'The Last of Us' season 2, episode 6 recap: Hard Feelings

A flashback episode with a dinosaur, brutal truths, and Joe Pantoliano

“Hard feelings
These are what they call hard feelings of love
When the sweet words and fevers
All leave us right here in the cold-old-old
Alone with the hard feelings of love
God, I wish I believed ya
When you told me this was my home”- Lorde

Yes, I am beginning a recap of the prestige zombie show with lyrics from Lorde’s masterful 2017 album Melodrama.

Both this song in particular and the title of the album fit this virtually Infected-free hour of television’s vibe (complimentary). It’s an emotionally volatile series of back-and-forths, of lies covered up and dragged screaming into the open.

It may also be the single best episode of the season, though the brutal action movie spectacle of the second episode¹ is hard to top. This week saw the return of Joel and, more importantly, Gail, as well as the truth (finally!) about what happened to her husband Eugene.

Let’s dive in.

‘The Last of Us’ season 2, episode 6: The Price

The penultimate episode of The Last of Us’ second season is potent and moving; its time-jumping structure and uniformly excellent performances were a welcome break from the haphazard if still engaging revenge plot that has dominated this season. Still, just as I feared, the season is quickly running out of time just as it’s starting to cohere.

‘The Price’ is a series of flashbacks that deepen and then deteriorate what initially was the show’s central relationship: That of rugged smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) and zombie-immune teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey).

Many of the flashback vignettes focus on Joel celebrating Ellie’s birthday during each year they lived in the Jackson settlement. As she progresses from her mid-teens to an elder teen, he makes her a guitar, takes her to an abandoned science museum, and barters with Seth the Homophobe² to procure birthday cakes.

The museum sequence in particular is quite touching. Episode director and co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, who also helmed the video game and co-wrote this episode, recreates much of this game stretch beat for beat.

This includes Ellie climbing a giant T-Rex statue and a moving moment where she and Joel enter an abandoned space pod and she imagines blasting off while he adoringly looks on. In the game, the birthday museum visit offers a reprieve from its relentless violence while also illustrating just how much Ellie has cashed in on her humanity in her quest to avenge Joel’s death.

The scene has the same if less impactful effect here, partly because we have only really seen Ellie in Fatality Mode once, at the end of last week’s episode³. It also has to do with the episode focusing just as much on Joel. ‘The Price’ is a belated farewell to the character that illuminates both his irrepressible savior complex as well as his reawakened parental instincts.

To that end, the episode begins as a kind of origin story, showing a teenage Joel (Andrew Diaz) protecting his brother Tommy (David Miranda) from their hit-happy cop father. Younger Joel’s unabashed defense of Tommy takes his father (Tony Dalton) back, and the two have a quiet but intense exchange about parenthood. It ends with his dad in tears, telling Joel to “do a little better than me,” if he ever has kids.

This line is repeated at the end of the episode, in a fiery exchange that finally has Joel admitting the violent truth to Ellie about what he did at the Firefly facility in Salt Lake City. Pascal and Ramsey are spectacular in this sequence, each unleashing a torrent of repressed truths and emotions.

The scene’s power is enhanced by the episode’s structure, a bold reconfiguration and recontextualization of how things unfold in the game. We don’t get this flashback until much later in the game, but here it hits harder because we’ve seen Joel’s increasing desperation to both hide the truth from Ellie while keeping her safe and happy through the years.

While Druckmann and the actors effectively adapt two of the game’s most iconic moments,⁴ there is a new scene here that serves as a brutal transition between the temporary joy of the museum visit and the tense Firefly confessional.

When Ellie turns 19, Joel finally decides she is ready to get involved in regular patrols in the wooded area around Jackson. During her very first one, the two receive a distress call to go check on another patrol. They’re greeted by a horse dragging a body through the woods, a dead Infected, and a shellshocked man leaning against a tree.

It’s Eugene (Joe Pantoliano)!

As you may recall, we learned in the season premiere that Eugene is the husband of Gail (Catherine O’Hara), Jackson’s unconventional, irascible therapist. We also learned that Joel, one of her patients, killed him.

Here, we find out the fairly obvious “why” (zombie bite) and much more harrowing “how.”

After revealing his bite mark, Eugene begs Joel and Ellie to let him see Gail one more time before he turns. This goes against Jackson’s strict protocols, and at first Joel isn’t about to entertain the idea. But Ellie insists that Eugene has time, so Joel tells her to go retrieve the horses so they can take him back to camp to see his wife.

Ellie pauses while walking away and looks at Joel.

“I promise,” he tells her.

While Ellie is retrieving their horses, Joel starts walking with Eugene through the woods, and takes him to a clearing near a serene lake, with a view of the mountains; this is the kind of place Joel envisions as a good spot to die.

But Eugene doesn’t care about the view, he just wants to see Gail. Druckmann keeps the camera pinned on Pantoliano’s tormented, weary face as he comes to terms with the situation. Joel tells him to imagine Gail one last time, and then the camera cuts to a wide shot of the woods, a muted gunshot making a flock of birds fly away.

It’s a heart-rending sequence that shows Joel’s deeply warped sense of parental protection. He thinks lying to Ellie will preserve her humanity, assuming that she will either understand or forgive him.

She does neither here. When Joel tries to lie to make Eugene’s passing more palatable to Gail, Ellie tells her the truth. She wants Joel to face the consequences for his decision.

She also looks him dead in the eye after doing it and says, “You swore.”

This word choice is intentional. At the end of season one, Ellie makes Joel swear (not promise) that everything he said about the Fireflies and a cure was true. He did, and she’s been filled with doubts ever since.

But this lie is the missing cog she needs to know what he is capable of. The biggest choice of her life, dying so that the Fireflies could make a vaccine against the Cordyceps fungus, was taken from her by her would-be father. And not only was it taken from her, but several people had to violently die so that Joel wouldn’t have to lose another child like he did at the beginning of the outbreak.

‘The Price’ fully captures the shattered mirror parenthood that Joel tries to recreate with Ellie. It comes at a structurally annoying time within the context of this very short season, but it was a necessary detour.

The episode ends with a brief, rainy shot of Ellie back in Seattle, walking to the Paramount Pinnacle Theater after torturing Nora for information about Abby’s whereabouts. There is just one more episode left, and Ellie’s prey is nowhere to be found.

Do you think we’ll see an Ellie and Abby confrontation next episode? For those who have played the game: Where do you think season 2 will end?

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2. It’s hilarious to me that the showrunners simply cannot get enough of Seth the Homophobe, one of the most inert characters in the entire show.

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4. Notably, this is the first episode of the season that was not written exclusively by co-showrunner Craig Mazin. He is joined by Druckmann and Halley Gross, the writing team behind the second game.