[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 6. For previous coverage, check out last week’s review.]
“The Final of Us” Episode 6 is constructed round a lifeless man, so it’s solely becoming that a lot of it’s formed by ghosts. Ghosts, in spite of everything, are simply echoes of the previous; reminders of what shouldn’t or couldn’t be forgotten, due to how a lot these recollections imply, or as a result of they nonetheless have one thing to show.
“I simply actually wished to put on short-sleeves once more,” Ellie (Bella Ramsey) says to Joel (Pedro Pascal). It’s 2023, and an almost 15-year-old Ellie comes dwelling together with her arm wrapped in gauze after burning it with a scorching pan. The implication, after all, is that she did it on goal. Ellie already has a scar on her arm from when an contaminated bit her, which proved her immunity, however she has to cover that scar from everybody — therefore the perpetual lengthy sleeves — and it’s exhausting. Her immunity is a secret that’s troublesome to bear, and something Ellie can do to lighten the load — even when it’s simply having the ability to put on lighter garments on heat days — is value a number of hours of ache.
“I actually wished to put on brief sleeves once more,” Ellie says to Dina (Isabela Merced). It’s 2029, and Ellie wakes up subsequent to the girl she loves, who’s asking about her arm. The night time earlier than, an contaminated bit Ellie — once more. Wanting carefully within the morning mild, Dina can see extra than simply the freshest wound. There’s a burn underneath her tattoo. “You probably did it to your self?” Dina asks, to which Ellie echoes the reasoning she gave to Joel, years in the past. The tattoo, the burn, the bites — they join Ellie’s previous and current; they join her family members, too: Joel and Dina.
“If I had been ever to lose you, I’d certainly lose myself,” Joel sings to Ellie. It’s 2023, and Joel has simply given Ellie a guitar for her fifteenth birthday. He obtained her a cake, too, however whereas Seth (Robert John Burke) did the baking, Joel put the guitar collectively himself. He sourced the elements, carved the items, and tuned it up only for Ellie. She doesn’t know easy methods to play — but — so she asks him to sing one thing for her, and he chooses Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.”
The track frames Episode 6 properly. We get to see the times Joel cherished most — those he spent with Ellie, the “days of you and me” — understanding he received’t get as lots of them as he would’ve preferred. But it surely’s these opening lyrics that hang-out Ellie six years later, in Episode 5, when she picks up a special guitar in a Seattle theater and sits all the way down to sing. “If I had been ever to lose you,” she begins, however she will’t go on. Is it the reminiscence of Joel that stops her, or is it the lyrics themselves?
“If I had been ever to lose you, I’d certainly lose myself.” That forecast held true for Joel, because it utilized to his daughters. He misplaced who he was for a very long time after dropping Sarah (Nico Parker), and the reminiscence of that loss is what drove him to “save” Ellie for himself. Now, Ellie is on the identical path. Her “you” is Joel, and now she’s misplaced him. However will she lose herself, simply as he did? The reminiscence that makes her cease singing, the ghost within the auditorium together with her, possibly it might additionally flip her coronary heart towards mercy once more.
Episode 6 reframes many-a-scene from all through Season 2. Joel and Ellie’s journey to the museum lends heartbreaking that means to her appreciation of astronauts, just like the doomed Apollo 1 explorers she mentions to Dina in Episode 4 once they first enter Seattle. On the flipside, Ellie’s offended message to Joel after he knocked Seth over on New 12 months’s Eve — “I don’t want your assist” — is given shattering significance to Joel, who was simply informed by his sister-in-law, Maria (Rutina Wesley), that “households assist one another.” If Ellie doesn’t need Joel’s assist, is she actually nonetheless his household?
Directed by sequence co-creator (and online game architect) Neil Druckmann and written by Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin, the episode additionally provides key context to how Joel and Ellie ended up in a chilly struggle to begin Season 2, just like the combat they’ve when Kat (Noah Lamanna) offers Ellie her moth tattoo. (Facet notice: Kat and Ellie’s tender familiarity when Joel walks in on them in Episode 6 stands in stark distinction to their icy take away within the premiere, once they’re out on patrol.) Joel tries to know its that means however that issues much less to Ellie than his preliminary repudiation of her sexuality. (“It wasn’t a fucking experiment,” she says.) Plus, Joel being Joel, he nonetheless misses the purpose. The moths, as Gail later informs him, are extra about demise than rebirth: Ellie can’t get previous her failed try and die for a trigger; to offer her life, her immunity, a “better goal.”
