"You swore."

Comparing The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6 "The Price" to The Last of Us Part 2

The party ended over a week ago but I’m still here!

It’s time to dig into Episode 6 of The Last of Us Season 2 and I’m excited to really explore what this episode reveals to us. A lot of people consider this to be one of the best episodes of the series, which is understandable. However, I do think part of that is just because audiences missed having Pedro Pascal on their screens every week. Who can blame them for that, really?

Unfortunately for me, I think this is the episode that really sealed the deal that I wasn’t going to have a change of opinion about this season of the show. We’ll discuss it soon but I do want to get this out of the way immediately: the show adapted my favorite scene of the game in a way that I think really butchered the importance of the scene and I am still in mourning about it.

Even though the season is over (and I’ve already watched the finale), I’ll still be doing my best to avoid discussing scenes from the game that have not yet been adapted for the show. Also, fair warning: this is a long one. There’s A LOT to go over. Okay… Here we go!

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Austin, Texas 1983

Our flashback episode opens with a new flashback not previously seen in the game. It’s an interesting choice to show us a scene from Joel’s childhood. Our knowledge of Joel’s life before the outbreak is isolated to just the opening 5 minutes of The Last of Us Part One and small snippets of dialogue here or there. For the purposes of the game, Joel’s actions as a character are defined almost entirely by the loss of Sarah on the night of the outbreak. Every act of violence, every lie, every denial is influenced by that steadfast fear of losing Ellie, who in many ways is a new Sarah to Joel. The show has widened our understanding of his choices, revealing a history of lying to protect those he loves, a willingness to cause bodily harm to those who threaten his loved ones, and a cycle of violence that predates the outbreak through his father’s methods of discipline.

A little detail that I really appreciate from this scene is the reveal that the watch Joel wears throughout the series once belonged to his father. The watch, frozen forever on the very second Sarah was shot, as an object that has been passed down through generations of men who cause harm in the name of love is a really nice visual to build.

Outside of that though, I do see a lot of what’s discussed between Joel and his father to be a further illustration of how desperate the writing is to make every theme of the story as abundantly clear as possible. The Last of Us Part Two is about finding oneself trapped in the cycles of violence and the agonizing process of trying to break out of those cycles. This isn’t a new concept to be exploring in this story, but having the characters discuss it so directly feels a bit cheap, particularly when this is the one and only time we will likely ever see Joel’s father. Additionally, I think part of what I always found so compelling about Joel’s character is that in the game, it’s easy to interpret his actions as a byproduct of the environment he finds himself in post-outbreak. Before the outbreak, there are environmental cues that make us believe he struggled financially and with his mental health, but the rage, distance, and violence that defines a lot of his behavior throughout the game is a coping mechanism for a world that is full of so much death and suffering. In expanding his character in the show, we instead view him as someone who has always carried this violence within himself and it’s just something he unleashed as the world fell apart. There’s pros and cons to either side of this type of characterization, but given how limitedly we explore this new depth to Joel, it feels a lot less impactful to me.

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The Fifteenth Birthday

An interesting thing of note about this episode is that the majority of flashbacks all fall on Ellie’s birthday. In the game, only one of these flashbacks happens on her actual birthday and the rest are occurring at different points over the years. I’m not sure what sort of rationale to conjure about this minor change beyond the writers wanting to make it as simplistic as possible for audiences to follow. Which is… again… a discredit to audiences’ intelligence… ANYWAYS.

Get Seth off my TV or so help me!!!!

I think it is so fascinating how attached the show is to including his character in as many scenes as possible. The trade between Joel and him for a birthday cake and for some bone to finish the guitar Joel is making for Ellie works mostly to help draw an immediate connection to what we just saw in the opening flashback. Seth reveals that before the outbreak he was a police officer, just like Joel’s father. We can now draw a connection between Joel’s father’s abusive actions towards his children with Seth’s homophobic and xenophobic comments that he makes in the earliest episodes of the season through their shared profession. Connecting Seth to Joel’s father also, I think, attempts to draw more sympathy for Seth’s character that I don’t see much point in. We just watched Joel’s father tearfully admit he has messed up but he’s trying to do better than his father before him, and by placing Seth in the same profession, it’s a quiet attempt to encourage audiences to see that same sentiment in him as we do in Joel’s father. I’ve written previously about how I think it’s not effective to include his character so much in the episodes, but I feel that even more in how this episode briefly attempts to strengthen our understanding of him.

