[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 7 of The Last of Us, “Convergence.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

A common refrain about revenge is to “dig two graves.” The idea is that you will kill a part of yourself, or someone will inevitably come after you should you take fatal retribution on another. But as we’ve seen throughout the second season of The Last of Us, two graves are far too few. There is no way to tie off the cycle of vengeance neatly, and while Abby largely vanishes from the story following her murder of Joel, we’re seeing the fallout of her decision to not only kill Joel but also to let Ellie live. What’s meant as an act of mercy instead only creates the conditions for Abby to lose her friends at Ellie’s hands.

Where we end up in “Convergence,” the Season 2 finale, are two strikingly similar young women motivated by grief, and forced to pay the price for trying to find solace in bloodshed. As I’ve said throughout this season, the battle between Abby and Ellie is a microscopic version of what we see play out between the WLF and the Seraphites. Each side feels righteous, neither side can give an inch, and they feel as if they can just kill the right people or enough people, then they will “win.” Where “Convergence” digs a bit deeper is not only the tension between two individuals and two communities, but between the individual and the community.

We see this tension come to the surface in the dichotomy between Ellie and Jesse. For Ellie, there are only individuals. She would go to hell and back for them, but the abstract ideal of “community” makes no sense to her. She wasn’t raised in a community, and while others find comfort in their societies, Ellie invests everything into individuals, whether it’s Riley (Storm Reid), Joel, or Dina. To Ellie, communities are a larger version of us vs. them, and those outside the community, like the Seraphite boy dragged to his death by WLF soldiers, are deemed unworthy of protection, so what good is any kind of value system beyond interpersonal relationships?

To its credit, The Last of Us doesn’t try to offer an easy answer here. The best it can offer is perhaps a basis of survival, but at a tremendous cost of personal morality and identity. When we see Isaac lament Abby’s absence, his subordinate Elise wonders if it’s because he feels some attraction towards Abby. But Isaac has no space for those emotions. He thinks of the WLF only as an organism, and he needs it to live on with competent leaders like Abby, even if he dies. Anything beyond the community’s survival is irrelevant.

Jesse plays like the flipside to Isaac’s coldhearted view of communal perseverance. Jesse is in a far more difficult space where he’s trying to balance the needs of Jackson against the needs of individuals, which is what competent, admirable governance means. We know that he’s right not to try and take on six WLF soldiers because it’s too great a risk despite the moral cost. Balancing morality with pragmatism is never easy, but at least he’s trying.

Of course, being moral and pragmatic guarantees nothing. The episode’s climax sees Ellie, Tommy, Jesse, and Dina reunited at the theater. It seems like they’ll go home together despite Abby surviving Ellie’s rampage. But then Ellie and Jesse hear a commotion in the lobby, and before they can even confront Abby taking Tommy hostage, Abby shoots Jesse in the face and kills him. His sudden and shocking death stresses that morality won’t protect you in this story, but I would also note that death permeates this entire setting. All you have is what kind of person you want to be, and while Jesse’s death may not be fair or just, there’s an empowering idea behind a guy who knows what he’s about.

The alternative is to follow Ellie’s trajectory, which is a self-centered mode of thought that pretends violence can be neatly contained. Nowhere is that flawed thinking more evident than a single bullet killing Owen, Mel, and Mel’s unborn child. It doesn’t matter that Owen pulled a gun, or that Ellie only intended to shoot Owen, or that Ellie didn’t know Mel was pregnant before she fired. Violence doesn’t fit into a neat little box.

Ellie driving her tiny boat through the storm becomes a good visual metaphor for how blinded she’s become. She’s surrounded by darkness, the rain is beating down on her, and it almost leads to her death at the hands of people who do not care who she is or where she’s from. Ellie may not care about community, but the community—whether it’s the WLF or the Seraphites—cares about protecting itself from any perceived threat. Violence spreads so widely that it becomes the community’s identity.

There are no infected in the Season 2 finale because while they color the world of The Last of Us, we have seen throughout this season that the greater plague is one of violent retribution. It doesn’t matter who broke the truce. It doesn’t matter that Joel killed Abby’s father to save Ellie. None of it matters because violence now becomes the lingua franca of this post-apocalyptic wasteland. While Season 1 certainly had its fair share of violence, up until Joel’s rampage at the hospital, it was largely violence of self-defense. The violence of Season 2 is of self-justification, and it never ends.

Rather than ending Season 2 on a straight cliffhanger where it appears Abby may have also shot Ellie, we instead cut to black on the gunshot. We then awaken with Abby in a stadium, the title card of “Seattle: Day One” comes up, but now we’re with Abby’s perspective. Looping the story back three days is not only a great way to set up a new story that will likely come from Abby’s perspective, but also to show that neither Ellie nor Abby has come any closer to where they thought they would be. They’re both stuck, crushed under the delusion that vengeance would bring them release from their grief while restoring a sense of normalcy. They’ve both paid a heavy price, not only by giving in to their darker impulses, but also by all the people they’ve lost. Abby wanted to kill Joel, and while she got what she wanted, she ended up losing Nora, Owen, and Mel. Ellie wanted to kill Abby, and not only is Abby still alive, but now Jesse is dead too. Blood demands more blood.

