Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us season two through episode three as well as references to the games and the first season of Game of Thrones. Read at your own risk.

Introduction

The Last of Us has a hard task following up on Joel’s death. I’m not specifying game vs TV show because both face the same challenge. When your part one/season one is about the relationship between two characters, how do you get audience buy in when your part two is about how one of those characters is gone?

Well that’s the thing, the story now is about how one of the characters is gone.

At which point we may as well get into talking about the episode. But I’m going to give a caveat that it’s difficult to talk fully about what episode three, Something’s Got A Hold On Me, is doing without getting into spoilers from the game. I don’t want to do that, so much like I did when going through the first season I’m going to keep things to some high level observations to help provide some food for thought without giving any answers about where any of this is going.

Assuming of course they follow the game exactly anyway, which they could always tweak at any time. They’ve already made a few tweaks to things so you never know. But as I say, I’ll avoid spoilers and promise you that anything we don’t touch on now I’ll circle back to once the show makes them relevant.

Onward!

How Can The Last of Us Go On After Joel’s Death?

As I talked about last week, the second part of The Last of Us is the reversal of the first part. In the first part we spend time with Joel, grow to know him as a person, then see him do something horrific. Horrific with good reason (at the very least to him, whether or not you agree with him), but horrific. The first part asks can we recognize that what Joel did was horrible?

The answer for a not insignificant part of the audience was no, no they could not. They confuse Joel’s reason, love for his surrogate child, with the morality of his actions. He killed an innocent man. He killed someone’s father who was trying to do a good thing. He killed someone, very importantly, who he did not have to kill. (Again, if you want all the things Joel could’ve done besides kill the doctor while still saving Ellie, I already gave a list of multiple options.)

Part two then flips this on its ear. If you meet the killer when they do the killing, if for example they kill someone you care about, can you feel the same sympathy for them?

And if someone wants to then kill that person? For taking their father figure away from them? How’s that sympathy going? Is it different from what you felt for the two killers before? If so, why?

I’m going to pause here to talk about this because after last week I saw a fair number of people saying they weren’t interested in The Last of Us now that Joel is gone because to them this was the Joel and Ellie show. And like… I mean sure? Like I talked about at the start of season two I personally felt part one was a perfectly good story whose power came from having an end.

But the power of the story wasn’t that it was the sweet tale of a hurt man who found love for a daughter again and the poor lost little lamb of a girl who only needed a parent to watch over her. No more than it was the story of a zombie apocalypse. Both of those things were simply trappings to hang the real story on, which was the question of what would we do for those we love.

Sure, if all you want is the story of Joel and Ellie being found family go nuts. I’m sure there’s a metric buttload of fanfic out there about Joel working in a coffee shop adopting Ellie in a perfectly normal world where she’s just an orphan in the foster system and also plays in a band. No judgement, enjoy what you like.

But it’s one thing to want that story and another to think that this is or ever has been that story. Which it hasn’t.

This is among the reasons why part two needed to kill Joel. Because to a certain extent Neil Druckmann agrees with me when I say that the story of part one is done. You can’t hang things solely on Joel and Ellie anymore because it becomes diminishing returns and undermines the impact of the ending of part one. Part one needs the audience sitting in discomfort with what happened, same as Joel and Ellie sit in discomfort.

Part two, on the other hand, can first double down on the discomfort by saying there’s never going to be an in world answer. Neither Joel nor Ellie get closure with what happened. We start the story seeing that there’s tension between them and then one of them dies. The answer never comes. Just like life for most of us, really.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t still the Joel and Ellie show. Ellie very much feels the impact of Joel’s loss. That emptiness is lingering with her. She, like the audience, very much wishes he was still around. She wants more time with him same as we want more story.

And I think this is a key part about how The Last of Us differs from things like Game of Thrones. After last week’s episode I saw a lot of people making comparisons between killing off Joel and killing off Ned Stark. While this is certainly true in the sense that both qualify as major characters played by fairly big name actors which therefore make the audience expect that they are protected by plot armor, in terms of their respective stories the impact is different.

Ned Stark’s death was largely to shake up the audience. This isn’t your typical fantasy story! No one is safe! Also the world is cruel and horrible! Let us kill people to remind you how cruel and horrible it is!

Which isn’t to say no character mourned Ned’s death, but story wise Ned’s death was more political than it was personal.

Joel’s death, on the other hand, is extremely personal. He wasn’t killed off for shock value. He was killed off to provide a character driven mirror for the first story. Joel killed someone’s father, Joel is now the father who has been killed. Yes, it’s a cycle of violence but now we’re picking that cycle up again with the other character we already care about, Ellie. It’s still a Joel and Ellie story, but now it’s what does Ellie do without Joel?

