‘The Last of Us’ Season Two Premiere Recap: Ellie and Joel Grapple With Joel’s Big Lie

“Okay.”

The second season of The Last of Us begins with the word that last season closed on—a heartbreaking moment of ambiguity between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the girl he now sees as his surrogate daughter. As you may recall Joel lied to Ellie by saying that her immunity to the cordyceps infection that has turned much of humanity into shrieking zombies wasn’t replicable, and that Ellie was now free to carve out whatever post-apocalyptic life she chose. The truth is much grimmer than that: Joel learned that making a potential cure would kill Ellie, and while she was unconscious in the operating room, he murdered the Firefly resistance movement to set Ellie free.

“Future Days,” the show’s season two premiere, sets up that lie as the first small domino that will cascade into the central conflict of this season, and beyond. That “okay,” delivered wonderfully by Bella Ramsey in the first season and replayed as the first moment in the premiere, leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether Ellie actually believed Joel. Picking up five years later, The Last of Us doesn’t yet give us a definitive answer.

What is clear is that Ellie is chafing under Joel’s overbearing and protective nature. Now a young adult, Ellie is relishing the work of keeping herself and others safe. She loves sparring practice, going on patrol, and her butterfly knife. She hates feeling like anyone is treating her like a kid, and the confusing nature of her friend Dina’s (Isabella Merced) mischievous advances—romance suits Ellie awkwardly, even as she begins to entertain the idea. The two share tremendous chemistry, fighting and flirting together in the show’s most prolonged action sequence as they battle a new breed of infected that’s capable of stalking and deceiving them.

Joel, meanwhile, is doing his best to be a pillar of the community. He and Ellie have set up shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming—a populous community briefly visited last season, now thriving and approaching pre-zombie apocalypse normalcy. Joel’s past life in construction has provided him with ample work in Jackson, as he works closely with his sister-in-law Maria (Rutina Wesley) and brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) to meet the rapidly growing community’s needs. Maria and Joel pick up an argument they seem to have had many times already, about needing to balance welcoming refugees while making sure they take care of their own. Joel leans conservative, and Maria leads with compassion.

There’s a nice, lived-in feel to this scene, even though I’m not sure The Last of Us is particularly interested in digging into this particular ideological argument. At the end of the day, the questions Joel asks his nephew—what’s inside Jackson’s borders? (People) What’s outside? (Monsters)—seems to answer it clearly.

Joel has it less easy in therapy—which is a thing he does now, in exchange for ziploc bags of sub-par weed. Gail (Catherine O’Hara, in a wonderful dramatic turn) has been harboring anger towards Joel—we learn he killed her husband Eugene in a moment of desperation. It’s a bit jarring to hear about something so consequential that happened entirely off-screen, but Craig Mazin, who writes and directs this episode, is clearly setting up a thread he intends to revisit. We already know that Eugene will appear in an upcoming episode played by Joe Pantaliano, and that knowledge is exciting. Like this scene, that one will not have originated in the game. Eugene is just someone mentioned in passing in The Last of Us Part II, while Gail does not exist at all.

This is where the TV version of The Last of Us sings: finding grace notes to expand upon, then rooting them back into the show’s central relationship. Here, Gail brings up her ugly feelings towards Joel to make a point: You can’t heal or fix something you refuse to talk about. She doesn’t know about Joel’s lie, but she does know that Joel is hiding something. And unless he can say it out loud, he can’t expect to repair whatever afflicts his relationship with Ellie.

That relationship is the inspiration for the episode’s title. “Future Days” is a bit of an easter egg—it’s a Pearl Jam song that Joel plays for Ellie when he gives her a guitar in The Last of Us Part II. It’s quite likely we’ll see the same moment in the show—season one sets it up when Joel mentions fixing up a guitar for Ellie in passing, and he frets over the instrument’s condition when he pays Ellie a visit in this episode. That guitar is a big deal in the game, and Pearl Jam is a big deal for Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann. Other nods to the source material give “Future Days,” the episode some extra flourish: Ellie’s journaling; her horse, Shimmer; and the new tattoo she has covering her infection scar.

Many of The Last of Us’ best moments continue to be lifted directly from the games, too. In “Future Days,” that’s the big dance in Jackson, where Dina and Ellie share a very public kiss. It’s a gossip-worthy moment in the town for two reasons: The first is that Dina has just broken up with Jesse (Young Mazino), perhaps the most serious-minded and responsible of Jackson’s young adult cohort. The other is that their budding queer romance attracts the ire of a local bigot named Seth, who tells the two that they’re at “a family event” before tossing a slur their way. Ellie and Dina don’t get to respond to the man because Joel intervenes on their behalf, shoving Seth to the ground and kicking him out. Ellie is furious at Joel for both making a scene and for continuing to treat her like a child—the rift between them getting deeper the longer they’re unable to clear the air.

A number of things threaten to interrupt the heart-to-heart Joel and Ellie need to have, however. There’s an internal threat—cordyceps tendrils have infiltrated the community, growing through a rotting pipe that runs beneath everything—and an external one. In a small shift from the source material, the show immediately introduces viewers to its most consequential new player: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who leads a crew of young Firefly members who all want revenge for Joel’s murderous rampage at the end of season 1. We don’t know much about her yet, but she bookends the show with menace, vowing revenge in its opening moments and arriving outside of Jackson as it closes.

That’s the risk you run when you keep secrets from people you care about: someone else might beat you to the truth.