Ellie picking up The Monster at the End of This Book in the ruined bookstore is a nice acknowledgement of impending motherhood as she hopes to parent Dina’s baby, but as the Sesame Street muppet Grover learns: monsters are not external to us. Joel wanted Ellie to be a bit better than him, and instead, she’s become the same kind of monster, feeling entitled to violence in the name of security. The death of Mel and her unborn baby is not only one of the most gut-wrenching moments of “Convergence,” but also the most symbolically loaded: there is no future here.

Stray observations:

• HBO is one of the best networks at showcasing young acting talent, and while the loss of Pedro Pascal certainly reverberated through Season 2, I can’t help but be impressed by the performances from Bella Ramsey, Isabela Merced, and Young Mazino.

• The show remains the gold standard for translating a video game to another medium, although given the benefit of serialized storytelling, pulling from a narratively-heavy game, and having the game’s director serve as co-showrunner, I’m not sure how much of this is replicable for other adaptations.

• Overall, I liked where Season 2 took us as viewers, and my only major qualms were with the set pieces, not because they were poorly staged, but because they felt obligatory and largely lacked tension due to the characters’ plot armor. But I also think it’s telling that for all the expense those action scenes required, the last two episodes of the season were almost entirely about character drama rather than fighting off the infected. Even what was likely the most expensive part of “Convergence,” Ellie on the boat, felt more like a poignant visual rather than something to get the blood pumping.

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us has been renewed for a third season. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 6 of The Last of Us, “The Price.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

“What is the cost of lies?” This is the question that bookends Craig Mazin’s previous HBO series, Chernobyl. In the framework of that show, lies led to the deaths of thousands of people, and arguably the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A nation tried to prop itself up with pleasing fantasies to maintain its power. The cost of lies also factors into The Last of Us, and while there are no more nations to dissolve in this post-apocalyptic wasteland, Mazin knows that a fantasy can’t last forever. There is a cost to lies, and that’s how we get an episode titled, “The Price.”

The penultimate episode of Season 2 is a series of flashbacks, starting the story two months after Joel and Ellie’s arrival in Jackson, and then moving forward one year or two with Ellie’s birthday serving as the demarcation of time. The first two years of their lives are what Joel bought with his lie: domestic bliss. He fed Ellie an elaborate fiction around the events in Utah, and now he gets a second chance to play father. The episode’s cold open involving Joel and Tommy’s father is a particularly inspired touch because it provides further insight into how Joel, despite not being physically abusive to Ellie, carries the same kind of flawed logic—I’m not as bad as my dad, therefore I am better. But even in the moment when Joel’s father recounts being abused by his father, the explanation sounds ridiculous. “I never hit you as hard as he hit me,” is cold comfort to the one receiving the blow.

Joel would never lay a hand on Ellie, and we shouldn’t throw around the term “abuse” lightly. I would not say that Joel abused Ellie by lying to her, but he did lasting harm because he thought his lie was being protective, just as I’m sure Joel’s father thought he could protect his children from the world if he beat that into them. But this approach only focuses the resentment into a single point, and we see the growth of that resentment over the years as Ellie grows up. Joel, in his subconscious desire to build Ellie’s identity around being a surrogate daughter, ends up denying her the chance to forge an identity based on the truth of their relationship. He didn’t want to lose her, and so he came up with a comforting lie instead.

Mazin, a veteran storyteller, isn’t immune to the power of fiction, and as Joel and Ellie’s trip to the science museum shows, stories transport us. When Ellie “blasts off,” she’s engaging a fiction within a fiction. She imagines herself leaving the Earth’s orbit, becoming an astronaut in a world that likely won’t see astronauts again for centuries. That fantasy exists within Joel’s, where he’s just a dad taking his nerdy daughter to a museum. Sure, in this museum you get to break into the displays and wear the helmets, but it’s still a semblance of normalcy that Joel craves. He knows Ellie isn’t a replacement for Sarah, his daughter who died when the outbreak began, but the relationship he forged with Ellie allowed him to become a father again. And when your “real” world consists of zombie patrols and the potential of losing a loved one every day because you can’t lose sight of survival, perhaps there’s something to be said for escapism — for leaving the world behind even if it’s only in your imagination.

But there is a cost of lies, and Ellie isn’t stupid. The fierceness of her character and her no-bullshit mentality won’t allow her to maintain a pleasant fiction even if revelation causes pain, and we see that play out when Joel and Ellie come across Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). An infected recently bit Eugene, but he hasn’t turned yet. Ellie believes there’s time to get him back to Jackson, where he can say farewell to Gail face-to-face. Joel reluctantly agrees and tells Ellie to go on ahead. However, Joel then takes Eugene to a lakeside and stresses that there’s no way he can take the risk of bringing Eugene back to Jackson. He tells Eugene he’ll pass on any message to Gail, but Eugene shouts back that what he needed was to see his wife’s face one last time. It’s a clarifying moment where we see how Joel can only center himself and make himself the conduit of this relationship. He’s here to take action rather than be a passive observer in the final moments between a husband and wife.

Joel kills Eugene and then tries to tell Gail a comforting fiction. An appalled Ellie won’t let that stand, and relates what actually happened. It’s a massive fissure in Ellie and Joel’s relationship, not only because Ellie can see how Joel lies to cover up his transgressions in the name of consoling others, but she’s now certain he lied about Utah. She may not have all the details, but the last few years were built on lies, and what kind of relationship is that? It’s not a mistake that the flashbacks we see take Ellie from a teenager to a young adult. She can no longer be infantilized with pleasing fictions; being treated like an adult means being trusted with hard truths.

