“This is bullshit, right? It’s just a drill.”
“Yeah. It’s a drill.”
“Unless we’re attacked, and then it’s not.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Whoa.
Well, if you were disappointed by the low key, character-focused opener of The Last of Us season 2, this episode will have more than made up for that. All the spectacle, action and drama you could hope for was here in spades, along with some jaw-dropping plot developments. It’s just that, typically for this show, that first episode was necessary to establish the stakes before throwing us headlong into the carnage.
Let’s get the big one out of the way first. They killed off the leading man! I gather this happens in the second game too, but I’m glad I didn’t read up on it earlier, because in its form as a TV drama, this was about as massively unexpected as possible. Sure, The Walking Dead “killed off” Rick Grimes halfway through season 9 (except of course they didn’t, not really).
But that was well-known in advance, thanks to AMC pre-publicity, whereas this was, for non-game aficionados, a total shock. Sure, you might expect the main character to die in a season finale, or even (like Rick) a mid-season finale. But in episode 2? With a massive star like Pedro Pascal playing him, and his face all over the posters for this second season too? That was a total bolt out of the blue, and incredibly dramatically effective as a result.
Like Ellie, crawling sobbing towards his prone form, the viewer (ie me) just can’t believe this is happening. We’ve seen Joel recover from terrible injuries in the past – surely he’ll come back from this too? But while The Last of Us may be based on a game where you can have multiple lives, its TV incarnation is brutally realistic about injury. And let’s face it, there’s no coming back from being shot in the kneecap, brutally beaten, then stabbed through the neck with a broken golf club.
It was a horrifically brutal scene, well played by all concerned, even Kaitlyn Dever as the homicidal Abby. Yet director Mark Mylod played it sensitively, not shying away from the brutality of what was happening, but avoiding showing us the majority of the blows actually landing on Joel. Instead, we saw the reactions on the faces of the others; Abby’s cold fury, her compatriots’ horror, and Ellie’s shock and grief. The only blow we saw actually land was the final, killing one, portrayed almost offhandedly in long shot, and all the more shocking as a result.
All this was the result of a staggering coincidence – that Abby, pursued by a horde of Infected, should stumble on Joel and Dina’s hiding place in time for Joel to save her life could have seemed like a massive contrivance. And yet somehow it felt believable within the context of this show, where the worst possible outcomes can and frequently do happen.
I’d assumed that the subplot of Abby’s quest for revenge would be a season-long arc, complicated by Joel’s comparative safety and her own colleagues’ misgivings. Instead, it seems more likely that the ongoing arc will be Ellie’s quest for revenge against Abby, in a never ending cycle of violence and retribution. I found myself thinking of the similar cycle of violence between Israel and Palestine, with good reason, it turns out – game creator Neil Druckmann grew up in Israel, and intended the second game’s themes to echo just that.
Plotwise, that was definitely the biggie this week, a totally unexpected shock for the viewer (provided they hadn’t played the game). But it didn’t completely overshadow some awesome set pieces involving the Infected, seen here in numbers that dwarfed the small horde we saw in season 1. The Last of Us, as a nominal zombie story, is basically grounded in horror, and that was reflected in the hugely spooky scene where Abby stumbled across a snowy field littered in half-buried corpses, only for the still-living Infected, to start emerging from beneath and chase pell-mell after her.
Equally effective was the sequence with the mine’s chainlink fence gradually collapsing on top of her under the weight of the furious Infected, as she crawled along a gap that narrowed and narrowed until finally the fence broke and the Infected poured through. It was a heartstoppingly tense moment, even though Abby was the nominal villain.
But of course the ep’s biggest set piece was the (not entirely unexpected) assault by the Infected on the settlement at Jackson. Clearly this was where the bulk of the ep’s budget had been spent, as a gigantic horde of frantically sprinting Infected piled up against the walls of the encampment, while its defenders fought them off in a manner that echoed a medieval siege. With the stormy, snowy backdrop, it was inescapably reminiscent of the battles with the undead Wights in Game of Thrones, particularly the storming season 5 episode Hardhome. Not coincidentally, the director of this ep, Mark Mylod, cut his teeth directing that show (though he didn’t actually direct that episode).
The frenetic battle as the Infected finally broke into the town was a nonstop ten minutes of action, as the street defenders broke and ran, while rooftop snipers picking off the attackers unexpectedly found themselves overwhelmed too. Last week’s hints about the unexpected intelligence of the Infected paid off in spades here; not only do they have the nous to keep themselves warm under piles of their own dead, they know that when they’re under attack from a rooftop, they need to get into the building and climb up to deal with the snipers. I can’t imagine Walking Dead’s shambling Walkers doing that.
And then there was the two-way battle between Tommy and another of those bloody huge Infected that I gather are referred to as ‘Bloaters’. We saw one briefly last season, where its near-invulnerability to bullets was established; here, Tommy had the seemingly more ferocious weapon of a flamethrower, but even that took a nailbitingly long time to have any discernible effect. It was a hugely tense sequence, with the camera cutting to the plummeting fuel gauge even as the monster came on, seemingly unfazed. Its final collapse was a relief, precisely because Tommy is a character we’ve come to like and care about; and in this show, nobody is guaranteed to survive.
Indeed, the stakes of the battle felt that much higher precisely because of the work done to establish these characters in that low-key season opener. It felt like Tommy really might die; or Maria, or even some of the terrified civilians hiding in their barricaded basements. In the event, the one that didn’t survive was Seth – not in the battle itself, but put down afterwards having been bitten. It was all the more poignant given his earlier, halting attempt at apology and reconciliation with the unaccepting Ellie.
That final montage, which really felt like a necessary breather to take stock after a devastating episode, was soundtracked, appropriately, by a cover of songwriter Shawn James’ ‘Through the Valley’ from Ashley Johnson – the game’s original Ellie. Its doomy lyrics (“I know when I die, my soul is damned”) were a perfect fit for this bleak, downbeat ep.
So the show’s going forward without its nominal star, which presumably means more of it will be carried by Bella Ramsey as Ellie. That’s a hell of a challenge, but I think she’s more than up to it. And I doubt we’ve seen the last of Pedro Pascal – I suspect he’s likely to crop up in flashbacks along the way, particularly as we’ve yet to unpack what exactly happened for him to kill the oft-mentioned Eugene.
It seems like the season’s arc will be Ellie’s quest for vengeance against Abby, but presumably there’ll be more to it than that. What was the significance of the “WLF” logo given so much prominence on the former Fireflies’ backpack? What will happen to Ellie’s budding romance with Dina, now Dina failed to rescue Joel? Whatever new plot threads are introduced, I have to applaud this storming, shocking episode for pulling the rug right out from under us, and giving us no idea what to expect next. Unless, of course, you’ve played the game…
Simon’s Incoherent Blog 