The second season of The Last of Us begins with Joel and Ellie at odds. In the most recent episode, "The Price," we finally find out what happened between them, thanks to a series of flashbacks that stretch back to Ellie's 15th birthday all the way up the night before he's brutally killed in the second episode of the season.
Actually, they go back farther than that: the episode opens with a flashback to Joel's childhood, where he has a frank discussion with his father. "Even now that Joel is dead in the show, you still feel his presence, partially through Dina, but mostly through Ellie, who’s trying to be like him. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she’s in over her head. So there’s this idea of like, a lot of our programming comes from our parents," episode director Neil Druckmann — who also worked on The Last of Us video games — explained to Deadline. "Then it became interesting to say, well, what if we went backwards in time to see where does Joel get his programming? Where does he get his savior complex? Or how he feels he needs to use violence to protect the people close to him? Those were the early thoughts for that conversation with the dad."
"We wanted to not only have this idea of generational trauma that can stay with people going forward, but also this idea of generational repair and hope, and this idea that you do your the best to raise your kids with the tools that are in front of you, and then you hope that they will pick it up from there and grow even further and become better people than you were with their kids and so on and so forth. Then, coming back to that porch scene of what Joel imparts to Ellie is this hope that she would do better. And the question is, is she doing better, or is she heading to a much worse place?"
Well, the episode before this one ended with a dead-eyed Ellie brutally beating a woman to death with a pipe in a red-tinted hallway, so she doesn't seem like she's in a great place. Sure, the woman — Nora — was among the people who came to Jackson to kill Joel, but it was still disburding to see Ellie so far out of pocket.
In the video games, Ellie is more obviously dark and moody from the start, right after Joel dies. On the show, she's been more cheery, starting up a new romance with Dina and generally not showing just how disturbed she is until that moment with Nora. Why the change?
Ellie as been "hiding" how disturbed she is more than she did in the game
"In the game, it was important to me for Ellie to get into this really dark headspace and be unable to kind of get out of it for a while, because…you have to commit a lot more violence than you do in the show," Druckman explained. "Whereas in the game, by the time she gets to Nora, she would have already killed a bunch of people, including some of the people responsible for Joel’s death, really, in the show, the first one is Nora. So, she’s on this journey, and I don’t know if she really understands what this journey means, until this point now, when she gets to Nora and this is a moment where she’s trying to be like Joel."
"She’s trying to commit this like, ‘I will do whatever it takes to go forward on this journey and find out where Abby is.’ Now we see the darkness that’s been brewing underneath that. She’s been doing a good job of hiding different than game Ellie, not necessarily better or worse. They’re just slightly different on their journeys, even if the destination is the same. But now that she’s committed this act, the question we want to explore is, can you come back from something so horrific?"
The beating of Nora definitely read like a turning point to me. We'll see where that goes in the season 2 finale, which will air this upcoming Sunday.
Why were the flashbacks structured differently in the show?
Returning to the flashbacks, in the games, we see them throughout the experience, whereas on the show get all of them one after the other in this new episode. Druckmann had a reason for rearranging them.
"I think if we were to take, let’s say, the scenes that we wrote for this episode, and spread them out over the season, a few things would happen that I think would have a negative effect," Druckmann said. "There’s one, I don’t know if they would land, because they’re relatively short. And two, you might not be missing Joel enough if we started spreading them throughout the episodes. We felt like for the show, we would get a lot more impact if we brought them all together and you could see them side by side and feel the deterioration of that relationship. I also had concerns that the episodes would turn into a bit of a template. It’d be like, ‘Okay, what’s the Joel flashback this week?’ So, it was nice that the characters and the viewers could really miss this character, and then we get in the whole bunch for one last time."
Personally, I enjoyed this episode more than any other this season, so I'm behind this approach. The flashbacks led up to a talk Ellie and Joel had the night before he died, when he finally came clean about what he did in the season 1 finale: kill a hospital full of people to save Ellie's life, even though her death would have resulted in the creation of a cure for the zombie plague that had brought down society.
"Ellie understands, again, the weight of this action, and it’s maybe the worst she could be betrayed, because she wanted so much meaning in the death of Riley, in the death of Tess and the death of Henry and Sam," Druckmann explained. "Had a cure had come out of that, even if she died, it would have somehow made all those deaths worthwhile. Joel took that away, and she means it when she says it on that porch, ‘I don’t know if I could ever forgive you, but I would like to try.’ She really wants to move towards this idea of forgiveness, because she understands that this guy is maybe the person that will care more about her than anybody else in this world, and she doesn’t get to do that because she’s robbed of that. I think she just struggles with that internally, and that makes it hard to share it with anybody else, because sharing that is the most vulnerable she might ever be."
But as we know, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) kills Joel before Ellie can fully forgive him. "Hopefully, as a viewer, you understand this is what Abby took away from them," Druckmann told Entertainment Weekly. "They would've moved towards forgiving each other because they love each other unconditionally, and they never fully got that moment.... There's also something happening under the surface. This goes back to the conversation they had at the end of season 1; Joel tells her, no matter what, you find something to fight for. And here she has found something to fight for, but is it really the thing that Joel would've wanted her to fight for, which is justice for his death, or would he have wanted something more positive for her?"
The season 2 finale of The Last of Us airs this Sunday night on HBO and HBO Max.
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