We get a lovely scene of Joel making Ellie’s guitar. I really like this scene because of how quiet and intentional it is. It’s a nice change from the dialogue-heavy scenes that define most of the season. Joel’s woodworking is a nice way of illustrating how he’s begun to let his guard down in Jackson and in the game, we only ever see this side of him in the aftermath of his death as we walk through his home. Getting to see this version of Joel build something with his own hands and look at it with such satisfaction really helps show the other side of him that comes out around Ellie. I like that! It’s nice!

Not seen previously in the game is the moment directly after Ellie intentionally burnt her bite mark. In the game, when we see this flashback between Joel and Ellie, Ellie is wearing a bandage on her arm to show the wound is still fresh but she doesn’t talk about it with Joel. It’s only with Dina later in the weed den that Ellie reveals that she burnt her arm intentionally to cover her bite mark. The focus of the scene in the game is more on the subtly awkward dynamic between the two of them and then Joel giving her the guitar as a surprise gift. Maybe that’s another reason why they change the flashback in the show to occur on Ellie’s birthday? They needed more justification as to why Joel would be giving Ellie a gift? Anyways, including Ellie’s injury is, to me, a way for the writers to show again how much more affectionate this version of Ellie and Joel are with one another. We see this not only in how they embrace after Ellie explains why she hurt herself, but in their physical proximity to each other in their living situation too.

In the game, Ellie always lives in the garage. Something significant about her that I’ve always found very compelling is that Ellie craves consistency and closeness, but never at the sacrifice of her own autonomy. She and Joel care for each other, but as Gail reminds us in the first episode this season, she is not Joel’s daughter. The game respects these boundaries, ensuring that she always has her own space, her own boundaries in place between herself and Joel that the show seems disinterested in exploring. I think it’s perceived as being more appealing to show audiences when the two behave more explicitly as father and daughter. Audiences can understand that sort of relationship whereas something that exists in a more muddled grey area like the game’s iteration can leave some frustrated or uncertain of how to react. The other downside to this more affectionate dynamic between the two of them is it can be used as a subtle way to absolve Joel of his choices in season one. In the US in particular, children are seen more as objects or extensions of their parents rather than fully-fledged people with their own rights. When we as an audience are encouraged to view Joel as Ellie’s “father”, we can more easily justify why he makes such severe choices for her without her consent or acknowledging her desires because that’s what parents “should” do. This is a possible rationale that is present when examining Joel’s actions in the game as well, but it’s in a much more hypothetical space and I think it’s easier to truly see Ellie’s side of things when their relationship is blurrier. This version of them strives to diminish Ellie’s perspective, amplifying Joel’s desires to be a good father and to break the cycles of his past with Ellie. It’s another shift in focus from Ellie’s deeply personal experiences to another character’s, which is yet another issue that has plagued this season.

It’s nice to see Joel play “Future Days” finally! I was floored by interviews where Mazin shared that he didn’t want to include the song and that Druckmann had to talk him into it. The use of this song specifically is such an easy expression of Ellie’s inner turmoil as she grapples with her grief and I really don’t understand why Mazin was so set on ditching it for something else. I’m relieved it was ultimately kept.

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The Sixteenth Birthday

This is the first playable flashback in the game and it arrives after Ellie and Dina’s fight on the first night in Seattle. After potentially ruining her relationship with Dina by calling her a burden, Ellie recalls this memory, which transports us to a rare, fleeting moment of joy within the game. This is also our first time seeing Joel since the first two hours of the game and it always hits extremely hard. The game does such a fantastic job of reflecting on Joel’s death before this moment, reminding us of him and his absence constantly so that when he appears on screen again, it knocks the wind out of you. Shoving all the flashbacks together into one episode instead of drawing them out across the season robs audiences of this same sensation.