But the truth of what happened in Utah is not the only truth revealed at the episode’s climax. That truth is useful for the plot, but what Joel and Ellie take away from his confession is far more revelatory. For Joel, there’s the slow realization that he has become his father. He’s not physically abusive to his child, but now as a parent, he comes to see that you make damning mistakes, not because you’re cruel, but because sometimes you love a person so deeply it causes you to be selfish. Joel came to grips with the truth that “I saved her,” was not an act of herosim (it’s telling that his fiction to Ellie presents him as a rescuer), but a willingness to damn the world out of how much he loved her.

Because, as much as the world has changed since Joel was a kid, he has come to a place that parents typically arrive at no matter the era: I am an imperfect person, and my child knows it. Any parent who remotely tries to raise their child will inevitably screw up, and perhaps on a long enough timeline, there can be time to repair what’s been broken, and for a child to see their parent as a flawed person acting out of love. That doesn’t mean automatic forgiveness or absolution, but it does mean the chance to perhaps have a stronger relationship by addressing the broken parts.

Except that’s the hard truth Ellie learns. “The Price” doesn’t end with Joel’s confession at the house. It ends with Ellie alone in the rain. She never got a chance to repair her relationship with Joel. He wasn’t honest with her, and she was too hurt to try and reach back out until it was (unbeknownst to both) too late in his life. In their last conversation, he repeats the line his father told him: “I hope you do a little better than me.” Joel thought he might be able to buy Ellie a better future with a comforting lie. But lies have a cost, and it’s not only the person who tells them who has to pay.

Stray observations:

• Pedro Pascal presents a problem for The Last of Us in that he’s too good. He’s an incredible actor at the top of his game, and it’s not an unfair criticism to say that the show is weaker without him. I would only counter that bringing Joel back for this episode serves to further emphasize Ellie’s loss and grief. In “The Price,” we see a condensed arc of domestic bliss to bitter fracture to unrealized reconciliation. Pascal excels at all of it, but the texture and layers he brings to Joel make us miss not just the actor, but the character.

• I was wondering if we would ever get to see an actor play Eugene, and The Last of Us did not disappoint by bringing in Joe Pantoliano to hit it out of the park. Eugene is probably in this episode for less than 15 minutes, but what Pantoliano does in his brief scenes is fantastic. Fill your guest roles with veteran character actors, and you’ll rarely go astray.

• “You don’t own anything!” is a perfect sentiment for Ellie to shout at Joel. It not only shows how Ellie refuses to be a part of Joel’s fantasy of domestic bliss, but also how this entire world is built on scavenging. No one owns anything in this world. It’s only what you can take and hold onto.

• “Is there a ‘The Doctor Is In’ sign on me like fucking Lucy from Peanuts?”

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 5 of The Last of Us, “Feel Her Love.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

Early in this episode, we not only receive some details about Dina’s backstory, but we also get a parable of sorts. Dina, raised in this new world of the apocalypse, understands all the tropes and sarcastically downplays her trauma. The idea is that everyone has suffered so much in this world that you can suss out a person’s harrowing origin from only a handful of generalities. Life in the wasteland is pain, but Dina, Ellie’s true north at this point, provides a light: killing the raider who beat her mother and sister to death gave Dina a semblance of peace. We can see from Dina’s face that those events still haunt her (I feel like Isabela Merced is on track for a Best Supporting Actress nomination at this point), but going after the people who killed Joel makes sense. It will bring solace.

This is the fallacy that Ellie and Dina rest their mission on—the only way to accept Joel’s death is to murder the people who killed him. It won’t bring him back, but it will create the best sense of justice this world can provide. But as Ellie witnesses in “Feel Her Love,” this is a world that doesn’t lack for violence and retribution. If anything, she and Dina have left a place of peace and community and, in their quest for vengeance, come to a place where vengeance is king. The WLF and the Seraphites are locked in a cycle of bloodshed, and this episode beautifully uses setting to show Ellie witnessing acts of horrific violence without realizing she could become just as monstrous.

Writer and co-showrunner Craig Mazin does a terrific job of structuring the episode. While the cold open sets up the spores permeating level B2 of the hospital, once we get to Ellie and Dina, the episode is about a series of settings, each emphasizing the kind of hell they’ve wandered into. “Let’s go be reckless” becomes an understatement as Dina’s brains and Ellie’s bravado are already outmatched the second they’re trapped in a dark room with smart infected. It’s great that Jesse comes along with the save, but so early in the episode, we can already see that the duo is in over their heads, with Ellie’s best plan seeming to be, “It’s okay if they bite me a bunch.”

While the subway chase in last week’s episode left me a bit cold for how familiar and low-stakes it felt, I was far more impressed with this week’s run from the infected in the dark. Even though the stakes are still relatively low in that we’re unlikely to lose our characters in this fray, I admire how director Stephen Williams intentionally uses darkness here to create unease. Not only does it feel purposeful (as opposed to underlit), but the darkness emphasizes how our characters are out of their element. We’ve gone from the even lighting of Jackson to a place where the shadows belong to the infected.

