Season 2, Episode 6
What is the opposite of a love story? A disenchantment story, perhaps?
That may be the best way to describe this week’s haunting and heartbreaking “The Last of Us,” which features a years-spanning flashback. The episode functions a lot like the award-winning episode “Long, Long Time,” from Season 1, except in reverse. We follow Joel and Ellie from their early days living in Jackson, closely bonded; and then, over time, we see how that bond weakened and broke.
This episode begins with a prologue, set in 1983 in Austin. We learn that Joel and his younger brother, Tommy, were the sons of a cop (played by the great Tony Dalton of “Better Call Saul”) who was quick to smack them around whenever they stepped out of line. One night — after Tommy was caught buying pot — Joel tried to shoulder the punishment, telling his dad to leave Tommy alone. In a moment of bracing self-awareness, Officer Miller admits that he may be following in the footsteps of his own father, who once beat him so hard he had to be hospitalized.
“But I’m doing a little better than my father did,” he says to Joel. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”
Post-prologue, the episode cycles through five vignettes — four set on Ellie’s birthdays, and one on the New Year’s Eve night we saw in the Season 2 premiere.
The first vignette catches Joel and Ellie at a somewhat awkward place in their relationship: still recovering from the trauma of Salt Lake City, and in the first few months of living in a normal domestic situation, as a surrogate father and a daughter. Nevertheless, Joel makes what might be his first grand parental gesture (besides saving her life) as he rebuilds a guitar for her for her 15th birthday, using real bone for the saddle and carving a moth design from one of her notebooks into the neck.
But these two have not really found a relaxed family groove yet. Joel can’t figure out how hard to play “dad” when Ellie intentionally burns her arm, trying to hide a bite mark. And when he describes how he fixed up the guitar, he becomes adorably awkward, going deep into the weeds on the machinery. (“Used a Dremel. That’s a rotary drill. Or it could be a saw, depending on the tip. Actually it’s a pretty versatile tool.”)
One year later, when Ellie turns 16, the two of them have what may be their best day together ever — the kind of deeply satisfying parenting experience that moms and dads and guardians hold onto tightly, to compensate for all the times their children are surly or remote.
Joel has come up with something incredibly special for Ellie’s 16th birthday. On his patrols, he stumbled across the Wyoming Museum of Science and History, which has an amazing dinosaur exhibit and — for our NASA-obsessed Ellie — an actual space capsule and a display of space helmets. Joel has made sure the building is safe to explore; and he also found a cassette tape of NASA radio chatter so that Ellie can put on a helmet, get in the capsule and imagine being an astronaut. It’s a beautiful sequence, filled with wonder and warmth.
Even on this day though, there are signs of trouble. The banter between these two is a lot more natural now, but Joel still sometimes fails to see Ellie as her own person with her own unique perspective and feelings. (When Joel teases Ellie for spending so much time with Jesse, suggesting he has a “keen eye” for young love, she laughs and says, “I don’t think you do.”) As the day ends and Joel talks about how he would like to do this more often, Ellie is momentarily distracted by a cloud of fireflies, reminding her of the other kind of Fireflies and her lingering doubts about what happened in Salt Lake City.
The next vignette is short and sour. On Ellie’s 17th birthday, Joel finds her in her room with Kat (“the other one,” according to Dina in the Season 2 premiere), smoking pot, fooling around and getting a tattoo. Joel registers this as typical teenage rebellion and “experimenting.”
Ellie, though, does not like him trying to assert any kind of parental authority. As far as she is concerned, their house in Jackson was given to them jointly — “You don’t own anything,” she says to him after he tries to give her some “my house, my rules” talk — and she is free to live her own life there. She may feel bad that he feels bad, but she is not sorry for anything. She announces her plan to move into the garage so that Joel will stop hovering.
Of particular note in this segment is the tattoo itself: twisting vines leading to an image of a moth, just like the one Joel engraved into her guitar. (Ellie wants the ink to cover up her burn, which she used to cover up her bite.) Joel pesters the psychologist Gail at lunch, asking if moths are a symbol of change and growth. Gail answers that moths typically symbolize death — a sentiment eerily echoed in Ellie’s notebooks, which feature many sketches of moths surrounding the words, “You have a greater purpose.” Ellie, perhaps, believes she was meant to save the world by ding at the hands of the Fireflies.
This sets up the episode’s longest and weightiest segment, set two years later, on Ellie’s 19th birthday. By this point, Ellie has decided she has to confront Joel about the many discrepancies between his version of what happened in Salt Lake City and what any reasonable person would believe, given the facts. Before she can question Joel, though, he fulfills one of her birthday wishes by taking her out on her first patrol. (Ellie, overeager: “What’s the record for number of kills on a training run?”)
They initially get back some of their old “affectionately antagonistic” dynamic while on this run; but everything goes awry when an emergency call comes in, saying that Eugene has run across an infected horde.
We know from the Season 2 premiere that Joel will end up killing Eugene, and that Gail — Eugene’s wife — will have some lingering beef with how it all goes down. But the details are still unexpectedly chilling.
By the time Joel and Ellie reach Eugene, he has been bitten; but because the infection is still in its earliest stages, Joel and Ellie might be able to get him back to Jackson to say a proper goodbye to Gail. Before Ellie leaves to retrieve their horses, she makes Joel promise he will give Eugene that chance. Joe Pantoliano brings such humanity and heart to his few minutes onscreen as Eugene that I also really wanted Joel to come through for him (and Gail and Ellie). Instead, Joel leads Eugene to a picturesque lakeside clearing and shoots him in the head.
When Ellie catches up to them, Joel hastily tells her the plan: They are going to lie to Gail to spare her feelings. But Ellie makes a choice that is cruel to both Joel and Gail by telling her the truth about Eugene’s final request. Ellie seems at first to be punishing Joel for breaking his promise to keep Eugene alive; but when she hisses “You swore!” at him, it is clear she is referring to more than just this one day.
The last vignette closes the loop on Joel and Ellie’s relationship, revealing that after the New Year’s Eve party, Ellie finally had her big face-off with Joel, giving him one last chance to be honest with her about Salt Lake City. In a teary scene — for both the characters and the audience — Joel comes clean about everything. But he also says he would do it again. She accuses him of being selfish and denying her “purpose.” (There’s that word again.) Joel counters that sometimes you love someone so deeply it surpasses all reason. He then echoes his own father, saying “I hope you do a little better than me.”
But will she? This episode does not offer much optimism. After all the flashbacks are over, we return to Ellie in Seattle, walking back to the Pinnacle in the pouring rain, having just beaten someone to death.
It could be that a dark determination just runs through this family, across generations. The Millers make decisions and bull their way forward, knowing they are doing tremendous damage but unable to stop.
Side Quests
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Next to Joel and Ellie, the most prominent character in this episode is Seth, who before causing trouble on New Year’s Eve had a connection of sorts with Ellie. Joel had Seth bake and decorate Ellie’s birthday cakes, every year.
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If, like me, you have never played the “Last of Us” video games, you should know that if you Google “wyoming science museum dinosaur space capsule” you will be directed to a page on “The Last of Us” fan wiki. It’s not a real place.
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The popular culture seen in this episode includes an a-ha cassette, George R. Stewart’s 1949 postapocalyptic novel “Earth Abides,” and a Zamfir record (on vinyl!). Also, Joel sings the Pearl Jam song “Future Days” on Ellie’s 15th birthday. So when Ellie started singing that song last week — and then abruptly stopped — it is highly likely that she was thinking more about Joel than Dina.
The post ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 6: Like Father appeared first on New York Times.
