The Last of Us Part 2was always going to be a difficult game to adapt to television, what withits complicated structureand highly interactive gameplay experience. The iconic game follows two characters, Ellie and Abby – one very familiar to us, and the other a stranger, and tells their simultaneously occurring stories one after the other, with plenty of flashbacks across both halves.
HBO’s attempt at bringing this landmark gaming property to television was largely successful when it came to adapting the more straightforward first game, but season two has had a more mixed reception. Case in point: episode six of season two, the penultimate episode of the season, has inspired quite a bit of discourse.
Uh Uh, That’s Emmy Bait
Episode six, The Price, is the kind of episode crafted to court award shows. Like the critically-lauded third episode of the first season, Long, Long Time, The Price departs from the main storyline and tells a separate tale, this one entirely through flashbacks that get closer and closer to the story’s present. We see Joel and Tommy when they’re young, and it’s revealed that their cop father was abused as a child, and therefore is guilty about the way he abuses his own sons, though he justifies his own actions by saying he never hurt them as badly as his father hurt him. He then tells Joel, “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”
The episode then goes through years of Ellie’s birthdays. We see Joel gift her a guitar one year, and that famous Museum of Science and History scene. We see them fight after Ellie is caught getting high and fooling around with Kat after getting tattooed. We see him helping her move out into the garage, a whole sequence around Eugene’s death that underutilised the incredible character actor Joe Pantoliano and further contextualised Gail’s animosity towards Joel, then a pivotal scene where Ellie confronts Joel about lying to her about what happened in Salt Lake City.
It’s a moving episode, to be sure. Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal are acting like their lives depend on it, and to their credit, they’re doing a great job with the material they have. Ramsey slips seemingly effortlessly into the shoes of a less jaded, younger Ellie, a version of her that still feels glee and has a close relationship with her surrogate father. Pascal plays an incredibly affecting Joel, who conveys exactly what he needs to with a single, tear-filled glance.
But god, I hate what this entire episode is doing. All these flashbacks being crammed into one episode dilutes their effect. I’ve always interpreted these flashbacks as being Ellie’s processing of grief – the non-linear structure reflects that of grief, and popping all into Ellie’s memories into one cryfest of an episode throws off the pacing of the overall story.
The Last Of Us Forgets What It’s About
I’m neither stupid enough nor audacious enough to insist that the game’s storytelling structure is flawless, and that no other structure could work. However, what HBO has done with this episodedoes not work. Yes, it does its job of depicting how Ellie and Joel’s relationship has changed throughout the years, but its entire purpose is to frame Joel’s actions as sympathetic: he was part of a cycle of generational trauma, and his actions, while violent, ultimately are the actions of a father who’s trying to be better than his father. HelovesEllie, which is why he destroyed the world’s one chance at a cure, massacring innocents because they got in his way.
It would be overly cynical of me to take this as the show hammering sympathy into our heads – I believe that even with this episode, there’s room to be horrified at his actions while understanding why he does what he does. But much of the show already does a lot to make Joel more sympathetic.He has panic attacks. Hegoes to therapy. He’s played by Pedro Pascal, a universally beloved and incredibly talented actor, who portrays this complex characterwith the requisite pathos.
And the show does the same for Ellie,detracting from the intensity and depth of her characterin favour of making her more palatable, more cheerful, more jokey. By making us sympathise more with these characters, it lightens the burden of blame for their horrible, violent actions.
I think a lot about Gail, Catherine O’Hara’s therapist character, telling Tommy, “Nurture only gets you so far, the rest is nature.” These characters are driven by their pasts, but also the violence they inherit from each other. So many of the show’s characters, even Dina (who in the game acts more as a voice of reason), act on an animalistic drive for revenge and self-preservation. But the writers seem to have forgotten to include that free will and agency are things we contend with, as well. And isn’t that the whole point of the story?
The Show Speeds Past All The Important Bits
There are a whole other host of things I hated in this episode. For one, throwing in that Joel was homophobic is justwild. In the game, his confusion about Ellie’s sexuality is more out of ignorance than malice – here, he outwardly denies her sexuality, telling her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
I understandwhyit was added. It adds weight to their reconciliation and his defense of her against Seth at the party. But the show adds homophobia through Dina’s mother as well, bringing the total of homophobes to three, whilesimultaneously botching its attempt at referencing queer Pride. In context of the wider show, it doesn’t make the show’s grappling with its characters’ sexualities any more nuanced or interesting, it just adds another reason for Ellie and Joel’s rift, as if her suspicions that he’d done a horrible thing weren’t enough.
The show’s version of the pandemic starts in the early 2000s, so views on sexuality would necessarily feel dated to modern viewers, but this is still a choice the writers made.
And that’s the other issue – the manipulation of the timeline. In this episode, Ellie doesn’t know for sure what Joel has done until he confirms it to her the night of the dance, the day before he dies. She tells him that she doesn’t know if she can forgive him, but she’ll try.
But in the game, Ellie finds this information out for herself by exploring the Salt Lake City hospital. Joel finds her and tells her the truth, and she agrees to return to Jackson with him but she wants nothing to do with him anymore. Two years pass, in which she comes to terms with what has happened, grows up a little, and becomes more open to speaking to him again. Their reconciliation on the night of the dance, after he defends her, is the product of that time. When she says she would like to try to forgive him, we know it’s taken her time and effort to get to that place.
When Ellie says it in the show, immediately after he confirms her suspicions, there’s no room for all of that. Nobody has grown, and nobody has changed. The show chooses to rush through these long, bitter years in favour of a tidy resolution that it doesn’t earn. Ellie decides she’s willing to try to move past it after a five minute conversation. Cool!
The Last of Us’ first season was excellent TV. I’m afraid I can’t say the same about its second season. The writers’ insistence on explicating all of the grey areas of the source material so it’s easily understandable for viewers who are likely scrolling on their phones while watching is egregious, and it’s agonising to watch all the themes the game explored with nuance getting hand waved away in favour of easy consumption. Yeah, I cried, and you probably did too. But a tearjerker doesn’t make a show good, and in this case, I feel like I was cheated into it.
