‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Revenge

Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Through the Valley’

In most postapocalyptic stories — “The Last of Us” included — one big idea that comes around repeatedly is that when death is omnipresent and inescapable, life becomes more precious. Just think of all the small twists of fate and fortune that kept Joel Miller alive for so long. It’s a miracle, really, that he lived deep into middle age — let alone that in this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” he is in the right place at the right time to save the life of Abby, a woman who spent years looking for him.

The problem is that Abby wants Joel dead. And so, in one of the most horrifying moments in this horror-filled series, she obliterates this great miracle of life — the great miracle of Joel — with a several swings of a golf club and one deadly thrust. It’s a damned shame.

Were it not for Joel’s death, the episode “Through the Valley” would likely be remembered for the stunning battle sequence, in which Jackson holds it own — barely — against hundreds of the savage, relentless zombies. The action here, set against a snowy landscape, recalls the spectacle of “Game of Thrones” at its best.

But we have to deal with Joel first, don’t we? The shock of his murder is going to be hard for a lot of this show’s fans to bear.

Granted, if those fans have also played the video game “The Last of Us Part II,” they may not be so shocked. Abby kills Joel there, too, early in the story. But if you’ve experienced “The Last of Us” only as a television show, Joel’s death is a gut punch. It’s just the second episode of Season 2. Who kills the hero when a new season is just starting?

Also, the murder is so, so ugly. It’s bloody, ferocious … hard to watch. It feels like a punishment. But aimed at whom? And why? Prestige TV dramas do have a history of cranking up the violence whenever viewers get too comfortable with an antihero’s bad behavior. But what did Joel ever do to deserve this?

Oh, right … he killed a bunch of Fireflies, including Abby’s father, an unarmed doctor. He also, if you believe those Fireflies, condemned every living human on the planet to continue living through this insidious mushroom zombie plague when he rescued Ellie — the person whose one-of-a-kind brain and blood may have held the key to a cure. Divorced of the context this show brings to Joel’s story, he could easily be the bad guy.

There are ironies aplenty to the way Joel dies, beginning with the way he saves the life of his killer. While Abby is making her way to Jackson to find Joel — whom she has never met and knows only by a vague description — she runs into one of the encroaching hordes of the infected that have become a problem in the area lately.

The beasts have developed a new method of ambush in the Wyoming winter, in which some of them stay warm beneath an insulating layer of their frozen kin. Abby, who is keeping an eye on Jackson’s patrols from a spot high on a mountain, tumbles down into one of those infected patches and then has to run for her life.

Like much of this episode, Abby’s race through the snow is thrilling, culminating in a sequence in which she crawls along the ground as the infected reach for her through a collapsed chain-link fence. One of them is about to do Abby in when Joel — out on patrol with Dina — shoots the thing. Abby, for a few seconds, is relieved to be saved. And then she hears Dina call Joel by name, and her thirst for vengeance returns.

As a blizzard and a bitter cold front closes in on the survivors, Abby invites Joel and Dina to take shelter with her fellow ex-Fireflies (without, of course, identifying them as such) at a house outside of town. But once the Jacksonians are inside, these soldiers — now part of a militia called the W.L.F. — sedate Dina and then watch warily as Abby she shoots Joel in the leg. Then Abby begins clubbing Joel, with both an actual golf club and her own fists, pushing her prey to the brink of death while trying to keep her vow to make him die “slowly.”

Compounding this tragedy: Joel dies before reconciling with Ellie. We still don’t know exactly what has caused Ellie to hold such a grudge against her guardian, but in the season premiere we saw how much it hurt him to have lost her faith and companionship; and we saw the effort he was putting into trying to repair the rift.

Ellie learns that Joel and Dina are in trouble while she is out on her own patrol with Jesse (Young Mazino), her combat trainer and Dina’s ex-boyfriend. This episode begins with a relatively chill vibe as Dina’s two love interests go riding out into the snowy wilderness, busting each other’s chops.

