The penultimate episode of The Last of Us Season 2, “The Price” answers questions and still leaves viewers lost. If “The Price” is the foundation, then the final episode “Convergence” is the crack in it — giving us our greatest taste of the vast, horrible world Ellie dove right into, and it will leave fans with a horrible uncertainty about what lies ahead.
“The Price” both combines and restructures two essential moments from The Last Of Us Part II. In the game, the scene of Joel telling Ellie that the fireflies claimed they could make a cure, but it would have killed Ellie, so he stopped them, occurs two years into their four year stay at Jackson. Now, it’s combined with the porch discussion that occurs the night before Joel died. The other way it’s restructured is that this porch scene, while a flashback in both mediums, is the last scene of the game.
When Ellie tells Joel she doesn’t know if she could ever forgive him for what he did and elaborates she “would like to try,” there are, maybe, 10 more spoken words before the credits roll. The significance of this can’t be overstated, but it also can’t be properly dissected at the moment. The change is meant to be disorienting, because it means there is going to be a new ending to the material, and how this factors in can’t be fully known until that new ending.
For now, we’ll focus on what we do know, which is the build-up to this revelation. This makes “The Price” an interesting episode, one that almost can’t be spoiled, because we know the outcome of all the events. Because “Feel Her Love” revealed that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) knows Joel lied to her, we know “The Price” will show Joel telling Ellie the truth. Because “Future Days” revealed that Joel killed Gail’s (Catherine O’Hara) husband Eugene (Joe Pantoliano), we know that Eugene’s death was necessary, but Gail found his method unforgivably cruel. Still, it’s seeing the characters endure the bad and relish in the good that matters, and the blanks “The Price” fills in are heavy, sometimes joyous, sometimes frightening, and sometimes they’re all three.
One of the few scenes taken directly from the game involves Joel giving Ellie a surprise birthday present as they explore an abandoned museum. For a time, they traverse a world of dinosaurs and space travel, where the devastation of the world does not take from the relics of our past. When Ellie puts on a space helmet inside a rocket ship and listens to a countdown to liftoff, maybe it no longer matters that people can’t actually go to space, anymore than it actually matters that the T-Rex went extinct millions of years ago. However, this inspiring reflection on the human spirit can only go so far. “The Price” acknowledges that it’s not just kindness Joel has to exhibit. It’s the truth. Ellie has more or less always known the truth about the fireflies, but she isn’t satisfied until Joel can actually say it, and that it takes him so long to say it is only compounded by the fact that another great lie is told in the interim. This is where Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) comes in.
Fleshing out Eugene the way they did was a brilliant decision. He’s never seen in the game, only referred to as some standard for life we can aspire for. The game’s characters speak of him positively, and, in a world of cannibals and infected, his own death of a stroke at 73 is seen as a gold standard. Even amidst his new tragedy, the show still uses him as a similar standard. When Joel and Ellie come across him on patrol, Eugene doesn’t hide the bite from the pair, showing them before even saying a word, but he has a simple goal: he wants to say goodbye to Gail.
Even though we’ve seen Gail condemn Joel for how he’ll kill Eugene, you might hope he’ll honor the man’s last wishes. You might hope that, after a brief argument, Ellie’s convinced Joel to let him do this. You might even hope that, as Ellie leaves the two of them to get their horses and she turns back, that Joel’s promise is sincere. Even if hope for that explicit outcome is in vain, hope for Joel to have a heart is not. Joel thinks Eugene’s demands are too dangerous, but if didn’t care about him, he’d just shoot him in the back of the head without a word. Instead, Joel doesn’t let Eugene die before being at peace. He wants to see his wife again, and Joel tells him “if you love someone, you can always see their face.” Joel gives this time to settle, and Eugene, overlooking a gorgeous view Joel picked out for him, says, peacefully, “I see her.” Ellie and Gail may never know what happened, so they may never know the peace Eugene felt, but despite breaking his promise, despite appearing to be callous, Eugene did feel that peace.
Using this new plot point to affirm Ellie’s concerns about Joel telling the truth is a brilliant decision, and the writers (Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann, and Hailey Gross. Druckmann co-developed the show with Mazin, directed this episode, and co-wrote the game with Gross) established this in a brilliant way. When Ellie calls out Joel for breaking his promise about Eugene, she doesn’t say “you broke your promise,” but instead says “you swore,” calling back to the fact that he specifically swore everything he said about the fireflies was true. This human element, of a father lying to his daughter, is what makes Joel’s particular trolley problem so investing, and why “The Price” provides great insight into him.
