‘The Last of Us’ season 2, episode 6 recap: the Joel episode
The penultimate episode of season two explores the makings of Joel, revealing some sour truths in the process
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SOME OF US ARE still recovering from Joel’s death, meanwhile Pedro Pascal is currently living it up at the Cannes Film Festival. While he’s doing that, the penultimate episode of The Last of Us season two just aired, and the producers weren’t going to leave those of us mourning dis demise (which you can revisit in gripping detail here) in suffering. Loose ends need to be tied up, and so the whole episode is dedicated to what made Joel the man he was: as a brother and as a father.
We flash back to Joel and Tommy as young children, the latter terrified of getting hit by their cop father after being caught buying weed. Stepping in for his brother, Joel was prepared to take a beating, but instead got a vulnerable admission on fatherhood and being a better dad. Their father never hit Joel and Tommy as hard as his father hit him, he justifies. This inscribes itself into Joel’s brain as a young boy; he will, indeed, try to be better.
We then flash forward into vignettes of Ellie’s birthdays, where Joel is actively trying to live out this truth to devastating effect.
“Gee-tar”, pork, and moths
Our first time jump is on Ellie’s fifteenth birthday. As Joel collects the parts for the guitar he’s gifting her, he carves one of her drawings of a moth onto its neck. Interrupted by Tommy and Ellie bursting into the house, the first loose end is tied here: the burn on her arm. Ellie tells Dina in an earlier episode that she burnt herself to hide the bite marks, but also because she missed wearing short-sleeves. So true. The vignette offers a moment to see Joel get on Ellie’s level and tell her that he understands the extreme decision. “It smelled like pork,” she says, high on anaesthetic, of the smell of burning flesh.
Let’s go to space!
Jumping ahead one year later, Ellie is turning sixteen. Father and daughter head out of the Jackson compound for some exploring, like the old days, Joel says, when it was just the two of them. More birthday surprises up his sleeve, they stumble upon a life-size T-rex, which makes you think for half a second that Jurassic Park has crossed over into The Last of Us. Joel surprises Ellie with a day at the space museum, which by now is covered in moss and foliage. A giant constellation is still spinning, much to Ellie’s surprise. “Someone must’ve greased it,” Joel deadpans. Teary-eyed yet?
He’s pulled out all the stops. Any insecurity he has about being a bad father is long gone. And to top it all off, Joel gives Ellie a tape of the Apollo 17 take-off recording as they climb into the module. As she closes her eyes, show-runners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann simulate the take-off for the birthday girl. Driving it home, a tear streaks down Joel’s face, ending one of the happier segments of the season.
All the teenage shit all at once
While we’re packing all this parenting into one episode, Joel got all the “teenage shit all at once” on Ellie’s seventeenth birthday. Holed up in her room, she’s getting inked, getting high, and having sex. Naturally, it’s a lot to walk in on, as Joel holds a birthday cake on which her name is finally spelt right. One last teenage thing: Ellie moves out to the garage in the middle of the night.
The conflict doesn’t last long as they quickly apologise to one another. “Did it hurt?” Joel asks of her tattoo. He notices that she made her fixation on moths permanent in the tattoo, which she tells him is because she’s interested in the insect’s symbolism for change and growth. Joel takes this to Gail (keep in mind: Eugene, her husband, is still alive. More on that soon), who says that they’re thinking of butterflies. Moths are actually symbolic of death. Certainly, moths may be a less emo take on death, but it is nonetheless a nasty piece of foreshadowing to have marked on Ellie.
We meet Eugene
Moving things along to the present timeline in The Last of Us season two, we jump forward two years to Ellie’s nineteenth birthday. Ellie is by now curious as to the events of Salt Lake City and the massacre of the Fireflies, practising into empty space how she’ll bring it up with Joel. She’s also old enough to go on patrol, which Joel takes her out to practise, until they get an alert from home-base about an Infected sighting. They stumble upon a bitten Eugene (played by Joe Pantoliano!).
The protocol follows that he needs to be shot immediately, but Eugene reasons that he at least has an hour before the cordyceps set in, and would like to see Gail one last time. While Ellie supports this, Joel goes behind her back and nudges Eugene along to an Edenic view that surrounds Jackson. Facing the epic view, this is Joel’s idea of killing him peacefully.
Another nasty piece of foreshadowing is apparent in the way they transport Eugene’s body back: wrapped up in white cloth and tied to the horse dragging on the ground. Joel’s selfishness is constantly up for debate, though this instance is irredeemable, as if he’s the last authority on what Gail needs to know. So, he crafts a far-flung narrative on Eugene’s noble decision to kill himself so as not to infect the community. Festering with contempt, Ellie calls Joel on his BS.
We’re all caught up on The Last of Us season two
A short nine-month month time jump (my grasp on time was by now out the window; I thought we time jumped to Dina giving birth), and we’re now at the New Year’s Eve party. Joel and Ellie’s relationship hasn’t fully recovered since Eugene’s death, his insecurities eating away at him in the ensuing months. We get the other POV of Seth being homophobic towards Ellie and Dina as Joel comes up behind him to defend his daughter. This hopefully would’ve restored his hero image; instead Ellie wants nothing to do with him.
The two reconvene at the house and Ellie is ready to move forward, but only with the truth. Joel finally comes clean about the events of Salt Lake City, Ellie taking it all in, one fact at a time: there were no raiders, Joel killed them all, and the Fireflies and Abby’s father were making a cure from her. It was selfish of him, she says, to have taken away her purpose like that. But she’s willing to understand, and it’s clear when she killed Nora that she’s made peace with the fact. They head in for the night. The Jackson siege is tomorrow, and the rest is history.
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