You can see how I start going hmmm, I need to be careful about spoilers here. But I think episode three makes it clear that this is the direction things are going.

We see this as well as we get the scene of the town debating if they’ll send people to support Ellie on her trip. One of the things the show does compared to the game is, frankly, spell out the point for the audience. On any other show I’d ding them for the on the nose writing but considering the reaction people had to both the game and last week’s episode of completely missing the fucking point, I honestly cannot blame Craig Mazin for what I assume is the heavy sigh he sighs as he sits in front of his keyboard and tries to figure out even smaller words to use to explain this is not about how cool someone looks while firing a gun.

So we get the citizens of the town spelling it out for us in this episode the same way Abby spelled out her story in the last episode. Jackson is the proof that you can survive in this world without being cruel. You can have a thriving town with food, homes, and even joy. But that requires supporting those in the town. It means shoring up your weapons and walls but it also means potlucks and dances, because those are two sides of what makes Jackson work.

Yes, Jackson has to resort to violence. And let us not forget that last season we were told that to those not in Jackson, Jackson is terrifying. You’re with them or against them.

It’s by no means a candy colored view of the world. But it’s still proof that you do not have to be cruel and punishing all of the time. We’ve seen multiple towns and settlements that lived that way back in season one and how they were ultimately destroyed by how unbalanced they were. Violence and cruelty is a way but it’s not the way.

Which is why it’s no coincidence that the one person who agrees with Ellie that you need to act out of anger and frankly hate is the guy who is a homophobe. Again, the show is not really going for subtle. Likewise one of the first people we see speaking out against her makes the point that Ellie’s not the only one who lost a loved one and the town needs protection and to be rebuilt for the next time. Yes, one person argued for live and let live but nobody is saying that’s the only way to live. Keep your gun handy but use your gun wisely and to protect, not to get vengeance.

At which point again we start to get into spoiler territory. So I’ll stop here and just reiterate this is all stuff to keep in mind as the season continues. I’ll dig in more as the show lets me.

Lagniappe

As always, things that didn’t fit anywhere else. In this case including things I can only comment on as quick bullet points because any more would mean spoilers.

• The sound design in today’s ep was phenomenal. You could feel the quiet emptiness in Joel’s home. Then, when we saw the vehicles in Seattle, it was like getting slammed in the face with how loud and terrifying they were in comparison to Jackson with its softly mooing cows and the light clip clop of horses.
• I can’t imagine how bad that pile of burning infected smelled.
• “Give Sarah my love” got me, damn it.
• There was some nice subtle acting by Isabela Merced that I want to tip my hat to even if I can’t say any more about it at this moment in time.
• Going to be extremely vague here but there was a costuming detail on a character which stood out to me as well. So I’ll just give Ann Foley props if it was done on purpose.
• I want an entire show on the logic behind how Jackson works. Don’t get me wrong, I get that it’s a TV show and we’re not meant to worry about if they have enough space to grow the crops you need to feed the cows, let alone the people. But I also know that Craig Mazin asked these questions and the games actually did a pretty reasonable amount of research into how apocalypse survival would work as well. So this isn’t me “Um, ACTUALLY corn would be a bad crop because….” anything. It’s me wanting to sit down with the various behind the scenes people with a cup of tea and listen to every thought process they had about what they needed to show and how.
• Nice change to the opening credits so that Ellie is now alone.
• Tommy talking about how Joel would justify what he did is part of the continuing theme that nobody in the world thinks Joel did a good thing. Even Joel didn’t dispute it when Abby accused him. He had good reason, but he did not do a good thing. In the official podcast for episode two Craig and Neil talk about why you have to show the world pushing back on Joe’s actions. They both sympathize with him and might have done the same thing if it was their child on the line, but that doesn’t make it right.
• Look, I have no hate on product placement. You gotta pay the bills somehow. That being said, the Ace Hardware logo on that building gets high priority in making sure it’s still clean and pretty? They got someone up there with brand appropriate paint and Windex before they fully shored up the wall again? C’mon.
• I debated including this because this video reveals some game spoilers, such as the name of the group and who they encounter in the future, but since the show itself introduced the idea of the whistles having meaning for what it’s worth in the game the whistles do have meaning. There’s a consistent pattern that, when playing, you can use to know what they’re saying to each other. No clue if the show will use the exact same whistles but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.
• Related, I liked how they used the man looking behind himself to reveal that he had scars on both cheeks. Likewise I felt it was a good way to introduce how The Last of Us is now expanding the world beyond what we knew in the first game by revealing there are so many more factions out there than we thought.

And that’s all for this week. Three down, four to go for this season. A lot of place setting for now but, well, we’ve made it to Seattle. That’s a pretty big place. Should be interesting.

Thanks for reading!