Two years later — after shifting out of the home and into the storage — Ellie is working up the nerve to sort out her problem with Joel head-on. She’s ready an inventory of inquiries to ask him about what actually occurred in Salt Lake Metropolis. However then Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) will get bit, and Joel kills him. It’s not the demise that will get to Ellie, though one will get the sense she was pleasant with Eugene; it’s the lie. One other lie. “You swore,” she seethes at Joel, after coldly, selfishly exposing the reality of her husband’s demise to Gail. He’d promised to stroll Eugene again to Jackson and let him see his spouse yet another time. As an alternative, he walked him to a lake and shot him. He lied to Eugene, and he lied to Ellie.
“You seemed me within the eyes and it was the identical face,” Ellie says. “The identical fucking look.” It’s 9 months later, on New 12 months’s Eve. Ellie is lastly able to confront Joel. His ghost has caught as much as him. Ellie sees it — she sees it in Joel’s face, when he guarantees to take Eugene again to Gail, simply as she noticed it 5 years prior, when he promised he was telling the reality about Salt Lake Metropolis. Now, he has no selection however to handle it.
“Making a remedy would’ve killed you,” Joel says. “Then I used to be imagined to die,” Ellie wails. “That was my goal. My life would’ve fucking mattered. You took that from me. You took that from everybody.”
Joel is concurrently crushed by the load of his betrayal but resolved sufficient to maintain shouldering the burden. He says he would do it once more. He’s prepared to pay the worth, and after spending only a few days with Ellie over the 5 years he obtained together with her, it’s simple to see why he would threat all the things simply to have that point together with her.
“[It’s] since you’re egocentric,” Ellie says.
“[It’s] as a result of I like you,” Joel replies.
In “The Final of Us,” these two emotions aren’t mutually unique however inescapably linked. Love is egocentric. Put one other approach, as Mazin did in an interview, “Love is immoral. It’s immoral as a result of it doesn’t comply with guidelines. […] Love is the issue.” That perception reverberates all through the sequence, whether or not it’s in Joel’s actions in Salt Lake Metropolis, Kathleen’s (Melanie Lynskey) actions in Kansas Metropolis, Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) actions outdoors of Jackson, or Ellie’s actions to date in Seattle.
However the reverse can be true. Love could be the answer. Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Invoice (Nick Offerman) proved as a lot by turning a dystopia right into a utopia (particularly Frank, whose love transcended Invoice by extending to others). Ellie’s love for Riley (Storm Reid) was pure and good, too. Her love for Joel saved him from the love he misplaced with Sarah, and it saved him once more that night time, when she informed him, “I don’t assume I can forgive you for this. However I want to attempt.”
Mercy. Candy mercy. If Abby hadn’t caught as much as Joel the following day, who is aware of what his life would’ve develop into? What he may’ve performed, who he may’ve been, now that he’d been forgiven? Ellie’s implicit forgiveness is so highly effective as a result of it upends expectations; what feels at first just like the definitive nail in a heartbreaking cut up as a substitute reverses course to develop into a staggering gesture of compassion. In only a few seconds, our hearts are damaged and healed.
Love could be the issue or the answer, and by no means is that clearer than in Episode 6’s loudest echo, which is first heard from Joel’s dad (performed by the nice Tony Dalton). It’s 1983, and Joel is defending his little brother, Tommy, from a beating they know one in all them has to endure. Joel and Tommy are afraid of their father, however the ageing sheriff doesn’t see himself that approach. “OK, yeah I’ve hit you. And I’ve hit Tommy,” he says. “However by no means like [my father hit me]. Not even shut. Perhaps I am going too far. […] However I’m doing a bit higher than my father did. And when it’s your flip, I hope you perform a little higher than me.”
It’s 2028, New 12 months’s Eve, and Joel is making an attempt to elucidate himself to his daughter, similar to his dad as soon as tried to elucidate himself to Joel. “I like you,” Joel says, “in a approach you may’t perceive. Perhaps you by no means will. But when that day ought to come, in the event you ought to ever have one in all your personal, properly then, I hope you perform a little higher than me.”
It’s 2029. Ellie is in Seattle, and that day has come. Can she discover the mercy she was as soon as prepared to indicate Joel, or did she lose that a part of herself when she misplaced him? Episode 6 proves she hasn’t forgotten who she was; she remembers the moments that mattered with Joel, and people ghosts nonetheless have classes to share with Ellie. They’re making an attempt to carry again the individual she as soon as was and, possibly, could be once more.
Grade: A
“The Final of Us” releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max. The Season 2 finale will premiere Could 25.