Review: The Last of Us, "Future Days" | Season 2, Episode 1

Welcome back to our coverage of HBO’s The Last of Us, which returns for a second season after a lengthy hiatus. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For more information on what we’ll be covering in April and beyond, see our Spring schedule.

So let’s get this out of the way: I don’t much like The Last Of Us Part II. There are Reasons, and I won’t get into them here because I don’t want to spoil anything going into this season. However, I’ve been trying to replay it before the show aired again, and I’ve been struggling to get through it. I mention this now in case I miss some subtle connections, and to let you know that I’m going into these reviews with a small but real chip on my shoulder. I will, as always, do my best to judge the show as a show, and not just as an adaptation, but this isn’t going to be the same as season one for me, and I wanted to warn you in advance.

The thing is, whatever my problems with LoU2, I still love the world it created. I still care about Joel and Ellie, and Neil Druckmann, the director and writer of the game, is still very good at making characters talk in a way that’s engaging and believable. That’s something the show has done a decent job capturing, and my hope for S2 is that Craig Mazin and others will take the bones of the game’s plot and find a way to spin them that makes something compelling for both fans of the source and newbies—and, fingers crossed, for people like me who loved the original and couldn’t click with the sequel. What I’m saying is, I haven’t given up on the show just yet, and after this first episode, I’m excited to see how the changes (and similarities) to the source material unfold. I have reservations, but there are a lot of reasons for me (and everyone) to hope after “Future Days.”

After a brief flashback to the final scene of the previous season, reminding us of Joel’s lie to Ellie and Ellie’s tenuous belief of that lie, we check in on a group of Fireflies mourning in the aftermath of the massacre that saved Ellie’s life. One of those Fireflies, a young woman named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), is especially pissed and already making plans to hunt and kill Joel for his actions. If you know the game, you know this character is important, and the show spends just enough time on her to make her stick in the viewers’ mind. However, she and her friends disappear for most of the hour, vanishing into a five year time jump only to pop in just before the final credits.

As with last year, I’ll keep most of the specific video game connections and comments to a section in the Stray Observations, but Dever is an interesting choice for Abby, to say the least. She’s a great actor, but Abby’s physical strength was a big part of what made her character stand out in the game. As is, Dever and Bella Ramsey are roughly the same size, and it’s not difficult to imagine a world where Dever might have ended up as Ellie instead.1 I’m curious to find out how intentional that similarity is, but we still don’t know much about Abby, beyond the fact that she is scarily determined to kill Joel—”slowly.”

The bulk of the episode concerns Joel and Ellie in Jackson, Wyoming, a large town of survivors cordoned off behind walls. It’s a homey, welcoming place, and what becomes apparent almost immediately is how ill-suited both Joel and Ellie seem to it. The first time we see Ellie, she’s doing a practice fight with the intensity of someone who knows exactly how they look to everyone else, and whatever sweetness might have defined her in the first season is gone. She’s determined to prove herself in some way that I suspect even she wouldn’t be able to define, punching harder than everyone, browbeating Tommy into letting her go on patrol, and then ignoring recon rules and heading into an abandoned grocery store with clear signs of the Infected.

I want to pause for a moment on that scene in particular. The whole sequence is solid suspense, leading up to an encounter with what seems to be a new kind of Infected: a fungal zombie with enough dim vestiges of intelligence to draw Ellie out and nearly kill her. My problem is that Ellie brings her friend Dina along with her. Dina (Isabela Merced) is a new introduction to the world of Jackson, and we quickly learn that she and Ellie have been best friends for a while; we also learn, if we aren’t completely blind, that Ellie has a crush on her (and the feelings are likely reciprocal). Merced is distractingly pretty in this world of grouchy weirdos, but she makes Ellie’s affections easy to relate to, although right now the character doesn’t have much more than that going on.

Anyway, like I said: my problem is that Ellie, who is immune to Infected bites and understandably cavalier about her own life, brings her best friend and potential love interest on a pointless excursion that could easily have ended in Dina getting bitten. The overall construction of the sequence is simple enough to follow: the two are on patrol together, they’re both over-confident about their abilities, and they’re young and trying to show off and think death can’t touch them. Except Ellie literally discovered her immunity to the fungal plague at the same time she lost her first love in a situation not unlike this one, and the fact that she seems to be pushing for them to go forward (instead of her just going along with Dina’s enthusiasm, which would’ve made more sense) makes the character seem a lot dumber and more self-involved than I’d come to believe.

