It feels strange for The Last of Us to spend an episode on Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) happier days together so soon after losing Joel. He’s only been missing for three episodes, and most of them have spent so much time introducing new characters and factions that Ellie has started to feel like a guest star on her own show. Yet with one episode to go, this brief season is already about to wrap up. So if there’s going to be any reflection, it might as well be now, in an episode called “The Price” that’s structured as a series of flashback vignettes.
In the first, a young Joel Miller has a conversation with his dad (Tony Dalton), who recalls his relationship with Joel’s grandpa. The elder Miller remembers his father punching him in the face so hard his jaw needs to be wired shut. He’s telling Joel this story because, while he has hit both Joel and Tommy, he told himself he would never hit them like his father hit him. That’s the lesson he wants to impart to Joel: To be a little better than his own father.
It’s a nice scene well-acted by Dalton, but a very blunt tone-setter for the episode, which reflects on Joel’s relationship with Ellie. Focusing on four of Ellie’s birthdays in between seasons 1 and 2, it’s this season’s version of “Long, Long Time,” season 1’s surprising and heartfelt standalone following two characters’ relationship over several years. Only this time, the characters are our former leading pair, a duo that’s sorely missed after Joel was killed at the end of “Through the Valley.”
For most of the remaining hour, we get moments from Ellie’s birthdays. For her 15th, Ellie’s first year living in Jackson with Joel, Joel lovingly restores a guitar for her, and offers to teach her how to play. She asks him to sing, and he roughly, and sweetly sings the first verse of “Future Days,” the Pearl Jam song Ellie quietly sang the opening bars of in “Feel Her Love” last week. (This is how the whole episode functions: providing the full context for little bits of foreshadowing in the previous five episodes. It’s like the show making its own Easter Eggs, as opposed to just pulling them from the game.)
Ellie’s 16th birthday adapts a moment fans of The Last of Us Part II adore, a visit to a natural history museum where Joel has prepared a surprise for Ellie: a recording of the Apollo 15 mission for her to listen to while sitting in the actual space capsule, a real astronaut helmet on her head. Much like in the game, Ellie closes her eyes and the viewer sees what she imagines: The flare of rockets, the majestic depths of space. Unlike the game, we also see Joel’s face the whole time: Completely taken by Ellie, and thrilled to make her so happy.
By focusing on moments like this, The Last of Us wants us to know that even after the queasy, ambiguous ending of season one, Joel and Ellie have formed the kind of daddy-daughter relationship it isn’t terribly clear they had at the start of season two. And as nice as these scenes are – Ramsey in particular has a lot of fun reverting to a younger, goofier version of Ellie – the more wholesome and complete relationship that the two are shown to have makes Ellie’s present-day actions much harder to come to terms with. Prior to this episode, it seemed like the two of them had a lot of unresolved tension; that lack of resolution gives Ellie’s actions grounding. But in “The Price,” as we see, the two do get the chance to clear the air on even the show’s thorniest questions.
After a rocky 17th birthday, where Joel tries to surprise Ellie with a cake only to find her doing “all the teenage shit at once”—fooling around with a slightly older girl, who gave her a tattoo, and brought weed—”The Price” skips ahead to Ellie’s 19th birthday. She’s rehearsing questions she has for Joel, things about their departure from the Firefly base at the end of season one that don’t add up to her. She wants to ask them on her first patrol with Joel, but doesn’t get the chance before an emergency demands their attention.
This is the Eugene (Joe Pantalianio) story The Last of Us has been teasing all season long, and it’s honestly not terribly substantial for something so heavily hinted at. We basically know what happens from stray bits of dialog in preceding episodes: Eugene got bit while out in the woods, and Joel kills him before he turns. What’s new—besides a heartbreaking performance from Pantaliano—is the immediate aftermath, where Joel lies to Gail (Catherine O’Hara) about Eugene’s last moments. Joel claims that Eugene didn’t want to see her because he wanted to keep her safe, and that he ended his own life.
Ellie knows both of these claims are false. Seeing Joel lie sets her off; she blurts out the truth to Gail, who slaps Joel, and collapses in grief.
The final vignette in “The Price” revisits the New Year’s dance from the season premiere, where we see what Joel was up to that night. Mostly, he’s getting forgiven: first by Maria (Rutina Wesley), who tells him she’s sorry for getting mad and reminding him that he was a refugee once when they were arguing about how many newcomers Jackson could support—a pretty massive concession, and a strange one for the episodes three writers (Neil Druckmann and Haley Gross joining Craig Mazin for the season’s final two episodes) to just idly drop here. “You’re family,” Maria tells Joel, the implication being that protecting family, and one’s own, take precedence over refugees and strangers.
Joel and Maria’s heart-to-heart is cut short by Seth’s harassment of Ellie and Dina (Isabela Merced), where Joel intervenes. But later, we see that Ellie approaches Joel on his front porch, and in her anger finally gets the nerve to confront him about the night he saved her. It all comes out: That he lied, that she was the only chance at a cure, and that he killed Marlene (Merle Dandridge).
Like every scene in “The Price,” it’s extremely well-acted, but the short-term catharsis seems to run counter to the story’s long-term goals. While Ellie does get to say that Joel’s choice robbed her of her agency, that he took her choice and the world’s chance at a cure from everyone, Joel, through tears, says he’ll pay the price of Ellie turning away from him. But he does not regret his choice, and that he’d do it all over again. “Because I love you, in a way you can’t understand.”
It’s possibly Pascal’s last scene as Joel, and he really goes for broke with it. But it’s also coming after 50 minutes of Joel doing nice things for Ellie, always looking out for her even at his most overbearing—which, again, includes murdering a hospital full of people and dooming mankind. Ellie’s perspective, that sacrificing herself would have given her life meaning, is rendered moot by Joel’s paternalism. His perspective matters more, and the episode is built to underline that.
In these last moments with Joel Miller, The Last of Us‘s writers repeat an error from the source material: they unmake the phenomenal ending from the first PlayStation game, and the HBO show’s first season. As Ellie heads back to her Seattle hideout after murdering Nora (Tati Gabrielle), she returns a murkier character than when she left—one that will become harder to understand the more people she decides she must kill.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Scarlett Johansson Wants
-
Inside LA’s Young, Testosterone-Fueled Sperm Race
-
Live Updates From the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
-
Rita Hayworth’s Heartbreaking Vanishing Act
-
See All the Looks From the 2025 Cannes Red Carpet
-
Creator Tony Gilroy Breaks Down Andor’s Gut-Wrenching Finale
-
The Nuances of Casey Means’s Medical Exit and Antiestablishment Origins
-
Why Buckingham Palace Tried to Stop a Photo of Princess Diana and David Bowie
-
Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame
-
From the Archive: Princess Margaret’s Not So Happily-Ever-After
The post ‘The Last of Us’ Reunites Joel and Ellie—and Reveals What Really Happened to Eugene appeared first on Vanity Fair.
