The Last Of Us Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: On The Road Again

Hey folks. Y’all feeling alright after last week’s harrowing episode of The Last of Us? Everybody have a productive therapy session to talk about your TV peepaw’s death? Alright, cool, because we’re gonna spend this week’s episode doing more therapy and leaning harder into the show’s worst tendencies. Strap in, folks. I’m about to start swinging.

Post trauma

We open on the bloody aftermath of the battle in Jackson. Corpses, human and infected, are scattered across the small town. But the body we linger on didn’t come from the massive clash; it’s Joel’s. In a somber moment, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) comes to the morgue to see his big brother. He starts to clean his arm and sees the broken watch on his wrist. He gives his brother one more longing look and tells him to “give Sarah [his] love” before getting back to work.

Last week, I was admittedly pretty dismissive of some of these smaller added moments of grief the show adds to what was in The Last of Us Part II, the game on which this season is based. Ellie crawling to Joel’s body and cuddling up to him felt performative to me in the moment, and maybe that was more me reacting to the show’s broader lack of restraint than to the scene itself. But this scene with Tommy landed for me because we got remarkably little of Tommy’s grief in Part II, and because it wasn’t led up to by 10 minutes of monologuing and telling me what to feel. Tommy is speaking to Joel, not to the audience.

We then see a bustling hospital full of the injured from the battle. Ellie is also here after Manny kicked her in the chest and seemingly collapsed one of her lungs. She’s breathing weakly through a chest tube as she wakes, but immediately starts screaming as she remembers what Abby did to Joel until she’s sedated. Cut to credits.

We then jump forward to three months later. Things are warming up, and Jackson has made good progress rebuilding after the battle against the horde. Ellie, meanwhile, has also made good progress and is getting her final check-up with the doctors after her injuries. But she has to see one more person before she can leave the hospital: Gail (Catherine O’Hara).

As I said in the episode one recap, Gail is one of my least favorite additions in the show, not because O’Hara isn’t wonderful, but because she facilitates some of the show’s worst tendencies. Ellie, clearly telling Gail what she thinks she wants to hear, now unloads about how she misses Joel, laments that the “last time” they spoke was the New Year’s dance fiasco, and says that your final moments with someone shouldn’t define your life with them. Then when the conversation veers into when Joel supposedly “wronged” her, Ellie says she doesn’t know what he could have meant and wishes she could have “let him off the hook” for that, but that she’ll also need to “let herself off the hook” for not being able to do so.

Gail lets Ellie go but seems mostly unconvinced by her performative response to her line of questioning. And as soon as they’re done, Ellie’s chipper facade falls away quickly, and the smile disappears from her face as quickly as she put it on. The irony of this scene is that Ellie is speaking aloud the things she will eventually learn, even if she doesn’t believe any of it right now. She pulls off a convincing enough performance to leave the facility, but there was still part of me that felt suspicious of this exchange after the show has already proven it doesn’t trust its audience to follow along. I can’t help but look at this scene and feel like it’s meant to tell viewers what Ellie should be feeling rather than the feelings of fury she does right now. A therapist approved all these lines of thought, right? That’s the only way she’s deemed of sound mind to walk around the citizens of Jackson once again. In a vacuum, the scene is fine and illustrates that Ellie is still very much wrestling with debilitating anger and doesn’t trust the adults in her life, but again, every time The Last of Us describes the themes of the source material in no uncertain terms, I’m left wondering why showrunner Craig Mazin has made these blunt edits. Does he not have faith in the viewers to get it, or is he making up for what he perceives as a weak link in the game’s writing?

Speaking of showing instead of telling, we now get the show’s version of one of The Last of Us Part II’s best sequences: Joel’s home. After Ellie is released from the hospital, she heads home, and instead of going straight to her shed, she goes to Joel’s big empty house. Flowers and tributes cover the white picket fence. They’ve been there for months, but this is the first time Ellie’s seen them. To Abby, Joel was a murderer. To Ellie, he was a complicated father figure. To the people of Jackson, he was a beloved member of their community. There are different versions of each of us in the minds of everyone we’ve ever met, and the truth is we all exist somewhere in the middle. That’s why people come away from The Last of Us Part II with such contrasting feelings: because the entire game is about that concept.

