‘The Last of Us’ season 2 premiere recap: Parenthood makes Joel an even less fungi

Joel acted out of love.

It’s been two years since the devastating season 1 finale of The Last of Us, HBO’s adaptation of the 2013 Naughty Dog video game that coiled its tendrils around our throats and yanked us into a bleak apocalypse. After the surrogate father/daughter duo spent a season fighting for survival amid terrifying cordyceps zombies and some even more terrifying humans, “Look for the Light” found Joel sacrificing what was left of his soul for the little girl who brought him back to life.

He acted out of love. And nothing’s been the same since.

Season 2 opens with a tower of giraffes (yep, that’s what a group is called) strolling through a graveyard of the Firelies Joel (Pedro Pascal) cut down in the Salt Lake City hospital where Ellie (Bella Ramsey) was about to be sacrificed in the hopes of a cure for the cordyceps infection.

The members of the group who survived (Spencer Lord, Ariela Barer, Tati Gabrielle, and Danny Ramirez) have gathered to mourn their fallen companions and make new plans, possibly involving a new sanctuary in Seattle. 

But Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) has other ideas. She wants to find the man who destroyed everything for the sake of one little girl. And when she does, she plans to kill him. 

“Slowly,” she grits out. “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”

And now we jump five years, where the little girl who spent season 1 begging for Joel’s affection is now 19 and holding the more-grizzled-than-ever Joel at an icy distance.

They’ve settled into his brother Tommy’s (Gabriel Luna)  Jackson, Wyo., community — notice I didn’t say “happily settled” — where Ellie’s spent the past half a decade leveling up her fighting skills, embracing her teenage angst, and charging a little too eagerly into danger outside of the city walls with Tommy’s reluctant approval. 

Joel, meanwhile, has become Jackson’s construction foreman, which puts him at odds with his sister-in-law, Maria (Rutina Wesley). (She wants him to build faster so they can take in people fleeing collapsed settlements, while he’s in the “secure your own oxygen mask first” camp.)

He also patiently mentors Ellie’s best friend Dina (Isabela Merced) about working with circuit breakers and fixing the root-clogged clay mainlines running through town. But when Dina interrupts their lesson to ask why Ellie’s angry with him, his desire to learn the answer himself cracks him wide open, and we see how devastated he is to be stuck watching Ellie flail against his presence in her life like an animal caught in a trap.

So what caused the rift? One obvious answer hinges on just how much Ellie knows about Joel’s big lie five years ago. At the time, he told her that doctors weren’t able to extract a cure from her, and they were forced to flee when raiders attacked the hospital. But her expression and subdued demeanor afterward suggested Ellie wasn’t buying what Joel was selling. It’s unclear how much he’s revealed since then, and in a hardscrabble existence like theirs, even a small amount of distrust can fester until it frays the strongest of bonds.

There’s some good news, at least: Joel’s in therapy! And there’s some even better news: his therapist, Gail, is played by the great Catherine O’Hara. Gail takes post-apocalyptic personal grooming to a new level while retaining enough brittleness to realistically exist in a community that fights every day for survival.

Joel’s copay for his session is a baggie of ditchweed, which will pair nicely with Gail’s a.m. cocktails in bitter celebration of her first birthday without her husband of 41 years. 

When Joel returns to what’s obviously his greatest therapy hits — woe is me, my teenage daughter hates me — Gail’s had it and urges him to say the scary thing out loud. In fact, she goes first, telling Joel that she hates him for killing her husband, Eugene. (It’s not that he did it, it’s how he did it.) Having lanced some of the acid from that festering wound, she asks Joel for the same hard honesty: “Did you do something to her?”

No. He did something for her, but as his eyes brim with tears, all he can muster is a clench-jawed, “I saved her.”

And now the girl Joel saved has moved into the garage attached to their home. It’s crammed with posters, cassette tapes, a Buddha incense holder, and even a guitar with a moth design on its neck, which means Joel at least attempted to honor his promise in the finale. 

As she cleans her gun, we see a large tattoo covering a wicked barn scar on her once-bitten arm. That combination of brutality and beauty is strategic; the good people of Jackson aren’t aware of Ellie’s immunity, even though she brattily screams it to the heavens when she and Tommy are alone outside the city.

Not even Dina’s aware of Ellie’s secret, despite their obviously close friendship. Dina tries to play gentle peacemaker on behalf of Joel when she comes to collect Ellie for patrol, suggesting they join him for a screening of Curtis and Viper. Ellie doesn’t take the bait, but she does take her late mother’s switchblade on the way out the door.

The pair mount their horses and impatiently listen to Jesse’s (Young Mazino) instructions before they set out on a recon mission under the leadership of Kat (Noah Lamanna), Ellie’s ex-girlfriend who “left her mark” on our heroine. As they chat about the upcoming New Year’s Eve barn dance, we learn that Dina and Jesse have broken up (“Yes, again. For now.”), and Ellie’s into someone who isn’t Kat.

Then the discovery of a grisly grizzly halts their conversation, and Ellie hops off Shimmer (an excellent name for a horse!) to investigate the bear’s mutilated remains, along with the dead clickers, humans, and various body parts scattered around it.

The survivors were likely sheltering in the nearby grocery store, and Ellie and Dina barely wait for the say-so from Kat before creeping inside to investigate the eerie screeching. 

With silence and precision that comes from countless dangerous excursions together, the pair sweep the building, and Ellie’s victory strut after dispatching a clicker is interrupted when she plunges through a rotten part of the floor. 

