'The Last of Us' season 2, episode 2 recap: Fore!🏌️♀️
A relentless, action-packed episode tees up a punishing revenge saga
Hello! Do not read this recap until you have watched the episode.
Very consequential things happen plot-wise, and if you care even a little bit about having something big ruined for you, please bookmark this and come back after you’ve watched.
Again, and I’m repeating myself so that I can include a meme and put a bigger buffer before the actual review, if you haven’t watched the episode:
The Last of Us season 2, episode 2: Through the Valley
“Pulling a Game of Thrones,” has become modern TV shorthand for “doing something surprisingly violent, usually killing off someone important… or better yet, an entire wedding party’s worth!” Television did exist before the odyssey in Westeros, but cultural memory is short. There are roughly 17,000 new shows released every quarter, so no one watches the same shows. When something like Game of Thrones achieves mass appeal, it becomes an easily understood reference point.
Many people will draw parallels between this week’s episode of The Last of Us and that epic, occasionally exhilarating adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series. I am taking my observation a step further, though: This episode of The Last of Us felt like Game of Thrones cosplay.
From its frosty, episode-length battle with the undead to its shockingly brutal murder of a main character1, it felt like more than a homage; it was the tightening strings attached to a much bigger budget from HBO. Its similarities to the premium network’s buzziest series are more than narrative. In ‘Through the Valley,’ the show felt like it was being forcibly handed a torch to carry.
I say this with a mix of affection and frustration. It is exhilarating to see this story brought to life with both care for the general emotional core and a distinct understanding that television and video games are not the same. But, such a glossy coat of paint covers up some distinct, necessary aesthetic blemishes, which I’ll get to when I discuss the Big Character Death.
First, the Battle of Jackson.
(I am giving you another chance to turn away before I go into gory, spoiler-filled detail. I am so kind).
At the end of the previous episode2, we saw that the Cordyceps fungus had made its way into old piping in the Jackson, Wyoming, settlement where our main characters are living. Partway through episode 2, these tendrils direct hundreds of zombies in that direction, battering the city’s walls and screeching in that distinctly unpleasant but still irreverent noise that they make.
Now, as someone who played the games,3 this was quite an escalation. As far as I can recall, the only time we really see Infected in these kinds of numbers are in the opening of the first game when the plague is initially taking hold and society is starting to crumble. From then on, you encounter them in small, scarily formidable groups.
Staging a confrontation on this level feels like a corrective. Aside from a similar-but-smaller-scale groundswell confrontation midway into the first season, encounters with the Infected were largely muted during the initial TV go-around. This didn’t really bother me, but I guess it irked some.
Here, showrunners Craig Mazin (who wrote this episode) and Neill Druckmann have decided to blow the bloody doors off, with the Infected charging across the snowy landscape as the people of Jackson defend themselves with fire and firepower.
It is a chaotic spectacle, a ruthlessly full-throated action sequence where Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Maria (Rutina Wesley) oversee Jackson’s defense and barely live to tell the tale.
Director Mark Mylod relishes in the expansiveness of the conflict, in the phased unveiling of the town’s defenses. At the start, we’re positioned on the city’s walls, which have ramps that allow residents to launch barrels of oil into the zombies; they then shoot the barrels and lob torches to create a wall of flames.4
In phase two, the stakes are raised: a big-ass Infected called a Bloater5 breaks through the outer defenses, and Maria has soldiers mounted on rooftops sniping zombies as they charge down the city streets. Tommy is waiting with another group in the middle of the street, armed with flamethrowers.
There is a somewhat clumsy detour here, as Tommy draws the Bloaters’ attention away from his wife’s battalion and gets it to chase him down a preposterously empty alley. He keeps unleashing his flamethrower on it until he runs out of fuel. He thinks he’s done for, when it turns out that the Bloater is well-done enough that it ceases brain function. Kind of anticlimactic, to be honest!
The final stretch of the Jackson conflict sees Maria unleashing scores of dogs onto the Infected. They charge into the crowd and rip out zombie throats; it’s a viscerally effective sequence.
This kind of carnage doesn’t happen in the settlement in the games, and I’m very interested in how this battle’s aftermath plays out. Therapist Gail better clear her schedule and fill up a flask!
Which brings us to The Big Thing I keep spoiler-warning you about.
After this week’s episode, we know Gail has at least one opening in her schedule!
Yes, this episode saw the death of Joel (Pedro Pascal) at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). It is a plot twist that was leaked before the game was even released, and which everyone who was a fan of the first game has been really normal about.