The initial starting point of the flashback is the same in the game as it’s shown in the show. Joel and Ellie are walking through the forest towards a big surprise that Ellie insists on trying to guess. In the game, her very first guess is a dinosaur (rather than a bow and arrow in the show), which is sweet given that is exactly what her surprise is. There is a minor gameplay mechanic revealed during this walking sequence which shows us that Joel kept his promise and taught Ellie how to swim. Also in the game, an interesting note is that it is possible to miss out on Ellie climbing up the t-rex in front of the museum as this action is optional and not clearly marked as possible.

In the show, Joel implies Ellie likes Jesse in this scene, revealing that he isn’t aware of the fact she is a lesbian. In the game, this conversation is saved for the next flashback, which has been changed significantly for the show, when Ellie is another year older.

Then, the show fast forwards through part of this sequence. I’m really surprised by this decision because this flashback specifically is one of the most beloved in the game and BTS shows that they also shot this part of the flashback for the show. Before Ellie and Joel make it to the space exhibit, they first go through a giant dinosaur exhibit. Ellie’s love for dinosaurs means we get lots of sweet dinosaur facts and there’s a fun additional task in the form of putting an Indiana Jones style hat on all the dinosaur skeletons. At the end of the dinosaur sequence, as the two walk up a set of stairs, they’re met with the skeletal head of a brachiosaurus. This image is a callback to their encounter with a giraffe near the end of The Last of Us Part One. It’s sweet and reflective, drawing us back to that previous tender moment between the two, and, maybe more importantly, placing us back in Salt Lake City, which will become even more relevant by the end of the flashback.

Space sequence follows and the way it’s portrayed in the game is exactly as it is in the show. So… No notes on that beautiful moment lol.

However, this flashback progresses even more in the game. The show rushes us out of this sequence and on to the next one rather abruptly. There is a brief pause as Ellie stops to stare at literal fireflies. This is meant to remind us of the Fireflies and allude to the possibility that Ellie is still thinking about what happened in Salt Lake City. In the game, this revelation is far more explicit. Ellie and Joel continue through the museum to a second building that can only be accessed via window. Joel boosts Ellie up with the hope that she can open the door from the other side once she’s in. However, the door is blocked and the two are temporarily separated.

What follows is a hard shift in tone. We go from joyful and warm to fearful and cold very quickly. This side of the museum is plunged in shadows and as we go further through the exhibit of North American animals, we hear noises that imply a possible threat is close by. Ellie also encounters some taxidermy animals here that allude to what’s to come in her story down the line. She encounters a moose surrounded by hungry wolves and she expresses sympathy for it. The scene is eerily reflective of a moment from Joel’s death scene where the WLF have him pinned for Abby.

As we continue through the rest of this exhibit, in addition to the scary sounds we hear, Ellie also comes across disturbing writing on the walls. Someone has written confessionals throughout the exhibit, admitting to terrible acts. The writing throughout this sequence reads as follows:

“I killed for them”, “the woman we tortured chocked on her own blood”, “the 4 soldiers at the gate the last one cried”, “the stragglers who snuck into camp they just wanted food”, “the kid who ran into the blast I couldn’t stop him”, “the people in the van we locked them in and doused it with gas”, and finally, “there is no light”

beneath which sits the skeleton of who wrote these admissions, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A note reveals that this person is wracked with guilt for what they have done for “them” with nothing now to show for it. It’s not revealed quite yet but this person is a former firefly, left alone after the group disbanded because of Joel’s massacre. All these terrible actions committed with no greater good to show for them. The message above his head an indication that the Firefly mantra “when you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light” has been proven false. Their light is gone, all that remains is the darkness.

The source of the scary noises is also revealed here in the form of a wild boar. The boar is another animal that will come up again later on in the game and plays a crucial role in exploring Ellie’s inner turmoil. After the boar flees the room, Joel busts through a side door, finally having found Ellie. Ellie barely acknowledges him though, her attention drawn to one last piece of graffiti on the wall from our skeleton friend. The Firefly symbol with the word “Liars” written beneath it. Ellie is visibly shaken by this sight and Joel has to coax her out of the room and in doing so, he briefly obscures part of the writing on the wall so it reads as “Liar”. He walks away first, leaving Ellie to stare at the graffiti for another beat on her own before she follows after him. The camera stays fixed on the image so that the last thing the player sees during the flashback is that graffiti. The moment is poignant and ends our joyful flashback with a sense of unease, these final beats revealing that Ellie is still plagued with doubt about whether or not Joel has told her the truth. Heavy stuff! I wish the show really leaned into this moment more rather than just briefly showing the insect equivalent (and this is coming from a guy who LOVES bugs!).

