The second season of The Last of Us is over! With a while to wait before season 3, how do the episodes stack up? We rank every episode put out so far, worst to best:
16. Season 1, Episode 4, "Please Hold To My Hand"
I don't think there are any truly bad episodes of The Last of Us, at least not yet. HBO has put a lot of care and time into this grand zombie drama, and it pays off.
There are some episodes that are a bit on the boring side, particularly when they need to set up future events. Such is the case with "Please Hold To My Hand."
The first season is a road trip as Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) make their way across the zombie-ridden American countryside to reach safety. "Please Hold To My Hand" takes them to what remains of Kansas City, Missouri. The survivors here are led by a woman named Kathleeth (Melanie Lynskey), whom we sense traveled a long and hard road to get where she is. We also meet brothers Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Montreal Woodard), whom Kathleen is hunting. Joel and Ellie stumble into this drama while trying to mind their own business, and find that they can't.
This episode has a lot of setup for a much better episode that comes later. It's solid, but it's not complete with the follow-up.
15. Season 2, Episode 1, "Future Days"
The season 2 premiere of The Last of Us is more setup. By this point, Joel and Ellie have settled in the relatively safe confines of Jackson, Wyoming, but they've grown apart in the years since the end of the first season. Why? We can guess, but the episode mostly leaves things to our imagination.
While we puzzle through those questions, we meet new characters like Jesse (Young Mazino) and Dina (Isabela Merced), who will be crucial to the episodes ahead. It's fun to see the characters so safe after a whole season spent dodging danger at every turn.
At the end of the episode, a gaggle of new players arrive, including Abby (Kaitlyn), who will change Joel and Ellie's lives forever. Once again, it's a lot of setup that won't pay off for a minute.
14. Season 1, Episode 2, "Infected"
The second episode of the show gives us the lowdown on Ellie: she is immune to the zombie plague that has taken down society, and needs to be taken to a safe house so a group of freedom fighters known as the Fireflies can use her ability to create a vaccine. For most of the episode, she, Joel and Joel's partner Tess (Anna Torv) are making their way through Boston, trying to reach their goal. We learn about the different types of zombies, including the terrifying Clickers.
The episode ends with Tess sacrificing herself so Ellie and Joel can continue on. It's powerful but limited, since we don't know Tess very well by this point. The best part of the episode may be the cold open, where we flash back to what life was like before the cordyceps plague spread, and a scientist recommends that the military bomb a whole city to prevent the spread. In its early episodes, The Last of Us did a great job of establishing how hopeless the world's situation was.
13. Season 2, Episode 5, "Feel Her Love"
In season 2, Ellie and Dina head off to Seattle in search of Abby, who returned there after coming to Jackson to kill Joel. Ellie is looking for vengeance, and at the end of this episode, she gets it.
The final scene of the episode is definitely the best. Ellie finds of the people who accompanied Abby to Jackson, Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and chases her into a hospital basement so rotten with infection that just breathing in the air can make you a zombie. There, Ellie interrogates Nora as to Abby's whereabouts, and when Nora doesn't comply, she beats her over and over and over.
This scene marks Bella Ramsey's acting high point for the show so far; her dead eyes as she beats Nora are terrifying. The rest of the episode is fairly short, and mostly consists of Ellie, Dina and the newly arrived Jesse running around Seattle getting glimpses of the strange factions at war there. It's like they crashed the weirdest, most violent party in the world, and none of them are happy about it.
12. Season 1, Episode 7, "Left Behind"
The flashback episodes in The Last of Us tend to be some of the very best. "Left Behind" is solid, but probably the least of them.
This episode shows us how Ellie was first bitten and learned that she was immune. It's a bit of a love story; we see that she was very close with her friend Riley (Storm Reid), who was leaving the military school where both of them lived to join the freedom-fighting Fireflies. On their last night together, Ellie and Riley visit an abandoned mall. It's very charming to watch these two teenagers fall for each even under the most dire of circumstances, and sad to see them have to part under the most tragic.