Then, while sheltering from the blizzard in an abandoned 7-Eleven, Ellie and Jesse hear over the radio that Joel and Dina have neither returned to Jackson nor checked in. They split up and head back into the storm, where Ellie is able to pick up Joel’s trail leading to the W.L.F. bunker, in a mountaintop lodge. She arrives just in time to see Joel lying in a bloody heap, still alive but barely. After a brief struggle, she is captured and pinned to the floor, forced to watch as Abby jams the broken end of the golf club into the back of Joel’s neck, killing him. Ellie is stricken with agony, her reaction almost feral. She vows to kill them all.

Abby and the other W.L.F. members let her live anyway, kicking her on their way out the door. Ellie lies beside Joel’s corpse for a while sobbing. In the episode’s haunting final shot, we see her, Jesse and Dina dragging his wrapped body through the snow back to Jackson.

Last week I suggested that the busted pipe into Jackson — with its suspiciously writhing collection of roots and weeds — might serve as a symbol of something unsettled within the community and within Joel and Ellie’s relationship. As it happened, it took only one episode for that rot to lead to a total collapse … and not just symbolically.

This brings me back to the siege of Jackson, which happens at the same time as Abby’s smug speechifying and Joel-torturing up at the lodge. (In fact, Joel can see Jackson burning off in the distance, which seems to worry him more than his own imminent demise.) The infected arrive en masse at the community’s gates, called to action perhaps by the cordyceps hive-mind within those decaying pipes. They run full speed into the wooden walls, even when doused in flaming gasoline, until eventually — with the help of a double-size, flame-resistant mushroom monster — they breach the barriers and run every which way, killing and destroying indiscriminately.

Jackson survives the attack but at enormous cost. With Tommy and Maria still in charge, it may be able to rebuild. But will Ellie still want to be a part of this, or is she about to become another Abby, driven only by revenge?

Back in Season 1, Joel comforted a depressed and traumatized Ellie — still reeling from the horrors she had witnessed and experienced in Silver Lake — by confessing that he once had tried to kill himself, after the death of his daughter. The attempt failed, and in the years since, Joel found other people not only to care for but also to live for — people like Tommy, Tess and Ellie.

Maybe Dina can become that person for Ellie. Because it should not be Abby, should it? Staying alive only to destroy, not to nurture … that is no way to live.

Early in this episode, Ellie mentions to Jesse that she is considering easing up on Joel and becoming his sort-of daughter again. “I’m still me, he’s still Joel, and nothing’s going to change that, ever,” she says. She didn’t know she would run out of time. She may not have realized — until right now — what a gift it was to have any time with Joel at all.

Side Quests

This is one of those “Last of Us” episodes where the show’s video game origins are apparent, in action sequences full of shooting. Yet that action is also very cinematic, with sweeping wide shots to establish the majesty of the scenery and the scale of the danger.
Is it a coincidence that this episode aired on Easter Sunday? Joel certainly gets hit with a Good Friday level of torture. He is unlikely to be resurrected, though — except perhaps in flashback. (The tale of how he killed Eugene still waits to be told.)
Speaking of Eugene, the 7-Eleven where Ellie and Jesse hunker down is where Eugene grew his marijuana. We also learn that he was an ex-Firefly who quit because he was “tired of killing people.”
For what it’s worth, Seth (Robert John Burke), the guy who insulted Ellie and Dina last week, apologizes to Ellie. She is unimpressed. By the time the day is over, she may not remember it even happened.
If you think a “shocking” TV death has to be wholly unexpected, then Joel’s murder probably falls short of, say, when Rosalind Shays (Diana Muldaur) fell down an elevator shaft in “L.A. Law.” But if “shocking” to you means uncommonly brutal, then this is in the same league as Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) getting bludgeoned by a spiked baseball bat on “The Walking Dead.”
It’s worth noting that Abby’s W.L.F. comrades are not cool with what she does to Joel — or to Dina, whom Abby casually threatens to kill. Also, they operate by a code, which Abby appears to violate by incapacitating Joel before beating him senseless. It does not take much to make a hero a villain, does it?