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The Seventeenth Birthday

New flashback time again. Joel brings another cake to the house to surprise Ellie with. He walks in on her with Cat and a fresh tattoo. “So, all the teenage shit all at once,” Joel bemoans. BOOOOOO! Oh brother, this guy stinks! I found this moment to be really frustrating. It again feeds into the enthusiasm the show has with painting Joel explicitly as Ellie’s father through the way the two interact with one another. Even as Ellie rebels against this dynamic, stating at one point that he doesn’t “own anything”, the way she maneuvers through this dispute still implies how prevalent this father/daughter dynamic is between the two of them. It also speaks to a larger issue between the two of them in that the show has an unwillingness to let the resentment Ellie feels towards Joel fester. They resolve this dispute in less than 24 hours, and though it ends with Ellie still moving to the garage, which helps show that a rift is starting to form, it is a pretty positive conclusion between the two of them. I wish again that this show was willing to explore the sensations of rage and building resentment that defines so much of Ellie as a character. Part of the effectiveness of these flashbacks in the games is in how we can see clearly how upset Ellie grows over the years and how determinedly Joel turns the other way when it comes to these feelings she’s having until it’s too late.

I do think this flashback does start to show how Joel can hear Ellie without actually hearing her. Or, more accurately, how he develops a sort of selective hearing when it comes to what she communicates to him. He can acknowledge her queerness and her desire for space, but not that there is deeper meaning behind her assertion he doesn’t own her. He can understand her fixation on the imagery of a moth, but not catch that his initial interpretation of what it symbolizes is wrong. Thank god we have Gail to reveal to him that his understanding of the insect’s symbolism was way off (not). Get her off my screen too!!! To quote the YouTuber Berleezy, “I’m sick of her ass!” and how she spells out every piece of subtext for Joel and us as an audience. Can’t we let anything stay in the subconscious? Must everything be so blatantly spelled out?!

In the game, this flashback is completely different, but its intentions are more aligned with the events of the show’s nineteenth birthday flashback, so I’ll discuss them in comparison to that instead of here. Overall, I do not like this new flashback.

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The Nineteenth Birthday

Opening with Ellie fully moved into the garage, this flashback begins with a reveal that Ellie is really struggling with the lie she’s been told about Salt Lake City. Her doubts are manifesting in such a way that she’s building towards having a direct confrontation with Joel, something that never goes well, at least in the game.

The equivalent of this scene in the game is the second flashback we play through which takes place when Ellie is seventeen. Her journal entries made available during this sequence speak to her inner anxieties about her immunity (she fears she might be contagious), her blossoming relationship with Cat, and how that relationship is negatively impacting her friendship with Dina. Gameplay opens with her on patrol with Tommy, he lets her try out his rifle (we see a version of this scene in the first episode of season one), and he reveals that Joel has expressed concern for Ellie because she is noticeably distant. She denies anything being wrong and concedes that she could do more to ease Joel’s anxieties about the state of their relationship.

The two meet up with Joel in the ski lodge, which we had previously seen in the opening of the game as Joel, Tommy, and Abby fled from the infected horde. It’s a noticeable shift in feel from that first scene, which was steeped in cold atmosphere and panic about the dangers at hand, because for this flashback, everything is painted in a warm, autumnal glow. Joel has Ellie’s guitar and points out that she needs to change the strings. Tommy encourages the two to continue on patrol to a music shop where they can get new strings and Ellie agrees to go, although she does try to convince Tommy to tag along as a buffer.

Ellie and Joel discover the path to the music shop is blocked and they decide to cut through a hotel. Between dealing with an arguably insane amount of infected (we even fight a bloater!), the two try and talk about the state of things in Jackson and with each other. Two teenagers have recently run away from Jackson and no one has heard from them since. Ellie is frustrated by the need to wear a gas mask even when it’s only her and Joel around. Joel expresses worry she’s told Jesse and Dina about her immunity, which she denies. This is the flashback where Joel expresses a belief that Jesse might like Ellie, which she bemusedly denies. In the game, Joel is unaware of Ellie’s queerness until the night of the Winter Dance, and it is a rather somber moment in the flashback when it’s revealed he has no idea that Ellie is dating a woman at this time (Cat).

