Context is everything. The same actions, in different contexts, mean completely different things. This week’s episode of The Last of Us makes some remarkable creative decisions because it diverges substantially from the game on which it’s based. While certainly more bombastic than its source material, the creative decisions here do more than make The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 compelling television. It changes who certain characters are. That’s going to have long-reaching consequences no matter where this season goes.
The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 opens by breaking one of the cardinal rules of storytelling by beginning with a dream. An older, wiser Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) warns a younger version of herself not to go into the operating room where Joel (Pedro Pascal) shot her father. His brains are splattered on the floor, she pleads. But the younger Abby doesn’t listen. In fact, she doesn’t even recognize herself as the woman she became after what she walked out of that room.
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As the older Abby watches her younger self open the door to the rest of her life, I wondered if she wasn’t mourning the death of her father so much as the death of who she’d been, and the things she’s about to do. Abby’s scenes largely don’t work for me in this episode, but this one hits. When she wakes up, she learns that their plan to kill Joel has gone up in smoke. There’s no good way into Jackson Hole, and anything they try will end up getting them killed.
Abby is desperate. Maybe, she suggests, they can kidnap a patrol and coerce someone into telling them where Joel is. But there’s really no way to do it without hurting anyone. Abby knows this, and Kaitlyn Dever does her best to sell it. In our review last week, we said Dever was miscast, and it’s hard to disagree based on what we’ve seen so far. Not because she’s small and weighs about 100 pounds soaking wet, though that doesn’t help. Standing next to everyone else in her group, she looks like a child who got lost on the school field trip and is waiting for an adult to take her home.
Abby’s physical changes aren’t what make her small; her lack of control does.
Kaitlyn Dever may not have the physique of Abby from the games, but that’s not what makes this version of the character small. The real issue is she’s not in control, and it’s obvious. Abby is in control of herself, and is so desperate for revenge that she can’t see the things in front of her. She’s not even in control of her own group; they can only speak honestly about their chances when she isn’t there. Owen (Spencer Lord) is in charge, clear as the day is long to anyone with eyes in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2.
In town, a hungover Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is woken up by Jesse (Young Mazino) to go on patrol fresh off her late-night kiss with Dina at the dance the night before. Like Joel, Ellie’s pain is eating her from the inside. She can’t tell anyone why, and she doesn’t seem to be able to admit it to herself. When Jesse annoys her so badly that she says she’d rather go out on patrol with Joel, she can’t even say why she’s confident that they’ll eventually mend what’s broken in their relationship. She’s her, he’s him, and nothing will change that.
Still, nothing will change what they have. Her belief in this is ironclad, even if she can’t say it out loud. Ramsey’s great strength as an actor is her ability to sell whatever she needs to in the moment, so when Jesse tells her that Joel is already gone out with Dina, the disappointment on her face, the fear that maybe this relationship isn’t fixable, is real.
In the next scene in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2, Ellie meets with an ashamed Seth (Robert John Burke), who stumbles his way through a seemingly sincere apology about calling her a slur the night before. Ellie stands there in barely veiled contempt before the conversation ends, and she walks out. It’s a small moment, but a telling one.
Ellie can’t forgive, nor can she let go. She loves Joel, but can’t forgive him. She understandably can’t forgive Seth, or at least acknowledge the apology was made, but most importantly, she can’t forgive herself for being alive. Ellie has wrapped bravado and anger around her like armor, and when the fall comes, it will shatter like glass, leaving the woman inside with nothing left.
The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 excels when we see Abby and Ellie as parallels.
Meanwhile, the town prepares itself for a potential onslaught of infected. Tommy (Gabriel Luna) is clearly in charge here, and people are on edge, but the town seems ready. As Jesse and Ellie ride out, a storm is on the horizon. At this point, we know every thread of what’s going to happen. The only thing left to do is pull on them and see what unravels first.
The parallels here are the episode’s greatest strength. Ellie and Jesse are in a 7-11 full of weed, lamenting the death of a Firefly. Abby, cold, shivering, alone, waiting for revenge that we know is inevitable if you know how the story goes. For her, though, it feels like it will never come. The difference is that while the story of this episode strengthens Ellie’s arc by showing us her anger, her guilt, and her inability to let go, the showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann weaken Abby.
