For better or for worse, our parents shape us into who we are. We try to emulate their image or avoid their mistakes or probably some of both. That’s why it’s so important that this season of The Last Of Us circle back around to Joel Miller’s story. It’s not just that it’s nice to see Pedro Pascal again (although it definitely is), it’s that we need to understand how Ellie was shaped by her five years with the only parent she’s ever known. Joel is gone, but his legacy lives on through his adoptive daughter. And this flashback episode paints a beautiful, bittersweet, brutally honest portrait of what kind of legacy that is.
Joel is a protector. As we learn this week, it’s a role he’s had since he was a kid protecting his little brother from their abusive father. And yet Joel’s protective streak has always operated within very specific parameters. When he and his family were first fleeing the Cordyceps outbreak, Tommy wanted to stop and help a couple with a kid. Joel, however, told him to keep driving. In that moment his instinct was to protect the two people he loved most from anything that could potentially do them harm. The rest of the world could save itself.
Joel’s protective streak can be ruthless in that way. Unlike Tommy, who yearns to be part of something bigger than himself, or Maria, who wants to be an empathetic leader who listens to others, Joel’s desire to protect has always been tied up in a desire to control the circumstances around him—emotionally and physically. He has an instinctual sense of what safety looks and feels like to him. And he’ll move heaven and Earth to make that image a reality.
That’s why he was initially so reluctant to take Ellie on in season one, when his image of safety was just him and Tess living together as lovers and smuggling partners. Once his circle of protection shifted to include Ellie, however, his sense of safety became bound up in the idea of the two of them living as a family. That’s why Joel didn’t fight to protect Ellie’s right to make her own choices about her life and death in the season-one finale. He fought to save her in the way he wanted her to be saved. He murdered the Fireflies who stood in his way, lied about it, and whisked Ellie off to his version of a happily ever after.
As we see as this episode picks up two months after Ellie and Joel’s return to Jackson, they did live happily for a while. At his best, Joel’s desire to control manifests as a deep level of care and attention to detail for the people he loves. For Ellie’s 15th birthday, he hunts down some old LEGOs to barter with Seth for a homemade birthday cake. (Happy birthday Eli!) And he puts an incredible amount of time and effort into making a beautiful homemade guitar for Ellie to learn on. He even plays and sings at her request—a tentative version of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.”
Joel tops that gift with Ellie’s 16th birthday the next year. In one of my favorite sequences of the show’s entire run, Joel takes Ellie to an old science museum where she’s not just able to see a giant T-Rex statue, but also climb inside the real-life Apollo 15 capsule! For as fun as it was to watch Ellie and Riley run wild in a mall last season, I’ve seen the “survive the apocalypse in a shopping center” fantasy before. The idea of breaking into a museum and playing with all the real-life artifacts was a genuinely mind-blowing apocalypse perk to me, maybe because I’m also a bit of a space nerd.
It’s incredibly moving to see how Joel has thought through every detail of Ellie’s perfect day—from greasing the wheels on the planet spinning diorama to letting her pick out her own helmet to tracking down a cassette tape with rocket launch countdown audio. So much of what made the first season of The Last Of Us so special came down to the incredible, playful chemistry between Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Watching them get to revisit that dynamic again feels like a gift—both for them as actors and for us as viewers. Now that Joel is gone, it’s heartening to know that he and Ellie still got at least some “future days” together.
And yet that impulse to control every detail of Ellie’s perfect day has a trickier flipside as well. For Ellie’s 17th birthday, we see what happens when Joel’s schemes don’t go according to plan. He comes home early to surprise her with a cake, only to discover Ellie and Kat getting high, fooling around, and tattooing Ellie’s bit/burned arm. What’s upsetting about Joel’s reaction isn’t just that he freaks out or gets righteously parental (it’s so charming to return to the season-one version of Ellie again that you kind of understand his impulse to want to freeze her in amber), it’s the way he chastises her. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he huffs. “We’ll discuss this later when you’re yourself.”
Joel’s mental image of his happily ever after with Ellie clearly involved her staying a sweet, precocious, easily impressed, conventionally heterosexual little girl. When that image is rocked, he lashes out in a way that, again, denies her right to make her own choices. If she’s not acting the way he wants her to, she’s “not herself.”
Crucially, however, that controlling side of Joel is mollified by a deep desire to change and be better too. We saw that in his willingness to compromise with Tess last season and we see it here with Ellie too. When Ellie pushes back that Joel “doesn’t own anything” (she’s talking about the house, but she also means herself), Joel actually listens and tries to meet her in the middle. He agrees to let her move into the garage after he makes it livable. He compliments her new tattoo. He tries to understand her dreams about moths, which Gail tells him are a symbol for death. Two years later, he’ll even let her go on patrol and talk about her dating Dina with warm approval.
