The Last of Us Recap: Father Days
For all the time we’ve spent with him, there’s a lot we don’t know about Joel. But we do know this: He was a good father, both to Sarah and to Ellie. Specifically, he was a good dad in the sense he was fiercely protective, and it was his willingness to put Ellie’s well-being above that of, well, everyone, that ultimately led to his death, and the deaths of others. Whether what makes someone a good dad also makes them a good person in a big-picture sense is another question, however, and one The Last of Us does not seem interested in answering.
With an episode-opening flashback set in 1983 we learn that Joel’s long been protective of those he loves. Here it’s Tommy, whom he attempts to shield from their cop father after Tommy gets into a fight over a pot deal gone wrong. (Tony Dalton’s an inspired casting choice as the Miller patriarch.) Both Joel and Tommy have felt their father’s wrath in the past, and know that “the belt” is a potential consequence, so this attempted sacrifice is no small thing. But the gesture seems to soften Joel’s dad, who recounts his own abuse at the hands of his father. “I’m doin’ a little better than my father did,” he tells Joel. “When it’s your turn I hope you do a little better than me.”
The moment serves as a prelude for an episode almost entirely devoted to Joel’s time as Ellie’s adoptive father in the years between their arrival in Jackson and his death. It covers both the highs and the lows, with the lows outnumbering the highs as Ellie grows older and the two grow apart. The season’s penultimate episode, it does virtually nothing to push the plot forward, but The Last of Us has always been about more than that.
Apart from a brief coda, the rest of the episode takes the form of five vignettes, each set a year or two apart. In the first, Ellie gives herself an early present in the form of a burn to her forearm. Her aim is to disguise the scar that would give away her status as seemingly the sole person to survive being bitten without turning — or, as Ellie puts it, a chance to wear short sleeves again. It’s a reckless but successful gesture, and one that doesn’t overshadow Joel’s careful plans to celebrate her 15th birthday. Bartering with Seth, who we learn used to be a policeman in Milwaukee (which tracks), Joel trades some salvaged Lego pieces for a cake (vanilla) and a bone, shaping and attaching the latter to a guitar he’s restored for the occasion. He’s even carved one of Ellie’s moth drawings into the neck. At Ellie’s request, Joel plays her a song, “Future Days” by Pearl Jam. “I understand,” he tells her. He’s referring to the burn, but the meaning stretches beyond that. They have a connection. If The Last of Us had somehow ended with this scene, it would have given Joel and Ellie’s story a happy ending.
But the story doesn’t end there. One year later, Joel has decided to celebrate Ellie’s birthday with an excursion and a surprise. En route, Ellie tries to guess what the surprise might be, but comes up snake eyes. (That Ellie knows there’s little chance Joel will have a convertible or a “lotter” of kittens for her suggests she isn’t taking the game that seriously.) But what Ellie really wants is adult responsibilities. She wants to be sent out on patrol, but Joel feels she should “enjoy being a kid for now.” It’s a reasonable, fatherly reply, but Ellie’s response, “Because childhood’s been such a joy for me so far,” is pretty understandable. There is no rift between them yet, but there are signs that Joel doesn’t know Ellie as well as he thinks he does, as when he tries to figure out if she has a crush on Jesse. (She doesn’t and Joel doesn’t yet understand how unlikely this is.)
When they arrive, it turns out that one of Ellie’s frivolous guesses, that Joel has gotten her a dinosaur, is sort of right. Outside what remains of a natural history museum Ellie climbs a T-Rex statue, but her real birthday treat awaits her inside. An astronomy enthusiast born after the extinction of the space program, Ellie gets to play with a functioning model of the solar system. Then, even better, she gets to “go to space” via a real capsule used in the Apollo 15 mission. What’s more, she even gets to wear a real space helmet and listen to a recording of a mission. Joel’s planned this day down to the last detail and it goes off without a hitch. It is, by any measure, another happy birthday. And perhaps it’s the beginning of Joel and Ellie growing even closer? On the walk home, the two agree they should have more such outings, before Ellie gets momentarily distracted by, foreshadowing, some fireflies.
