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The deck is stacked from the start. As the new season of The Last of Us begins, survivors of a massacre bury their dead. They’re the Fireflies, members of a scattered network of rebels fighting the fascist government that took over in the wake of the cordyceps outbreak that killed or zombified billions. (Ah yes, those happy golden bygone days when we thought it would take an evil fungus for fascism to come to America.) The perpetrator of the massacre was no jackbooted government lackey, though. Nor was it the monstrous and powerful infected known as “clickers” for their method of echolocation. It was Joel (Pedro Pascal), our player character — ahem, our protagonist.
And what choice did the writers — sorry, the Fireflies — leave him? Either he killed them or they would kill his adoptive daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Sure, if they did so it might enable them analyze why she’s immune to infection (she was exposed to a minuscule amount of the fungus during birth), and thus find a cure for cordyceps and save the world. But a real man does whatever he has to protect his family, or something.
The whole killcrazy climax to the show’s first season was frustrating because it set up a false binary, a choice between individual and collective needs. Reality is not a zero-sum contest between you and everyone else — only fascists believe otherwise — and genre stories that make such a conflict their central moral dilemma are playing fast and loose with how morality actually works.
We’re not five minutes into the Season 2 premiere when writer-director-co-creator Craig Mazin does it again. The surviving Fireflies are led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s born-again hard from the ordeal. Not only does she want to track down and kill Joel with the other survivors’ help, she wants to kill him slowly. She repeats the word for clarity and everything.
Once again, The Last of Us is not-so-subtly nudging us in the direction they want our sympathies to go. If this were a simple case of a gaggle of survivors hunting down and shooting the outlaw who gunned down their kinsfolk, we’d probably still be rooting for Joel — he’s Pedro Pascal, for god’s sake — but we’d at least sympathize with their goal. Torturing Joel to death is a bridge too far when you’ve spent a season asking us to identify with the guy, in a story based on an art form where identifying with the protagonist is baked right into the game mechanics. We can’t root for Abby now. That’s The Last of Us for you: It’s always less complex than it looks.
After our initial encounter with the Firefly survivors, the action jumps forward five years. By now Jackson, Wyoming is a thriving small town, its quaint buildings coated by snow. It’s actually Christmastime, technically, but I’m guessing the showrunners felt going full Currier & Ives on us would be laying it on a little thick. Presiding over the good people of Jackson is our hero, Joel — I didn’t catch anyone mentioning his official job title, but he’s some combination of mayor, sheriff, and head of the Department of Public Works. Meanwhile, his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and sister-in-law, Maria (Rutina Wesley), sit on the city council. And his “daughter,” Ellie (Ramsey, whose dry defiance works much better coming from an older character), is the most respected hunter of the infected in the biz.
All told, the family draws a lot of water in this beach community, but all is not well within the family nonetheless. Joel wants to take a hard line against welcoming more refugees within the town’s walls since they lack the housing capacity, putting him in conflict with the more benevolent Maria, who reminds him he too was once a refugee. Maybe this will work better than reminding Americans “we’re a nation of immigrants” worked, or maybe not.
More crucially to the story at the moment, Joel is on the outs with Ellie, for reasons he can’t ascertain. Most people, including his therapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara – more on her in a bit), assume it’s just basic 19-year-old daughter/dad stuff that he shouldn’t be so worked up about, but it’s clearly breaking his heart. What’s more, he feels guilty about the, let’s call a spade a spade here, wanton mass shooting he perpetrated to spare Ellie from Firefly scientists.
Joel is confronted about his secrecy by Gail, who by the time she sees him for his appointment is half in the bag. It’s her birthday, you see, and her first without her husband, and now she has to treat Joel, her husband’s killer. We don’t know what happened here, only that Gail admits Joel had no choice but that she hates him anyway; I assume this means the husband was infected and thus had to be killed, which, yeah, however justified Joel was I’d have a hard time being his therapist too.
Joel’s main complaint is his difficulty with Ellie, especiallay compared easy relationship with her best friend, Dina (Isabela Merced), who “makes me feel like a good guy — which I am!” (Ugh.) But even despite all this, Gail senses that Joel is hiding something from her, and she wants to help him bring it to light and work through it. Being a Pedro Pascal character, Joel grits his teeth and gets the hell out of there rather than open up. (You gotta build to Joel opening up, the way sci-fi and fantasy shows build to battle episodes.)
The fact that the massacre coming up at all right around the same time Ellie is giving Joel the cold shoulder makes me wonder if she’s figured out he lied about the incident herself. The episode actually begins with a replay of the Godfather-inspired scene in which Ellie asks him point blank if he’s telling the truth about the fate of the Fireflies and he straight-up lies to her face, and it seems clear that Ellie chooses to believe this because the alternative is unthinkable to her. Maybe it’s not so unthinkable anymore.
For further evidence, look how she reacts to the way Joel decks a homophobe at the town’s big New Year’s Eve party, when Ellie starts making out with Dina, on whom she’s been nurturing a crush all episode long. Honestly it’s the most elegant exit of the friend zone I’ve ever seen anyone pull off. Does cordyceps immunity also grant you extra pheromones or something? Anyway, Ellie reacts to Joel’s intervention with rage, insisting that she doesn’t need his protection anymore. She seems genuinely aghast at his capacity for violence, as much as she’s pissed he didn’t leave it up to her to deck the guy.
If there’s a theme for Ellie this episode, though, it’s self-sufficiency to the point of arrogance, even recklessness. Ellie’s a strong MMA fighter, but not as strong as she thinks. She’s a great shot, but not a crack one. She ignores the orders of her nominal superior on patrol, her ex-girlfriend Kat (Noah Lamanna), goes hunting for infected inside an abandoned supermarket with Dina, and survives — but she falls through he floor and gets stalked by an unusually intelligent infected, who bites her. She’s immune, but it’s another wound she’ll have to cover up, especially from Dina, since no one can know her big secret without putting her in grave danger.
Of course, danger’s on the way no matter what. Both the intelligent infected and the pack of six who took down a massive bear nearby indicate potentially major problems with the fungus zombies in the community’s future. The worn-out pipes that Dina is trying to help repurpose for the town’s needs are full of cordyceps that reactivate when exposed to the warmth of an abandoned sparkler after the New Year’s festivities. And a few miles away, Abby and the other Firefly survivors have finally arrived, with vengeance on their minds.
It’s a real “Tune in next week, same fungus-time, same fungus-channel” ending. Honestly, that’s the vibe TLoU should be pursuing. Its sociopolitical commentary and moral-philosophical dilemmas all feel like someone doodling the trolley problem from memory after hearing about it in a TLoU2 reaction video on YouTube. But the nasty visuals for the infected, the copious gore, stealth sequences straight out of a pretty good video game, jump scares galore, just genuinely anticipating it all going to hell because this is a horror story and that’s what happens — that’s where this show generates real energy and excitement. Why swing for the fences when you can swing the bat at some monsters’ mushroom-encrusted skulls and have a perfectly satisfying show as a result?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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