The trio gets out of the darkness only to stumble upon a Seraphite ritual where they’ve captured a WLF member and eviscerate him to “release his sins.” In the span of roughly half an hour (tonight’s episode was surprisingly short relative to previous weeks, but the abbreviated time worked in its favor as it feels like there’s no padding here), Ellie and Dina have stumbled across Seraphites executed in the streets, a room full of smart infected, and now Seraphites ritualistically killing their enemies. The emerging theme would seem to be, “We have stumbled into a world of monsters,” and the horror on Ellie’s face conveys that she understands these violent places as hellish, and, in the cases of the WLF and Seraphites, man-made.

Then Mazin makes an ingenious little twist by separating Ellie from Dina and Jesse, and sending Ellie to the hospital, where she encounters Nora (Tati Gabrielle), one of Abby’s friends who held Ellie down while Abby murdered Joel. The way the switch flips is a perfect encapsulation of how witnessing monstrous behaviour outside yourself is horrific, but when the rage takes over, you can’t see the monster you’ve become. It’s a testament to Bella Ramsey’s range that she can go from playing the normalcy of being horrified by the Seraphites gutting a guy to a cold, dead stare once she encounters Nora. When Ellie chases Nora down the elevator shaft, she’s literally and figuratively going to a darker place.

What “Feel Her Love” shows isn’t just settings as fixed locations, but realms of transformation. These are not hells that exist separate from human existence, but hells that are created by human existence. What are the infected if not transformed humans? We saw it last week in how Isaac and Burton departed the fascism of FEDRA, but now have little issue with torturing a Seraphite for information. The symbolism of people consumed by cordyceps but kept alive so they can breathe out more spores couldn’t be more pointed in showing how you can be transformed into something monstrous and unrecognizable.

That’s the Ellie we see at the end of the episode. You can’t become the thing you hate and expect to remain the person you were. Joel was willing to let the whole world die if it meant saving Ellie’s life, and now her life is constantly at risk. She witnessed Abby beat Joel to death, and now Ellie is beating Nora to death. Dina’s story is about the promise of violence bringing peace, but the reality is that violence begets more violence.

Ellie borderline brags that she can’t become infected. And she’s right that she can’t become a zombie. But as “Feel Her Love” shows, there’s more than one way to become a monster.

Stray observations:

• Considering that the game operates on a lead character/supporting character dynamic, I can’t help but wonder if there was a discarded idea in the game’s development where Ellie lets herself be bait for the infected while Joel pulls a lever or something.

• In addition to the symbolism of the cordyceps in B2 as something that takes hold and transforms you, visually it was reminiscent of Alien, where the xenomorphs plaster their victims to the wall and they’ll eventually have a little xenomorph burst forth from their chest cavity. Weirdly, that seems preferable to being a mushroom zombie for all eternity.

• I loved the sharp dichotomy to end the episode because, rather than just leaving us on Ellie’s violence, the emphasis is on Ellie’s transformation and how far she’s fallen by going down this path.

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3 of The Last of Us, “The Path.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

As noted above, we won’t be discussing game spoilers here. I’ll keep things broad by saying that the latest episode of Season 2, “Day One,” feels closest to resembling the game thus far, but that’s not inherently positive. While I think The Last of Us: Part II is a terrific video game, it understands how games have their form of storytelling just as plays, movies, novels, etc. have theirs. Perhaps more than any other video game adaptation, the HBO series has managed to walk a delicate tightrope of adhering to the game’s story while forging a unique identity. However, “Day One” highlights the complications of honoring the source material while making the series stand on its own.

Everything with Isaac highlights how much richer the TV series can be, not because the game failed, but because there’s no avenue in its medium to provide a backstory for this character outside of a rote cut scene. We now have the opportunity to see more of Isaac (played by Jeffrey Wright in both the series and the game) and his personality whereas in the game he comes off as a mix between illustrative symbol of the WLF’s mentality and a neat get for developer Naughty Dog (“Look, kids! It’s acclaimed actor Jeffrey Wright!”).

The show plays the character perfectly by leaning into his resemblance to Joel, not only in his grizzled demeanor and willingness to resort to torture, but that he comes from “the old world.” The episode wryly highlights that gap when we check in with Ellie and Dina, who are moving towards a romantic homosexual relationship, but are confused by all the gay pride rainbows on the streets of Seattle. The darker side of this gap shows Isaac as a man who has become the thing he once protested. Even the thing he once treasured—premium cookware—is now a tool of violence. As we saw last season in Kansas City, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann believe in the historical paradigm that revolutionaries inevitably become oppressors. While I don’t agree that’s always how things go, at the very least, it’s useful for illustrating the perils of Ellie’s path.

Isaac’s two scenes bring us to the same place as the game—he’s a fascist locked in tribal warfare with an army of religious zealots—but they show how his choices have hollowed him and his followers out. Ben Ahlers (The Gilded Age), who plays a young soldier Isaac takes under his wing, does a great job of showing how humanity gets set aside in the pursuit of violence, but also the macro scale of the WLF/Seraphite battle reflects the micro scale of Ellie and Abby’s cycle of vengeance. Seeing Isaac not only gives us a better sense of life inside the WLF; it also foreshadows where Ellie is headed, and that’s the emotional stakes that make for rich storytelling.

However, outside of the Isaac scenes, there’s a lot of familiarity for those who played the game, and I’m mixed on how to deal with that. On the one hand, plenty of viewers never touched the game, nor should they have to. This is all fresh material for them. That being said, Mazin and Druckmann know they’re engaging in a bit of fan service, so how do you make the show more than a retread? For me, I feel like the episode is a net positive because of the additions that deepen the character relationships.

