There are two passages of dialogue from this penultimate episode of The Last of Us’s second season that are worth singling out. On two very different levels, they spell out the two biggest reasons why The Last of Us, even at its best — which, in this episode, it probably is — doesn’t work.

The first comes several years into the multi-year flashback that comprises the bulk of the episode. The episode’s throughline is Ellie’s birthday, which we observe year after year following her and Joel’s arrival in Jackson Hole. By this point we’ve watched several of Ellie’s teenage birthdays come and go, typically celebrated by Joel with lavishly thoughtful gifts — specially baked cakes, handmade guitars, visits to a museum, simulated rides in an Apollo space capsule. 

But after he walks in on her during her 17th hitting the teenage trifecta — she’s stoned and making out with a girl who gave her a tattoo — the two become partially estranged. Joel’s unthinking homophobia here is striking, and one of the first times the show seems unequivocally opposed to his viewpoint. 

Two years later, they’ve mostly patched things up, though she still lives in his garage rather than his house. His gift for her 19th birthday is her first patrol, a gig she’s coveted for years. Joel is surprised to find her awake and dressed when he comes knocking; what he doesn’t know is that she’d been up early rehearsing a series of questions based on her suspicion that his story of what happened that fateful night at the Fireflies HQ years ago is a lie.

The patrol puts off her questions, but it also answers them. They receive an emergency call from another pair of patrollers, who need backup against some infected. By the time they arrive, one is dead. The other, Eugene (Joe Pantoliano in one of the episode’s two killer cameos), we already know as the husband of therapist Gail, slain by Joel. And he’s been bitten.

There’s some very clever writing being done here. We know that Eugene dies. We know that Joel is involved. We know that Gail knows this, though she continues to see Joel as a patient regardless. But we don’t know the truth of what happens. Will it go down like Joel says it went down — Eugene turns and Joel has no choice but to kill him? Is it actually Ellie, the rookie patroller, who kills him, with Joel taking the rap? Does Eugene’s past connection to the Firefles have anything to do with it? Writer Craig Mazin, whose script is directed here by his co-creator Neil Druckmann, adeptly bakes uncertainty into a sure thing.

In the end, Joel promises Ellie he’ll spare Eugene long enough to travel back to Jackson Hole and say goodbye to Gail. But while she’s off grabbing the horses, Joel marches the man to the shore of a mountain lake and shoots him, breaking a straight-up promise not to do so. So when Joel feeds Gail a line of noble bullshit about how it went down, Ellie blows up his spot, telling the truth and severing the bridge over their breach.

But not for good. Earlier in the season, Ellie said she never went to talk to Joel on New Year’s Eve after he decked the homophobic loudmouth at the dance. But she did! So why did she lie and say otherwise? Because the truth was unbearable. Finally confronting Joel about the death of the Fireflies, she extracts the truth from him. There were no other immune people. There were no raiders. He killed them all. And they could have found a cure if he hadn’t.

Is she mad? Yes, of course. In another extremely effective bit of writing, we see over the years that teenage Ellie has a sort of artistic fixation on moths — Joel engraves one in her guitar, her girlfriend tattoos one on the forearm she burned to hide her bite marks, she draws them compulsively. It’s literally years into this obsession that Joel learns the truth about it from Gail: moths represent death. Even if she doesn’t know, she knows. She’s spent years reckoning with the cost of Joel’s crime — to the Fireflies, to humanity, to her own sense of purpose in he world — and he had no idea. Her pain, and his sudden realization of his obliviousness to it, are haunting.

But her anger doesn’t change his mind. “If somehow I had a second chance, at that moment, I would do it all over again, Joel says.”Because I love you, in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will. But if that day should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me.” The reference here is to his own father, played in another terrific cameo by Tony Dalton. A cop and a child abuser, he one night spares Joel and his brother Tommy from a beating, instead telling Joel of how his own father once broke his jaw for stealing candy. He’s never been that bad, he reassures himself, before passing along his wish that Joel do better than he has the same way he’s done better than his own father.

Ellie doesn’t know the backstory, of course, but she takes Joel’s words on board. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this,” she says. Yeah, no fuckin’ shit, I wrote in my notes. He perpetrated a mass shooting and doomed humanity to a second dark age like a one-man Trump administration, on behalf of a person who would rather have died for the cause. (One of TLoU’s many false binaries is the idea that the only way the Fireflies could find a cure is by killing Ellie; another is that the only way they could bring about her death is through deception, rather than by respecting her autonomy and asking her for this sacrifice.)

But then she adds “…but I would like to try.”

To quote I Think You Should Leave, you sure about that? 

I think it’s perfectly okay not to forgive Joel for what he did, actually. (No matter what Druckmann says in interviews.) I think it is in fact reasonable to demand that members of society, even one being actively atomized by environmental catastrophes and authoritarian governments, consider not only their rights but their responsibilities, not only the good of them and theirs but of everyone and everyone’s. I think a common good exists, and I think it’s meet and right to shun and despise people who do their utmost to destroy it. 

Like most episodes of TLoU, this one makes the most of its gorgeous natural backdrop. Druckman has a real knack for theatrical tableaux — Joel watching Ellie climb a vine-encrusted dinosaur statue, Joel and Ellie walking around a model of the solar system, Ellie and Joel and Gail and Tommy gathered around Eugene’s body. These moments, where the action slows down so both the characters and ourselves can gaze in something in awe or horror or wonderment, are one of the show’s trademarks, and maybe its strongest aesthetic weapon. And again, Mazin is a frequently clever and capable writer; that moth business is going to stick with me.

But The Last of Us has chosen to prioritize a heartwarming father-daughter reunion over, quite literally, the salvation of humankind. The world is awash with men harboring this exact paranoid fantasy, that their proprietary interest in their wives and children absolve them of their bonds to broader humanity and absolve them of any wrongdoing committed in their in-group’s name. They run our country now, as they do others, and they’ve perpetrated real horrors against real people. I’m not interested in trying to forgive them. I think it’s worth considering what this show is asking us to forgive.

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.