Sure, okay.
This is the big shocking episode of The Last of Us this season, I guess, the one designed to throw the viewer off balance and generate “I can’t believe they did that!” buzz. The problem is that nearly 12 years after the Red Wedding, that particular party trick is played out. I don’t mind that this episode, just the second of the show’s second season, kills off Pedro Pascal’s lead character, Joel — and that’s the problem. I don’t mind, and I don’t care.
The battle stuff is fun enough. Yes, I question many of the tactical decisions made by Joel’s brother Tommy in defending their town of Jackson Hole from a ravening horde of infected who nearly caught Joel out on patrol before turning toward the town. I’m not sure how “give four guys flame throwers and stand them in the middle of the street in front of a zombie horde that can nearly outrun horses” was supposed to go even under the best case scenario, for example. Meanwhile, the infected’s winter survival mechanism of hibernating under a blanket of their own corpses doesn’t strike me as doing much good if they all launch themselves into the freezing cold en masse if you get too close.
Lapses in logic like these are easy enough to ignore if you get enough good stuff in exchange, though. Here, you’re still watching a horde of mushroom zombies charging through the snow, getting blown to bits and burned up and shot in the head and all that good stuff. Things go south when a huge cave troll–sized infected ignores the heavily fortified and defended gate and just bashes through another part of the wall. (That’s another oversight on Tommy’s part.) After that, zombies run amok through the village, swarming its rooftop defenders, until guard dogs help turn the tide. (Why not release them first? Who’s running this operation, Pete Hegseth?)
To the extent that anything novel or clever is being done here, it’s in getting you to think the showdown at Jackson Hole, not the fate of Joel, is the crux of the episode. Battles are normally the focal point of the episodes they take place in, for the obvious reason that they’re battles. Moreover, you’d normally think Abby’s character would engage in some long, elaborate deception of Joel, maybe even getting second thoughts, before their final confrontation. It’s not the kind of thing you see coming within fifteen minutes of the characters’ first meeting.
But then it happens. Abby, the vengeful ex-Firefly whose attempt to waylay a patrol triggered the zombie outbreak, is rescued by Joel. (It’s a small world after all.) Once she brings him back to the lodge where she and her pals are holed up, she relays the word to her comrades that Joel is Joel. They get the drop on him and his partner Dina, whom they knock out with a syringe full of something.
Then Abby shoots Joel in the leg, which she has her buddies tie off with a tourniquet. She proceeds to wail on the exposed shattered bone with a golf club, then beat him about the head and face with her bare hands.
By now Ellie has arrived, but Abby’s gang grabs her before she can do anything. As Ellie screams and cries and pleads for her to not to do it, Abby grabs the broken shaft of the golf club and stabs Joel in the neck with it, killing him. Abby and the gang depart, leaving Ellie, Dina, and Jesse, who arrives too late to help, to drag Joel’s corpse back to the smoldering, corpse-strewn streets of Jackson Hole.
Sure, okay.
That’s my reaction, honest to god. I wish it were “Holy shit!” Honestly, I’d prefer it to be “Ugh, this shit sucks,” even. At least then I’d feel something.
But I dunno what writer Craig Mazin and director Mark Mylod want out of me here. For Joel’s death to land the way it’s supposed to, a partial list of films and television shows I feel it’s best not to have seen first includes at least four specific episodes of Game of Thrones, the most famous episode of Breaking Bad, both Dawn of the Deads (Romero and Snyder), The Walking Dead, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Leon the Professional, maybe Casino if you want to be generous….Unfortunately, I have seen all of those things, and you’ve probably seen a few too. Nothing we get in this episode rises above the level of remixing these influences at best.
And the writing surrounding the death itself is dreadful. I don’t know what’s derived from the source material and what’s original to the show, but this is the reason people use the phrase “video game” as a pejorative. Abby is an absurd, speechifying villain, whose cartoonish sadism eliminates any temptation you may have to take her side in the question of what justice for Joel should look like. Her chance meeting with Joel is the stuff genre narratives are made of, and I wouldn’t take issue with it if it weren’t for the fact that it feels like a shortcut to wrapping up a storyline before the next chapter of the game.
If you want your post-apocalyptic survival-horror ice-zombie Sunday-night itch scratched as quickly and clumsily as possible, yeah, The Last of Us will do. But surely it can do better.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.