‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Zombies, Golf Clubs and Tears

Every character in “The Last of Us” is haunted by death, including Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). It comes with the post-apocalyptic territory. Abby’s biggest losses have not been the result of the HBO drama’s infected zombie outbreak, though. They’re because of Joel (Pedro Pascal), whom viewers learned in the “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere killed nearly all of her Firefly friends during his rampage to save Ellie (Bella Ramsey). In the opening moments of “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 2, Abby finds herself back in that Salt Lake City hospital where Joel decided a brighter future for humanity was not worth losing Ellie.

“Through the Valley” opens with Abby walking slowly down the same, dark hospital hallway Joel did at the end of “The Last of Us” Season 1. Her journey is interrupted, however, by her future self, who warns her not to go into the operating room waiting at the end of the hall. “His brains are on the floor,” she says, but her past self does not listen, and the mere memory of the trauma awaiting inside is enough to wake Abby from her nightmare. Those who played “The Last of Us Part II” have known for five years that the man Abby mentions in her dream is her father, the doctor Joel killed without hesitation before he could cut open Ellie’s brain. (Rather than making viewers wait hours for that info drop like “The Last of Us Part II,” the episode reveals it during its traumatic finale.)

It is this loss that first propels Abby to go on a patrol near Jackson, despite the danger of a forthcoming snowstorm, and then drives her to trick Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) into walking straight into a trap even after he’s saved her life from an infected horde. And it is the rage she feels over the crime she believes Joel committed against her that leads her to shoot him in the leg and then beat him to death in the final minutes of “Through the Valley.” This scene, while not quite as brutal or gory as the same sequence from “The Last of Us Part II,” packs the same sickening punch. Much like its video game counterpart, Joel’s death also marks both an end and a beginning — the conclusion of one cycle of violence and the start of another.

Infected at the Gates

Before “Through the Valley” gets to its bone-crunching conclusion, it returns to Ellie, who is awoken in the morning by Jesse (Young Mazino). He razzes her about kissing Dina just a week after their breakup, and Ellie reveals as they make their way through Jackson that she was actually planning on going on her morning patrol with Joel. Jesse tells her that the older man left earlier with Dina, prompting Ellie to say that she knows her and Joel’s relationship is “complicated” but that the two have patched things up — a confession that only makes the latter’s death all the more shattering (for her and us).

Ellie and Jesse’s patrol is cut short by a snowstorm they escape only when Jesse leads them into an abandoned 7Eleven that Ellie discovers was secretly a weed farm tended to by Gail’s (Catherine O’Hara) late husband, Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). While there, Ellie finds a Firefly pendant that once belonged to Eugene and Jesse remarks that it’s a shame Eugene survived so much only to still (presumably) get infected. He “couldn’t be saved,” Jesse says, and his words only make Ellie’s survivor’s guilt over her immunity rise to the surface again. He and everyone else could have potentially been saved, after all, had the Fireflies’ plan to use Ellie’s immunity to mass-produce a cure been successful.

In one of “The Last of Us” Season 2’s largest deviations from its source material yet, “Through the Valley” cuts from Ellie and Jesse to a blockbuster-sized infected attack on Jackson. An army of mushroom-ified zombies charge through the falling snow and pile onto the community’s walls. Tommy (Gabriel Luna) does a fine job leading Jackson’s defense, but he ends up cornered alone behind a trio of buildings with a bloater. He survives the encounter only after torching the zombie long enough with his flamethrower that it eventually dies. This sequence, as silly and video-game-y as it sometimes feels, is pulled off with thrilling style by director Mark Mylod, whose experience helming episodes of “Game of Thrones” likely prepared him well for this week’s “Last of Us” installment.

A Pack of Wolves

As technically impressive as it is, the infected attack on Jackson is nothing more than a distraction in terms of what follows it. Everything in “Through the Valley” is leading to Abby’s showdown with Joel. Along the way, “Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin makes a few key changes, including pairing Joel up on his patrol with Dina instead of Tommy (who gets beaten and knocked out by Abby’s friends in “The Last of Us Part II”). As she is being held by Manny (Danny Ramirez), Dina notices W.L.F. wolf patches on the former Fireflies’ bags before she is sedated and put into a drug-induced sleep by a reluctant Mel (Ariela Barer). Joel pleads for his and Dina’s lives by reminding Abby that he saved hers — a remark that only prompts her to ask, “What life?” before shooting him in the leg with a shotgun.

Abby forces Mel to tourniquet Joel’s leg so he doesn’t bleed out before she gets the chance to torture him. Before she begins, though, she kneels down and tells Joel exactly why she is going to kill him, asking him if he even remembers the doctor he killed in the “Last of Us” Season 1 finale. (He does, as Pascal’s look of recognition and a quick flash of the moment inform viewers). “The nurses* said you didn’t even look at him when you shot him,” Abby bitterly remarks. “It doesn’t matter if you have a code like me, or you’re a lawless piece of s—t like you. There are just some things, everyone agrees, are just f—king wrong.”

There was some concern among certain “Last of Us” fans that Dever was too small to play Abby, who has a purposefully muscular, broad physique in the game. Dever’s performance at the end of “Through the Valley” — the arrogance, rage, self-satisfaction and conviction she communicates as she kneels in front of Pascal — leaves no question why she was the right actress for the role. In a moment that will send a chill of recognition down “Last of Us Part II” players’ spines, Abby ultimately finds her weapon of choice in a nearby bag of golf clubs. She grabs one and proceeds to ruthlessly beat Joel to death while her friends look on.

*One of those nurses was played by Laura Bailey, the actress who portrayed Abby in “The Last of Us Part II”

The Shadow of Death

Abby’s beatdown is interrupted by Ellie, who only manages to cut Manny across the cheek before she is pinned to the ground. Ellie is then forced to watch through her sobs, screams and vows of vengeance as Abby kills Joel once and for all by plunging the broken half of her golf club through his neck. (As stomach-churning as this scene is, I still find the game’s version worse. That’s partly due to the sheer brutality of Abby caving Joel’s head in with her golf club in the game, as well as the hysteria and earth-shaking anger and sadness of Ashley Johnson’s performance* as Ellie. Ramsey takes a quieter, more devastated approach in “Through the Valley.”)

With Joel dead, Abby and her friends depart, and Ellie is left with nothing to do but crawl over to his body and press her face against his. The episode ends moments later on a shot of a shell-shocked Dina, Jesse and Ellie riding on horseback toward Jackson as they drag Joel’s wrapped body behind them through the snow. Over this image, “Through the Valley” plays its titular song. “I walk through the valley, of the shadow of death,” Ashley Johnson sings, just like she did in the original 2016 announcement trailer for “The Last of Us Part II.”

*Now seems like as good a time as any to note: For those curious about playing “The Last of Us Part II,” Johnson’s performance in it is, in this writer’s opinion, the greatest in any narrative video game.

That trailer, notably, ends with Johnson’s bloodied Ellie promising Troy Baker’s Joel, “I’m gonna find — and I’m gonna kill — every last one of them.” The inclusion of “Through the Valley” in “The Last of Us” Season 2 obviously carries a different weight and meaning than it did nine years ago, and there is something truly haunting about how Johnson’s Ellie gets to sing the thoughts and feelings of Ramsey’s this time. But the implication is the same. The shadow of death has covered the world of “The Last of Us” again, and thoughts of revenge are not far from the mind of Ramsey’s Ellie. As one cycle ends, another begins.

“The Last of Us” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.

The post ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Zombies, Golf Clubs and Tears appeared first on TheWrap.