You have to envy anyone who hasn’t played both superlative The Last Of Us games or are still fairly resistant to spoilers, because with its second episode, the adaption of the hit game series reaches it’s most controversial and hard hitting moment. I won’t say what the moment is (yet), but I’d wager that anyone who had a complaint that the rather slowly paced first episode was “boring” (incorrect, but opinions are like assholes, I hear) surely won’t be complaining now after this installment.
You see, not only do we get that moment, but a lot of other stuff happens too that takes the world we got reintroduced to last week and literally beat, burn, shoot and savage the ever loving shit out of it for a full hour. We’re talking Helm’s Deep from Lord Of The Rings with mushroom zombies; we’re talking flamethrowers versus Bloaters; we’re talking a shock death that easily rivals anything that The Walking Dead has attempted and it’s all happening in only the second episode. Chaos is in bloom…
It’s the morning after the night before and Ellie wakes with a head full of hangover and confusing questions. Did her best friend Dina really come onto her and kiss her on the dance floor of the New Year’s celebrations and did the estranged Joel really come to her defence when one of the other settlers threw a slur in their direction like a homophobic handgrenade. Having the urge to speak to her father figure for the first real time in months, Ellie wants to go on patrol with him only to find out that he and Dina had gone out an hour earlier, so she has to settle with Jesse instead.
Elsewhere, the vengeful Abby, who has sworn to enact terrible retribution upon Joel when he murdered his way out of a Firefly camp five years earlier, has arrived at the settlement with her colleagues Manny, Mel, Nora and Owen with murder on her mins. However, the frigid temperatures and the sheer size of the settlement means they have no clue how to find and extract Joel in order to violently get even. However, fate is a strange thing and after Abby accidently awakens a massive horde of the infected that’s avoided freezing by burying themselves with their dead, literally everyone is now at risk. Fleeing for her life from a stampede of undead spore-people, Abby is saved by – you guessed it – Joel and Dina who take her to safety, leaving the infected to descend upon the settlement in a massive siege. Of course, town leader and Joel’s brother Tommy has had the survivors prepped for something like this for years, but that doesn’t stop the battle racking up some pretty sizable casualties.
However, while Ellie and Jesse ride to meet up with Joel and Dina, Abby finally puts her plan into full swing (literally) when she reveals her intentions to her potential victim. Will she get her pound of flesh at the expense of everything that everyone has worked for, or will Ellie manage to save the day?
Man, this is one busy episode. I mean I know that The Last Of Us has garnered a well earned reputation for being surprising, but for the makers to bust out an episode this big only two weeks in really caught me for a loop. As you may have guessed (and as I’ve mentioned a few times before) I have not played either of the games, but I did know about the gut wrenching twist, so while the bloody outcome was hardly a bolt from the blue, the gargantuan fucking battle scene that preceeded it totally was.
But first we build to things and we start by properly getting to know Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby, who may be somewhat less jacked than her game incarnation (seriously, she’s a beast), but the actress certainly brings the determined rage. Elsewhere she’s flanked by Danny Ramirez, Tati Gabrielle, Spencer Lord and Ariela Barer as her compatriots who all have slightly different opinions on her quest which helps distinguish them from your average henchpeople; although we’ll no doubt spend more time with them as time goes on.
However, finding that his time is now incredibly limited is Pedro Pascal’s Joel who shockingly meets his maker at the business end of Abby’s golf club in a move that’ll no doubt horrify fans of cinematic father figures. Way more tastefully done than the infamous Negan scene in The Walking Dead, although I truly wish that I had no idea it was coming as I can’t accurately claim it hit me as hard as it could, but the scene is handled with all the heartbreak and drama you’d hope of as the show boldly exterminates both the Mandalorian and Reed Richards while Bella Ramsey looks on.
However, while Joel is dead, that doesn’t mean that Pedro’s time in the show is done as The Last Of Us is fairly fond of flinging in the occasional flashback episode here and there and as there’s still some unspoken backstory hanging in the air (Eugene’s unseen death is name dropped extensively once again), so I’m fairly sure we’ll get some more, posthumous, Joel stuff before we’re all said and done.
Heart rending death by golf club aside, the other headline from this week’s episode is an absolutely massive action sequence that surely must rank as one of the most epic zombie attacks ever seen on screen and contain so many memorable images. We start with Abby stumbling across the limbs of frozen infected sticking out of the snow like grotesque tombstones, but the ice starts to undulate disturbingly as the still living creatures underneath are signaled by her footsteps. Next thing you know we have a moment reminiscent of Train To Busan where the cracking, groaning glass of a zombie-stuffed train is replaced by a partially collapsed chainlink fence as Abby crawls through a rapidly shrinking crawl space. From here we go full medieval battle scene as the infected turn their coral-shaped heads in the direction of the settlement as Gabriel Luna marshals his troops and then we get the whole magilla. Barrels of gasoline dropped like bombs only to be shot full of holes and ignited to spectacular effect, but in retaliation, one of those hulking bloaters manages to punch a hole through the outer wall and from there it’s an utter scrap. If The Last Of Us never does an episode that has a scope of such size ever again, it doesn’t matter because Through The Valley gives us plenty of edge of the seat fireworks before it’s devestating denouement.
In fact, you know that the episode is good because even though I knew what the punchline would ultimately be, the entire installment still grips like a NASCAR tyre thanks to the zombie genre going full epic. Some may chip in that thanks to such a large and complex action sequence, some of the characters remain a little underserved, however, if The Last Of Us has proven anything in the past, it – like the infected – is fiendishly good at playing the long game. Joel may be dead, but believe me, he’ll still be affecting this world for a long time yet.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 