[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 4. For previous coverage, check out last week’s review.]
Episode 4 starts with a simple, if surprising, choice: two men change their minds.
Back in 2018, Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) is riding in an armored truck with a gaggle of FEDRA chucklefucks, sitting in silent judgment as Josh Peck’s super-bro-y soldier tells an awful story about some other asshole named Greenberg who beat the shit out of an innocent man because he thought the word “disseminating” meant “jerking off.”
After the cackles of laughter subside, the nervous new guy among the the caravan of douchebags dares to ask a question: Burton (played by “The Gilded Age’s” Ben Ahlers) wants to know why they keep calling citizens “voters.” Clearly annoyed that this kid isn’t appreciating the humor in his horrific story, Peck’s “thoughtless” storyteller brushes it off — “Because that’s what we fucking call them, who cares?”
But Isaac wants to answer.
“Because we took away their rights,” he says. “We took away their right to vote, and somebody started calling them voters to mock them.”
Before he can say much else, the driver alerts Isaac to a group of people gathering in the road. The crew in the back immediately assumes they’re W.L.F. — or wolves, as they were labeled in the previous episode — and starts preparing for a fight. But Isaac tells them to stand down. He knows they’re “all Greenbergs,” and rather than let them go attack some random strangers for the fun of it, Isaac gets out on his own to greet the unknown “voters.”
Except, they’re not unknown. Isaac greets their leader by name. “You Hanrahan?” he asks, after she identifies him as Isaac. The two nod at each other, and Isaac promptly turns around, walks back to the armored vehicle, and tosses two grenades inside before locking the door. All the Greenbergs are dead — all but the new guy. Isaac pulled Burton out when he went to meet Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), taking note of his naivete and deeming it a key distinguishing factor. The rest of them were a lost cause, but Burton, maybe, could still think for himself.
So he asks him to: “Now make your choice,” Isaac says. And Burton does. The young scared soldier may not have had much of a choice — clearly, Isaac would kill him if he didn’t join up — but he still changes his mind, just like Isaac did, and their motivations are still aligned. Isaac decided to leave FEDRA and join the wolves long before he heard the Greenberg story, but one gets the sense he was influenced by hearing it one too many times from one too many people. He turns on his fellow FEDRA agents because he’s disgusted by what they’re doing. He sees a better path, and he chooses to walk it. Burton just follows in his footsteps.
Eleven years later, as Isaac tortures a Scar prisoner, we see Burton again. Now, the wide-eyed lamb is a hardened wolf. Like his savior — and unlike the other, greener officer guarding the door — Burton has become desensitized to the violence inflicted on the “animal” inside. The naked man chained to a wall getting seared and beaten with a burning saucepan is just getting what he deserves, much like Josh Peck’s soldier got what he deserved over a decade prior. Burton learned to think this way from Isaac, and Isaac learned this from his own yet-to-be-shared experience.
Long ago, they made their choice, and look where it’s gotten them. Burton isn’t who anyone wants to be. His face, much like Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) dour, unforgiving countenance, is not that of a happy man. His choice kept him alive, physically, but his soul may have died in that armored truck. Isaac isn’t any better off. Despite feigning nonchalance during the interrogation, his own funny story betrays his true misery. He tells the Scar prisoner that when he was young, he was shy; he didn’t know how to talk to women, so he cooked for them. As he got better at it, he vowed to one day own a Mauviel saucepan — the best of the best. Today, he does, “just not how I planned.” Instead of using Mauviel to make dinner for people he likes, he uses it to scorch the flesh from his enemies’ limbs.
Isaac took a gesture of love and turned it into a weapon of hate — a recurring theme in “The Last of Us,” whether it’s Abby using the love she has for her dead father to fuel her vengeance against Joel (Pedro Pascal), or Joel using the love he has for Ellie to justify his killing spree to save her. Love can be beautiful, but it can also be destructive. Love can change you, and it can change within you. The question (which Catherine O’Hara’s Gail posed so pointedly last week) is whether our individual nature leaves us at love’s mercy, or if we have more of a choice in the matter.