Ellie’s 17th birthday is another story. Arriving home unexpectedly (with cake in hand), Joel finds Ellie smoking pot and giggling in her room with Kat (Noah Lamanna), distracted in the middle of Kat covering Ellie’s forearm with a tattoo. “So all the teenage shit all at once, huh?” Joel asks angrily, to Ellie’s annoyance. She’s especially peeved when he suggests she was “experimenting” with girls. Ellie knows who she is, and maybe now Joel can understand why she definitely didn’t have a crush on Jesse. In a dramatic assertion of her independence, Ellie decides to move into the garage in the middle of the night in the midst of a rainstorm. “I’m sorry that I got a tattoo and smoked weed and fooled around with a girl. Except I’m not,” she says after first reminding him that he doesn’t own the house in which they live (and, by extension, her). Joe responds by saying, “Maybe it’s a good thing for you to have your own space,” then agrees to fix up the garage for her.
It’s a decision he’ll later come to regret, and maybe she will too. But for now they talk about tattoos and moths and why she likes them so much — because they stand for “change and growing and such.” The next day, Joel consults with Gail about the symbolism. After noting that, yes, some doctors studied dreams but they were “the dumb ones, mostly,” Gail informs Joel that moths are associated with death, not change and growth. All Joel can do is walk away while, elsewhere, Ellie packs her moth drawings and everything else and leaves.
We don’t get a glimpse of Ellie as she turns 18. The next sequence picks up the action with Ellie on the cusp of turning 19, the age she’s been throughout most of the second season. Ellie has questions. Specifically, she has a bunch of questions about Salt Lake City, a collection of holes she’s found in Joel’s story of how they escaped and what happened to the Fireflies. Before she can work through the full list, Joel shows up with this year’s present: she’s going on patrol.
Ellie’s excitement doesn’t last long once she realizes she’s been assigned the patrol equivalent of a novice skier’s bunny hill (though she does spot “a little squirrel fucking a big squirrel”). Joel uses the outing to tell Ellie he wishes they spent more time together, which silences Ellie. But before Joel can explore why his request has this effect on Ellie, a call comes over the walkie talkie, drawing them away. After they dismount they encounter several grim sites: a horse dragging a corpse, what remains of an infected and, finally, Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). From the season premiere we’ve known something awful happens to Eugene and that Joel plays a role in his fate. Now we’ve come to that moment.
Eugene warns Joel and Ellie off, quickly revealing he’s been bitten. Eugene knows he’s fated to die, but he wants to bargain. He knows they can’t break protocol, but he hopes to bend it. Figuring he has an hour to live he wants to be able to return to Jackson and say goodbye to Gail before ending his life. Joel wants to be a stickler for the rules, but Ellie, after performing a quick check, agrees that they have time to restrain Eugene and bring him back to camp. Joel agrees and tells Ellie to meet him further down the trail. Sensing Ellie has doubts he reassures her with two words: “I promise.” It’s a variation on “I swear,” the words Joel used to assure her that everything he said about what happened in Salt Lake City was true. When this turns out to be a lie, it confirms Ellie’s worst fears.
Instead of bringing Eugene to the horses as promised, Joel kills him by the side of the lake. As with other hard decisions Joel has made, it’s easy to see why he does this, even if the right and wrong of it can be argued. And, as before, Joel’s decision has awful consequences. But before Joel pulls the trigger, we get a truly remarkable scene in which Eugene pleads to see Gail one last time, to which Joel responds, “If you love someone you can always see their face.”
This has clearly been difficult for Joel, but that’s not what Ellie’s thinking about when she arrives at the scene. She sees this as both a betrayal and confirmation that Joel isn’t always honest with her. “When we get there I’ll tell Gail what she needs to know and nothing more,” Joel tells her. “It’s the right thing to do.” Ellie now recognizes this is the exact logic Joel used to keep her in the dark about the Fireflies’ fate, which only deepens her anger. So does Joel’s tacked-on justification: “I had no choice.” When they arrive at Jackson, Joel attempts to tell Gail his version of what happened, which is broadly true, but leaves out a lot of details and ends with the lie that “he ended it himself.” As Gail hugs Joel, Ellie tells her what really happened. It breaks Gail’s heart. It breaks Joel’s too.