When the snow goes out from under Abby and we see an extended shot of her falling down a cliff, I couldn’t help but laugh. That she lands among infected is sobering, but her panic, while understandable, again emphasizes how weak this version of the character is. You’d honestly think she’s never done this before.
I felt for Abby as she ran from the horde: physically overmatched, afraid, not even trusted by her friends enough to tell her the truth. She is a woman driven by pain, like Ellie is, but there’s armor here, no strength in which to cloak herself—just fear.
Joel saves Abby, of course, because that’s the way the story goes. And when Dina (Isabela Merced) calls out his name, you can see the wheels in her brain turning. And she takes her moment, telling them to come to the lodge where her friends are.
At home, things aren’t better. Tommy has learned that they can’t reach his brother, and when Ellie and Jesse learn that, they set out to find them. But the town has a problem of its own: a horde of infected are bearing down on them. This siege is a remarkable sequence, but it’s the little things that sell it.
The way the infected slam into the walls, the thousands of shell casings falling from the rifles stationed along the wall, rolling underfoot. Each spent cartridge, each drum of gasoline, is a cost in a world where resources are scarce, something they won’t have for the next time. When the infected breach the walls, and the shots are allowed to linger and breathe, it’s hard not to be impressed by the spectacle and choreography of it all. And when the dogs show up? Cinema. We stan an army of good boys and girls, even if they are obviously computer-generated.
There are a couple of things that undermine this sequence in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2. Tommy’s one-on-one fight with the Bloater is built almost entirely on him not knowing (or forgetting) the town’s layout in the moment of truth and artificially enhanced by a flamethrower that barely seems to have any juice. In the end, the Bloater falls over when it’s convenient, which knocks a bit of the wind out of the scene. For the most part, though, it works.
The lodge is the climax, but it’s also Abby at her worst.
The lodge is where the ‘climax of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 takes place. Here,Abby lies to get them there, promising warmth,ammo, and help for the town, which is the first of many major changes to the iconic video game scene. When Abby gets them inside–when she knows she has them–she transforms into a completely different character, one who’s confident, one the rest of her crew takes orders from. Once she can use Dina, weak and frostbitten, to get Joel to do what she wants, she begins monologuing like a Bond villain, full of righteous anger.
But this is where context matters. There’s a famous quote attributed to Plato: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Without it, this Abby is weak, pathetic, and incompetent. It’s only when nothing can challenge her, when one of her lackeys holds a frostbitten woman at gunpoint, that she becomes strong. That she has used what is potentially the death of a town to get to this moment seems to bother her not at all. There is a level of selfishness here that is not in the game, and the character is worse for it.
That Abby is an entirely different character in this scene seems not to bother the writers. Perhaps we’re supposed to be impressed by this, by her take-charge, take-no-lip glow-up. But it only makes her look pathetic. When Joel, having had enough of listening to her yap, finally says “shut the fuck up and do it already,” I said “thank you!” out loud.
In the game, Abby doesn’t talk much during this sequence. She doesn’t need to tell us how strong she is or how righteous her cause was. She lets her actions speak for her. Here, she doesn’t know when to stop eyeing her golf club and start swinging it, and it does this version of the character no favors. We’re not supposed to like Abby, and that’s fine. But I’m fairly certain I’m not supposed to think she’s a pathetic little worm, either.
The rest of the scene plays out much as it does in the game, with one major exception. Abby stabs Joel in the neck instead of killing him with one final swing, which seems more intimate, and forces Ellie to remove it. The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 ends with a broken Ellie and a broken town, each trying to figure out what comes next. And aside from Abby, it works.
What happens next remains to be seen, given how much this season has diverged from the game that inspired it. Violence begets violence begets nothing much at all. Still, I’m curious to see where this will be a highwater mark for the series, or setup for something grander. This episode was good. But I wouldn’t call it great. That takes something more. We’ll see if The Last of Us Season 2 can get there.
The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2 is streaming now on MAX (formerly HBOMax) with new episodes ever Sunday.