Joel’s desperation to change is so real and raw and human. And yet maybe there’s only so much we can ever really unlearn. In the safety of Jackson, Joel could work on evolving. But in a moment of crisis, he reverts back to the same coldly protective instinct that kept him alive through the first two decades of the apocalypse. That’s what happens on Ellie’s 19th birthday, when Joel and Ellie discover the much-discussed Eugene (a heartbreaking Joe Pantoliano) bitten but still lucid in the woods. After trying and failing to pull a gun on them, Eugene begs them to take him back to the Jackson gates and let him say a proper goodbye to Gail before they kill him.
It’s a genuine moral dilemma. Jackson’s policy seems to be to shoot the bitten immediately to protect the community, but Joel and Ellie find Eugene so early in his infection that his plan seems like a reasonable one. You can see both arguments, but what’s disturbing is the way Joel goes about making his decision—promising to take Eugene back then killing him anyway and lying to Gail about what went down. It’s exactly the kind of thing he found so despicable when Marlene and the Fireflies tried to do it to him and Ellie in Salt Lake City. There Marlene told Joel, “I have no other choice.” Here he’s the one telling Ellie, “It’s the right thing to do. I had no choice.”
Only that’s not necessarily true. Joel acts like he’s giving Eugene a calm, merciful death by the lake, even though that’s not actually what Eugene finds comforting and Joel mostly seems worried about killing him out of sight of Ellie. And he acts like he’s helping Gail by spinning a story about Eugene’s poignantly noble death, even though that lie is for his comfort as much as hers. It’s protection and denial and dominance all swirled into one messy package—the same impulse that inspired Joel to leave that family by the side of the road and justify it with a “someone else will come along.”
This time, however, someone is there to call him out. This time-hopping episode lets us see how Ellie processed her Salt Lake City experience in the five-year jump between seasons. Even in their earlier, happier years in Jackson, little niggling questions about Joel’s cover story lingered in the back of her mind—manifesting in her unnerved glances at fireflies or those moths she keeps drawing everywhere. (“You have a greater purpose,” she’s scribbled on a piece of paper.) By her 19th birthday, she’s trying to muster up the courage to discuss everything with Joel directly. But once she sees how easily he lies about Eugene, she knows everything she needs to know. Her entire image of Joel is shattered, and it’ll be nine months before she can fully process what that means for their relationship.
The episode ends with a quietly devastating final flashback that fills us in on the “missing scene” between Joel and Ellie’s fight at the New Year’s Eve dance and her softer stance on him the morning of his death. It turns out she did actually stop to talk to him on the porch, finally asking him all the questions she’d been afraid to ask the past five years. And he, in turn, finally gives up all that control he’s been clinging to as his life raft.
Joel tells Ellie the truth about the Firefly massacre and prepares for her to turn away from him forever—the only circumstance he could imagine if the secret were to come out. Only then something unexpected happens. Back in the premiere, Gail told Joel, “You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud.” It’s not until Ellie hears Joel’s truth that she can move on from the emotional turmoil she’s been living in. She’s right that Joel is selfish; Joel is right that he’s driven by love. And though Joel assumes there’s no way she can hold those two ideas in her head at once, it turns out she can. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this,” she says. “But I would like to try.”
It’s heartwarming to know Joel and Ellie got that moment of closure and heartbreaking to think of all the happier years they didn’t get together. It’s also a harrowing contrast to where Ellie is at on her Seattle revenge mission. As Joel’s dad makes clear, this is an episode about how each generation tries to do a little better than the one that came before them. Joel’s grandfather’s shocking brutality became his dad’s more commonplace parental abuse became Joel’s emotionally controlling protective streak. Now that Joel is gone, it’s up to Ellie to determine how she continues the family legacy. Right now her vengeance is driven by a need to feel in control again. But maybe there are other parts of Joel she can learn to carry on too.
Stray observations
- • After Joel’s death, the opening credits switched from two figures to just one. This week we’re back to two again—maybe for the last time.
- • Jumping back into a pre-outbreak flashback in 1983 was kind of shocking to me. I know other post-apocalyptic shows have used that structure before, but I think The Last Of Us’ flashbacks have always been to a mid- or post-outbreak world.
- • I really believe Tony Dalton could have raised Pedro Pascal. Great casting.
- • I thought using birthdays as a way to chart the five-year time jump was a brilliant structural choice. I wonder if they skipped Ellie 18th birthday for time or if there’s a chance they’re saving it for another flashback before the show is done.
- • Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” wasn’t released until 2013 (a.k.a. ten years after the show’s outbreak happened), but Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have said the song is way too important to the series to worry about the continuity issue.
- • Joel threatening Kat with the fact that Ellie is 17 only for her to reply that she’s 19 was so funny. I also loved him talking about Dina’s “intentions” like he’s some kind of 1950s dad.
- • It’s just a New Year’s Eve joke, but Tommy saying “See you next year” to Joel was so quietly devastating.
- • I know some people argue that there’s no way the Fireflies could actually have made a cure from Ellie and they were just doing reckless science, but I think it’s a much more interesting moral dilemma if we assume they could. This episode confirms Ellie would have wanted to go through with the procedure, and maybe letting Joel hear that and actually saying goodbye would have prevented his massacre (maybe).