Neither Ellie nor Joel come across especially well in this episode. That’s not a criticism per se; after their experiences together, the trauma they went through, and Joel’s actions in the end (which, even if Ellie doesn’t know yet, is still a festering sore between them), neither of them were in a position to settle into a community without growing pains. In the five years since the end of season one, both have been settling into bad habits without really recognizing that’s what’s happening. But it feels like, with Ellie, they spun the dial too hard towards “rebellious asshole.” She’s not a monster, but her selfishness and sarcasm have a childishness to them that stands out among the largely reasonable and level-headed community. Joel wronged her, she’s the victim, but we don’t really see much vulnerability or fear in her, the mix of steel and sweetness that made her so memorable in season one; hopefully that will come in the future.

As for Joel, he’s done a fairly decent job of hiding his past and fitting in, although the asshole still pokes out from time to time. He and Ellie are on the outs, for reasons that haven’t been filled in yet—the big question is, did he tell her what really happened? Did she find out evidence he lied to her? Or was it something else? And while he’s mostly genial and level-headed, he turns whiny when he tries to figure out why she’s so angry. He’s also got a conservative streak going: when talking to community leader Maria about incoming refugees, he argues they shouldn’t be accepting so many people when they don’t have the resources to house them. It’s a logical argument, but one that smacks of self-serving “I got mine” protectionism, which has been at the core of Joel’s personality for a while. He has empathy, but only to a point, and once he’s decided what’s important to him, everyone else can go hang.

This comes especially clear in the episode’s best scene, which features the introduction of Gail (Catherine O’Hara), Jackson’s resident therapist. Gail rules. O’Hara only really has a single scene in this episode (we get a glimpse of her later on during the New Year’s Eve party that ends the hour, but it’s edited in a way that makes it obvious she wasn’t around to film very long), but she knocks it out of the park. Joel wants her to validate him for his resentment and frustration with Ellie, and she more or less tells him to wake the fuck up, delivering a monologue about her anger at Joel for killing her husband, Eugene.

We don’t know yet what happened, and given that Joel is still walking around in Jackson and Gail is willing to see him at all, I’m guessing this had something to do with being infected. Hopefully we’ll get the details later, but what matters in this moment is Gail being willing to confess something she thinks is bad about herself in order to start healing from it; Joel, when confronted, refuses to do the same. This isn’t surprising, and it’s not new information either, but it serves to establish the main conflict between Joel and Ellie going forward, and how that conflict has made it impossible for either of them to really find anything like peace in their lives (even if Ellie still doesn’t know exactly went down).

The hour ends with the party, and with Dina and Ellie smooching, at Dina’s insistence (not that Ellie’s objecting); a guy named Seth calls them dykes and Joel shoves him, which pisses Ellie off to no end. It is not the most exciting of conclusions, but then—apart from the long sequence in the grocery store—this wasn’t an episode about suspense. Instead, “Future Days” set about establishing Jackson, the value of it, the fractured nature of our two heroes’ lives, and the coming threat of Abby and her quest for vengeance. Oh, and we’ve also got super smart fungus to worry about. I’m sure we won’t have long to wait for blood.

Stray observations

• No one in town besides Tommy (who’s married to Maria; they have an adorable son) and Joel know about Ellie’s immunity. Ellie isn’t all that happy about keeping it secret. So there’s another time-bomb ticking in the background.
• The idea that Joel, a fifty-something dude with salt-and-pepper hair dressed exactly like everyone else, would be easy to track post-apocalypse is pretty funny, although I guess it did take Abby and her group five years to find him.
• I enjoyed how video game-y the first sequence of Ellie stalking an Infected was. She has to do stealth, she uses a bottle to distract the monster, and then she jumps on it and stabs the fuck out of it. (In the game, stealth kills are fait accompli if you press the right buttons; in real life, I don’t know if I’d be quite that cavalier about it even if I was immune.)
• Editor’s Note: Despite the fact you have no doubt read dozens of reviews written with the use of advance screeners, HBO actively refused multiple requests to do the same for Episodic Medium. So please be patient with Zack on Sundays, yes?

Video Game Corner

• Okay, so this both varies a lot from the source and not quite as much as I was expecting. For one thing, the source doesn’t open with an introduction to Abby—we meet her for the first time after she and her group arrive in Wyoming, learning soon enough that they’re there for someone but not finding out why even after they catch him. The game cuts back before between her and Ellie right up until, well...we’ll get to that soon enough. The opening could still play out on the show like it plays out in the game, as everything we see in this first hour could technically happen before the game’s first section. But I’m hoping the series keeps finding new spins on the material. I don’t want to lose certain characters as quickly as we lose them in the game, and the introduction of a “smarter” fungus— something I don’t remember from the source material—has all kinds of interesting possibilities. Also, for what it’s worth, I don’t like the game because I think it’s way too heavy-handed about its “Violence is bad” take, and that it sacrifices being an engaging experience to use misery as bludgeon; that will, at the very least, play better on a TV show that isn’t constantly requiring me to do, and rewarding me for, violent things.