[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 6. For previous coverage, check out last week’s review.]
“The Last of Us” Episode 6 is built around a dead man, so it’s only fitting that so much of it is shaped by ghosts. Ghosts, after all, are just echoes of the past; reminders of what should not or could not be forgotten, because of how much those memories mean, or because they still have something to teach.
“I just really wanted to wear short-sleeves again,” Ellie (Bella Ramsey) says to Joel (Pedro Pascal). It’s 2023, and a nearly 15-year-old Ellie comes home with her arm wrapped in gauze after burning it with a hot pan. The implication, of course, is that she did it on purpose. Ellie already has a scar on her arm from when an infected bit her, which proved her immunity, but she has to hide that scar from everyone — hence the perpetual long sleeves — and it’s exhausting. Her immunity is a secret that’s difficult to bear, and anything Ellie can do to lighten the load — even if it’s just being able to wear lighter clothes on warm days — is worth a few hours of pain.
“I really wanted to wear short sleeves again,” Ellie says to Dina (Isabela Merced). It’s 2029, and Ellie wakes up next to the woman she loves, who’s asking about her arm. The night before, an infected bit Ellie — again. Looking closely in the morning light, Dina can see more than just the freshest wound. There’s a burn under her tattoo. “You did it to yourself?” Dina asks, to which Ellie echoes the reasoning she gave to Joel, years ago. The tattoo, the burn, the bites — they connect Ellie’s past and present; they connect her loved ones, too: Joel and Dina.
“If I were ever to lose you, I’d surely lose myself,” Joel sings to Ellie. It’s 2023, and Joel has just given Ellie a guitar for her 15th birthday. He got her a cake, too, but while Seth (Robert John Burke) did the baking, Joel put the guitar together himself. He sourced the parts, carved the pieces, and tuned it up just for Ellie. She doesn’t know how to play — yet — so she asks him to sing something for her, and he chooses Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.”
The song frames Episode 6 well. We get to see the days Joel cherished most — the ones he spent with Ellie, the “days of you and me” — knowing he won’t get as many of them as he would’ve liked. But it’s those opening lyrics that haunt Ellie six years later, in Episode 5, when she picks up a different guitar in a Seattle theater and sits down to sing. “If I were ever to lose you,” she starts, but she can’t go on. Is it the memory of Joel that stops her, or is it the lyrics themselves?
“If I were ever to lose you, I’d surely lose myself.” That forecast held true for Joel, as it applied to his daughters. He lost who he was for a long time after losing Sarah (Nico Parker), and the memory of that loss is what drove him to “save” Ellie for himself. Now, Ellie is on the same path. Her “you” is Joel, and now she’s lost him. But will she lose herself, just as he did? The memory that makes her stop singing, the ghost in the auditorium with her, maybe it can also turn her heart toward mercy again.
Episode 6 reframes many-a-scene from throughout Season 2. Joel and Ellie’s trip to the museum lends heartbreaking meaning to her appreciation of astronauts, like the doomed Apollo 1 explorers she mentions to Dina in Episode 4 when they first enter Seattle. On the flipside, Ellie’s angry message to Joel after he knocked Seth over on New Year’s Eve — “I don’t need your help” — is given shattering significance to Joel, who was just told by his sister-in-law, Maria (Rutina Wesley), that “families help each other.” If Ellie doesn’t want Joel’s help, is she really still his family?
Directed by series co-creator (and video game architect) Neil Druckmann and written by Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin, the episode also adds key context to how Joel and Ellie ended up in a cold war to start Season 2, like the fight they have when Kat (Noah Lamanna) gives Ellie her moth tattoo. (Side note: Kat and Ellie’s tender familiarity when Joel walks in on them in Episode 6 stands in stark contrast to their icy remove in the premiere, when they’re out on patrol.) Joel tries to understand its meaning but that matters less to Ellie than his initial repudiation of her sexuality. (“It wasn’t a fucking experiment,” she says.) Plus, Joel being Joel, he still misses the point. The moths, as Gail later informs him, are more about death than rebirth: Ellie can’t get past her failed attempt to die for a cause; to give her life, her immunity, a “greater purpose.”