Just as the two think they may have found a way out of the hotel, they come across the remains of the two missing teenagers mentioned earlier. One of them is a skeleton and the other is an infected that they kill. A note reveals that the two ran away from Jackson out of guilt for living in such a stable environment. They dreamed of leading more people to the community but just a few hours after leaving, they were both bitten. The boy, Adam, shot Sydney but was too afraid to kill himself before the infection took over.

Ellie is visibly shaken by the note and says, “If only they were immune, right?” with the implication behind that statement being she feels tremendous guilt that the two could not be protected from the infected by her immunity. Joel’s guard goes up as he tries to insist they should get going so they can take the bodies back to Jackson. Ellie instead lashes out at Joel, demanding to know why he took her from Salt Lake City before she was awake and able to speak with the Fireflies. In the game, Joel’s lie revolves entirely around the fact that dozens of other immune people exist and there was no good that came from the Fireflies’ tests. Show Joel adds an extra detail to the lie that raiders appeared and killed everyone. Game Ellie insists Joel must have misunderstood the Fireflies and if they had waited they could have gotten more answers. Joel grows visibly angry with Ellie and cuts her off, denying any possibility for a cure and stating, “I know you wish things were different. I wish things were different. But they ain’t.”

He acknowledges Ellie’s pain without claiming responsibility for it and he offers his own commiseration in addition to hers as an attempt to realign himself with her. Ellie fights back tears but agrees that she’s done probing the issue and, like the last flashback, Joel walks away first, leaving us to watch Ellie collect herself before she walks out of frame. The camera stays fixed on the bodies lying on the ground, making sure the last thing we see in this flashback is the loss of life that could have been prevented if Joel had made a different choice.

The show’s version of these events are very different and feel more like a desire to include Gail in another(?!) scene rather than freshly articulate the divide between Ellie and Joel.

Joel interrupts Ellie’s attempt at practicing her questions with another birthday surprise: Patrol! Yay, wow, so awesome. Ellie in the game is already well-versed in patrols, she was ready to start going on duo patrols at seventeen rather than nineteen, but whatever! The show has committed itself to painting Ellie has more immature and incapable this season and so her inexperience with patrols makes sense (but I am begrudged about it). Of note in this sequence to me too is how horrified and scared Ellie seems at the sight of Eugene’s patrol partners body. Her expression reads like she’s never seen a body before, which I found a bit confusing to take in. Ellie insists she and Joel let Eugene return to Jackson with them so he can say goodbye to his beloved Gail and this reads in a similar manner to how much empathy game Ellie has for the two teenagers who died in the hotel. It visibly pains her to see people suffering when she holds the cure within herself. I do like how hard she fights for Eugene’s right to say goodbye.

Joel convinces her to go get the horses, adding another lie to his mountain of them. Because the show has been more reluctant to explore Ellie’s growing doubts and anger towards Joel, she’s quicker to believe him in this moment and fully trusts him. Thanks to that that trust, Joel can go Of Mice and Men Eugene before she returns. He insists they both lie to everyone back home instead of telling them the truth of what he’s done. Once confronted with a grieving Gail, Ellie reveals that Joel was lying to her about the nature of Eugene’s death. Gail is horrified by what Joel has done and Ellie looks at Joel through new eyes finally. It’s an essential moment in this version of their relationship arc, but because we jump from this scene to the Winter Dance, the show winds up missing out on really leaning into this growing anger fully, which is a real shame.