This is the inciting incident for the second game: Abby exacts slow, painful vengeance on Joel for killing her father, an unarmed doctor, during his rampage at the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City. This doctor was going to perform a fatal procedure on Ellie (Bella Ramsey) that would have led to a vaccine to stop the plague, but Joel wasn’t about to let his surrogate daughter die.
Mazin’s script is unrelenting: Abby looks Joel in the eyes and recounts what he did, emphasizing the very real human he could barely look at when he shot him in the head.
Dever is incredible here, and in this entire episode. Even before she meets Joel, when she’s stalking the outskirts of Jackson, there’s a violent determination in her expression that manifests whenever she has to exert herself.
Joel rescues Abby when the zombie hordes bust through the frozen ground and give chase. Taking shelter in a warehouse with his patrol partner Dina (Isabela Merced), Abby convinces them to go to a nearby abandoned lodge where she’s holed up with the rest of her Deadly WLF Assassination Squad to resupply.
Surprise!
Once the trio joins the rest of Abby’s group at the mansion, she shows her hand. She shoots Joel in the leg and has one of her friends sedate Dina so she can take her time with her father’s killer. “You stupid old man, you don’t get to rush this,” she tells him.
She grabs a golf club6 from a nearby bag and smashes Joel in his wounded leg. After hitting him enough to break the club, she proceeds to pummel him in the face with her fists until she exhausts herself.
Obviously, it’s a brutal sequence, and one that arrives with baggage. There’s an obligation to get it right while also delivering a water-cooler moment7 for new fans.
Something felt a bit off in the way this scene looked, though. It felt, if not clean, a bit sanitized8 and hermetically sealed. This house is fairly tidy, abandoned but seemingly untouched by the ravishes of time. It sticks out like a sore thumb when you think back to any of the other worn-down or outright collapsed structures we’ve seen in this series.
In the game, this murder happens in a lower level of the lodge; it’s dirty and claustrophobic. ‘Through the Valley’ takes the action upstairs, staging it in a wide open room near large windows. I think this decision was made so that the distant carnage at the Jackson settlement was visible when needed, a marker of hopelessness that also allowed for intuitive cutting between storylines.
But in the moment- when Abby is staring Joel in the eye as she monologues and bludgeons, when her crew looks on in horror but does nothing to stop her- this crucial sequence often feels clumsily blocked and overlit.
It’s carried by its performances, though, including a late-arriving Ramsey. Ellie notices Joel and Dina’s horses outside the house while searching for them on her patrol, and wanders into a nightmare. The group pins her to the ground while Abby thrusts the broken end of the golf club into Joel’s throat; Ellie screams, begs, then swears revenge. When the killers leave, she crawls across the floor to Joel’s body and collapses.
The episode concludes with a flurry of haunting grace notes: of Abby’s squad marching dutifully towards the camera, of Ellie, Dina, and Jesse (Young Mazino) riding away from the camera on horseback, Joel’s corpse towed behind them, wrapped in bloody cloth.
With such a narrative bombardment, I feel like next week’s episode will leave room for a little dust (or snow flurry) settling. The residents of Jackson have to lick their wounds, Abby and her gang are heading back to Seattle, and Ellie has a lifetime of rage and trauma ahead of her. Brace yourself, Gail!
The Last of Us airs Sunday evenings on HBO and is streaming on Max.
And also like Game of Thrones, this episode did not feature boozy therapist Gail (Catherine O’Hara).
Every time I reference playing the games, imagine I’m making this face
It’s not as simple as it is most video games, where you often just shoot these barrels to make them explode. This is the real world, there are rules.
Which are there because I guess rich people just left them in the living room before they evacuated?
Are these still a real thing?
This train of thought was first inspired by this take from The Washington Post’s Gene Park
“After this week’s episode, we know Gail has at least one opening in her schedule!” This really made me laugh. Thank you.
Tbh the Jackson assault felt more video game-y than almost anything the games do! But it was spectacular (in the “what a spectacle” sense), which was kind of fun and an ironic twist on a zombie story that prides itself on being “grounded.”
I am personally bummed that they have been so forward and expositional with Abby, especially in THAT scene. But Dever is really doing a lot of great work with the character and the script just the same.
I’m excited to see how the rest of the show goes! As someone who loves the games, I feel like I get the best of both worlds—I get to enjoy the changes they’ve made in the show that I think really work, and I can always fall back on the games for the moments the show doesn’t quite land.
It’s an enjoyable adaptation, but I think the changes have so far been misguided. It’s overall less oppressive and I miss the structure of the game.