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

Introduction

Episode 6 of season two of HBO’s The Last of Us - because apparently it’s HBO again! Right after I finally acknowledged it wasn’t! - frustrates me. On the one hand it’s an interesting collection of flashback vignettes which add useful flavor and information to scenes that we’ve seen already. On the other hand as I sat there watching the thing that I kept coming back to again and again was why was this about Joel?

Which is a whole rant in and of itself so let’s just get into it.

Why The Last of Us: The Price Was Useful Information From the Wrong Character

One of the things The Price does for us is recontextualize what we’ve already seen and had a question mark about. Based on the first scene of season two we know that Ellie always doubted Joel’s promise that his story of what happened with the Fireflies is true. Seeing the timeline and how this doubt ate away at Ellie over the course of five years tells us more about why she behaved the way that she did.

For example, in episode one without context her screaming “I’M IMMUNE!!!!” during that fight with Tommy makes her look like a brat who doesn’t respect basic concepts of safety - which she doesn't. However, when we are reminded that Ellie considered her ability to save the world to be her purpose in life, a purpose she knows that Joel destroyed for his own selfish reasons, her bratty action becomes one of defiance. Why should she treat her immunity with any reverence and respect when Tommy’s own brother didn’t? When her entire existence is meaningless now thanks to Joel?

And yes, we can litigate the logistics of whether Ellie and that one hospital and doctor was the world’s only chance for a cure and we already have. The point is we have to accept the story where it tells us to. We’re not talking about the actual world we’re talking about this fictional one. And in this fictional one a cure could have been created then and Joel is responsible for why it will never happen.

Moreover, regardless of any protests people want to make about manufacturing and shipping routes of vaccines in an apocalypse, Ellie is allowed to decide for herself if she would have preferred to take the risk of dying on that operating table. She’s allowed to be pissed about it. People in the world, such as Abby, are allowed to be pissed about it. Joel himself doesn’t even argue that this wasn’t a selfish thing. It was selfish, he’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it wasn’t good.

So we can take all this and understand why Ellie’s normal teenage rebellion got kicked up a notch in terms of her lack of respect for rules and her own safety. She felt her purpose in life was to die on that operating table in the hopes of saving the world. Right now she believes her life has no purpose, so why should she give a shit about danger and dying? Why should she care about being respectful to authority figures when the one she allowed herself to fully trust betrayed her on such a fundamental level?

It even gives further context into why Ellie devotes herself to getting revenge for Joel’s death. After losing her purpose, the one constant that formed and grew over the years was her resentment towards Joel. She finally reached a point where she got confirmation of her suspicions and resolved to try to figure out how to work through her feelings about it. To her mind, Abby stole this from her. Once again Ellie finds her purpose forcibly taken away from her and this time she’s not hesitating to make sure the person who did that to her knows how she feels about it.

We also get more understanding of how people in town see Ellie. Gail’s dismissal of Ellie as someone who is too damaged to help makes a hell of a lot more sense now that we’ve seen that Ellie was basically a fucking psychopath in the way she handled revealing the truth about Eugene’s death. Psych degree or not, I’d have probably written Ellie off for the rest of her life too if she thought that was the time, place, and method to give me that information.

To be clear - I get why Ellie did it, but as always explanations aren’t excuses.

A final bit of context for the story we’re seeing so far is that piece of the puzzle that Joel explained to Ellie that having a kid makes a difference. And here I actually kind of wish that they’d given Joel a line like “When you’re a father, this is what you feel.” simply because it would’ve had a nice resonance with Ellie’s comment to Dina of “I’m going to be a dad.” Ellie lost her chance to get understanding of what Joel did with Joel directly, but life has served up another opportunity for her to see things from a new perspective.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that’s a thousand percent too on the nose. But frankly far too many in the audience for this show miss the point even when the show spells it out for them so for HBO’s The Last of Us specifically I don’t think there’s anything that can ever be called too on the nose (see also: the people who don’t understand why Dina said she wasn’t gay even though Dina herself actually had a monologue which explained that very thing).

All that being said, my supreme frustration with this episode is why in the tapdancing fuck were we in Joel’s POV? This wasn’t Joel’s story! We didn’t need Joel’s story! Joel feels strongly about how he failed his daughter so he overidentifies with being a father to Ellie and does wildly overreaching things to protect her because of it! We had a whole first season to learn this information! We’re good!

Look, I love Pedro Pascal as much as the next person but Joel’s story is done. Home boy is worm food. Ellie is the star of the show now. We need to be with her.

Seriously, what did we learn about Joel that was new? He’s been protecting Tommy since they were kids which we could’ve easily guessed since why would that only start when they were adults? We learned about the mystery of Eugene’s death but 1) the show’s the one that created that mystery and could’ve just as easily skipped it (also this was really a waste of Joe Pantoliano unless there’s more flashbacks of him in future episodes) and 2) the result of what happened was about Ellie’s reaction so it shouldn’t have stayed focused on Joel.