In the game, after the hotel flashback, we get one more, very brief flashback that plays directly after Ellie has brutally killed Nora. It’s revealed that a year before the main events of the game, Ellie left Jackson and returned to St. Mary’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. She finds notes from Abby’s father that express his excitement about Ellie’s immunity and a voice recording left by none other than Mel(!!) that reveals that the Fireflies are disbanding and she personally wanted to go after “the smuggler and the girl” with some other people (presumably Abby, Owen, Manny, Nora, Jordan, Nick, and Leah) but there’s no point because the only person capable of making a vaccine is now dead. Shortly after Ellie finds this recording, Joel arrives at the hospital as well. He embraces Ellie and chastises her for leaving without speaking with him about her plans and Ellie roughly pushes him away from her. In the game, this is only the second time we have ever seen Joel physically affectionate with Ellie. The other time was in the first game directly after he had to physically restrain her to get her to stop hacking at David’s face with a machete. In that moment, she had fallen into Joel with a visible sense of relief, so her pushing him away in this flashback is striking and cause for concern.

Ellie demands to know the truth about what happened in the hospital. Between Joel’s flimsy story and Mel’s recording, she’s essentially put the pieces together herself but she needs to hear it from Joel directly. She promises to go back to Jackson if Joel tells her the truth but swears that he will never see her again if he lies to her one more time. At long last, Joel confesses the truth to Ellie and she breaks down into anguished sobs. When he reaches out to comfort her, Ellie jerks away and states that she will return to Jackson like she said she would, but that they are done. And she means it. The two of them do not speak again until the night of the Winter Dance almost a year later. This flashback ends with Ellie walking away from Joel, which is a notable change from the last two flashbacks that had Joel walk away first. Ellie holds the power now. Additionally, instead of remaining fixed on one point, the camera follows her as she moves so that the last thing the player sees in this scene is her devastated expression.

Unfortunately for all of us, the show cuts this flashback entirely, using Ellie’s anger about what Joel does to Eugene as the main cause for their rift and Ellie finding out the truth about Salt Lake City is saved until one of the last scenes of the episode. This makes these moments feel incredibly rushed and less emotionally heavy than their game counterparts. Boo!!!! I am booing the writing in this show very loudly!!!

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The Dance 2.0

It’s an odd choice to me that we see the dance scene again but through Joel’s perspective. It’d be one thing if this was our first experience with the dance scene, but as a retread of a previously shown scene, I don’t think there’s much here that feels worth sitting in. If anything, the inclusion of this scene to me makes it feel like all the flashbacks should be viewed through Joel’s perspective rather than Ellie’s. This shift in focus is super frustrating to me because the flashbacks are some of the most illuminating for us as players when it comes to understanding Ellie’s perspective. The show not only refocuses on other characters instead of Ellie, it also overwrites her perspective whenever possible, making sure the freshest version of these events are not seen through her eyes. It puts us as an audience against her at every turn and while that is a feeling that builds between the player and Ellie in the game as her actions grow more cruel, it’s done with a lot more complexity and subtly compared to the show’s equivalent.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before but I suppose it’s also worth noting that the dance scene in the game isn’t shown until the final three hours of the game. The only way we know about what happened at the dance before then is through dialogue in Jackson at the beginning of the game.

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The Porch

Seeing this scene included here is, for lack of a better word, utterly devastating to me. The porch scene is, in my opinion, the absolute heart of everything and is the most important scene in the entire game. But a crucial piece of that lies in the fact that this flashback is the second to last scene in the game and comes after huge story beats. Absolutely everything in the game builds to this scene. Every death and every new reveal adding to a mounting need for a specific type of relief that this scene offers. Including it now in the show feels like all the air has been let out of the balloon. I am so sad and disappointed.

Not only is the placement of this scene changing the entire feel of the scene, but the conversation at hand is different as well. In the game, the porch scene is the first and only time Joel and Ellie discuss her queerness and Joel is immediately supportive. His support frustrates her because she’s still so incredibly angry with him about his lies and I think she also feels especially vulnerable about Joel finding out about this part of her in such an uncontrolled, unpleasant way. Ellie expresses that Joel has robbed her of purpose in life just as she does in the show. But the conversation between the two of them is so much more nuanced and subtextual in the game, in part because so much more time has passed between Ellie finding out the truth and this moment. Something especially worth noting is that Joel does not say he loves Ellie in the game. The show’s decision to do so made me roll my eyes and throw up my hands in frustration. It’s the type of writing you see fifteen year olds include in their fan fiction for the game. Writing choices like this feel like a fantasy world where everyone says everything they’re feeling at all times and no one has any regrets because thank god we all said what we were thinking at every turn. Game Joel saying he would do it all over again if given the chance IS him saying he loves Ellie. Having the show’s version of the character say those words and then also that he loves Ellie feels like a redundancy and a cheap way to draw sympathy from audiences. Especially when he repeats the line his father said to him in the opening flashback about how he hopes Ellie does better than him someday.

