You can feel it right away. Even though it’s three months after the episode’s opening — in which a badly traumatized Ellie wakes up screaming in a hospital after witnessing her father figure Joel’s execution — and the good people of Jackson Hole are busy rebuilding in the spring sunshine, the sense of loss is palpable. I’m not talking about the dozens of citizens killed by the infected during their incursion into the fortified city. I’m not even talking about the death of Joel himself, not exactly.
Pedro Pascal isn’t on this show anymore!
That’s problem number one with The Last of Us’s choice to kill Joel: charisma collapse. The departure of Pedro Pascal leaves a black hole where his star power used to be. No shade to Bella Ramsey, or to Isabela Merced as Ramsey’s new traveling companion, or Gabriel Luna as Joel’s brother; they’re all capable actors, and Merced in particular makes the show’s tinny, quippy dialogue feel natural. But none of them have spawned catchphrases or serve as the living embodiment of a beer. You can feel the show’s center of gravity dissipate without the guy. It’s just not the same.
The funny thing is that The Last of Us didn’t even harness Pascal’s star power properly! Like The Mandalorian, it decided to cast the man who made his bones as the flamboyant Red Viper on Game of Thrones was as the strong silent type, brought out of his shell only by his love for a child in his charge. I dunno about you, but I’d prefer to see him brought out of his shell by pansexual orgies or cool spearfighting moves.
Problem number two: character shortage. When Game of Thrones killed off (spoiler alert for a 14-year-old TV show, I guess) Ned Stark in its ninth episode, it was one of the most shocking deaths in TV history. (TLoU demonstrates how shocking deaths have yielded diminishing returns.) But Thrones had a massive cast of compelling, fan-favorite characters to fall back on: Daenerys, Tyrion, Jon, Arya, Sansa, Robb, Cersei, Catelyn, Jaime, the whole gang.
By contrast, TLoU has Ellie and…Ellie, pretty much. Sure, Tommy and Maria appeared in Season 1, but they were barely presences in it; I remembered Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s characters better, and they’re best known for dying. For all intents and purposes, it’s like the show just lost fifty percent of its cast. But that’s actually understating the graveness of the situation, because when you have only two main characters and you get rid of one, you’re pretty much stuck with the other. If you find Ellie’s constant tough talk grating, as I do, that doesn’t leave you with much.
Problem number three: audience identification. The Last of Us Part II, the video game upon which this season is based, obviously killed Joel off as well, subbing in his murderer, Abby, as one of the game’s two playable characters (not just an antagonist, as she comes across on the show) from that point forward. Any gamer can tell you that thinking for a character, acting for a character, helping decide what a character can do or say naturally breeds attachment. In Ellie’s case, a full season-plus following her journey will accomplish much the same thing for TV.
But we didn’t spend that season with Dina. We certainly didn’t spend it with Abby, to whom we’re introduced when she’s vowing to torture Joel to death, which she then proceeds to do, largely audibly and on screen. You just can’t ask an audience unfamiliar with the games and Abby’s role in them to accept this particular baton toss. That thing’s getting dropped no matter how hard you try to pass it along.
This episode does its best, to be fair. There’s no sign of Abby just yet, though we see a whole platoon of heavily armed, vaguely Nazi-coded comrades in the Washington Liberation Front militia, aka the Wolves. But there’s plenty of Dina, who comes across as hyper-competent but not a dick about it, compassionate but not sappy, flirty but not carelessly so, quite possibly as strong a survivalist as Joel himself but still able to be sick to her stomach over the atrocities she and Ellie encounter. She’s also as good-looking in her own way as Joel was in his.
She is, in short, the perfect friend and traveling companion if you’re going on an unauthorized mission to Seattle to track down and assassinate your adoptive father’s killers in violation of a city council vote against such activity. I’d’ say too perfect, but again, Merced is adept at making Dina seem believable as a person, not just a collection of things Ellie needs a person to be. (For the record, like Dina, I probably prefer Frank Zappa to Fleetwood Mac, though it’s close.)
Ellie should thank her lucky stars she’s got someone as on-the-ball as Dina with her, because shit’s about to get hairy. The two women approach Seattle and, finding its outer perimeter and streets abandoned, assume they’re in the clear until they track down Abby and her, apparently, small group of fellow travelers. Little do they know that the Wolves are basically a full army, and were likely responsible for the massacre of a lightly armed religious cult we encounter earlier in the episode, whose bodies Dina and Ellie discover on their way west.
There’s not much to conclude from any of that just yet, unless you wanna read the wiki for the video game and spoil yourself. (I for one doubted Abby’s group were the “Wolves” mentioned as a threat by the cultists until I saw them in formation.) I can’t say the show’s track record, which over and over again establishes revolutionaries as being in some, all, or even more ways worse than the dictatorial government they were at one point all fighting. Andor this show is not. Sometimes the cure really is better than the disease, fellas!
The writing aside, this episode looks perfectly lovely. There are some gorgeous shots of Ellie and Dina visiting Jackson Hole’s cemetery at dawn, with Ellie dark agains the rose-gold haze of the sun. Nighttime looks black and rich on this show, forests green and lush, mountains stark and silver. Director Peter Hoar seems to understand that he’s collapsing Season 1’s entire road-trip narrative into hafl an episode, and he’s making all those natural vistas count.
But mainly I’m concerned that the show let all the air out of its own tires when it said goodbye to Pascal and Joel. I’ve never felt quite so distinctive and immediate a sense of “Oh, this isn’t working” after a big creative swing of this nature. This is a hole in the wall no amount of fortifying can close back up.
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.