In HBO’s The Last of Us, revenge is a dish best served democratically
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: Yeah, I’ve said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.
But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who’s played the game knows how central “the porch scene” is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we’d still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.
Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn’t, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence… I don’t know what they were thinking. Then again, if it’s just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.
Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he’s helped to build.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O’Hara, world’s least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I’m sure we’ll get it at a time that’s engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn’t it?
We’re able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn’t want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one “normal” community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.
Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between “paramilitary psychopaths” and “normal community.” But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson’s uniqueness all the more important as a setting.
We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same “Ellie and Dina go out for revenge.” While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.
Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the “Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance” meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).
Part of it almost felt too much like “our” politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that’s the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific “they” who would be “laughing at us” if the community doesn’t track down and execute Abby. I’ll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie’s attempted vengeance tour doesn’t make me feel better about what she’s deciding to do here.
Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that’s already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I’m not sure the town hall “deterrence” arguments would have swayed him.
Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the movie). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much “You’re gay, I’m not” bit…
Ellie and Dina conspire.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: “You’re gay, I’m not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!”
I am not inclined to get too on Dina’s case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn’t go into it, but I’ve also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.
Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being “out” in this context than Dina would be.
Andrew: One thread I’m curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame “Abby and her crew,” people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it’s easier to kill her when the time comes. We’ll see how well it works!
But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the “Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps“-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.