One last time jump (leaving out the coda) brings the episode forward nine more months. We’re back more or less where the season began, with Ellie and Dina kissing on the dance floor and Joel rushing to Ellie’s defense after Seth insults them. This time, however, we get a bit more shading and detail. Rather than ending with Ellie staring at Joel as she sits on the porch, we see their final conversation in full. Joel says all the right things about the kiss with Dina, specifically that she’d be lucky to have Ellie. But it’s not enough. Ellie lays it out for him: “You lied to me,” she says, then makes clear that she’s referring both to the incident with Eugene and his account of Salt Lake City. Stating that she needs the truth or they’re “done,” Ellie then asks a bunch of pointed questions about whether there were other immune patients, whether there was a raider attack, and whether Joel believes they could have made a cure. Joel answers her wordlessly but truthfully, even when she asks, without quite saying it, if he killed everyone.
“Making a cure would have killed you,” Joel says, to which Ellie replies, “Then I was supposed to die. That was my purpose. My life would have fucking mattered, but you took that from me. You took it from everyone.” It’s always been an open question if Ellie would have sacrificed herself to create a cure and now we have an answer. Of course, the answer she gives, in anger, at the age of 19 might differ from the one she would have given at 14, but we’ll never know. Joel made the choice for her and, in the process, made a decision about the fate of the world.
That has to weigh on Ellie. It already weighs on Joel, who says he’ll pay the price because, “you’re gonna turn away from me.” He also says he has no regrets. “Because you’re selfish,” Ellie says. His reply: “Because I love you.” And, echoing his father, he tells Ellie he hopes she can do a little better than he did if she ever becomes a parent. “I don’t think I can ever forgive you for this,” she replies. “But I would like to try.”
This scene returns to the question at the heart of Ellie and Joel’s relationship this season, if not the season itself. Joel died not knowing if Ellie would forgive him, but with hope that she would. But the question of whether he did the right thing will forever remain unanswered. Can saving Ellie’s life excuse all those deaths, and the deaths a cure could have prevented (to say nothing of the hope of restoring civilization it might have created)? It’s hard to justify but, again, also easy to understand. Now Ellie is committing her own awful acts and making impossible choices for reasons no less personal. There’s little doubt that she’s forgiven Joel, but is it possible that she hasn’t learned a final lesson from their relationship? Joel did something awful in the interest of doing something good, saving Ellie.
Ellie can’t even make that claim. Will killing Abby make the world a better place? The Ellie we see walking the rainy streets of Seattle in the coda that closes the episode might make the argument that having one less unrepentant killer walking around is an improvement, but she’s turning herself into one in the process of exacting revenge. Ellie never had it easy. Childhood, as she says, was never joyful for her. But with Joel she had something meaningful. In this, the season’s most moving episode, we see that erode then fall away, leaving Ellie a harder, sadder person than before. Seeing that is a big part of why this season has been a tough watch at times, but it’s also what’s made it so rich, challenging, and in this installment, remarkably moving.
Infectious Bites
• Joel playing Ellie Pearl Jam’s 2013 song “Future Days” is a holdover from the game, where the cordyceps infection arrived in 2013 (the year of the game’s release), not 2003. Initially it seemed like naming the season premiere after the song might be the extent of that reference, but Last of Us goes all in on the anachronism here.
• “Happy 15th Birthday, Eli.” There aren’t that many laughs in this episode, but there is this one, and the sight of Eli sampling her cake without waiting for Joel to get plates and utensils.
• Gail is reading George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides, the grandaddy of all post-apocalyptic tales. It’s a nod to one of the series’ inspirations (and inspiration for essentially every post-apocalyptic story that followed). It’s a terrific book that was also recently adapted into a miniseries for MGM+.
• Pantoliano only has one scene, but he absolutely kills it. It’s an understated death for a Pantoliano character, particularly one featured on an HBO show. (No spoilers, but fans of another HBO series will get that reference.) But it’s also a more understated performance than Pantoliano’s usually asked to deliver. We don’t learn that much about Eugene, but the details we do get suggest he’s become a man who loves his wife and wants to do his best to put bloodshed behind him. As death approaches, he only wants one last moment with Gail. The look on his face when he realizes he’ll be denied even this is devastating, whatever uplift his final words might offer.