The Last of Us (TV Program)

Dina learns the truth. Ellie learns a hard lesson about the unintended consequences of vengeance.‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 7In an interview with Collider last week, “The Last of Us” co-showrunner Craig Mazin estimated that it will take four seasons for him and the video game’s co-creator Neil Druckmann to adapt the two “Last of Us” games properly. I found this comment a bit surprising. Mazin and Druckmann covered most of the first “Last of Us” game in an action-packed Season 1. After this week’s Season 2 finale, is there enough story left in “The Last of Us Part II” for two more seasons?Having never played the game, I do not know the answer to this. But I do know that Season 2 — as good as it has generally been — has raised some questions about where this show is ultimately headed. Season 1 was something of a quest saga, about a one-of-a-kind hero traveling to the place where she was meant to sacrifice herself and save the world. Then Joel ripped up that script. In the Season 1 finale, Joel didn’t just move the narrative goal posts, he tore them down.So what’s the endpoint now? What does a “chosen one” do when she is no longer chosen?The Season 2 finale wrestles with these questions in ways both exciting and somewhat perplexing, before ending in someplace unexpected and potentially promising. If nothing else, the episode does have a strong arc for Ellie, as she realizes that missions of vengeance are messy and unsatisfying.We begin with Ellie’s return from Lakehill Hospital, where — contrary to how it appeared in last week’s episode — she did not club the infected Nora to death. As Ellie explains to Dina, she beat on Nora until she gave up clues Abby’s location. (The words “whale” and “wheel” were mumbled.) Then Ellie took off, leaving Nora to get zombified.Ellie says all this in hushed, even tones, admitting that torturing Nora was easier for her to do than she had expected. Still in a confessing mood — and in an especially vulnerable place, as Dina is washing the wounds on her bare back — Ellie finally tells Dina why Abby and her crew came after Joel in the first place. Dina’s icy reply? “We need to go home.”After this opening, much of the first half of the episode follows Ellie and Jesse as they head out to find Tommy so that the Jackson contingent can get the heck out of Seattle. This is not a happy journey. Jesse, understandably, is in no mood for Ellie’s flippant attitude; and Ellie does not have much use for Jesse’s sanctimony.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A series of flashbacks traced the evolution of Joel and Ellie’s relationship in Jackson, Wyo., filling in some blanks about her current state of mind.Season 2, Episode 6What is the opposite of a love story? A disenchantment story, perhaps?That may be the best way to describe this week’s haunting and heartbreaking “The Last of Us,” which features a years-spanning flashback. The episode functions a lot like the award-winning episode “Long, Long Time,” from Season 1, except in reverse. We follow Joel and Ellie from their early days living in Jackson, closely bonded; and then, over time, we see how that bond weakened and broke.This episode begins with a prologue, set in 1983 in Austin. We learn that Joel and his younger brother, Tommy, were the sons of a cop (played by the great Tony Dalton of “Better Call Saul”) who was quick to smack them around whenever they stepped out of line. One night — after Tommy was caught buying pot — Joel tried to shoulder the punishment, telling his dad to leave Tommy alone. In a moment of bracing self-awareness, Officer Miller admits that he may be following in the footsteps of his own father, who once beat him so hard he had to be hospitalized.“But I’m doing a little better than my father did,” he says to Joel. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”Post-prologue, the episode cycles through five vignettes — four set on Ellie’s birthdays, and one on the New Year’s Eve night we saw in the Season 2 premiere.The first vignette catches Joel and Ellie at a somewhat awkward place in their relationship: still recovering from the trauma of Salt Lake City, and in the first few months of living in a normal domestic situation, as a surrogate father and a daughter. Nevertheless, Joel makes what might be his first grand parental gesture (besides saving her life) as he rebuilds a guitar for her for her 15th birthday, using real bone for the saddle and carving a moth design from one of her notebooks into the neck.But these two have not really found a relaxed family groove yet. Joel can’t figure out how hard to play “dad” when Ellie intentionally burns her arm, trying to hide a bite mark. And when he describes how he fixed up the guitar, he becomes adorably awkward, going deep into the weeds on the machinery. (“Used a Dremel. That’s a rotary drill. Or it could be a saw, depending on the tip. Actually it’s a pretty versatile tool.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Dina fills in some blanks about her past. Ellie finds the first of her intended targets.‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 5Early in this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” Dina tells Ellie a story about what her life was like when she was 8 years old, surviving the apocalypse in a cabin in a sparsely populated forest north of Santa Fe, N.M. One day back then, Dina grabbed a gun and went for a walk, without permission. When she returned, she found a raider in their house and her mother and sister dead.She killed the intruder — the first person she ever killed. Ever since, Dina has wondered what would have happened if she had been home when the raider arrived. Would she have been forced to watch him beat her family to death?There are different conclusions we could draw from all this. On the one hand, Dina suggests her experience helps her empathize with Ellie’s decision to hunt down Abby. Dina knows that if she had not killed her family’s murderer right away, she would have tracked him down until the job was done.But was her in-the-moment act of vengeance “justice,” exactly? Or just survival? Dina says that even if her family had hurt the raider’s family first, they would not have deserved to die the way they did; and she says that Joel did not deserve to be brutally slain, no matter what he did. Dina never proposes this directly — and would maybe disagree strongly with I am about to say — but the logical endpoint of her argument is that no one “deserves” to be killed. The act of taking a life should be a necessity, not a notion.Dina concludes her monologue by giving Ellie a choice, to press on or head home. Interestingly, Dina insists that there is “no right answer,” which is subtly different from “no wrong answer.” (It’s as if she were saying that all of their choices are equally cursed.) Anyway, Ellie sees only one option, so the mission continues.This week’s episode is ripe with bad vibes. For one thing, this is now the third week in a row that we have spent in Seattle, and after the variety of locations and stories that helped distinguish “The Last of Us” Season 1 from other end-times TV dramas, a certain exhausting repetitiveness is starting to set in here. The story feels a bit stuck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

This week brings an expedition full of harrowing action and emotional revelations.Season 2, Episode 4It’s comforting to know that long after the collapse of civilization, certain TV clichés will persist. Like: If a woman vomits unexpectedly in one episode, in the next episode we will find out she is pregnant.So it goes with Dina, who puked in last week’s “The Last of Us” after stumbling across some human corpses, and noted at the time that her reaction was unusual, given that she often sees (and smells) dead people. Sure enough, in this week’s episode, Dina finds some pregnancy tests in a Seattle drugstore and gives several a try. They all come up positive.Dina does not say anything to Ellie — or to those of us watching at home who had not already guessed her secret — until close to the end of the episode, after the two of them have narrowly escaped multiple waves of Wolves and zombies. Her confession retroactively lends weight to everything these two women have just gone through. They have so much more at risk now.As was the case last week, a good portion of this episode is spent watching Dina and Ellie’s relationship blossom. They bounce sardonic, deadpan repartee back and forth. (Ellie, when Dina is exploring on her own: “Shout if something tries to kill you.” Dina: “That’s the plan.”) They share stories from their pasts, with Dina confessing that when she was little she told her mother she liked both boys and girls — to which her mom said, “No, you like boys.” They also fall into each other’s arms, making passionate love.Overall, there are three major revelations that Dina and Ellie share. One is the pregnancy. The other is that they have feelings for each other. And because of extenuating circumstances, Ellie also reveals to Dina that she is immune from the cordyceps infection. (I will come back to that later.)Unlike last week, all the charming chitchat is balanced with harrowing action. Dina and Ellie’s expedition into Seattle gets off to a quiet start, highlighted by a trip to an abandoned music store, where Ellie serenades Dina with a lovely acoustic rendition of A-ha’s “Take on Me.” The scene is beautifully staged and lit, with sunshine streaming in from a weed-and-moss-covered hole in the wall. At the end, Dina says Joel taught Ellie well. In a quiet voice laden with meaning, Ellie responds, “He did.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The first episode after last week’s loss of a major character makes a fine case for this season’s future.Season 2, Episode 3What is the appropriate amount of time for a TV character to mourn another TV character? In the old days, when television was less serialized, the answer to that question was usually “until the episode’s closing credits.”Then in the 1990s and 2000s, the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon was partly responsible for changing the way TV series handle death, with heroes carrying the pain of a loss for multiple episodes — to the point where fans would anxiously wonder whether the show would ever be fun again.In this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” the credited screenwriter and series co-creator, Craig Mazin, takes a smart approach to the aftermath of Joel’s horrible, bloody murder. Mazin jumps the action ahead three months, just as Ellie is getting out of the hospital, and long after she has gotten used to the idea of losing Joel. When Ellie is discharged, she is not mopey or surly. Instead, she is ready to get on with the next phase of her life: finding and killing Joel’s assassin, Abby.I question a different choice Mazin makes, however. This is an unusual “Last of Us” episode in that it lacks any kind of big action or horror set-piece. There is one devastating moment of violence that happens offscreen, and the episode ends with a major threat looming. But unlike in Season 1, where the calmer scenes of people hanging out and living life were balanced with terrifying monster attacks and shootouts, this week Ellie and the Jacksonians mostly just regroup. Given that some disgruntled fans have wondered whether this show can be as entertaining going forward without Joel, I’m somewhat surprised that this episode is so devoid of spectacle.That said, for people like me, who think Ellie is fascinating enough to carry a series, this episode makes a fine case for this season’s future.The action this week — such as it is — is understandably Ellie-focused. First, she completes her checkout from the hospital, which involves rating her pain level for the doctor (“nothing … zero”) and then getting past Gail, who knows she is not being wholly honest about how Joel’s death is affecting her. Gail mentions her own last conversation with him, and how he said that he had wronged Ellie by saving her. Ellie pretends not to know what Joel meant, then spins some therapy-speak to get Gail off her back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More