‘Through the Valley’ is not just the biggest episode of The Last Us due to scale due to its Helms Deep-esque action set piece or in terms of emotional significance with the story pulling the trigger with that heart-shattering twist. It’s the biggest episode, because it’s the episode of the series.
The Last Of Us, as an adaptation of action-adventure video games, is obligated to have action, but it is not obligated to make every action scene in the games an action scene in the show.
This freedom and how it factors in the drama is on full display with the first two episodes of this season and they function as a sort of yin and yang with each other. The breathtaking scale and visceral action of ‘Through the Valley’s” means nothing without the day-to-day lives ‘Future Days‘ shows us, yet the scale and action of ‘Through The Valley’ gives those day-to-day lives, those simple interactions, a heart shattering meaning.
When Ellie walks past Joel at the end of ‘Future Days,’ she doesn’t know what she denied both Joel and fans of the game. In the game, she doesn’t walk past him, she walks up to him. She doesn’t ignore him. She speaks to him, and he responds. Fans (such as myself) have cried themselves to sleep thinking about the words the two of them say to each other in the game. We will probably cry ourselves to sleep again, thinking on the knowledge that, on HBO, these words won’t be said.
Based on the morning after of ‘Through The Valley’, it seems Ellie thinks little of this. She was just a little drunk, temporarily annoyed with Joel, but she’ll talk to him tomorrow. Still, despite reassurances, Jesse (Young Mazino, BEEF) pries and pries and pries, until Ellie’s had enough.
Stopping short of a naughty word, Ellie stands her ground, saying “My shit with Joel is complicated. From the outside, it probably looks really bad. It has been really bad, but I’m still me, and Joel’s still Joel and we….and nothing’s ever gonna change that. Ever. So you all can stop talking about us and worrying about us and thinking about us, alright?”
Following this definitive stance, Jesse asks “So you two…hashed it out?”
This is a fantastic bit of writing. For one, Jesse’s snarky, sarcastic presence in ‘Through The Valley’ is distinct from his hall monitor archetype in “Future Days,” so that he’s still running his mouth a touch when Ellie elaborates this new side of Jesse. However, even if Ellie’s annoyed by the question, it’s also a pragmatic one. After all, as “Future Days” reminded us, it’s not just the truth you can speak about, it’s who you say it to. Can you say what you must to your loved ones? Can you even say it to yourself? Could Joel tell Tommy what he told Gail? Abby can inform someone that Joel killed her Dad, but can she tell herself that? Ellie can tell Jesse that she loves Joel, but can she tell Joel?
That said, it seems her final, frustrated words to Jesse on the subject are an affirmation of her love for Joel. Her walking away the night before wasn’t a malicious act towards Joel specifically, but, like Gail (Catherone O’Hara, Schitt’s Creek) in “Future Days,” says, just Ellie acting like “Every 19 year old daughter has ever acted to their Dad, ever.” If that assumption is true, this is a nice scene. In fact, a lovely scene. One that tells us that Ellie’s tired of people assuming she doesn’t love Joel. She understands the belief, but the belief angers her, and if she’s angry that people think she hates Joel, then, damn, she must really love the guy.
How nice. How nice for this moment of an annoyed teenager being annoyed to, very briefly, be a sincere reflection of love. Please, hold moments like this in your heart. Please cherish them. If you can hold them in your heart, if you can cherish them, then you deserve to. Please, I hope you deserve to. If you deserve to, you’ll have something to hold onto when the storm hits.
In the game, the storm and onslaught of infected put Abby in a visceral moral quandary, on the big, broad scale that The Last Of Us demands. Not unlike God sending a storm so Noah would take the f*cking hint, Abby’s bloodlust both isolates and nearly gets her killed, only to be saved by the very man she wants to kill. This is like the Almighty himself telling Abby the choice to make. Will she make it, or will her dumb ass look in the face of the Almighty and say “no”?
This near Biblical element of the storm and Abby’s decision remains true for the show. However, the new medium means new opportunities, even necessities, not just for Abby’s arc, but the scale of the storm, and how this scale affects the world of Jackson. The camera, no longer tethered to a single character, can show an abundance of Jackson residents and infected, and the cordyceps functioning as a hivemind gives us a purely cinematic tension. When some poor Jackson-ite accidentally cuts into the hivemind, it doesn’t matter that a horde of thousands is already chasing Joel and Dina.
The show cuts from the damaged fungus, to one new infected awakening. This one new infected evolves into a new horde. This new horde merges with the other horde, and this grander horde changes direction, as though their ravenous passion was changed with the direction of the wind. Joel and Dina feel no relief knowing the horde isn’t after them. Now, the Horde is after all of Jackson, and the battle that follows gives Jackson a vulnerability it didn’t have before. Jackson may still be standing at the end, but it will not be the same. This hope for humanity now has scars, but do they have to be a death sentence?
This same question can be asked of Abby’s scars. Joel saving her life means that she chooses to have one. Your empathy, should you choose to engage with it, should want her to choose life. Still, we can’t control or even see Abby’s heart, we can only see what she shows us. To tap into this tension, both mediums give the viewer and player a perceived 1-1 connection with Abby, only for this 1-1 connection to be betrayed. In the game, we’re literally controlling Abby, she is our player character for a brief time, is all the game needs to make her motives so treacherous. That we control her gives us that perceived 1-1 connection with her, and this makes her hiding her motivations hit you even harder.
Abby explicitly saying her motivations through dialogue might seem to run contrary to this, but this isn’t the case. Remember, the point of playing as her in the game was that it was a perceived 1-1 connection. She may be telling us what happened, but she isn’t looking at it herself, so there is no 1-1 connection. An unsubtle and magnificent dream sequence in the beginning is a testament to this. We see a younger Abby on the night of Joel’s slaughter, walking to the room where she finds her father’s body. Moments later, behind her, present day Abby stands against a wall. Arms crossed, Abby’s acting like a big, tough action star, telling her younger self not to go in there. His brains will be all over the floor, she says. Her younger self says “you’re lying” and enters the room. Just because the younger Abby doesn’t believe the elder’s words, just because she doesn’t think she’ll see the brains all over the floor, doesn’t change the fact that the younger Abby is the only one of the two brave enough to look.
Abby can monologue like a big action star. She can say how many people Joel killed, which were soldiers, and which was a doctor. She can make up some “code” about not harming defenseless people that their military faction almost certainly doesn’t have. None of this matters if she can’t look. We can hope Abby can eventually look. For now, take solace in the fact that Joel and Ellie can. In their scene together, Ellie doesn’t just look at Joel and then walk away, like she did the night before. She speaks to him. He doesn’t speak back, but he does respond. This, the most basic and human of interactions, tells us all we need to know. Through the violence, through the screams, through the deaths that await them at Jackson, Ellie’s love for Joel was always there, and so was his love for her, which tells us one last thing about what Joel did for Ellie. That he would do it all over again.