I’m reminded of The Mitchells vs the Machines where part of the problem in having some 40+ year old guys in charge of a story involving teenage girls is that when it comes to writing about teenage girls the story is entirely about their fathers and the teenage girls themselves are these flimsy pieces of paper with long hair drawn on and “Moody” and “Has opinions???” scrawled underneath.

Granted, Halley Wegryn Gross helped out with the writing for this episode so there’s some female perspective. But think about it - the only thing we see that Ellie likes that’s not factored through the opinion of a man born in the 1970s is space, which is based on Ashley “the original Ellie” Johnson’s desire to be an astronaut. Think about it, even the music Ellie listens to - Pearl Jam, Nirvana, A-ha - is based on the fairly masculine music tastes of someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s.

And hey, as a bisexual woman Nirvana is on my personal playlist to this day as well. But I’m also squarely Gen X. I’d never write my music preferences onto someone half my age without an extremely good, character based reason.

I get that the apocalypse means music stopped being made in a certain year but 1) publication dates haven’t been a factor for this show before and 2) hey you know what other performers there were before the apocalypse who queer girls would listen to? Madonna. Prince. Cyndi Lauper. Alanis Morissette. Suzanne Vega. Melissa Etheridge. Hell fucking Indigo Girls for the world’s easiest “did you know this character is a lesbian?” layup.

Look, maybe my eyesight is shit - well it is, but point being maybe I missed a k.d. lang poster on Ellie’s wall. I know there are female performers on there whose names I couldn’t read. But point is even when Ellie is singing to her female crush it’s a song factored through an older male’s perspective. What, was Ani DiFranco suddenly allergic to royalty money?

(I know Take On Me was in the game, doesn’t mean it’s any less of a “Oh come on” in terms of picking that as the song for Ellie to sing to Dina).

All of which means that it was nice to see Pedro Pascal again, once more acting up a storm as the older guy who solves problems with violence but cares for a kid. But gosh it would’ve been nice to see something about the internal life of this Ellie character we keep hearing about. Is she somehow related to the person who’s been leading the show since episode 2? I’d sure love to know!

Heck, even the closing shot doesn’t really do it. In the game we get these flashbacks because Ellie is going through PTSD after killing Nora. Here she’s just walking in the rain. Is that shot of her even related to her killing Nora or is it days later? Who knows?

So yeah. Great series of little flashbacks, entirely about the wrong person. Oh well.

Lagniappe

As always, things that don’t fit anywhere else.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts about hair and costuming this season, but given that this largely took place in Jacksonville it’s not the ep to talk about the good hair and lack of dirt on the clothes. Jacksonville actually makes sense for that. Also hey, Eugene’s shirt even looked a little dirty. That was a nice change of pace.
I will side eye that Gail was wearing high heels though. I know some people like them but seriously? In the apocalypse you’re finding heels that fit you well enough you want to wear them? (Though I suppose in an apocalypse maybe high heels are shoes in the best condition because nobody wants to wear them.)
I’m curious about the thought process that says vanilla is comparatively easy to get. Maybe the idea is that the alcohol of extract makes it last longer? Regardless, I did like the quiet storytelling behind Joel having a chocolate cake two years later. We’re told it’s the harder ask and we can guess that didn’t get any easier with the passage of time. It speaks to how much effort Joel was putting in to try to be there for Ellie.
Another reason why the POV of this episode didn’t work for me is that the flashback to Joel as a kid wasn’t a story about Ellie. It was a story about Sarah. Yanno, his first daughter? The one he raised for 15 years? With who knows how many of those years as a single father? Any lessons Joel had about “do better” applied to her first and more significantly. Ellie was his take two after her. And episode one already told us what lessons Joel learned in the time between Sarah’s death and meeting Ellie so we didn’t need to be told that again.
I have another long list of thoughts about the characterization of Ellie this season that I’m holding off on until the finale. However, I do note that this episode has strange handling of Ellie’s intelligence. On the one hand she knows about spaceships and dinosaurs and was savvy enough to figure out all the holes in Joel’s story. On the other she doesn’t know the term for a litter of kittens. Seriously? The girl who was all over puns as a 14 year old?
(What do you call it when you toss a bunch of kittens outside? Littering!)
Bella Ramsey did a great job of showing the evolution of Ellie’s youthful joy to sullen rebellion to seething anger. You could see the light going out of Ellie’s eyes with each leap forward in the timeline.
Credit where due: The shot of Ellie and Joel’s feet hitting the forest ground had a nice feeling of suspense to it now that this season has treated the idea of underground communication between infected better than season one did.
Not for nothing but Ellie could’ve called Joel’s bluff with Eugene by pointing out that it made way more sense for her to be the one to stay with him on the odd chance he fully turned. Yanno, since she’s immune? Just saying.

And that’s it for this week. See you next week as we find out how they handle bringing season two to a close and setting up season three. Thanks for reading!