The Last of Us Episode 6 Review: An Episode Full of Changes … For the Better

While visiting Jackson, the newfound haven that his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) calls home, Joel sees a woman that looks like his daughter Sarah. It can’t be his late daughter, but it looks like it could be. This can’t-be-but-could-be walks toward a child, possibly her own, to embrace, all while the town of Jackson stands around a communal Christmas tree. 

This kind of fake out is not new, but the catharsis is. Typically, when a person longingly looks at a stranger that could be a lost loved one, the revelation that it’s not that lost love subverts the longing. It dismisses it, leaving the character lost. Think of Alfred’s fantasy of seeing Bruce while on vacation in The Dark Knight Rises. The revelation that it’s just some other guy on vacation is like fate dismissing Alfred’s dream, almost callously so. 

The reveal that this woman is not Sarah, at least to me, does not engage in this subversion. This is not to say that the reveal doesn’t hurt, because it does. Loss will always hurt in some way, but the pain will always sting more sharply if you only focus on what could have been, and not what can be. 

And so we come to the focus of the episode, and the purpose of that fake out. The Last of Us Episode 6 is about the future that could have been, and the future that can be. 

(It only just hit me after typing that sentence that the Christmas setting was probably not incidental, turning Joel into an Ebeneezer Scrooge of sorts.)

The sense of a future that Jackson provides will not be felt exclusively by fans of the second game. TLOU newcomers will have no trouble juxtaposing the quaint, beautiful civility of Jackson with the untamed wilderness of death that we’d seen. Even the beloved third episode only showed us what two lovers in control of their own property are capable of, not what a commune of different souls could accomplish. Yet fans of the games will easily note that, when we reunite with Tommy in the game, he and his newfound family are getting a dam up and running. We don’t see Jackson up close and personal until the second game. 

All this is to say is that the sense of the future will hit differently for those that have a better understanding of it. The contrast of certainties with possibilities hits a little harder. For newcomers, the town will be a beautiful, possible home. For fans, it’s like visiting home again, but for the first time. Ellie meeting Shimmer as a foal warmed my heart, as I thought about the bond that awaited them. Not knowing if the girl spying on Ellie was Dina left me wondering if that’s how Ellie met the love of her life.

The revelation that Tommy and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) are expecting a child is a detail not in the game, but it appropriately reinforced the joy of the familiar elements. It’s a future of excitement, of hope, of love. It’s also a future of devastation. Acknowledging that past losses will always hurt in some way will not stop the losses of the future, regardless of how much life awaits. In the game, Joel professes the same, suppressive, angry lie to Tommy and Ellie about why it’s best for Tommy to take Ellie the rest of the journey. In the show, he’s able to open up to Tommy, confessing his emotional turmoil, his everlasting nightmares of his failure to protect Sarah, effectively convincing Tommy to take the job. When he speaks to Ellie afterwards, we think he’s conveying the same vulnerability, the same honesty….until Ellie brings up Sarah. Then the suppressive anger returns, and the script shifts to a line-for-line recreation of the scene from the game. 

Diverging from the script to show a new, vulnerable side of Joel we didn’t see at this point, only for him to easily jump right back into the original, angry script, is a marvelous juxtaposition. 

It takes us miles from the familiar, only to bring us right back to it with a single step.

The Last of Us Episode 6 is now streaming on HBO MAX.