‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Future Days’
“The Last of Us” began with a prologue that set up everything about to happen, in the episode and in the series. In a scene set in 1968, a scientist explained that his greatest fear was that a warming planet would provide the perfect incubating conditions for a mind-controlling fungus that could turn humans into brainless killers. There is obviously more to “The Last of Us” than just, “What if there were mushroom zombies?” But that idea put the plot in motion.
The second season of “The Last of Us” begins with two prologues. In one, we meet Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), one of the surviving Fireflies from the Season 1 finale’s Salt Lake City massacre. Abby and her fellow resistance-fighters gather around their loved one’s graves to discuss a plan to retaliate against Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), the man who slaughtered so many of their people. (“Slowly,” Abby says, when her allies say they will kill Joel.)
In the other prologue, we flash back to the final scene from that finale, when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) made Joel swear that he took her away from the Fireflies because they had given up on finding a cure for the cordyceps plague. Joel gave Ellie his word, which she warily accepted.
I expect there to be as many twists, turns, new characters and new story lines in Season 2 as there were in Season 1. But based on the premiere, it seems this season will also be driven by one simple idea: that when Joel saved Ellie from the Fireflies and then lied to her, he made a godawful mess.
After the prologues, the episode jumps ahead five years. Joel and Ellie are now settled in Jackson, Wyo., the edenic survivor colony run in part by Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and Tommy’s wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley). Joel is making himself useful with his fix-it know-how, and Ellie has been honing her fighting skills and going on patrols, to gather supplies and to winnow down the numbers of the infected in the area. But while they seem reasonably content, something has soured between them.
As I mentioned in my reviews last season, one of my great fascinations with any postapocalyptic story is in seeing how people make fortresses for themselves, sealed off from the surrounding mayhem — and also seeing how they try to build fulfilling lives inside their hidey-holes. So it’s a pleasure early in this episode to get reacquainted with Jackson, a place that has electricity, agriculture, law, and even culture in the form of music and dancing.
We meet two important new characters, too. One is Gail (Catherine O’Hara), a therapist who has been helping Joel process his feelings about past mistakes. These therapy sessions have been hampered by Joel’s unwillingness to come clean about everything he has done. Also, Gail resents Joel because he killed Eugene, her husband of over 40 years. (The details of this killing are unrevealed in this episode, but given that the season’s cast list includes Joe Pantoliano as Eugene, expect a flashback.)
The other major new character is Dina (Isabela Merced), a young woman who pals around with both Joel and Ellie. Given that Joel and Ellie are barely talking to each other when this episode begins, their scenes with Dina are a reminder of why those two characters were so easy to like in Season 1. We see Joel patiently explaining to Dina how circuit breakers work. We see Ellie making heart-eyes at Dina as they get suited up to go out on patrol. We see our heroes’ humanity.
When they interact with the rest of the Jackson community, relations are thornier. Joel has issues with the way Maria and the town council run things, complaining they let in too many newcomers. (Maria’s pointed response: “Joel, you were a refugee too.”) Meanwhile, Ellie annoys the powers-that-be with her recklessness and inability to follow orders. The locals also seem to be wearying of how Joel meddles behind the scenes to protect Ellie, and how Ellie has become unnervingly frosty toward her guardian. (No reason is given for their suddenly strained relationship, but I assume it has something to do with what happened in Salt Lake City.)
“The Last of Us” is an action-horror series as much as it is a drama, so this episode’s writer-director, Craig Mazin, does not let all the relationship complications run on too long before shifting to a few good scares. Ellie and Dina join a patrol, checking into the increased presence of the infected in the area. The mission leads them to a crumbling old grocery store, with a gutted bear and several dismembered corpses out front.
