After two weeks of episodes that threatened to suggest that The Last Of Us was in danger of getting repetitive, order is restored by an episode that pulls back from the current, revenge-fueled storyline and instead delves back into the reliable world of the TLOU flashback. The show has come out smelling of roses before thanks to taking a step back in time and filling in some typically tragic blanks, but it proves to be especially vital as it restores an aspect of the show that’s been crucially missing for most of the season – a sizable dose of the parenting skills of vitamin Pascal.
After rocking the world by bowing out early thanks to Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby and a well placed golf club, Pedro Pascal’s understandable absence has nevertheless been keenly felt and there was a sense when the season started that we had been cheated out of Joel and Ellie’s best years after disaster struck. Well, feel cheated no more as we inhale deeply from the hash pipe of the time between seasons and pour salt in the wound of the show’s loss.
Prime The Last Of Us, then.
While Ellie has only just started on the bloody road to revenge after bludgeoning Nora to death, we zip back to spend every birthday she spent with Joel between the two seasons. Bear in mind, Ellie’s fifteenth birthday probably occurred not long after Joel slaughtered the Fireflies who were going to kill her in order to fashion a cure for Cordyceps out of her immune blood and he fashioned a tale about raiders attacking to hide the fact he went on a kill-crazy rampage. However, here Ellie is still mercifully ignorant of this and is visibly thrilled when Joel gifts her with a custom-made guitar he promises to teach her to play.
A year later, for her sixteenth, Joel takes her to a museum he’d located and let her live her dreams of being an astronaut by allowing her to play in the Apollo 15 module and imagine she’s blasting off to the stars. Of course, much like the inevitable growing of the Cordyceps, soon Ellie’s teenage rebellion starts to bloom and her seventeenth birthday takes more of a negative tone as Joel catches her smoking weed and fooling around with a female tattooist who have given her a moth design over her bite scar. Joel takes all three of these revelations quite badly and the fact that in secret Ellie has become to suspect the truth about her rescue from the Fireflies means that the duo are fast growing apart.
However, it’s with Ellie’s eighteenth that the bow finally breaks and the discovery about what actually transpired with Gail’s husband, Eugene, opens up a whole can of worms that tears Joel’s relationship with his “daughter” to pieces. But as we finally settle on the night before Joel’s death, we get one last moment between the two that suggests his untimely demise may have been even more tragic than we realised.
Thanks to the last minute cameo of Pascal at the end of the last episode, the fact that the sixth episode was going to be heavily steeped in flashbacks was hardly a shocker, but what is is that it comes at the absolutely right moment for the series. While the drama, the darkness and the scenes featuring hunting Infected were all delivered with the panache and depth we’ve come to expect from the show, things were – dare I say it – feeling in danger of becoming a little samey, so it was high time for the creators to shake shit up. Not only does this perfectly timed dip back into the past give us an overview of the father/daughter bond first strengthening and then weakening as teenage years approach and long buried secrets emerge, but we also get an hour long meditation on generational trauma and the effect our parents choices can have on our growth. This is highlighted immediately by a flashback to Joel’s youth where we find a cameoing Tony Dalton playing his police officer father who is a firm believer of even firmer punishment. However, after a young Joel defiantly tells him he’s not going to beat his brother, Tommy, for trying to buy weed, he’s told a story but his dad about how worse his father was to him and it’s here where the true theme of the episode comes out: the desire that the children do better than the parents.
From here we catch up on all those years we thought the time jump between seasons one and two had cost us and from here we watch the slow erosion of the love of a father and daughter as the decisions he (and by extension, all of us) makes when it comes to raising a child. Boundless wonder and a near-hero worship that comes with thoughtful gifts tailor made for a child with their whole life ahead of them soon gives way to confrontations where the wrong things are said at the wrong moment that cause just as much pain as a belt or the back of an impatient hand. While Joel never resorts to the type of physical action his father or his grandfather did, his knee jerk reaction to Ellie’s queer tendencies is handled poorly, widening the widening rift between them. However, it’s the long awaited reveal of what exactly happened to Joe Pantoliano’s Eugene that tears them asunder.
Simply put, Gail’s husband is found by Ellie and Joel as they take her out on her first patrol, but it soon becomes apparent that a member of the Infected has managed to use part of his body as a temporary gumshield and the Cordyceps is working it’s way through his nervous system. However, Eugene is calm and has no illusions about his fate; all he wants is to be taken back to the village so he can see Gail one more time before he dies, but Joel is steadfast in upholding the rules until Ellie seemingly convinces him otherwise. However, tricking both Eugene and Ellie, Joel gives the dying man a humane death, but blatantly denies him his final wish which understandably horrifies his daughter. But when Joel later lies to Gail with the exact same expression on his face when he spun the story of the raiders and the Fireflies years later after his rampage, Ellie finally knows what truly happened. Initially, her outrage leads her to confess all to a horrified Gail.
Of course, all this would hit like a sledgehammer on its own as all the truly wonderful moments they’ve share turn to ash with a single lie, but The Last Of Us has never been a show to let us off easy when it comes to causing lancing pain to crackle the length and breadth of our emotions and if every thing we’ve seen has worked hard to cripple our feels, the final flashback finishes them off mercilessly. Set after the New Year’s party that saw Joel try to defend Ellie after that homophobic slur, we find that immediately after, the two reunited and Joel confessed all, revealing that he chose Ellie, rather than have her killed for a cure. Of course, Ellie is mortified, but co-creator Neil Druckmann saves the most hefty gut punch until last.
It seems that the night before he died, Joel and Ellie had made the first steps towards a slow reconciliation (“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that… But I would like to try.”) which somehow makes everything simultaneously better and worse at the same time. But while such revelations come with superlative performances and a poignant script, The Price will probably be the last refuge we get before things once again get irrevocably dark. Horribly magnificent in only the way The Last Of Us can bring.
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