One nice touch the show adds to this segment is that Ellie has a room in Joel’s house that wasn’t present in the game. Though the mattress is no longer here and is now in the shed out back, the rest of the room looks largely untouched. It’s covered in astronaut stickers, old sketches, and toys. It feels like a childhood bedroom, whereas her new space gives off something more like college burnout. The brief shot we see of the old room illustrates how much Ellie has grown up, but maybe also how Joel probably felt left behind. He has this snapshot of a younger version of his surrogate daughter in his own home. No wonder he didn’t understand the rift between them as she grew up.

Then we reach the gut punch: Joel’s bedroom. It’s full of unfinished wood carving projects he’ll never return to, but it also has a small red box sitting on the bed. Inside, Ellie finds the last of Joel’s belongings: his broken watch from Sarah and his trademark revolver. Ellie only takes the latter before turning to leave, but also takes a moment to stop in Joel’s closet and take a whiff of his leather jacket. Then she finally allows herself to cry before this moment is interrupted by Dina (Isabela Merced) calling to her from the lower floor.

Her friend brings with her two things: cookies and information. She says that, when visiting Ellie in the hospital, she’d hid that she knew most of Abby’s group’s names because the doctors told her not to tell Ellie anything that might upset her while she was recovering. Ellie is furious because Joel’s killers now have a three-month head start, but Dina, being the more level-headed person in the room, reminds her that if you want to find someone and you know where they’re going to be, you should let them get there. Then Dina reminds Ellie that she loved Joel, too. In Part II, Dina went to Seattle because she’s a ride or die, but the show is giving her more personal stakes in seeing justice for Joel because they had a relationship of their own. It’s a good change; a lot of Dina’s characterization—such as her relationship with her family’s Jewish history—is lost without the ambient dialogue between her and Ellie in the early game, so this helps fill out her character more in a way I appreciated.

Dina runs down what she knows, including the names of most of the group and a wolf patch she saw on their gear with the initials “W.L.F.” She recalls a story Eugene told her before his passing about subsets of civilian militia that were trying to fight FEDRA, the government agency that turned fascist after the cordyceps outbreak, including one called the Washington Liberation Front. They don’t know what they’re up against, but hopefully it’s not too much for them to handle.

But rather than head out immediately, Ellie and Dina go to see Tommy. He’s hesitant because the town is still recovering and not in any position to send out a squad of vengeful soldiers. Ellie says Joel would have already been halfway to Seattle by now, a claim which Tommy rebuts, saying that he’d only take that kind of risk to save someone he cared about, not to seek revenge (I don’t know about that one, chief). If they’re going to do this, they have to go through Jackson protocol, which means taking it to Maria and the town’s council. Ellie isn’t thrilled, but Tommy says he’ll back her, and lets Dina know that if she holds back information again, there will be consequences. As the girls leave, Tommy tells Ellie that they buried the dead after the attack south of town, if she wants to visit. Ellie says she will when she’s on the way to Seattle. Tommy said in episode one that Ellie and Joel were the exact same person, and her self-assured stubbornness in this moment is giving Pedro Pascal. To her, this whole song and dance is just another obstacle in the way of something inevitable. She can’t imagine any other possibility.

Literal and metaphorical scars

We’ve spent a lot of time in Jackson these past few episodes, so this next scene gives us a preview of what to expect in Seattle. We open on a lone man walking through a forest wearing a tattered trench coat, sporting a shaved head, and with twin scars across his face. He whistles to a group of similarly dressed people elsewhere in the forest, and one of the adults asks a young girl to translate the meaning of the whistles, which were orders to keep moving as there was no danger present. The group apparently doesn’t know where they’re headed, but there’s a “reason” for this pilgrimage with no known destination. There was a war happening wherever they’re fleeing from, and the prophet they once followed has been dead for a decade, so she can’t protect them. But they keep her spirit alive by following her teachings. To do this, they have to keep themselves safe, which is why they’re armed with hammers and bows. Just as the girl says she feels safe, another whistle comes from the lookout, warning the group of incoming danger. They hide in the forest, and the girl asks if it’s “demons,” to which the man replies that it’s “wolves.” On that ominous note, the show pops back over to Dina’s sketch of the wolf patch she saw on Abby’s clothes.

