THE LAST OF US: The Path

Pin

Spring returns to Jackson. After the physical and emotional devastation of the New Year’s Day attacks, the town bounces back and The Last of Us gives us all a little breather. Given the Little League games and hospital administration and beer, it would appear that Jackson is significantly more civilized than any other community we’ve seen in this world so far, which lends the hour a sense of optimism. There’s a reason this episode is titled “The Path.” Writer Craig Mazin and director Peter Hoar understood that the viewership of The Last of Us was going to need two things out of this episode: closure and a way forward. Right now, a whole lot of show fans who didn’t see Joel’s death coming are now talking about whether they still have any interest in the show without Pedro Pascal in it. This episode needed to establish that there’s still a story to be told here and that the people who survived are capable of shouldering the burden of telling it. Hence, the optimism in the face of so much sorrow.

After all, how bad can things be when there are new buildings going up and home-baked cookies to be delivered? Granted, any time shows like this try to establish a recovering civilization, we can’t help but get bogged down with questions like, for instance, how well stocked could any hospital could be in a world that has virtually no manufacturing? Ellie woke up with an IV in her and we were momentarily distracted by thoughts of how such a thing could even exist let alone what it could be pumping into her. Then again, the implied lack of resources might explain why it took Ellie three months to recover. Still, it’s encouraging to see a community that can weather an attack as devastating as the one we saw in last week’s episode. While Dina said there were funerals for weeks, the makeshift morgue didn’t look to be too overwhelmed with bodies and the town council meeting appeared to be fairly well attended. A devastated community this is not.  It says something about what Joel must have meant to this community that in the wake of a mass-death event, people still erected a makeshift shrine in front of his house.

Pin

There’s enough of a civilization in Jackson that there’s a bureaucracy in place, much to Ellie’s frustration. First, she has to get past Gail to get out of the hospital and then she has to somehow convince the town to put together a posse to avenge Joel. She does the first by lying and the second by telling the truth. Bella Ramsey does tremendous work in this episode, revealing both the intensity of Ellie’s grief and the simmering anger inside her that’s threatening to overwhelm her. After her half-assed session with Ellie, Gail tells Tommy that she’s a liar and a lost cause, which is an incredibly brutal and dismissive thing for anyone to say, let alone a therapist. There was something a little odd about the way Gail focused on the last conversation between Ellie and Joel. It was like she was trying to make Ellie feel bad. We’re starting to wonder if she’s bad at her job or if she truly hates Joel and Ellie, which appears to be the case. The way she needled Ellie about her last conversation with Joel and Ellie’s terse responses to her questions makes us think that, first off, Gail has serious suspicions about the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death and secondly, that we haven’t actually seen Joel and Ellie’s last conversation. Not yet, anyway. It’s genuinely unclear how much Ellie knows about what went down in Salt Lake City, although she clearly has her suspicions. It seems likely, given that he was a Firefly, that Gail’s husband was killed by Joel because he knew or figured out that Ellie was the mythical immune girl that was supposed to save humanity. We suspect that this was the event that drove the wedge between Joel and Ellie and that Pedro Pascal still has several scenes to come in this season.

But it was during the town meeting that Ellie came into her own and in some ways, would have made Joel proud. To be fair, while she showed tremendous maturity and personal growth by stating her needs and wishes to the community so clearly, the story’s making it fairly obvious that she’s choosing a bad path for herself. When she tried to guilt trip Tommy into backing her, he lashed out at her and pointed out the truth of the situation: that Joel wouldn’t have wanted her to go after his killers. Given that the only person willing to stand up for Ellie and to help her get out of the town was the raging homophobe, we think it’s safe to say that her judgment is being questioned and that there’s an overwhelming sense of looming tragedy on this path.

Pin

The pacing for this episode was a bit off, although we could see the argument that it may have been deliberate and in service to the story. We start with a time jump, which leaves the audience unsettled and curious as to what’s happened, then we go into a slow burn as we unpack how the town and various people were affected by the attack, which tends to reflect in the audience Ellie’s growing frustrations with the lack of action, then Ellie and Dina are in Seattle suddenly and we’re all dying to see what happens next. In other words, while the rhythm of the storytelling was a little uneven, but it tended to serve the story well because it lent the hour an unsettling, disjointed, slightly confusing feel. Still, while the scenes of Ellie and Dina making their way through the west were stunning to look at (especially the gorgeously haunting scene at the cemetery), we felt like we missed out on something by not getting to travel with them.

In Washington, we find out that the Washington Liberation Front is a lot bigger and more organized than Ellie or Dina realize and also that there’s some sort of extremely goofy-looking cult. Sure, the latter group got slaughtered, but there’s obviously more to the situation than we know. Ellie and Dina are walking into a mine field and they’re both worryingly blasé about it. We sure hope they get to kiss again before it all goes to hell.

[Photo Credit: Liane Hentscher/HBO]

• Reviews
• The Last of Us
• TV Reviews