11. Season 2, season 2 finale
The season 2 finale ramps things up considerably in Seattle. Ellie finds more of the people who accompanied Abby to Seattle, and continues to mow them down. She reaches a crisis of conscious here, wondering whether it's worth it to get revenge on Abby if it means becoming a merciless monster. But the damage may already be done, as Abby shows up at the end of the episode to exact her own revenge.
That final scene is a thrill, but it's over too fast. The episode ends with a flashback to a few days in the past, where we'll pick up with Abby's side of the story in season 3...two years from now, most likely. This episode would probably rank higher on the list if we didn't have to wait so long to see what happens next.
I also didn't fully Ellie's ocsillations between bloodlust and guilt, although I'm sure the situation is very confusing. Some absolutely gorgeous shots of ruined Seattle help chase this episode down.
10. Season 2, Episode 3, "The Path"
This is a fairly minor episode in the grand scheme of The Last of Us, so you may wonder why I'm ranking it ahead of the season 2 finale. "The Path" comes right after Joel's murder and shows Ellie's attempts to convince the people of Jackson to send out a posse of their own to hunt down Abby and get revenge. They vote her down, but I liked seeing Ellie use her cunning and try and convince the community that they needed to hunt down Abby for the sake of justice, rather than vengeance, which is what she's really after. The show did a great job of making the community of Jackson feel like a believable place in a short amount of time.
I also enjoyed the story with Seth (Robert John Burke), a local cook who drunkenly made a homophobic remark toiwards Ellie and Dina a couple episodes before. Ellie is justifiably cold towards him, but Seth shows repentance by helping equip Ellie and Dina for their trip to Seattle even after the town council vetoed their attempts to put together a posse. I'm always a sucker for a story about people who are initially at odds finding common ground, even if in this case the common ground is, "There will be blood."
And I enjoyed Ellie and Dina's cross-country trip, where we're treated to beautiful shots of the North American countryside. "The Path" is a transitional episode, but a meaty one.
9. Season 1, Episode 9, "Look for the Light"
The season 1 finale takes place in Salt Lake City, where Ellie and Joel finally reach the group of Fireflies who can use Ellie's immunity to make a cure to the zombie plague. They finally learn about the catch: in order to make the cure, Ellie has to die in surgery.
Is it worth it to sacrifice his surrogate daughter for the sake of the world? Joel answers that question with a firm no, killing everyone in the hospital so he can leave with an unconscious Ellie. Afterwards he lies about what happens, laying the groundwork for their split in season 2.
The episode is powerful, but somehow not as powerful as it should be considering the enormity of what Joel does. Still, Joel's actions will reverberate through the rest of the series, and have us all questioning how far we're willing to go for love, and if it's possible to go too far.
8. Season 1, Episode 7, "Kin"
"Kin" is another transitionary episode, and a fine one at that. After five episodes of trudging through the wasteland finding zombies and despots, Joel and Ellie finally get a break when they reach Jackson, Wyoming, which is then in its early stages as a community. We get to see who Joel and Ellie are when they're not fighting for their lives, which is the breath of air we need before the first season plunges into its endgame.
I like how "Kin" has a bit more time for humor than other episodes. I like how Joel and Ellie slow down long enough to realize they they're more to each other than just parcel and deliveryman. "Kin" is an unassuming pivot point of an episode that ties the season together.
7. Season 2, Episode 4, "Day One"
"Day One" marks Ellie and Dina's first full day in Seattle on the hunt for Abby. They pack it full of fun activities. They come upon members of the Washington Liberation Front strung up and hanged by persons unknown ("What the fuck is wrong with Seattle?), outsmart a bunch of a WLF soldiers in an old subway system, and have a confrontation when Ellie gets bitten by a zombie, since Ellie then has to come clean about her immunity.
That's incredibly dramatic, especially when Dina finally believes her and the two have sex for the first time. In between the death and brutality, the whole episode is really about their blossoming romance. There's an incredibly sweet scene where Dina looks rapturously at Ellie as she plays a cover of A-Ha's "Take on Me" in an abandoned must store. Somehow, these kids find a way to make it.
