00:00The Last of Us, Season 2, Episode 2, Recap, Revenge.
00:04In most post-apocalyptic stories, The Last of Us included,
00:08one big idea that comes around repeatedly is that when death is omnipresent and inescapable,
00:13life becomes more precious.
00:15Just think of all the small twists of fate and fortune that kept Joel Miller alive for so long.
00:20It's a miracle, really, that he lived deep into middle age,
00:23let alone that in this week's episode of The Last of Us,
00:25he is in the right place at the right time to save the life of Abby,
00:28a woman who spent years looking for him.
00:31The problem is that Abby wants Joel dead,
00:32and so, in one of the most horrifying moments in this horror-filled series,
00:36she obliterates this great miracle of life,
00:39the great miracle of Joel,
00:41with the several swings of a golf club and one deadly thrust.
00:44It's a damned shame.
00:45Were it not for Joel's death,
00:46the episode Through the Valley would likely be remembered for the stunning battle sequence,
00:51in which Jackson holds it own, barely,
00:53against hundreds of the savage, relentless zombies.
00:56The action here, set against a snowy landscape,
01:00recalls the spectacle of Game of Thrones at its best.
01:03But we have to deal with Joel first, don't we?
01:06The shock of his murder is going to be hard for a lot of this show's fans to bear.
01:10Granted, if those fans have also played the video game The Last of Us Part de Sano,
01:15they may not be so shocked.
01:17Abby kills Joel there, too, early in the story.
01:19But if you've experienced The Last of Us only as a television show,
01:24Joel's death is a gut punch.
01:26It's just the second episode of season two.
01:29Who kills the hero when a new season is just starting?
01:32Also, the murder is so, so ugly.
01:35It's bloody ferocious.
01:37Hard to watch.
01:38It feels like a punishment.
01:40But aimed at whom?
01:41And why?
01:43Prestige TV.
01:44Dramas do have a history of cranking up the violence
01:47whenever viewers get too comfortable with an anti-hero's bad behavior.
01:52But what did Joel ever do to deserve this?
01:55Oh, right.
01:56He killed a bunch of fireflies, including Abby's father,
01:59an unarmed doctor.
02:01He also, if you believe those fireflies,
02:04condemned every living human on the planet
02:06to continue living through this insidious mushroom zombie plague
02:09when he rescued Ellie,
02:11the person whose one-of-a-kind brain and blood
02:13may have held the key to a cure.
02:17Divorced of the context this show brings to Joel's story,
02:20he could easily be the bad guy.
02:22There are ironies aplenty to the way Joel dies,
02:25beginning with the way he saves the life of his killer.
02:28While Abby is making her way to Jackson to find Joel,
02:31whom she has never met and knows only by a vague description,
02:34she runs into one of the encroaching hordes of the infected
02:37that have become a problem in the area lately.
02:40The beasts have
02:40developed a new method of ambush in the Wyoming winter,
02:44in which some of them stay warm beneath an insulating layer of their frozen kin.
02:49Abby, who is keeping an eye on Jackson's patrols from a spot high on a mountain,
02:53tumbles down into one of those infected patches,
02:56and then has to run for her life.
02:58Like much of this episode,
03:00Abby's race through the snow is thrilling,
03:02culminating
03:03in a sequence in which she crawls along the ground
03:05as the infected reach for her through a collapsed chain-link fence.
03:10One of them is about to do Abby in when Joel,
03:12out on patrol with Dina,
03:14shoots the thing.
03:15Abby, for a few seconds, is relieved to be saved.
03:18And then she hears Dina call Joel by name,
03:21and her thirst for vengeance returns.
03:23As a blizzard and
03:25a bitter cold front closes in on the survivors,
03:28Abby invites Joel and Dina to take shelter with her fellow ex-fireflies,
03:31without, of course, identifying them as such,
03:34at a house outside of town.
03:36But once the Jacksonians are inside,
03:38these soldiers,
03:39now part of a militia called the WLF,
03:42sedate Dina,
03:43and then watch warily as Abby she shoots Joel in the leg.