For example, as the showrunners noted in the “Behind the Episode,” Ellie playing the guitar is a fan-favorite moment from the game. How do you repeat that magic in the show, especially when no viewer has the immersive element of a controller? By leaning harder into the Ellie/Dina romance. Never shying away from love has been the show’s secret strength. It’s not that love is unimportant in the game, but there’s no mechanism to lean into a slow serenade of “Take on Me,” as Dina falls hard for Ellie (romance tip: if you want to win someone over who already likes you, you can’t go wrong with performing an acoustic cover of a pop song). It’s a scene where the show takes a moment to breathe with the characters, and the expansion feels worthwhile.

I wish I could say the same about the chase through the subway tunnels. Director Kate Herron (Loki) does a fantastic job handling the action, and yet here, similar to the big attack on Jackson in Episode 2 of this season, I rarely felt like the set piece was serving the characters. It does get us to an important plot and character moment when Ellie allows herself to be bitten to protect Dina, but for all the technical bravado of seeing the duo flee from infected, it felt emotionally weightless. It’s a scene that thrills because of its craftsmanship and setting, but there’s nothing to underpin those emotions. It’s a tight spot, but it never feels dire or that there’s even a cost.

I suppose I could try to memory-wipe the game from my mind, but the showrunners haven’t (and one of them is the game’s director!), so I feel like these comparisons are fair territory when we talk about the success of adapting from a medium that traditionally fails to translate to a movie or TV show. As The Last of Us demonstrates, respecting the difference in how these mediums approach storytelling in turn respects the audience of both. The question isn’t “Is the show or game better?” but “How can both be done well given the opportunities and limitations of the format?”

Seeing Ellie and Dina fully in love at the end of the episode feels like a satisfying answer to that question. The game still has a love story, but the genre and narrative’s propulsive nature doesn’t allow for a scene where Dina talks about wrestling with her bisexual identity. That’s not only a benefit for the show, but for its longform storytelling because we need to see the relationship of these two women at its highest. We know from Isaac’s journey just how far there is to fall.

Stray observations:

• As someone who likes to draw, it’s a shame Ellie has likely never seen the “Take on Me” music video.

• This week, we saw scavenging like you do in the games. Future episodes should contain Ellie improving her weapons at a workbench and taking medicine to learn new skills.

• I wonder if there was any conversation with the good people at Mauviel about product placement.

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3 of The Last of Us, “The Path.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

One of the reasons The Last of Us currently stands as one of the few successful video game adaptations is that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann understand the narrative demands of both mediums, and how what a game requires isn’t necessarily what a TV series requires. Understanding this distinction gets us “The Path,” an episode that takes a moment to dwell on our characters’ grief rather than moving them onto the next action-oriented event. By allowing Ellie, Tommy, Dina, and the rest of our characters sit with not only their personal devestation at the loss of Joel, but the impact of the infected’s assault on the community, we get an episode that can stand on its own rather than relying on spectacle or translating a particular moment from the game.

But “The Path” also immediately recognizes the shift in the show now that Pascal is no longer in the cast. After the cold open, it feels like we’re being sold on Ramsey as the true lead, and someone capable of carrying the show without her popular co-star. Wisely, the scenes don’t rely on Ramsey’s dialogue (although she does give a good brush-off to Gail) as much as her facial expressions. Watching the façade drop from Ellie’s face as she exits the hospital or how she quietly breaks down among Joel’s belongings demonstrates how Ramsey can obviously put the show on her back. There’s still an amazing supporting cast around her, but Ramsey does a good job here of displaying the transformation in Ellie’s character without it playing the role like an entirely different person.

Although Ellie is the driving force behind the narrative, “The Path” wisely chooses to expand its canvas beyond a revenge story, even though revenge is at the core of both Ellie and Abby’s motivations. The show uses its broader canvas to ask if revenge is what a community can ordain. The most fascinating scene in the episode comes during a town hall meeting where the council hears a motion to form a posse and execute the WLF members responsible for Joel’s death.

Before Ellie can even make her case, she gets unexpected support from Seth, the bigot who called her a slur at the party and, as a result, got attacked by Joel. In the “Behind the Episode,” Mazin points out that Seth’s actions show that “people are complicated,” but that’s not how I read the scene. Ellie is so consumed with rage that even though she’s made a tidy little case about why going after Joel’s murderers is good for Jackson, she fails to see the troubling implications of having a close ally in Seth, a guy who quickly identifies people as outsiders and then snaps to anger. It’s one of those moments where Ellie should pause and consider what it means to find Seth in her corner, but she’s already made her choice, and there’s no turning back.

Her case that going after Joel’s murderers is not personal justice for her or even Joel, but for the community, is interesting, but it’s a scene that kind of undercuts itself because it has no stakes. It raises interesting questions about the distinction between justice and revenge in a time where there are no firm laws and procedures (even Maria, the former prosecutor, says that the posse is to execute the perpetrators rather than bring them back for a trial), but as narrative, the scene mostly rings hollow because Ellie has already made her choice regardless of how the council decides. The impact isn’t so much about what Ellie will do, but her sense of abandonment by the community.

The notion of community and what we owe to each other under dire circumstances is currently the show’s richest vein of material, and it makes Ellie’s quest far more interesting than mere revenge. What “The Path” shows is that Joel was Ellie’s tether to the world, and while she cares for Dina, Tommy, Jesse, and others in Jackson, she now feels adrift once more, and the council’s decision against forming a posse only confirms her loneliness. These are old tropes of the western genre where our antihero can no longer live in society once they seek frontier justice. Community doesn’t guarantee survival, but it does foster an identity.