6. Season 1, Episode 1, "When You're Lost in the Darkness"
The series premiere of The Last of Us covers a lot of ground. We meet Joel, his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) living normal lives before the zombie apocalypse. We see the moment that breaks Joel before skipping years ahead to pick up with him as a hardened survivor who's given up hope of finding meaning in his life. Perhaps a young girl named Ellie can change that.
"When You're Lost in the Darkness" was originally going to be two episodes: one set in before the zombie apocalypse and one that explained how Joel and Ellie met. I think it might have been better as a two-fer, but this episode still does a great job of setting up the world and characters.
5. Season 1, Episode 8, "When We Are In Need"
Quite possibly the most disturbing episode of The Last of Us finds Joel incapacitated and Ellie left alone to face down a cult of cannibals, led by a deranged preacher named David (Scott Shepherd). Honestly, it's almost too grim and wild to be believable, but the show spends just enough time fleshing out David's character that we buy it.
Ellie faces down David in an incredibly dramatic climax in a burning building. Joel recovers just in time to save her from the worst of it, and they are bonded forever after.
4. Season 1, Episode 6, "Endure and Survive"
Finally, we reach the follow-up to "Please Hold To My Hand," the very first episode on this list. In "When We Are In Need," Ellie, Joel, Henry and Sam have a reckoning with Kathleeth, all of which ends with the most spectacular action scene the show had yet produced. Zombies, including a gigantic bloater, emerge from under the ground, wiping out much of Kathleen's kingdom and giving our foursome time to escape.
But this episode isn't awesome just for the action scene. It ends in horrible tragedy for Henry and Sam, who are a mirror for Joel and Ellie. The episode is a bitter lesson for both of them. Happily, we have a needed reprieve just the week after with "Kin."
3. Season 2, Episode 2, "Through the Valley"
Everyone who'd played The Last of Us video games was waiting for this episode, where Abby finds Joel and kills him for killing her father back during his massacre of the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City. The scene is absolutely brutal, and Kaitlyn Dever makes an unforgettable impression as the implacable Abby. It makes you wish she'd showed up more in the second season!
Joel's death scene would be enough to carry this episode on its own, but The Last of Us adds a huge action scene back in Jackson, where the town walls are breached by hundreds of infected. It all comes together to create easily one of the best episodes of the show so far.
2. Season 2, Episode 6, "The Price"
The penultimate episode of season 2 takes us back to when Joel and Ellie first settled in Jackson and marches through time as they grow further apart, finally ending with a heart-to-heart they share the night before Joel's murder. The episode answers the question of why Joel and Ellie's relationship had fractured by the start of the second season. Even if we'd already figured most of it out, seeing what happens step by step adds a ton of meaning.
This episode is just moving. Seeing Joel take Ellie to a derelict museum so she can indulge her dreams of being an astronaut is very sweet, all the more so because it's in sequence with scenes that show the two of them at odds. The final heart-to-heart, where Joel lays bare his fears to Ellie and she gives him hope that their relationship can be prepared, is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the show so far.
1. "Long, Long Time"
I don't know if The Last of Us will ever top this. Early on in the show's run, we take a break from Joel and Ellie's adventures to get to know Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman), two men who find each other in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Bill is a survivalist and one of the few people on Earth happy that civilzation came to an end, and Frank is a guy who happens to show up on his doorstep one day. We see their relationship develop over the course of years, skipping through history until they both die peaceful deaths, or as peaceful as anyone can hope for in this world.
Joel and Ellie are headed to Frank and Bill's place to pick up supplies for their journey, so there is a reason to include these two characters, but mostly, their extended story could lift right out and it wouldn't affect the larger plot. But you wouldn't want to lift it out, cause it's one of the best standalone episodes of TV produced in a past several years. The Last of Us fits a whole life's worth of feeling into this moving panorama of an episode.
But of course, this is all just me. How do you think the episodes stack up against each other?
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