Flashback time! I’ll admit, I didn’t think we’d be getting it as the penultimate episode to The Last of Us‘s second season. But the people get what they want tonight. Joel and Ellie are about to spend a day together, and Pedro Pascal called Bella Ramsey “kiddo.”
The smash cut to our favorite duo of 2023 was clearly intended as both punctuation and continuity. It was the end of Ellie’s utterance, “I know,” when Nora revealed the details of Joel’s carnage in Salt Lake. And it was the beginning of the answers to all the questions that surround this entire season—hell, the entire heart of this story—and drive Ellie’s reckless force of purpose in Seattle.
As far as notes on when to tune in for the second installment: HBO will release episodes of The Last of Us on Sundays at 9:00pm ET/6:00pm PT.
For story notes, read on.
The Last of Us story notes
Don’t look now, but I see an even scoreboard on the revenge tally. One for Abby, one for Ellie. It’s not entirely fair nor balanced, given that, at one point, Joel was Ellie’s whole world. Or maybe it was always just the other way around. I digress. In any case, Ellie’s not done yet, not by any stretch of the imagination. But before we get to any of that, Mazin and Druckmann are dialing it back a few years and giving us what we can imagine to be the singular most important sequence in Joel and Ellie’s post-Salt-Lake companionship.
As to what that will look like, we only have snippets from the trailer. A confrontation. Many smiles. Backpacks. A trek through the woods. A small body of water. Ellie’s face in wonderment. Ellie’s face in rage. Joel’s stoicism through it all—except for those smiles.
We break from the main action—the revenge game—tonight for what will likely feel like feature-length devastation. Manchester by the Sea in Jackson, Wyoming type stuff.
Present-day storyline housekeeping
Just one thing we want to remember, here. Jesse (the father of Dina’s unborn child) and Tommy (Joel’s brother) tracked Ellie and Dina to Seattle. Jesse and Dina split off from Ellie (this time it definitely was the other way around) to head back to the theater; Tommy is scouting the perimeter.
We’ve now, once again, got an entire ensemble to worry about amidst the faction war in Seattle.