If you felt that was disorienting, I wouldn’t blame you, but these people with all their cultish language and archaic weaponry are the Seraphites, a cult in Seattle that is at war with the W.L.F. As we get close to the Emerald City, some of the uglier parts of the series to unpack will start to become more prominent, as the violence between the Seraphites and W.L.F. is inspired by the ongoing conflicts in Palestine and Israel which have only escalated in the years since the game came out. This isn’t me projecting; series director Neil Druckmann has said as much. The actual specifics of how The Last of Us portrays its fictional war, and how Druckmann’s public pro-Israel reaction to the ongoing real-world conflict have justifiably colored the interpretations and experiences of the series for many players, are a lot to untangle and dissect. It’ll be some time before the show really dives into this plot thread and we really need to dig into it in these recaps, but I felt it was important context to bring up now as we begin our journey to Seattle, where this storyline becomes more prevalent.

Ellie, meanwhile, is training for the upcoming fight. Jesse is impressed that she’s bounced back so quickly after being hospitalized, but not impressed enough to be forthcoming with her about the upcoming council meeting. Now that he’s on the council, he can’t discuss his or anyone else’s votes, even as Ellie tries to appeal to their friendship. As a sign of good faith, he does give Ellie some advice, telling her to write her thoughts down and read them to everyone in the meeting. Ellie dismissively takes this as a sign that she’s “stupid,” but Jesse says it’s because she’s angry, and her inability to take that well-meaning advice as such is further proof of that.

Unfortunately for Ellie, she has a lot of time to organize her thoughts at the council meeting because her revenge tour is not the only issue on the agenda. Some folks came to talk more mundane shit like livestock. But when the topic of sending people to Seattle comes up, Ellie isn’t the first one to take the stand, it’s a woman who points out that Jackson lost a lot more people that day than just Joel. Things are too fragile right now, she says, to send a large group chasing after Abby’s crew. Another man stands up and says that they should separate themselves from the raiders and murderers by showing mercy. Then, Ellie finds an unexpected ally (see what I did there) in Seth, who says that those murderers don’t deserve mercy. The town bigot is the only one to support vengeance for the man who knocked him on his prejudiced ass the night before he died. Seth says that they’ll be back to finish the job if Jackson doesn’t send someone after them.

When The Last of Us Part II came out, there were criticisms that the game boiled down to a metatextual scolding about something obvious to most civilized people: violence is bad, actually. Revenge is not it. Even Kotaku’s review by Riley MacLeod touches on this, with him writing, “Late one night, I paused the game and asked myself aloud if the developers thought I was stupid, if they thought the existence of violence had just never occurred to me before.” I never felt this kind of condescension when I played the game, largely because I viewed revenge as one piece of the puzzle, rather than the full thing, but I can’t shake that feeling when I watch the show. I really felt it in this scene that sounded like a podcast of people debating the morality of The Last of Us Part II. The show’s heavy-handed dialogue continues to feel weirdly patronizing, like it needs to make sure you have considered every nuance that should feel.

Finally, Ellie is allowed to speak. She followed Jesse’s advice and wrote her thoughts down to read. She says she doesn’t want revenge, she wants justice. Then she points out that if they do nothing, no one will do anything because no one else is fighting for Jackson. Ellie appeals to the community aspect Jesse has been hammering into her head, and points out that while the rest of the world is full of dangerous “strangers,” she wants to know that the people of Jackson can count on each other. This is a version of Ellie we’ve seen who is very jaded toward the idea of community, and it’s unclear if this is her trying to appeal to the sensibilities of the council or if it’s a last-ditch effort to convince herself that there is a community for her here. While Joel may have been a beloved member of Jackson, Ellie has been ostracized by several people in this small town. Her discomfort has been ignored by the adults in her life, her desires have often been denied to her because they think they know better, and yet all that’s ever been said to her is that the good of the community comes first. If she’s supposed to be part of that fellowship, why are her needs never a priority? Whatever her reasoning, Ellie knows now that she can’t count on Jackson because the council votes against her proposal. A wave of relief fills the room, but Ellie silently walks out.