We get a good taste of Ellie and Dina’s dynamic during their trip into the Wyoming wilds. They talk about their love lives, with Dina urging Ellie to take their patrol-leader Kat (Noah Lamanna) to the New Year’s dance. (Dina says of Kat, “She’s the other one,” meaning the only other out gay young woman in Jackson.) Then they ignore Kat’s orders and barge into the grocery store to go monster-hunting; and while tracking the infected’s hideous sounds, they make goofy little jokes and hand gestures, showing absolutely no fear.
Because this is “The Last of Us,” their heedlessness has consequences. While acting all casual after killing a “clicker,” Ellie falls through the floor to a lower level, where a new kind of infected creature stalks her. This beast looks like a young girl (surely not a coincidence, symbolically speaking), with antler-like protrusions. Rather than attacking Ellie immediately, it holds back, as though developing a strategy. Ellie ultimately gets bit on the belly; and since her immunity from infection is still a secret, when she gets home she cuts around the wound so that it looks less like a bite-mark.
The supermarket sequence is the sensational center of this episode, full of suspense and excitement — everything this show does well. These scenes matter to the larger plot too, because what the patrol finds outside the walls — savage mutilations and a new kind of mutated monster — is concerning.
But in this show, small details matter as much as pulse-pounding standoffs, so the final scenes back in Jackson are also important. At the New Year’s dance, Dina and Ellie end up together, smooching passionately in the middle of the dance floor. The moment is reminiscent of Season 1’s beautiful flashback episode “Left Behind,” as we once again watch Ellie’s face light up, realizing the person she is crushing on likes her back.
Alas, the magic fades. Someone complains that this is “a family event” where two queer women (not the words this yokel uses) should not publicly display affection. The ever-protective Joel rushes in to give this yahoo a hard shove. Ellie, rather than thanking Joel for caring, yells, “What is wrong with you?”
The biggest question at the end of Season 1 was whether Joel’s choice to save Ellie rather than (potentially) saving the world was selfish and shortsighted. On the one hand, keeping Ellie alive reaffirms one of the series’s central ideas: that we must make the most of whatever kind of life we have. Yet the ramifications of that choice keep causing problems — including at the end of this episode, when we see Abby and her armed Firefly comrades arriving just outside Jackson.
And the Fireflies are not the only looming trouble. Early in this episode, Dina mentions to a preoccupied Joel that one of the community’s underground pipes — connected to the outside — has been rendered useless by encroaching roots. Devoted “Last of Us” fans know not to take any tendrils lightly, since they could be part of a larger cordyceps hive-mind. Sure enough, we later see that crumbling pipe again, and see the roots within ominously squirming.
Joel is determined to keep Ellie safe, behind thick walls. But underneath their feet — and in the relationship between them — the infrastructure is compromised.
Side Quests
-
Joel and Gail’s therapy session is another of this episode’s highlights. It builds in tension, as a frustrated Gail tries to get Joel to say “the thing you’re afraid to say.” He is on the verge of tears as he denies ever hurting Ellie. But when Gail asks one last time, “What did you do?,” Joel hardens. “I saved her,” he says, before storming out.
-
On the wall in Gail’s living room, there hangs a painting of a cowboy on a horse, with a riderless horse trailing behind. The picture reflects both Gail’s situation and Joel’s. It also matches the episode’s visual style, which resembles a western.
-
A fun callback to the Season 1 premiere: More than one person tells Ellie that with her patrol gear on, she looks like Curtis from “Viper,” Joel’s favorite action movie franchise.
-
Good to see that Ellie still loves puns, even when they are as bad as Dina’s quip about a dead bear’s ribs being “bear-b-que.” Ellie likes that one so much that she writes in her journal.
-
The Miller brothers have got jokes too. When Maria tells Joel they need to build faster to accommodate all the new arrivals, he sarcastically replies that he will just turn up the dial on his “construct-o-meter.” A few minutes later, when Maria mentions to Tommy how far behind they are, Tommy looks at his brother and says, “Did you tell her about the big dial?”
The post ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 1: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch appeared first on New York Times.
