‘The Last of Us’ Reunites Joel and Ellie—and Reveals What Really Happened to Eugene

It feels odd for The Last of Us to spend an episode on Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) happier days in combination so quickly after dropping Joel. He’s most effective been lacking for 3 episodes, and maximum of them have spent such a lot time introducing new characters and factions that Ellie has began to really feel like a visitor big name on her personal display. Yet with one episode to move, this temporary season is already about to wrap up. So if there may be going to be any mirrored image, it could as nicely be now, in an episode referred to as “The Price” that’s structured as a sequence of flashback vignettes.

In the primary, a tender Joel Miller has a dialog together with his dad (Tony Dalton), who recollects his courting with Joel’s grandpa. The elder Miller recollects his father punching him within the face so exhausting his jaw must be stressed out close. He’s telling Joel this tale as a result of, whilst he has hit each Joel and Tommy, he informed himself he would by no means hit them like his father hit him. That’s the lesson he desires to impart to Joel: To be somewhat higher than his personal father.

It’s a pleasing scene well-acted by way of Dalton, however an overly blunt tone-setter for the episode, which displays on Joel’s courting with Ellie. Focusing on 4 of Ellie’s birthdays in between seasons 1 and 2, it is this season’s model of “Long, Long Time,” season 1’s surprising and heartfelt standalone following two characters’ courting over a number of years. Only this time, the characters are our former main pair, a duo that’s sorely ignored after Joel was once killed on the finish of “Through the Valley.”

For many of the closing hour, we get moments from Ellie’s birthdays. For her 15th, Ellie’s first yr residing in Jackson with Joel, Joel lovingly restores a guitar for her, and gives to show her the right way to play. She asks him to sing, and he kind of, and sweetly sings the primary verse of “Future Days,” the Pearl Jam tune Ellie quietly sang the outlet bars of in “Feel Her Love” closing week. (This is how the entire episode purposes: offering the overall context for little bits of foreshadowing within the earlier 5 episodes. It’s just like the display making its personal Easter Eggs, versus simply pulling them from the sport.)

Ellie’s 16th birthday adapts a second fanatics of The Last of Us Part II adore, a discuss with to a herbal historical past museum the place Joel has ready a marvel for Ellie: a recording of the Apollo 15 project for her to hear whilst sitting in the real house tablet, an actual astronaut helmet on her head. Much like within the recreation, Ellie closes her eyes and the viewer sees what she imagines: The flare of rockets, the majestic depths of house. Unlike the sport, we additionally see Joel’s face the entire time: Completely taken by way of Ellie, and overjoyed to make her so satisfied.

By that specialize in moments like this, The Last of Us desires us to understand that even after the queasy, ambiguous finishing of season one, Joel and Ellie have shaped the type of daddy-daughter courting it is not extraordinarily transparent they’d firstly of season two. And as great as those scenes are – Ramsey specifically has a large number of a laugh reverting to a more youthful, goofier model of Ellie – the extra healthy and whole courting that the 2 are proven to have makes Ellie’s present-day movements a lot tougher to return to phrases with. Prior to this episode, it appeared like the 2 of them had a large number of unresolved rigidity; that loss of answer offers Ellie’s movements grounding. But in “The Price,” as we see, the 2 do get the danger to transparent the air on even the display’s thorniest questions.

After a rocky 17th birthday, the place Joel tries to marvel Ellie with a cake most effective to search out her doing “all the teenage shit at once”—being silly with a reasonably older girl, who gave her a tattoo, and taken weed—”The Price” skips forward to Ellie’s 19th birthday. She’s rehearsing questions she has for Joel, issues about their departure from the Firefly base on the finish of season one that do not upload as much as her. She desires to invite them on her first patrol with Joel, however does not get the danger prior to an emergency calls for their consideration.

This is the Eugene (Joe Pantalianio) tale The Last of Us has been teasing all season lengthy, and it is truthfully now not extraordinarily really extensive for one thing so closely hinted at. We principally know what occurs from stray bits of conversation in previous episodes: Eugene were given bit whilst out within the woods, and Joel kills him prior to he turns. What’s new—but even so a heartbreaking efficiency from Pantaliano—is the rapid aftermath, the place Joel lies to Gail (Catherine O’Hara) about Eugene’s closing moments. Joel claims that Eugene did not wish to see her as a result of he sought after to stay her protected, and that he ended his personal lifestyles.

Ellie is aware of either one of those claims are false. Seeing Joel lie units her off; she blurts out the reality to Gail, who slaps Joel, and collapses in grief.