Two years later — after moving out of the house and into the garage — Ellie is working up the nerve to tackle her issue with Joel head-on. She’s prepared a list of questions to ask him about what really happened in Salt Lake City. But then Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) gets bit, and Joel kills him. It’s not the death that gets to Ellie, although one gets the sense she was friendly with Eugene; it’s the lie. Another lie. “You swore,” she seethes at Joel, after coldly, selfishly exposing the truth of her husband’s death to Gail. He’d promised to walk Eugene back to Jackson and let him see his wife one more time. Instead, he walked him to a lake and shot him. He lied to Eugene, and he lied to Ellie.
“You looked me in the eyes and it was the same face,” Ellie says. “The same fucking look.” It’s nine months later, on New Year’s Eve. Ellie is finally ready to confront Joel. His ghost has caught up to him. Ellie sees it — she sees it in Joel’s face, when he promises to take Eugene back to Gail, just as she saw it five years prior, when he promised he was telling the truth about Salt Lake City. Now, he has no choice but to address it.
“Making a cure would’ve killed you,” Joel says. “Then I was supposed to die,” Ellie wails. “That was my purpose. My life would’ve fucking mattered. You took that from me. You took that from everyone.”
Joel is simultaneously crushed by the weight of his betrayal yet resolved enough to keep shouldering the burden. He says he would do it again. He’s willing to pay the price, and after spending just a few days with Ellie over the five years he got with her, it’s easy to see why he would risk everything just to have that time with her.
“[It’s] because you’re selfish,” Ellie says.
“[It’s] because I love you,” Joel replies.
In “The Last of Us,” those two feelings aren’t mutually exclusive but inescapably linked. Love is selfish. Put another way, as Mazin did in an interview, “Love is immoral. It’s immoral because it doesn’t follow rules. […] Love is the problem.” That belief reverberates throughout the series, whether it’s in Joel’s actions in Salt Lake City, Kathleen’s (Melanie Lynskey) actions in Kansas City, Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) actions outside of Jackson, or Ellie’s actions thus far in Seattle.
But the opposite is also true. Love can be the solution. Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman) proved as much by turning a dystopia into a utopia (especially Frank, whose love transcended Bill by extending to others). Ellie’s love for Riley (Storm Reid) was pure and good, too. Her love for Joel saved him from the love he lost with Sarah, and it saved him again that night, when she told him, “I don’t think I can forgive you for this. But I would like to try.”
Mercy. Sweet mercy. If Abby hadn’t caught up to Joel the next day, who knows what his life would’ve become? What he could’ve done, who he could’ve been, now that he’d been forgiven? Ellie’s implicit forgiveness is so powerful because it upends expectations; what feels at first like the definitive nail in a heartbreaking split instead reverses course to become a staggering gesture of compassion. In just a few seconds, our hearts are broken and healed.
Love can be the problem or the solution, and never is that clearer than in Episode 6’s loudest echo, which is first heard from Joel’s dad (played by the great Tony Dalton). It’s 1983, and Joel is protecting his little brother, Tommy, from a beating they know one of them has to endure. Joel and Tommy are afraid of their father, but the aging sheriff doesn’t see himself that way. “OK, yeah I’ve hit you. And I’ve hit Tommy,” he says. “But never like [my father hit me]. Not even close. Maybe I go too far. […] But I’m doing a little better than my father did. And when it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”
It’s 2028, New Year’s Eve, and Joel is trying to explain himself to his daughter, just like his dad once tried to explain himself to Joel. “I love you,” Joel says, “in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will. But if that day should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me.”
It’s 2029. Ellie is in Seattle, and that day has come. Can she find the mercy she was once ready to show Joel, or did she lose that part of herself when she lost him? Episode 6 proves she hasn’t forgotten who she was; she remembers the moments that mattered with Joel, and those ghosts still have lessons to share with Ellie. They’re trying to bring back the person she once was and, maybe, can be again.
Grade: A
“The Last of Us” releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max. The Season 2 finale will premiere May 25.
