It feels unusual for The Last of Us to spend an episode on Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) happier days collectively so quickly after losing Joel. He’s solely been lacking for 3 episodes, and most of them have spent a lot time introducing new characters and factions that Ellie has began to really feel like a visitor star on her personal present. Yet with one episode to go, this temporary season is already about to wrap up. So if there’s going to be any reflection, it would as effectively be now, in an episode referred to as “The Price” that’s structured as a collection of flashback vignettes.
In the primary, a younger Joel Miller has a dialog together with his dad (Tony Dalton), who remembers his relationship with Joel’s grandpa. The elder Miller remembers his father punching him within the face so onerous his jaw wants to be wired shut. He’s telling Joel this story as a result of, whereas he has hit each Joel and Tommy, he advised himself he would by no means hit them like his father hit him. That’s the lesson he desires to impart to Joel: To be a bit of higher than his personal father.
It’s a pleasant scene well-acted by Dalton, however a really blunt tone-setter for the episode, which displays on Joel’s relationship with Ellie. Focusing on 4 of Ellie’s birthdays in between seasons 1 and 2, it is this season’s model of “Long, Long Time,” season 1’s surprising and heartfelt standalone following two characters’ relationship over a number of years. Only this time, the characters are our former main pair, a duo that’s sorely missed after Joel was killed on the finish of “Through the Valley.”
For most of the remaining hour, we get moments from Ellie’s birthdays. For her fifteenth, Ellie’s first 12 months residing in Jackson with Joel, Joel lovingly restores a guitar for her, and presents to train her how to play. She asks him to sing, and he roughly, and sweetly sings the primary verse of “Future Days,” the Pearl Jam music Ellie quietly sang the opening bars of in “Feel Her Love” last week. (This is how the entire episode capabilities: offering the complete context for little bits of foreshadowing within the earlier 5 episodes. It’s just like the present making its personal Easter Eggs, as opposed to simply pulling them from the sport.)
Ellie’s sixteenth birthday adapts a second followers of The Last of Us Part II adore, a go to to a pure historical past museum the place Joel has ready a shock for Ellie: a recording of the Apollo 15 mission for her to hear to whereas sitting within the precise house capsule, an actual astronaut helmet on her head. Much like within the recreation, Ellie closes her eyes and the viewer sees what she imagines: The flare of rockets, the majestic depths of house. Unlike the sport, we additionally see Joel’s face the entire time: Completely taken by Ellie, and thrilled to make her so completely satisfied.
By specializing in moments like this, The Last of Us desires us to know that even after the queasy, ambiguous ending of season one, Joel and Ellie have fashioned the type of daddy-daughter relationship it is not terribly clear they’d in the beginning of season two. And as good as these scenes are – Ramsey specifically has so much of enjoyable reverting to a youthful, goofier model of Ellie – the extra healthful and full relationship that the 2 are proven to have makes Ellie’s present-day actions a lot tougher to come to phrases with. Prior to this episode, it appeared like the 2 of them had so much of unresolved pressure; that lack of decision provides Ellie’s actions grounding. But in “The Price,” as we see, the 2 do get the prospect to clear the air on even the present’s thorniest questions.
After a rocky seventeenth birthday, the place Joel tries to shock Ellie with a cake solely to discover her doing “all the teenage shit at once”—playing around with a barely older woman, who gave her a tattoo, and introduced weed—”The Price” skips forward to Ellie’s nineteenth birthday. She’s rehearsing questions she has for Joel, issues about their departure from the Firefly base on the finish of season one that do not add up to her. She desires to ask them on her first patrol with Joel, however would not get the prospect earlier than an emergency calls for their consideration.
This is the Eugene (Joe Pantalianio) story The Last of Us has been teasing all season lengthy, and it is actually not terribly substantial for one thing so closely hinted at. We mainly know what occurs from stray bits of dialog in previous episodes: Eugene bought bit whereas out within the woods, and Joel kills him earlier than he turns. What’s new—moreover a heartbreaking efficiency from Pantaliano—is the quick aftermath, the place Joel lies to Gail (Catherine O’Hara) about Eugene’s final moments. Joel claims that Eugene did not need to see her as a result of he needed to maintain her protected, and that he ended his personal life.
Ellie is aware of each of these claims are false. Seeing Joel lie units her off; she blurts out the reality to Gail, who slaps Joel, and collapses in grief.