We see that clearly with the introduction of the Seraphites, the scarred religious cult walking through the woods outside Seattle. More importantly, our window into the group is through a conversation between a father and daughter. This particular relationship, a motif we’ve seen with Abby and her dad, and the surrogate father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie further conveys the validity of different communities who now find themselves at war despite their similarities—a macro conflict personified by the battle between Ellie and Abby. When Ellie comes across the dead bodies of the father and daughter Seraphites near the end of the episode, it symbolizes the death of community because she’s now abandoned Jackson, and also serves as a reminder of losing Joel as well as what she’s lost of herself.

From a plot standpoint, it also informs us that the WLF is ruthless and won’t hesitate to slaughter children. Rather than finding an isolated community akin to raiders, Ellie and Dina have stepped into a preexisting conflict they don’t understand, and Ellie’s bravado is darkly comic in the face of the WLF’s overwhelming physical might. However, I will note that as a closing shot of the episode, the marching WLF troops to show their vast numbers didn’t land because it’s not intimidating in any meaningful way. Ellie and Dina may be wildly outnumbered, but that was already the case with all the Infected roaming around. Furthermore, Ellie has pretty good plot armor by this point (I suppose you could kill her off and make it The Dina and Abby Show, but that feels like a bridge too far), so I don’t see much dramatic weight in these troops.

But it does show yet another kind of community by contrasting the democratic-leaning Jackson to the militaristic/fascist bearing of the WLF. While there is an overarching revenge storyline, “The Path” shows you can hang some interesting ideas on that plot if you pause to look at the wider relationship between the individual and the group. Perhaps Ellie never felt like she fit in Jackson, and losing Joel removed any reason to stay. But as “The Path” shows, once you’re outside the community, you’re in the wild.

Stray observations:

• Another great thing about a breather episode like this is you can remove Abby and the Infected and not feel like the show is spinning its wheels. I’m much happier watching character development for Ellie with a strong performance from Ramsey than I am seeing a zombie horde attack.

• I’m not sure the writers know what to do with Gail. She was a great counterpoint to Joel in the season premiere, and Catherine O’Hara is a tremendous actor, but now the show doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do with her. She tells Tommy that Ellie is a liar while watching a Little League softball game. Um, thanks?

• I like that Ellie’s bloodlust is pushing her away from the peaceful, democratic community of Jackson to the militaristic, authoritarian community of the WLF’s Seattle. It’s a nice way of showing that even though Ellie is now far from home, she’s much closer to a place that reflects her current emotional state.

• I feel bad for the corn crop guy whose concerns landed on the same day as “Should We Seek Vengeance for Our Beloved Joel Miller?” That’s just poor agenda timing.

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of The Last of Us, “Through the Valley.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

“Hardhome,” the eighth episode of the fifth season of Game of Thrones, set a high bar for the show’s action sequences. The series started with a budget so restrained that in early seasons, epic battles happened off-screen, but by Season 5, it took viewers into an epic fray between Jon Snow and the White Walkers. It was not only an exhilarating sequence, but it also felt like a new bar was set in what was possible to accomplish on television. However, in its later seasons, Game of Thrones seemed like it was trying to outdo “Hardhome” in spectacle without necessarily delivering the same dramatic punch. The show’s aim for its set pieces didn’t seem to be catharsis as much as giving viewers the kind of VFX-heavy scenes they had previously only seen in theaters.

This arms race for action scenes in episodic television is now everywhere, and while we shouldn’t be surprised to see it come to The Last of Us, it also highlights the issue of going for a larger scope and losing sight of character. Season 1 had its big set pieces, in particular the infected ravaging Kansas City in “Endure and Survive.” But the second episode of Season 2, “Through the Valley,” clearly intends to put that action scene to shame with a massive horde of zombies attacking Jackson and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Maria (Rutina Wesley) leading the defense of the town.

Watching this massive set piece, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed, not because it was poorly executed (as action scenes go, director Mark Mylod did a good job of pacing the battle and keeping the geography intact), but because I don’t think it’s the show’s strong suit. The reason the first season hooked viewers wasn’t the spectacle in “Endure and Survive,” but the intimate human emotions of the third episode, “Long, Long Time,” which chronicled the romance between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). The driving idea behind the show is how love is a wonderful and terrible thing, and that it drives people to make decisions that may seem selfish, but are done out of a complicated mix of emotions and human foibles. The zombies are there, but they work better in terms of the world-building and symbolism rather than as the central impetus behind the narrative.

Throwing so many infected at the screen leads to a fractured episode where everything important to our main characters seems to be happening largely outside the biggest action scene. The central conflict between Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and Joel (Pedro Pascal) is nowhere near Jackson when the zombies attack. There’s little to bridge the two plotlines, and if anything, it only serves to obscure our new character, Abby.

To be fair, the show seems like it’s purposefully playing coy on Abby, giving us just enough of her to understand her motivations, but not providing the same level of depth and texture we have for Joel and Ellie. It’s not rushing to put her on the same level, so she and her cohort are figuratively and literally outsiders. To put it another way, we’re getting glimpses of Abby, but our loyalties are still supposed to be with our Season 1 characters and those they trust, like Dina and Jesse (Young Mazino).

That’s a compelling story, but I suppose to avoid the same beats of the game and hold surprises for players and non-players alike, we now have this massive action scene set in Jackson, and the primary tension is what will happen to Tommy and Maria, which is fine, but doesn’t tell us much thematically or with regards to our central conflict. There’s less weight to a bloater bearing down on Tommy than there is with a horde bearing down on Abby. We’re certain Abby will survive (knocking her off wouldn’t make any sense after only a brief introduction), but watching her stumble into danger shows how reckless she’s willing to be if it means getting her revenge. It also serves the narrative convenience of letting her cross paths with Joel rather than figuring out how to infiltrate Jackson. Tommy facing down a bloater could mean he lives or dies, but there’s not much beyond that. The burning bloater just kind of keeling over was an apt metaphor for the whole set piece—big, bombastic, seemingly dangerous, and ending with a whimper.

At best, you can see it as an incredibly expensive misdirect, as so much energy gets put into the defense of Jackson that the casual observer assumes nothing major would happen anywhere else. Instead, the inciting event for the whole season happens in the lodge when Abby and her crew capture Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced), knock Dina out, and then Abby gets her revenge on Joel because Joel killed her father (the doctor who was going to operate on Ellie) in the Season 1 finale. Everything in the first episode of this season was to show how rocky things were between Joel and Ellie, and now Ellie is forced to watch Abby murder Joel. Perhaps if you see Jackson as synonymous with Joel and that now Ellie has no physical home and no father figure, then it makes sense to put the events in the same episode, but geography matters and “Through the Valley” feels like it’s trying to have it both ways by giving viewers the kind of big action scene they’ve come to expect from genre television but also leaving the central characters untouched by what’s happening in that scene.

Thankfully, The Last of Us still knows how to do intimacy, and watching Abby confront Joel is a reminder of why you hire an actor of Dever’s caliber. It’s not easy playing a character that the audience will instinctively hate, and it’s to Dever’s credit that she’s still able to retain some of our sympathies even as she’s monologuing through her violent desires. The episode does a good job of walking the line between showing Abby as willing to do something monstrous, but indicating she’s not necessarily a monster. The world of The Last of Us certainly has its share of horrendous people, but Dever is compelling enough to let us know there’s more to this young woman than sadism. Our sympathies may be with Ellie and how she’ll react, but Abby’s actions still relate to the show’s central question: What are the horrible things we’ll do out of love?

I hope that in the weeks ahead, the show returns more to the intimate character drama that made the first season come alive. Genre television doesn’t need to adopt the thinking behind Game of Thrones, where subsequent seasons require bigger set pieces. Those action scenes, while impressive, can also obscure the power of two characters just having a conversation. That’s where the show lives—with its human characters, not in shooting the walking dead.

Stray observations:

• Well, I don’t think Jackson is going to have to worry about its housing crisis.

• It is kind of amusing that next month marks the 10^th anniversary of “Hardhome,” and we now have another big old zombie battle in the snow in a popular HBO series.

• I’m eager to see how people react to Joel’s death. The Last of Us is not a big ensemble where anyone could die in any episode. You’ve killed off one of your three main characters to propel the central conflict between Abby and Ellie, and I’m wondering if anyone will bail now that Pascal is not a leading actor on the show (because where else where would you see him except for Freaky Tales, Materialists, Fantastic Four: First Steps, Eddington…)

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.

[This review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of The Last of Us, “Future Days.” It does not contain spoilers for the video game The Last of Us: Part II]

The first season of HBO’s adaptation of the video game duology The Last of Us landed on the notion of how love, as necessary and vital as it is, can also be a destructive force. In the climax of the Season 1 finale, Joel (Pedro Pascal) learns that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a host for a cure to the zombie plague that ravaged the Earth. However, for the cure to be created, Ellie would have to die. Unable to handle such a sacrifice, especially after the loss of his teenage daughter twenty years earlier, Joel rescues an unconscious Ellie and kills any Firefly (the militia group seeking the cure) who gets in his way. On their way to Jackson to rejoin Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) in his community of survivors, Ellie presses Joel for the truth about her condition. He lies and says that creating a cure was impossible, and there’s a sense that this, for the moment, will be a lie agreed upon. Ellie doesn’t fully believe Joel and Joel suspects Ellie hasn’t bought his lie, but they love each other too much to acknowledge the truth.

Season two is the fallout. Season premieres, particularly for serialized shows, have a way of functioning as mission statements. Although game creator and series co-creator Neil Druckmann mentions in the “Behind the Episode” that this season is about how different perspectives shape perceptions of heroes and villains, the Season 2 premiere, “Future Days,” tells us that something else is on the mind of the showrunners. We get that immediately from the prologue where we meet a band of new characters mourning their dead outside the hospital where Joel absconded with Ellie. A young woman, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), wants to go after Joel immediately and seek revenge for the slayings. Her friends explain to her (and any audience member who wants to nitpick) why that’s not possible, but that they will get revenge in time.

Our story then picks up five years later, and so many of the dynamics we came to expect from season one have changed. The most important is there’s now a major rift between Joel and Ellie. We don’t know if she now knows the truth of what happened at the hospital, but there’s now an iciness between this surrogate father and daughter. At the very least, we know Ellie’s suspicions have deepened as we see her, now 19 years old, in a serious sparring match, which she seems to enjoy until she learns that her friend and instructor, Jesse (Young Mazino), told her fight partner to pull his punches so that Joel wouldn’t get upset. Ellie’s entire demeanor changes, and she says with total conviction, “Don’t fucking pull your punches.”