It’s now Tommy’s turn to see the town counselor. He tracks Gail down at a tee-ball game and she has her own theories about Ellie’s speech. Tommy’s worried that Ellie’s going to do something reckless, and Gail asks if he believes Ellie’s words at the council meeting. She says that the girl is a “liar.” Tommy says she doesn’t want Ellie to go down the same path as Joel, who would also come up with justifications for every violent act he carried out in this desecrated world. Gail asks if Ellie might have learned this behavior from Joel, but says that “nurture” can only do so much, and that if violence is who Ellie is, it wasn’t because Joel taught her to be. She also says that some people can’t be saved, and as much as Tommy would like to change that, it’s probably true of Ellie, as well.

Alrighty, so I alluded to this conversation in my episode one recap, and I consider it one of the most disappointing in all of season two. The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin has talked at length about how he believes Ellie to be a naturally violent individual, and it shows in the sadism she expresses in season one. This is a marked change from how the character was portrayed in the first game, which showed her having no proclivity towards violence, just a desire to be trusted to carry it out when it was necessary. When it became clear that Mazin’s choice to make Ellie more intrinsically violent for the show was made in a misguided attempt to lean into Ellie’s violent tendencies in season two, I wrote about how the only reason Ellie’s shift towards violence in Part II works is because that game goes out of its way to show that she’s not cut out to inflict the kind of violence she learned from Joel. There are scenes in the game that have Ellie trying and failing to use Joel’s exact interrogation techniques, and Druckmann and game actor Ashley Johnson have spoken in Part II Remastered’s commentary about how the point was to show how Ellie was very different from her surrogate father, and that this violence may have been innate to who he was, but not her.

Without getting too specific about future episodes, I still find the show’s suggestion that Ellie’s sadism and anger are just part of who she is to be both a misguided change and a fundamental misunderstanding of the story of The Last of Us Part II. Where some changes, like revealing Abby’s motivations early or heavily implying that Ellie had some kind of reconciliation with Joel, undercut the narrative tension of the source material but leave character dynamics intact, this shift just lets Joel off the hook for who Ellie grew up to be and colors her grief-driven crusade as more of a tantrum that needs to be managed rather than as the actions of woman lashing out at a life that has taken most of the things she’s ever wanted from her. Ellie’s arc in these games is so much more complex than anger issues, and I find the show’s vision of her violence to be so one-dimensional. Violence is a language characters use to express everything from love to hatred in The Last of Us, and it’s one that the show barely knows how to read.

Back in her shed, Ellie is doing exactly what Tommy feared: something stupid. She’s got guns and supplies spread around her space and is clearly gearing up to head out by herself. Dina arrives and points out how an arsenal and canned food isn’t enough to reach Seattle and kill Abby. She has no plan, no route, no map; just a switchblade and a dream. Dina’s not here to talk her out of it, she’s here to make sure she doesn’t get herself killed on the way. In another life, Dina would be the one who plans the girls’ two-week overseas vacation down to booking the flights and itinerary, where Ellie gets to be a passenger princess who just has to show up.

Ellie thanks Dina as she leaves, to which Dina replies that she could have just asked. Ellie says she didn’t realize that, and if she’s become this jaded toward the community of Jackson, it makes sense that she wouldn’t even feel like she could rely on her best friend. But hopefully, Dina’s actions quell any of her fears. As the two prepare to leave with their horse Shimmer, they’re sent off by none other than Seth. He offers Ellie his rifle, some supplies, and a few words of encouragement. Ellie is skeptical the whole time, even scoffing at the notion that revenge for Joel is a collective cause between the two of them. But as they leave, the two exchange a silent handshake. Maybe bigots can grow. A radical thought.

But before we head out, Ellie has one more place she needs to go. She and Dina stop at a graveyard just south of Jackson and find one marked “Joel Miller, beloved brother and father.” Ellie unwraps some coffee beans and spreads them over the soil, lingers for a moment, then silently turns to leave. I’m glad the show displays some restraint here, because it would not have surprised me if Ellie had voiced everything she ever wanted to say to Joel, as that’s often the show’s M.O. Instead, we got an understated moment with a cute nod to Joel’s coffee fixation. It’s good.