With Isaac, his murky past makes it hard to tell if he’s always had a coldness to him or if he’s adapted to the coldness all around him in order to survive, like so many other characters we’ve met. But Burton’s past is clear. The man in the armored truck and the man guarding the door are not the same person. The former learned to behave like the latter, and his prominence in the episode, paired with Isaac’s story implying a similar transformation, is instrumental to understanding what’s at stake for Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced), as they face their own potential turning point.
In Episode 4, circumstances change dramatically for our two leads. Dina finds out she’s pregnant. Ellie finds out Dina is pregnant. Dina tells Ellie she’s in love with her, and Ellie doesn’t have to tell Dina the same thing because Dina already knows. Still, all of a sudden, these two patrol buddies are committed to each other in a whole new way. They’re in love. They’re starting a family together. “Holy shit,” Ellie says. “I’m going to be a dad.”
But is it enough to change their mind? Ellie is closer than ever to finding Abby, closer than ever to avenging Joel’s death, closer than ever to embracing the dark turn her love for him has taken. Dina is, too, and she refuses Ellie’s suggestion that she stay behind to protect herself and her baby. “Together,” she says, holding Ellie’s hand and staring out at the city where Abby waits. But is that… right? Once again, showrunner and co-creator Craig Mazin is reframing an action typically seen as good and right as, potentially, bad and wrong. As much as we want to see Ellie and Dina stick together — to fight for each other, to protect their love for each other — they’re risking everything they’ve just gained for revenge, and revenge has been repeatedly shown to be as dangerous as it is unrewarding.
We saw as much in Abby’s face after she killed Joel, and we see it again in Episode 4. Isaac and Burton are at war with the Scars. The choices they’ve made, starting in 2018, have led them to a place of heartless unhappiness. But they stand by those choices. Their rigid conviction is their armor; they have to believe that even though they’re hunting, hurting, and killing people, there are worse people out there, doing worse things, for worse reasons. If they stop believing that, if they question it even for a second, they may not like the answers. They may look at what they’ve done and see pain, fear, and ruin. Looking back at them in the mirror, they may see the face they despise the most: Greenberg’s.
At the end of Episode 4, Ellie and Dina have to decide which path to take. They can press on with the mission they’ve agreed to; they can keep chasing vengeance, keep chasing Abby, keep following Joel’s footsteps until they become his hardened, savage successors.
…or they can change their minds.
Grade: B+
“The Last of Us” Season 2 releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
Stray Tendrils
• Aside from the parallel narratives framing Ellie and Dina’s story this week, there are additional omens of doom scattered throughout Episode 4 — like when they find those dead bodies inside the armored truck, and Ellie immediately compares them to the deceased Apollo 1 astronauts. While I’m not sure why she’s got NASA on the noggin, Ellie evoking three dead explorers near the outskirts of Seattle doesn’t bode well for the three explorers (Ellie, Dina, and Dina’s baby) heading deeper into the city. That Seattle doesn’t prove to be all that hospitable is hardly a warning — very few places in “The Last of Us” are welcoming — but intended for Ellie or not, the disemboweled bodies hung for all to see sure feel like a message. Finally, call me cynical if you must, but I’ve always found a-ha’s “Take On Me” to describe a tragic romance — you better enjoy love while it lasts, because it’ll be gone in a day (or twooooooooo).
• That song was very sweet, though. So fun to see Dina absolutely swooning over her dreamy guitarist (soon-to-be) girlfriend.
• “What’s up with all the rainbows?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re all optimists.”
• Someone start the petition to change Seattle’s official motto to “Happy Proud Rainbow Town.”
• Nice to see Ellie’s hand-to-hand combat training come in handy.
• Holy shit, that subway escape was tight! The red flare set such an ominous visual tone, and watching the tendrils crawl around the flame — knowing it would draw a horde of the infected down upon the W.L.F. soldiers — while Dina counted the ones she could hear on her fingers (until she ran out of fingers) really amped up the tension. Once the rabid not-zombies showed up, there were a few less-convincing moments — none of the infected trying to tip the subway car scrambled on top? Only one got close enough to bite Ellie before they pushed through the turnstile? — but the acute claustrophobia combined with the killer location made it a thrilling, memorable sequence overall.
• “It’s a little thing, but when you start to hide little things they become big things,” Ellie says, referring to how annoyed she got wearing long sleeves to hide the scar on her arm… but also what’s the little thing she’s hiding now?
