New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: We start this episode from the perspective of a band of highly armed FEDRA agents in 2018 Seattle, shooting the shit in a transport that somehow still has usable gasoline. Maybe it's just the political moment we're in, but I was not quite emotionally prepared for these militarized characters in my post-apocalyptic escape show to start casually using "voters" as an ironic signifier for regular people.
"LOL, like we'd ever let them vote, amirite?"
Andrew: We've spent so little time with FEDRA—the post-collapse remnant of what had once been the US government—since the very opening episodes of the show that you can forget exactly why nearly every other individual and organization in the show's world hates it and wants nothing to do with it. But here's a reminder for us: casual cruelty, performed by ignorant fascists.
Of course as soon as you see and hear Jeffrey Wright, you know he's going to be A Guy (he's an HBO alum from Boardwalk Empire and Westworld, among many, many other film, TV, vocal, and stage performances). He just as casually betrays and blows up the transport full of jumped-up FEDRA jarheads, which is a clear prestige TV storytelling signifier. Here is a Man With A Code, but also a Man To Be Feared.
Kyle: Yeah, Isaac's backstory was only broadly hinted at in the games, so getting to see this big "Who This Character Is" moment in the show was pretty effective.
What I found less effective was Ellie playing a very able A-Ha cover when she discovers the abandoned guitar room. In the game it serves as a welcome change of pace from a lot of frenetic action, and a good excuse for an endearing guitar-playing mini-game. Here it felt like it just kind of dragged on, with a lot of awkward dwelling on close-ups of Dina's creepily enamored face.
I'll.... be..... gone..... in a day or... twooooooooo. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: You know what, though, I do appreciate that the show at least made an effort to explain why this 30-year-old guitar was still in pristine condition. I don't instantly buy that the silica gel packets (which Ellie, wisely, does not eat) in the guitar case would have lasted for that long, but at least she didn't pull a mossy guitar straight off the wall and start tuning it up. Those strings are gonna corrode! That neck is gonna warp!
I do also think the show (and the game, I guess, picking up your context clues) got away with picking one of the goofiest songs they possibly could that would still read as "soulful and emotionally resonant" when played solo on acoustic guitar. But I suppose that's always been the power of that particular instrument.
Kyle: Both the game and the show have leaned heavily on the '80s nostalgia that Joel passed on to Ellie, and as a child of the '80s, I'll be damned if I said it doesn't work on me on that level.
Andrew: It's also, for what it's worth, exactly what a beginner-to-intermediate guitar player is going to know how to do. If I find a guitar during an apocalypse, all people are going to be able to get out of me are mid-2000s radio singles with easy chord progressions. It's too bad that society didn't last long enough in this reality to produce "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."
Kyle: Not to cut short "Guitar Talk," but the show cuts it off with a creepy scene of Isaac talking about high-end cookware to an initially unseen companion on the floor. The resulting scene of torture is, for my money, way worse than most anything we're exposed to in the games—and these are games that are not exactly squeamish about showing scenes of torture and extreme violence!
Felt to me like they're taking advantage of HBO's reputation for graphic content just because they could, here...
Andrew: Definitely gratuitous! But not totally without storytelling utility. I do think, if you're setting Isaac up to be a mid-season miniboss on the road to the Dramatic Confrontation with Abby, that you've got to make it especially clear that he is capable of really nasty things. Sure, killing a truckful of guys is ALSO bad, but they were guys that we as viewers are all supposed to hate. Torturing a defenseless man reinforces the perception of him as someone that Ellie and Dina do not want to meet, especially now that they've popped a couple of his guys.
Because Ellie and Dina have unwittingly wandered into the middle of a Seattle civil war of sorts, between Isaac and his militarized WLF members and the face-cutting cultists we briefly met in the middle of last episode. And while the WLF types do seem to have the cult outgunned, we are told here that WLF members are slowly defecting to the cult (rather than the other way around).
Welcome back to "Jeffrey Wright discusses cookware." I'm Jeffrey Wright. Today on program, we have a very special guest... Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: I will say I appreciated the surprisingly cogent history of the "chicken and egg games" beef between the two factions, as discussed between torturer and torture victim. Definitely a memorable bit of world-building.
But then we're quickly back to the kind of infected attack scene that now seems practically contractually obligated to happen at least once an episode. At this point, I think these kinds of massive setpiece zombie battles would work better as a light seasoning than a thick sauce that just gets dumped on us almost every week.
Andrew: People in and from Seattle seem to have a unique gift for kicking up otherwise dormant swarms of infected! I know we'll get back to it eventually, but I was more intrigued by the first episode's reveal of more strategic infected that seemed to be retaining more of their human traits than I am by these screaming mindless hordes. Here, I think the tension is also ratcheted up artificially by Ellie's weird escape strategy, which is to lead the two of them through a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs before finally, barely, getting away.
But like you said, gotta have zombies on the zombie show! And it does finally make the "Dina finds out that Ellie is immune" shoe drop, though Dina doesn't seem ready to think through any of the other implications of that reveal just yet. She has her own stuff going on!
Kyle: Yes, I've had to resist my inclination to do the remote equivalent of nudging you in the ribs to see if you had picked up on the potential "morning sickness" explanation of Dina's frequent vomiting (which was hidden decently amid the "vomiting because of seeing horrifying gore" explanation).
Andrew: It does explain a couple of things! It does seem like a bit of a narrative shortcut to make Ellie extremely invested in Dina and whether she lives or dies, and given this show I am worried that this zygote is only going to be used to create more trauma for Ellie, rather than giving us a nuanced look at parenting during an apocalypse. But it is sweet to see how enthusiastically and immediately Ellie gets invested.
A question for you, while spoiling as little as you can: Are we still mostly just adapting the game at this point? You'd mentioned getting more Isaac backstory (sometimes the show expands on backstories well and sometimes it doesn't), and some things have happened a bit out of order. But my impression is that we haven't gotten a full departure a la the Nick Offerman episode from last season yet.
How do we keep getting into these messes? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: At this point it's kind of like a jazz riff on what happens in the game, with some bits copied note for note, some remixed and thrown into entirely different temporal locations, and some fresh new improv thrown in for good measure.
I'm definitely not a "the game is canon and you must interpret it literally" type of person, but the loose treatment is giving me a bit of whiplash. The reveal of Dina's pregnancy, for instance, is not greeted with nearly as much immediate joy in the games. That said, the moment of joy Ellie and Dina do share here feels transplanted (in tone if nothing else) from an earlier game scene that the show had mostly skipped thus far. It's like free association, man. Dig it!
The show also spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how pregnancy tests work in the post-apocalypse, which for me pushed past world-building and into overexplaining. It's OK to just let stuff be sometimes, y'know?
Andrew: It's jazz, man. It's about the zombies you don't kill.
However it's been rearranged, I can still tell I'm watching a video game adaptation, because there are stealth kills and because important information is conveyed via messages and logos scrawled in blood on the walls. But I am still enjoying myself, and doing slightly less minute-to-minute missing of Joel than I did last episode. Slightly.
The episode ends with Ellie and Dina hearing the name of someone who has the same name as someone who knew Abby over a WLF walkie-talkie they nabbed, which gives them their next objective marker for Abby Quest. But they've got to cross an active war zone to get where they're going (though I couldn't tell from that distance whether we're meant to be able to tell exactly who is fighting who at the moment). Guess I'll have to wait and see!
Kyle: Personally, I'm hoping we see the moment where the newly out-and-proud bisexual Dina finally realizes "what's the deal with all the rainbows." Show your post-apocalyptic pride, girl!
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"It works?!" Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
Why can't it be like this forever? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery
When you've only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery