Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of The Last of Us, S2E1, “Future Days” (written and directed by Craig Mazin)
“I mean, what did I do?”
Where do we even start with that question?
As Joel (Pedro Pascal) and new character Dina (Isabela Merced) sit at Joel’s kitchen table and discuss circuit breakers, the conversation turns to Dina’s best friend and Joel’s surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). It appears that in the five years since The Last of Us Season 1 ended, and the story picks back up in Season 2, there has been quite a falling out between Joel and Ellie. Whereas Season 1 ended with Joel and Ellie essentially bonding as father and daughter, that relationship is fractured with the passage of time.
Joel doesn’t understand her new distant attitude and blames it on Ellie just being a 19-year-old. Joel knows he is a “hard-ass and overprotective,” but can’t seem to understand exactly what he did to Ellie to drive her away. While we are not explicitly told why Joel and Ellie are on bad terms, based on Joel’s “what did I do?” comment and his inability to admit his shocking past to his therapist Gail (Catherine O’Hara), it does not appear that Joel has shared his literal world-changing secret with Ellie.
By way of recap, Season 1 introduced Ellie, who is immune to the infection from the cordyceps fungus that has taken over humanity for more than 20 years. Joel brought her across the country to doctors so they could try and extract some of her DNA to make a cure, but when he learned it would kill Ellie in the process, he went John Rambo on the hospital and killed everyone there so he could save her, humanity be damned.
When she woke up, Joel told Ellie that the doctors could not develop a cure and that he had to rescue her when the hospital was overrun with infected. Ellie made Joel swear it was the truth, which he did, sentencing himself to living a lie for the rest of his life.
So, to answer Joel’s question when he is talking to Dina, he essentially doomed humanity to living with the cordyceps infection forever. Dina doesn’t know that. Ellie doesn’t seem to know that yet. But much more than trying to learn how to be a father to a teenager, Joel “did” something that will have long-lasting and devastating effects throughout this second season.
For Joel to ask, “What did I do?” is more for our benefit than for his, or for Dina’s. We already know that his decision doomed millions, if not billions, of people, to an ongoing apocalypse. We know he saved one life at the expense of countless others and then lied to the person who expressly believed her purpose was to help save everyone.
But while I don’t know where The Last of Us video game will eventually end up or how many seasons of the TV series will be made, it doesn’t seem likely that Joel’s comeuppance is going to happen because of his verdict to millions of people. It will come because of one or two irreparable relationships. This is what Season 2 of The Last of Us seems to be signaling it will be about.
Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann understand the concept that our brains have a very hard time comprehending large numbers, and how large numbers have difficulty representing something that our brains can understand. The Last of Us is very unlikely to deal with Joel’s trolley problem of saving Ellie instead of a billion people. It’s much more likely to focus on the one, two, maybe five relationships that are most impacted by the sum of Joel’s choices.
This circles us back to the beginning of the episode, where we meet Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who appears to be the leader of a group of young Fireflies who were directly impacted by Joel killing everyone in the hospital when he rescued Ellie.
(Mild spoilers for the game in the next paragraph, and also something that was said in the “Behind the Episode” interviews that aired after Episode 1. Tread carefully if you don’t like to listen to those.)
Abby’s father was the doctor who was set to perform the surgery on Ellie when Joel barged in and demanded she be freed. Joel did not have to kill the doctor, as he was not armed like the other soldiers in the hospital. But, in Joel’s mind, he also needed to take out the brains behind the procedure, and hope that the world no longer has another brain surgeon who could handle that job.
It’s that extra measure of violence (perhaps unnecessary violence) that seems to be motivating Abby and her team. We see them five years in the past, plotting about how they are going to kill Joel (slowly). Then, as Episode 1 comes to an end, we see that same group descending upon Jackson, Wyoming, and the settlement that Joel and Ellie now call home.
The consequences of Joel’s violent act are now compounding on top of him, five years after he committed it. Joel’s likely overbearing nature with Ellie has pushed her away. His over-the-top violence at the hospital has put a target on his back from some revenge-seeking soldiers. And it appears Joel’s hero complex has gotten him into trouble at least a couple of times.
In his therapy session with Gail, she exposits that she hates Joel because he killed her husband, Eugene, even though she knows he had no choice. Eugene is a character only mentioned and referenced in part two of the game, and Gail is a character developed for the show as a way to enrich Eugene’s story. From the clues, it appears something happened to infect Eugene, and Joel had to intervene and kill him.
Speaking of intervening, when the town homophobe, Seth (Robert John Burke), tries to stop an intimate moment between Ellie and Dina at the Jackson New Year’s Eve party, Ellie embarrasses Joel in front of the whole town, screaming that she does not need his help. Whatever has happened between the two (and the upcoming scenes clip makes it seem like we will find out), I can only imagine the chasm that will develop once Ellie finds out about Joel’s lie.
All of this, of course, is set against a backdrop of a worldwide apocalypse that has begun to see the infected evolve and become smarter. While on a patrol, Ellie and Dina find themselves inside an abandoned market. Ellie hunts an infected, but notices that instead of running straight towards her, this one hid, waited, and even retreated when necessary. The infected are clearly getting smarter, even to the point where Ellie was bitten during an attack (but fortunately is still immune as far as we know).
If that wasn’t bad enough, it appears the underground network of the fungus that Tess (Anna Torv) talked about in Season 1 is flourishing, despite the harsh winter conditions in Wyoming. Towards the end of the episode, we see tendrils beginning to grow out of the root-filled water main lines that intersect the city. This means hordes of infected are likely only a short time away from finding out that a populated city is within their reach.
For now, however, Joel is reckoning with what he did. We will likely never see Joel in front of some international humanitarian court to answer for his actions, but the effects of his choices are seemingly much more devastating close to home. What was it they always said in Westworld? “These violent delights have violent ends.” Joel probably didn’t delight in the violence he had to resort to in order to save his new daughter, Ellie. But the violent consequences of what he did are coming all the same.
