flirtily reveals that she wasn’t that high when she kissed Ellie.
- • I also continue to love Young Mazino as Jesse. He’s such a warm yet practical addition to the series, and Ellie and Dina’s discussion of his secret sadness adds a ton of layers to his character.
- • Homophobic Seth becoming Ellie and Dina’s unexpected ally is a fantastic use of Jackson’s small-town dynamics. I totally buy that his “traditional values” would make a violent revenge mission appealing to him. And it’s intriguingly ambiguous whether we’re supposed to see Seth as noble for helping them or Ellie and Dina as wrongheaded for taking on the kind of mission he’d approve of.
- • Catherine O’Hara is hilarious at the little-league game, and I love that she’s just rooting for the kids by number because she doesn’t know their names. (Also, the idea that Tommy “inherited” Ellie from Joel is so sweet!)
- • Apparently the line “Quiet…too quiet” is said by both Curtis and Viper in all four movies. Now that’s cinema.
- • I’m fascinated that Jackson has a full hospital. Last season Maria mentioned that they started from a pre-existing gated community and expanded from there, but how far did they have to build to reach a medical facility?
- • Dina: “You know you could have just asked.” Ellie: “No, I actually didn’t know that.” Ellie really is Joel’s emotionally repressed daughter!
- • Ellie leaves coffee beans at Joel’s grave, which honors Joel’s love of java and a cute scene in season one.
- • Thanks again for being so good about marking game spoilers in the comments! After the more straightforward episodic nature of the first game, I think the more serialized, less linear nature of the second game makes it more compelling to discuss this season as an act of adaptation. These reviews aren’t exactly the space for that (again, I haven’t played the game myself—I just know some highlights from it), but I appreciate everybody trying to make it work as best we can.