Gotta say, even if I’m immune to an infected’s bite, the basement of a long-abandoned supermarket after the fall of civilization doesn’t top the list of places I’d like to explore. Not Ellie, though. She wanders the space and stops to page through an old PEOPLE magazine until a gasping, choking noise pulls her attention away from the glossy banality of our dead world.

Ellie barks at the almost human-sounding creature to run at her, but it darts away and hides instead. Then from its hiding place, the infected crawls into view so we can feel the full effects of its once-pretty, now-ruined face beneath a crown of twisting fungus decorating the top of its head.

As delicate tendrils emerge from its nose cavity, the stalker makes just enough noise to cause Ellie to whip around. But it’s already on the move and blindsides Ellie with a tackle from the side.

Before Ellie manages to dispatch it with a gunshot, the creature lands a bite on her stomach that would’ve been fatal for any other human. (The less said about the tendril wiggling into the open wound, the better.) 

Ellie hides her injury from Dina when her friend arrives to rescue her, and the women are summoned to appear before the town leaders to share their experience. Although Maria doesn’t believe Dina’s claim that she was with Ellie when it happened, she accepts to trust of the rest of it: an infected stalked Ellie, lured her in, and waited for the right opportunity to strike. Intelligent zombies are definitely not a positive development.

Later that day, Ellie gets ready for the barn dance by using her pocket knife  — sanitized with alcohol first, thankfully —  to slice up the bite on her stomach. Having obscured the teeth marks, she stitches herself up and sits down to scribble her true feelings about Dina in her diary. Long story short, Ellie loves her and is terrified of screwing everything up.

Gee, I can’t imagine why she’d worry about losing one of the most important relationships in her lif— oh wait, that knock on the door is Joel, there to try connecting with Ellie like they used to. But his attempts are stilted, and in the end, he gives up and grabs the guitar, muttering that he’ll go restring it.

At the new year’s bash, live music and flowing alcohol help the good people of Jackson ring in 2029, although Ellie and Jesse are both decidedly un-festive as they watch Dina throw herself into dancing with a few of the local gents. 

When Ellie glumly observes that Dina and Jesse will be back together before long, Jesse disagrees, although we don’t hear his reasons why before Dina pulls Ellie onto the floor.

At first, it’s just two gal pals bein’ pals on the dance floor, but when Dina pulls Ellie’s arm around her waist, Ellie’s eyes flare in a silent freakout. Then in one of the sexier fully clothed seduction scenes I’ve seen, Dina leans forward to whisper that everyone watching them is jealous of Ellie.

Ellie quickly points out that she’s not a threat to any of them, which causes Dina to breathe, “Oh, Ellie. I think they should be terrified of you.” Okay, is it hot in here, or is it these two?

When Dina first presses her lips to Ellie’s, Ellie keeps her eyes open, like she’s scared that if she blinks, it’ll all go away. But as the kiss continues, Ellie closes her eyes and sinks into it — until Seth (Robert John Burke), the town bigot, orders them to quit making out in the middle of a family event. 

The women apologize and start to leave until Seth’s muttered slur has Ellie whipping back around to confront him. But Joel handles it for her, barreling into Seth from the side like a freight train. (Actually, he barrels into Seth like the Fungus Queen’s attack on Ellie.) Once Seth is neutralized, Joel immediately checks that Ellie’s okay.

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Ellie is not okay, and she screams at Joel to stop acting like she can’t take care of herself. Later that night, when she returns home to find him on the porch plucking the guitar, she stalks past without a word.

Not a tense enough start to the new year for you? Don’t worry; two new threats are creeping toward the city in the earliest hours of 2029. One is a mass of tiny, twisting tendrils wriggling through one of the city’s mainline. The other is Abby, who’s grimly pleased to have found Jackson — and Joel — so she can unleash the revenge that’s been five years in the making.

Spores for Thought

• Hi! I’m Sara, and I’ll be your TLOU recapper this season. I’m a mega zombie fan (if you let me, I’ll spend hours raving about World War Z — book not movie, obvi), but I’m a game novice who’s been watching playthrough after playthrough to prep for the show’s return. Let’s see how this season lands with TLOU2 diehards and newbies alike.
• Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have promised that, like season 1, the second season will be a combination of faithful adaptation and remixed game elements: “Sometimes it will be different radically, and sometimes it will be (barely) different at all,” Mazin has said. “It won’t be exactly like the game. It will be the show that Neil and I want to make.”
• Even with that caveat, gamers got Easter eggs galore in the premiere. There’s Dina’s comment about Kat leaving her mark on Ellie, the grocery store’s July employee of the month (what a good boy!), Joel’s guitar, the mention of Eugene… and, of course, we get to see the barn dance kiss and the subsequent confrontation recreated in precise detail, down to the vee of Dina’s burgundy shirt.
• One notable departure: unlike the structure of the game, we’re privy to Abby’s motivations immediately, both to avoid the inevitable spoilers and to build empathy for her sooner, according to Druckmann. Done and done. Kaitlyn Dever — once in the running to play Ellie in the movie adaptation that never was — is one of the most ferocious (respectful compliment!) actors of her generation, and I cannot wait to see what she brings to this complex, divisive role.
• Speaking of welcome additions, Catherine O’Hara’s obviously never done a wrong thing in her life, and let’s hear it for the baroness of bear-beque herself, Isabela Merced. She would’ve won the audience over on the strength of her grocery store non-verbals alone, conveying competence, bravery, and downright joie de vivre in the face of life-or-death stakes. But then you go and add a QZ’s worth of effortless chemistry between her and Bella Ramsey? Their relationship is steeped in comfort, care, and crackling need, and I’m already counting the days until next Sunday. See you then!