There’s a lovely moment that re-contextualizes the ending of the season premiere, which previously portrayed Joel as sitting on his porch, waiting for Ellie, and feeling alone when she walked away from him. Here, it’s revealed he’s playing his guitar, trying to enjoy isolation, and when he sees Ellie, he freezes, like his Mom caught him playing his Game Boy (this writer will age themselves if they so well please, thank you very much) after lights out. When she does walk up to him, it’s like he puts on a mask for her sake. After laying some boundaries, Joel asks Ellie if she and Dina are dating. Ellie says they’re not, but can’t hide her feelings, so Joel assures her. “I don’t know what her intentions are, but I know she would be lucky to have you.”
This scene plays differently in the game, where it’s arguably a wholly genuine gesture, but in the show it’s contextualized with a previous scene, when he catches Ellie with a girl (who’s giving her a tattoo, no less, while smoking the devil’s lettuce). He kicks this other girl out and dismisses what Ellie’s doing as “experimenting” with girls and when Ellie says it wasn’t an experiment, he presumes she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Ellie’s identity is for him to question, to determine. This is the damage that he’s apologizing for when he affirms her and Dina, but he doesn’t get the scope of it. Remember, Ellie’s first romantic experience was with her friend Riley (Storm Reid), and it occurred the day they were both infected. Ellie didn’t just experience love as a lesbian, she experienced loss as one. This means the wound Joel inflicted isn’t just about his homophobia, and it’s not undone with him saying #LoveIsLove (though this writer LOVES him for trying), but about Ellie in her totality.
Because of this, however genuine Joel wants to be, it becomes too easy for Ellie to cut through his facade, and that’s why she makes him tell her the truth, right there on the porch, during what they don’t know will be the last time both of them speak to each other, and he does. Their words to each other are simple, potent, and feel tragically incomplete. When fans of the game heard Ellie say “I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that, but I would like to try”, these words echoed through the 20 sobering hours that preceded them. Here, they’re an unfinished hope, and Joel’s response to this unfinished hope is fascinating. He’s surprised, but is that surprise a precursor to horror, or elation? Is he horrified that she still wants to be in his horrifying world, or is he elated that he can get another chance at being a good Dad?
Alas, Ellie’s looking for answers in all the wrong places. The ends of episodes 4, 5, and 6 show a unique trajectory for Ellie: she ends episode 4 joyously certain of her love for Dina, episode five murderously certain of her hatred for Nora, but at the end of episode 6, after being pummeled by the past, both Ellie and the audience are lost. Now, in the finale, she comes to terms with the fact that she’s lost in a city where everyone’s at each other’s throats, tagging along with her injured girlfriend’s very angry baby daddy Jesse (Young Mazino) to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna), the OTHER Jacksonite who risked his life traveling across the country to save her and Ellie. The human level of The Last Of Us is able to shine through in some of these moments, in simple ways. There’s a moment when Jesse feigns certainty of Dina being pregnant, and when Ellie confirms his guess, the weight hits him like a brick and Ellie is embarrassed he had to find out his life had changed in such a flippant way. It’s a moment that doesn’t lose the stakes, and it jolts you with something as human as embarrassment.
There are, however, moments that do point to the ennobling possibilities of humanity. Ellie doesn’t quite walk to it, but Druckmann be damned if Ellie doesn’t see the light when she confronts Owen and Mel. Fans of the game shouldn’t worry: the awful tragedy that both didn’t have to happen yet was destined to happen, still does, It still cuts you right to the bone, but like the restructuring of the porch scene, it’s when Ellie finds out a key piece of information that matters. Her discovery of this didn’t and couldn’t change the outcome, but the drama is now in the desire to prevent it. This prevention is little more than grasping at straws, but if there’s nothing else, the grasp has to mean something, right? Can we hope her having the chance to grasp can point to a different future?
Alas, the last 10 or so minutes potently attest to how little Ellie knows about the world she’s thrust herself into. “The Price” filled in many blanks between Joel and Ellie, but the cliffhanger “Convergence” reveals there’s an entire city full of them, and Season 3’s deuteragonist has her own to hash out with Ellie. For now, we’ll end this review with one interesting point of contention. In the game, in separate scenes, Owen and Abby both tell the same person “we let you live.” In the show, while still in separate scenes, and still to the same person, they both say “*I* let you live.” The shift from both of them giving group credit for letting this person live, to both of them taking singular credit, is not yet known. What is known is that it’s the last crack “Convergence” skillfully lays to the foundation of “The Price.”
Season 3 will reportedly start filming next year, meaning we’ll probably wait until 2027 to see those messy blanks filled in.
See you in two years.
