THE LAST OF US: The Price

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The Last of Us airs the single best episode of season two and arguably one of its best episodes of all time and unfortunately, it tends to raise a point that we wish wasn’t true. It’s a much better story with Pedro Pascal in it.

We always knew where The Last of Us was heading and we always figured Joel would be killed off fairly early in the second season. The game fans were never going to allow a major deviation in the pacing of the original storyline (although the placement of this episode represents one) and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have always been very good about threading that needle; allowing new viewers the space to follow the story on an emotional level while also paying respect to the story’s origins and the fanbase that had driven it to such heights of success. It never occurred to us to stop watching once Pedro Pascal was out of the picture. Sure, the massive success of the first season came down to his star power and his insane chemistry with Bella Ramsey (although it should probably be noted that Pascal has insane chemistry with everyone), but we felt his death happened at the right point in the season and we made the obvious prediction that we would see him in a flashback at some point.

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And sure, maybe they could have constructed an entire season out of the five years depicted in this one episode, but the point of this interlude is that it was a time in their lives relatively free of danger and drama, which allowed Joel and Ellie the time and the space to figure out who they are in a world where they’re not constantly fighting to survive. It’s possible they could have wrung a few more scintillating hours out of that period of growth, but it would have likely been deadly dull to watch. Would they have aired four birthday episodes in a row? That would never have worked. Besides, we’d argue that all of this works much better as a flashback, with every scene positively weighted with the reality of Joel’s death; the massive emptiness he leaves behind in the story. As viewers, we got love-bombed by having all of these incredibly lovely scenes happen back to back, including one of the more iconic guitar moments from the game, which had the effect of making us sad even before the story turned toward anger and betrayal.

It’s no surprise to see that Joel isn’t all that great at some of the challenges of parenthood, and there’s a certain irony and humor watching him react badly to Ellie’s various assertions. We call them that because it’s really not correct to call them rebellions. Getting tattoos, smoking weed and making out with a girl might have been rebellious activities had his daughter Sarah engaged in them back in the pre-times suburban environment they lived in, but as Ellie harshly points out, that’s not the world they’re in anymore, she sees herself as his partner (in the buddy sense) more than his daughter, and he doesn’t even own their house. In a post-apocalyptic environment, no matter how much civilization and community might be reasserting itself, we find the imposition of conservative teenage norms to be a bit hard to accept. This was probably the only part of the episode that didn’t quite land for us. We have to believe that Joel is regressing to pre-2003 ways of thinking but the character has been through way too much for us to find that plausible. After all this time, it would be nearly impossible for him to confuse Ellie with Sarah. They were nothing alike in the first place and Joel and Ellie have been through too much for him to be confused about it now. The girl-kissing might have shocked him, but we’d have thought he’d have been no more than annoyed about the tattoo and the weed. What, is he worried about her job and college prospects? Doesn’t scan. On the other hand, this is a father-daughter dynamic between a man who lost his own daughter and a girl who never had any parents. It makes sense that they would not be on the same page about what they mean to each other. He has something to compare their relationship to – in fact, it haunts him – and she doesn’t.

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And we get that it plays into the larger story about the wedge that was always there between Joel and Ellie; the unspoken thing that Gail picked up on even in her weed-infused rage. Joel lied to Ellie all those years ago and she has suspected it ever since. The scene of her alone in her room, nervously reading a list of very good questions that she’s clearly spent years obsessing over was heartbreaking because you could see that they were never going to get back to what they had because this thing was always going to be between them. There was always the implication that we had yet to see Joel and Ellie’s final conversation, but we were blown away by how beautifully written and acted it would be. Joel tearfully telling Ellie that he loved her is definitely going to be Pedro Pascal’s Emmy submission just as Bella Ramsey’s delivery of the gorgeous line “I don’t think I can forgive you for this… but I would like to try” is going on theirs.

But we’re sorry to have to say that all of this reinforced the idea that this show – and as always, we’re not talking about the game at all here – this version of the story with these two actors in it, works incredibly well and when you remove one of them, it’s a different – and we’ll say it – lesser show. That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop watching, because we’ve enjoyed this season for the most part and we think Isabela Merced in particular has done a lot to fill in some of Pedro’s missing energy. It’s also to the show’s credit that it cast some very good supporting and guest actors this season to fill in the blanks, so to speak. Catherine O’Hara, who isn’t known for her dramatic acting, was lovely and touching in the scene with Joel and her husband’s body, moving from grief to rage easily and efficiently. And of course, it goes without saying that Joey Pantoliano, long one of the great character actors, absolutely nailed Eugene and turned him into someone whose death we grieved only a few minutes after meeting him.

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We’d rate this second only behind season one’s “Long, Long Time” as the series high point and we hope Pascal and Ramsey get the awards recognition they both deserve, but putting this episode here, at this point, only tends to reinforce what the show is going to lack going forward. We’re starting to think they should have wrapped this story up in two seasons.

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