Putting this scene directly after the one with Abby offers us a way to contrast Abby and Ellie’s pain. Abby’s pain is easy to grasp—she lost someone, and she not only wants revenge, but she wants Joel to die slowly for what he did. For Ellie, rather than this direct violence, she perceives anything resembling protection as a form of violence because of how it ties back to Joel’s lie. Abby seeks to meet violence with violence, but Abby sees that pulled punch—the absence of violence—as a similar form of harm. She’d rather take another brutal punch to the face than endure what Joel considers “protection.”

What we get from Joel and Ellie is a look at how love can bizarrely lead to hatred even when we acknowledge that hatred as irrational and unhealthy. Writer and director Craig Mazin conveys this idea elegantly in the episode’s centerpiece, a therapy scene between Joel and psychiatrist Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Joel admits to Ellie’s friend Dina (Isabela Merced) that he’s been going to therapy, but once he’s in session we see that he’s still dodging the central issue. O’Hara, with a great bit of acerbic acting, calls Joel out as boring and hiding behind belabored parenting issues that every parent faces when their kid starts trying to be their own person.

At this point, we would expect to get a confession of some kind from Joel, but Mazin flips the script and gives the confession to Gail. We learn that Gail lost her husband of forty-one years, Eugene, and Joel was the one who killed him. We can infer from what Gail says that Eugene got infected and that Joel put him down because he had no choice, but after acknowledging all the rational reasons to forgive Joel, Gail confesses that she hates him. “And looking at your face, sitting in our home, makes me so fucking angry,” she tells him. “There it is. I’ve said it. I’m ashamed, but it’s in their air, and I can’t take it back.” The scene recognizes how humans are irrational creatures, but we’re better at acknowledging our hatred and prejudices rather than pretending that we don’t have them. Sometimes the sensible thing to do is accept that we don’t make sense.

Joel then opens up a little, and while he doesn’t give Gail the full story of what happened at the hospital, he does say that Ellie doesn’t hate him because he hurt her. “I saved her,” he confesses, and that’s why we’re not going into a simple story of Abby being out for revenge. We’re in a story about all the ways we hurt each other even when we’re acting out of love. In an earlier scene, Joel notes how they can’t construct buildings fast enough in Jackson for all the incoming refugees, and how they need to take care of their own first. But then Maria (Rutina Wesley), a community leader and Tommy’s wife, reminds Joel that he was a refugee too. We can hide our desires in logic and pragmatism, but we’re still hiding, and Joel is still hiding too when he says, “I saved her.” That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. He built a new identity around protecting Ellie in the first season, and now that identity is being challenged by Ellie not needing a protector, but someone who will be honest with her.

The rift between Joel and Ellie is contrasted nicely against the deepening bond between Ellie and Dina. The two are close friends, but Ellie, despite having plenty of bravado when it comes to fighting infected, is uneasy around the cool, confident Dina. The show wisely takes time to show how much chemistry Ramsey and Merced have, and it’s an essential bit of storytelling because it shows not only Ellie establishing a crucial bond outside of Joel, but that she may have found someone other than Joel who can make her feel safe. That’s why Ellie’s blow-up at the dance is so important: Joel’s need to play hero is now an intrusion rather than a gallant action. It’s not rational to get so angry, but again, emotions have a habit of overriding rational thought.

As fraught as things are between Joel and Ellie, we also know this is the calm before the storm. Ellie comes across an infected that can strategize and stalk its prey, implying that they’ve now evolved to become even more dangerous. The pipe that the construction team broke open has live Cordyceps, and while we don’t know what the narrative payoff will be for this reveal, the symbolism is immediately apparent when Abby and her friends appear at the outskirts overlooking Jackson. After five years they’ve found Joel, and Abby still wants revenge.

The big question this episode asks is, “What do you do with all that hatred?” Like with the infected, there is no cure for that pain. It lives inside, tears apart the victim, and radiates outward. It makes you into a monster you wouldn’t recognize. We are looking at the ramifications of Joel’s choices in the Season 1 finale, and while it would be nice if our characters could be like Gail and voice their pain and their shame in hopes of some kind of reconciliation, we can see how hatred takes hold and drags its victims to their darkest impulses.

Stray observations:

• As someone who has played the games, I’m curious to see where this season will go. We know a third season is on the way (with a fourth possible), and that there are no more games coming, so presumably we’ll only get about a third through this adaptation of The Last of Us Part II since Season 1 covered all of the first game.

• I feel like 2025 could be the year where Isabela Merced makes it to the A-list. She’s already had standout supporting work in films like Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Instant Family, and Father of the Bride, but she’s already dazzling and charismatic at Dina. Plus she’s playing Hawkgirl in James Gunn’s Superman later this year.

• I remain impressed by how easily Pascal and Ramsey channel their video game counterparts while making the roles their own.

• Imagine living through a zombie apocalypse and still being bothered by the existence of gay people. Feed Seth (Robert John Burke) to the infected.

• We encourage you to talk about the episode in the comments, but please refrain from video game spoilers. Having played the games should not be a prerequisite for watching the show.

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO. Look for recaps of the latest episodes here later the same evening. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.