At last, we get the flashbacks. Not interspersed with the rest of the story, but all at once in a single episode that slams hard on the brakes after last week’s intense finish and gives everyone a moment to breathe before the big Season 2 finale next week. Unsurprisingly, I have mixed feelings about all of this. Spoilers ahead.
For the most part, this was a really great episode, in no small part because it plucked some of my very favorite moments from The Last Of Us Part II and put them to screen. The museum scene, in particular, was handled really well here.
I complained in the Season 2 premiere that the scene with Joel singing “Future Days” not being present was a mistake, and I’m going to stand by that complaint now. I’m glad we get that scene in this episode, but I think it still would have been better to include it in the first episode of the season, and then have the rest of the stuff with the guitar and birthday in this episode. For one thing, last week’s episode – when Ellie starts playing that song in the theater – would have landed harder. But also, I don’t know that all of these flashbacks needed to be cordoned off into a single episode like this. More on that in a second.
The episode essentially gets us through all the intervening years between when Joel and Ellie come to Jackson and the present. It does this by going from one birthday to the next. Early on, they’re doing okay. The museum trip is lighthearted and honestly just such a beautiful moment between these two. It kind of makes you wish they hadn’t gone and killed off Joel so that we could keep seeing their relationship grow and mature over the years.
Then the problem years come. Ellie starts acting out. She starts fooling around with girls, something Joel isn’t prepared for on multiple levels. She gets a tattoo to cover her bite mark. She tries to move into the garage and Joel doesn’t let her – but later relents and helps her make the move after he hooks up power and makes some other upgrades.
Things soften a bit when he gives her the guitar the following year and sings her the song (which I can’t help but to compare to the video game version, which is better). But the last birthday is where everything falls apart, and this is all new content. None of this was in the game.
So Long, Eugene, We Barely Knew Ye
When Joel finally allows Ellie to go on patrol, he brings her with him. They play it safe. This annoys her. When they’re contacted on the radio to go help with some infected, they find Eugene hiding out in the woods. He’s been bitten. Joel wants to kill him then and there, but Eugene begs him not to. He wants to go talk to his wife, Gail, before he dies. There are things he needs to say – in person – before he kicks the bucket. Ellie checks him and tells Joel he still has hours before he turns. They can make it back in time. So Joel reluctantly agrees and tells Ellie to go get the horses and meet them up the trail.
“I promise,” he tells her, just like he told her at the end of Season 1 after the Firefly massacre. This is probably something he shouldn’t have said, since he clearly had no intention of keeping said promise. He takes Eugene to a nice view and kills him and then Ellie shows up and she’s understandably unhappy. When they return to Jackson, Joel feeds Gail a line of BS that’s still at least comforting. Ellie is angry enough at this point, having realized that he almost certainly lied to her about the Fireflies also, that she spills the beans, outing Joel and his lie about Eugene. And so begins the fracturing of their relationship. This is why she’s so upset in the premiere.
I’ll save what bothers me about this whole segment for a moment and move on to the final scene. This takes place the night of the dance when previously we saw Joe on the porch and Ellie march past him without a word. Only we see more this time. Ellie comes out to the porch and asks Joel if he lied about the Fireflies. She tells him if he lies again, they’re finished. So he tells her the truth. She asks if they could have made a cure, and he nods. She tells him that she doesn’t know if she can ever forgive him . . . “But I’d really like to try,” she says. And they have a nice, heartfelt moment. And we realize that not long after this, Joel will die and these are, in fact, their last moments together.
Okay, so my problem with the Eugene scene is that it just doesn’t work. Joel didn’t need to kill him like that and if he really did need to kill him, he should have done it without promising Ellie something else. Meanwhile, if he was prepared to lie to her, why not just lie again and tell her started to turn? Joel doesn’t lie when it’s convenient, apparently, only when it’s used to make him look bad.
And boy does this entire flashback make him look bad. When Joel lies to Ellie about the Fireflies, it’s a profound moment, a major choice – and something Ellie sees through at the time, to some degree, but accepts because she loves him. It’s not a flippant little lie to shoe her away. But this time, with Eugene, it really is. She’s just inconveniently there when he has to do what he thinks is necessary, so he lies to her without batting an eye. Are w just supposed to accept that Joel is a chronic liar now? All of this cheapens the moment at the end of Season 1, cheapens the big lie, makes it less profound, makes Joel look like a scumbag for no reason. None of this even needed to exist in the first place. Just have a scene where Joel admits to Ellie that he lied and have Ellie really upset about it. You don’t need Eugene or Gail or extra lies on top. The story is weaker for these additions.
The Porch Scene Is All Wrong
Perhaps even worse than the Eugene lie is what comes next.
I have a few problems with the porch scene. The first is Joel just admitting that they could have come up with a cure. This wasn’t in the game, and here it feels like yet another way to make Joel look pathetic. I’m glad he told her that he did what he did because he loved her. I’m glad that he told her she won’t be able to understand that until she has a child of her own. All of this is true. But why say the Fireflies could have made the cure when that was never 100% guaranteed? Quite the contrary. Even a rudimentary understanding of medicine and vaccines suggests that they would not have been able to come up with a cure. And all that’s beside the point. Ellie was mad because she felt betrayed, like her purpose was taken away, she was robbed of her agency, and the likelihood of a cure doesn’t figure into in any of that.
So why not just tell her this? Why not tell her that it was a bad gamble. That they were betting her life and whatever potential use her blood and DNA might have been in the future on a really risky, really arrogant crapshoot? Or just have him lie more since you’re already painting him as this terrible liar. All of this just makes Joel look bad, both because he can’t defend his actions with more conviction, and because it reinforces the idea that the Fireflies were somehow in the right.
So alongside these great heartfelt, emotional beats we get Joel looking like a lying prick and then just folding and telling Ellie that the Fireflies were right and he was wrong, she can go on living with the guilt she’s been carrying for not dying as a child-sacrifice to the hubris and folly of foolish men. It’s just a very frustrating light to cast Joel in and he deserves better.
Second, what in Odin’s name are they doing moving this scene so far ahead in the story? This is a conversation we don’t see until the very, very end of the game. Now we’re getting the Future Days song that effectively opens the game, the museum sequence and the final scene all at once in a single episode. It’s just . . . kind of baffling and infuriating. The poignancy of this scene, following all the horrors Ellie endures (and causes), is impossible to overstate.
It’s a bit like revealing Abby’s motives in Episode 2, rather than allowing viewers to wonder and only set things out much later, robbing us of any surprise and leaving us without this later revelation to grapple with (now we get it in a villain monologue!). But frankly, this is much worse. I’m left scratching my head in disbelief. There’s simply no way that they can end the show better than this scene (and the very brief moments after).
Finally, the game’s version of the scene is far better overall. Ellie doesn’t threaten Joel. Her approach is less aggressive, more mature and measured. When he tells her he’d do it again, she accepts that. She gets it. Their interactions feel natural. Joel is less weepy and more in-character. The one moment where he loses his composure hits really hard because Joel is inherently a very gruff, emotionally closed-off person. When he does break, we notice.
Meanwhile, at no point does Ellie ask him about the cure. He never admits that it would have worked. It’s all so much more subtle with more understated writing, and better, more nuanced performances. All the problems with this scene were created by the show’s writers when they had a perfectly good scene already (to put at the end where it belongs).
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