My other issue with the show’s version of this scene is related to Ellie’s decision to forgive Joel. In the game, this isn’t the moment where she finds out about Joel’s lies. She’s had time to process the truth and what it means for her and her relationship with Joel for sometime. She has been living her life in such a way where Joel has been removed and she’s had time to assess what that means and whether or not it’s truly how she wants to go forward. Her decision to speak to him after the dance is huge given how committed she’s been to severing their relationship entirely. The show rushes us through these moments, which is an especially odd characterization of Ellie because again and again we see how incapable she is to forgive people. It’s one of her greatest faults that she bears grudges for so long and that quality is absolutely unidentifiable in the show version of her. I have plenty more complaints about how this choice to forgive dilute so much of her character but I think I’ll save it for the finale where those issues feel somehow even more prevalent.

The show had previously teased this scene in the first episode, a choice that had given me pause and cause for concern even then, but the game’s one reference to this scene is far briefer and with way less context involved and it occurs much later in the game as well. Because of this, we spend, quite literally, the entire game assuming the very last time Ellie spoke to Joel was when she got angry with him at the dance. The gradual reveal of the flashbacks fleshes this out even more, showing us that not only was the fight at the dance possibly their last conversation, but that she had cut ties with him entirely before the dance. There’s a great sense of mourning in these realizations that the player feels and it makes it easier for us to sympathize with Ellie’s choices because her quest for revenge is seemingly fueled by this need to atone for the fact she never forgave Joel.

But then!!! The porch scene flips that assumption on its head. Ellie did forgive Joel and what she’s seeking is not atonement for not forgiving him, but rather retribution for being robbed of what a full reconciliation could have meant for the two of them. It wasn’t just that Joel’s secrets were finally known, Ellie’s were too. She wasn’t hiding her queerness from Joel anymore, just as Joel wasn’t hiding his transgressions from Ellie. They could have finally seen each other fully and on a level playing field, had his death not followed less than 12 hours later. There is so much relief in knowing that Ellie expressed a desire to reconcile with Joel, but there is also a new found grief in understanding how close healing was before it was snatched away.

For me, this scene means a lot for very personal reasons. I never had an opportunity to reconcile with my dad before his own sudden passing. Our relationship ended on very, very bad terms, and there are countless times over the years that I have wished for a moment with him like Ellie and Joel share here at the end of the game. There is a sort of transmitted catharsis in seeing this scene play out, particularly because of its placement. We end the entire game on this choice to forgive and the brief and final scene that follows this flashback is so devastating and healing in its own right. I love it and treasure it a lot as a piece of understanding my own relationship with grief and regret.

So maybe, because of that, I just truly can not look at this piece of the show in fairness, but I do think ultimately the writing in this scene again is so heavy-handed and fan-servicey in a way that feels borderline immature and cowardly.

If you haven’t already seen the game version of this scene, I highly recommend watching it here.

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Overall, I found this episode incredibly frustrating in how it handles the material. Interestingly enough too, even though we get so many more flashbacks compared to the game, everything shown here feels so much more rushed and half-hearted. It’s a very troubling combination, particularly since this is an episode written by Druckmann and Halley Gross rather than Mazin. The game’s creator and writer are just as involved in the butchering of this story as Mazin is and that’s all the more alarming to me.

I hope to have my breakdown of the finale up sooner rather than later. However, to be transparent, it’s rough going. I watch the episodes at least two times through before I start writing and I rewatch certain scenes even more as I write these out and truthfully… I am dreading having to go through that process again. It was tough just getting through this episode. But I will persist, because I need to finish things I start, and because I do ultimately find the payoff of explaining my thoughts thoroughly rewarding.

Thank you for reading if you did, especially since this is so late and much longer than usual! Curious to read your thoughts on this episode if you’re willing to share them!