Washington bound

We skip forward a bit as Dina and Ellie play games to pass the time on horseback. Dina asks Ellie about her first kill. She says she won’t talk about the first one (we don’t need to relive Riley’s tragic fate), but she does tell her about her and Joel’s time in Kansas City. Dina says she’s sorry Ellie had to go through that, which surprises our funky little lesbian. “I shoot a guy and you feel sorry for me?” “I’m just loyal like that,” Dina replies.

The pair’s trip is put on hold as a storm passes over them. That’s how you know they’re getting closer to Seattle. They set up a tent, and it’s clear that Ellie is unsure what to do with all this closeness. Just as the girls are about to get some shuteye, Dina turns the lantern on and says she wants to talk about New Year’s Eve and their big kiss. You know, before Seth ruined it. Ellie seems to have stopped reading into it because they were both intoxicated, but Dina wants to know how Ellie would rate it. Ellie isn’t looking to play along, and when Dina reminds the room that she’s “not” gay, Ellie finally gives her a number: six. Dina doesn’t believe this rating, but when Ellie tells her she can go back to Jesse if she wants something better, Dina reveals she already did. That’s seemingly resolved that issue.

By this point in Part II, Dina and Ellie were established as girlfriends, and all the romantic tension was gone in favor of two girls getting to know each other in this new context. I’m okay with the show taking a different approach to this, as a lot of the relationship building between Ellie and Dina is lost when we can’t spend hours wandering around Seattle and chatting. Introducing Dina and establishing their relationship as quickly as the game does probably wouldn’t work for TV, so replacing it with some “will they/won’t they” awkwardness is probably the right call. A lot of fans were disappointed that this meant one of the best scenes between the two in Jackson, which involved passing weed back and forth among other activities, went out the window. But we’re making up for some lost ground in this scene, so I’m willing to see where this goes and weigh in later.

Dina asks if Jesse seems sad to Ellie, and she replies without hesitation that he does, though neither of them is sure why. Dina thinks maybe that’s just who he is. At least, she hopes so. Because if it’s not, then maybe she makes him feel that way. Before the two drift off to sleep, Dina tells Ellie she “wasn’t that high” when they kissed. Girl, you’ve got some decisions to make.

The two get back on the road in the morning, and are just about 10 miles out of Seattle when they come across the aftermath of some kind of battle. Bodies of the Seraphite crew from earlier in the episode are scattered across the trail, and as Dina investigates further, she runs back to Ellie to puke in the bushes. Ellie goes to see what elicited such a response and finds their bodies decomposing. Dina apologizes for her sickness, pinning it on the smell. Ellie guesses from the caliber of the various bullet casings at the scene that this might have been Abby’s crew. Now they have another reason to feel vindicated in coming all this way.

Then we finally reach Seattle. From a distance, you would have no idea there’s a war happening here. Dina says there might not be that many wolves for them to deal with, to which Ellie says there are about to be “a whole lot less.” Dina asks if that was a cool action movie line from the Curtis & Viper movies Joel loved so much. Ellie says that one was all her; she was just trying to sound like a badass. “You don’t need to try,” Dina whispers in her ear. Girlypop, don’t play like this when you’ve got a man waiting for you back home. (Do it. Give in to the gay thoughts.)

Spaking of wolves, we see the first sign of life from Abby’s crew. Manny (Danny Ramirez) is keeping watch from the remains of the Space Needle, and luckily doesn’t see the Jackson girlies as he gives the all-clear for a W.L.F. crew to move through the city. While Ellie and Dina may be expecting a small group of heavily armed bandits, the group Manny clears to move through the city is sporting tanks, military-grade weapons and armor, and is moving like a well-trained unit. Ellie’s rage may have brought her this far, but she’s gonna need a lot more than that to fight her way through Seattle to Abby.

New episodes of The Last of Us premiere on Sundays at 9 p.m. Eastern on Max.