03:47Then Abby begins clubbing Joel,
03:49with both an actual golf club and her own,
03:52fists pushing her prey to the brink of death
03:54while trying to keep her vow to make him die slowly.
03:57Compounding this tragedy,
03:59Joel dies before reconciling with Ellie.
04:02We still don't know exactly what has caused Ellie
04:04to hold such a grudge against her guardian,
04:06but in the season premiere,
04:07we saw how much it hurt him to have lost her faith and
04:10companionship,
04:11and we saw the effort he was putting into trying to repair the rift.
04:16Ellie learns that Joel and Dina are in trouble
04:18while she is out on her own patrol with Jessie,
04:21young Mazzino,
04:22her combat trainer and Dina's ex-boyfriend.
04:25This episode begins with a relatively chill vibe
04:28as Dina's two love interests go riding out into the snowy wilderness,
04:31busting each other's chops.
04:34Then, while sheltering from the blizzard in an abandoned 7-Eleven,
04:38Ellie and Jessie hear over
04:39the radio that Joel and Dina have neither returned to Jackson nor checked in.
04:43They split up and head back into the storm,
04:46where Ellie is able to pick up Joel's trail leading to the WLF bunker in a mountaintop lodge.
04:51She arrives just in.
04:53Time to see Joel lying in a bloody heap, still alive but barely.
04:57After a brief struggle, she is captured and pinned to the floor,
05:00forced to watch as Abby jams the broken end of the golf club into the back of Joel's neck,
05:04killing him.
05:06Ellie is stricken with agony, her reaction almost feral.
05:09She vows to kill.
05:11Them all.
05:12Abby and the other WLF members let her live anyway,
05:15kicking her on their way out the door.
05:17Ellie lies beside Joel's corpse for a while sobbing.
05:21In the episode's haunting final shot,
05:23we see her, Jessie, and Dina dragging his wrapped body through the snow back to Jackson.
05:29Last week, I suggested that the busted pipe into Jackson,
05:32with its suspiciously writhing collection of roots and weeds,
05:36might serve as a symbol of something unsettled within the community
05:38and within Joel and Ellie's relationship.
05:41As it happened, it took only one episode for that rot to lead to a total collapse.
05:45And not just symbolically.
05:49This brings me back to the siege of Jackson,
05:51which happens at the same time as Abby smug speechifying and Joel torturing up at the lodge.
05:57In fact, Joel can see Jackson burning off in the distance,
06:00which seems to worry him more than his own imminent demise.
06:04The infected arrive en masse at the community's gates,
06:06called to action perhaps by the cordyceps hive mind within those decaying pipes.
06:10They run full speed into the wooden walls,
06:14even when doused in flaming gasoline,
06:16until eventually, with the help of a double-sized flame-resistant mushroom monster,
06:21they breach the barriers and run every which way, killing and destroying.
06:26Indiscriminately.
06:26Jackson survives the attack, but at enormous cost.
06:31With Tommy and Maria still in charge, it may be able to rebuild.
06:35But will Ellie still want to be a part of this,
06:38or is she about to become another Abby, driven only by revenge?
06:42Back in season one, Joel comforted a depressed and traumatized Ellie,
06:46still reeling from the horrors she had witnessed and experienced in Silver Lake,
06:50by confessing that he once had tried to kill himself after the death of his daughter.
06:54The attempt failed, and in the years since,
06:58Joel found other people not only to care for, but also to live for.
07:02People like Tommy, Tess, and Ellie.
07:06Maybe Dina can become that person for Ellie,
07:08because it should not be Abby, should it?
07:12Staying.
07:13Alive only to destroy, not to nurture.
07:16That is no way to live.
07:18Early in this episode, Ellie mentions to Jesse
07:21that she is considering easing up on Joel and becoming his sort of daughter again.
07:26I'm still me, he's still Joel, and nothing's going to change that, ever, she says.
07:32She didn't know she would run out of time.
07:35She may not have realized, until right now,
07:37what a gift it was to have any time with Joel at all.
07:39Well, thank you.
07:40You
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