The end of season 2 of The Last of Us is slowly but surely approaching. HBO has just unveiled its penultimate episode full of emotion, centered on Ellie and Joel. As usual, we look back at the three major changes made by the series with respect to its source material: the Naughty Dog video game.
One of the best episodes of the series?
Just before delivering its grand finale, HBO chose for this episode 7 a flashback centered on the relationship between Ellie and Joel, or rather on the gradual fracture of their relationship, in several stages. A way to finally explain to viewers how Ellie came to reject her surrogate father. Upon learning that game creator Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross (co-writer of the second game) were directing and writing this seventh episode, we expected a beautiful copy subtly responding to Naughty Dog's title. They do even better with a "capsule episode" that skillfully uses the best flashbacks from The Last of Us Part II, while supplementing them with new sequences to reinforce the emotion provided by the tragic outcome of the relationship between the two main protagonists.
#3 The opening sequence between Joel and his father
First new scene: the introduction focused on Joel's childhood and his relationship with his father. An authoritarian police officer invented by HBO, he takes care of his two sons harshly, not hesitating to raise his hand against them at the slightest misdeed. Joel takes the blame for his younger brother Tommy's misdeeds, even if it means taking the beatings in his place. A way to show that the protective instinct of the character played by Pedro Pascal is anchored in him from a very young age. But while we expect Joel to take a good beating, his father uses a painful memory to explain to him that he does not intend to reproduce the same educational model as his father. He implies that Joel must be a better father than him when he has children. A sequence that inevitably brings to mind the way Joel tries to be a good "father" to Ellie, and which finds its resonance at the very end of the episode.
#2 Ellie's Birthdays
To tell us about the rift between Joel and Ellie, HBO summons three key moments: the teenager's fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth birthdays. Each marks a stage in her development, and the inevitable collapse of their relationship. The first is a nice reference to the video game (while the other two are pure inventions). An almost identical scene experienced by the player, controller in hand, where Joel takes Ellie to an abandoned museum to offer her a (fake) trip into space.
One of the last carefree moments spent between the two characters before Ellie's 16th birthday. Joel bursts into her room wanting to celebrate the event and discovers her in the company of another girl, scantily clad. Tattoos, marijuana, punk/rock band posters, all the markers of a rebellious teenager are deliberately included to show the evolution and emancipation of a teenager in opposition to the (overly) protective figure of a clumsy father who tries to understand his daughter. The symbolism of the moth materializes this gap and the increasingly dark direction that Ellie is taking. She begins to measure the weight of Joel's lie.
The real breakup comes two years later, on their 18th birthday. Joel offers Ellie her first horse patrol, and takes the opportunity to try to reconnect, without success. But an event will definitively tip their relationship to the point of no return. After a radio alert, they discover Eugene, Gail's famous husband (dead when season 2 begins) bitten by an infected. Joel promises Ellie that he will give Eugene one last moment with his wife before shooting him a few meters away, out of sight of the teenager.
A new lie that brandishes the irreparable fracture, in addition to rekindling the one in Salt Lake City. The last link in the chain deployed by HBO to its viewers. The wagons are finally reconnected. The next scene is a replay of New Year's Eve, but this time from Joel's point of view.
#1 The Ultimate Offbeat Flashback
After the New Year's Eve argument, it was thought Ellie would return home after seeing Joel playing guitar on his porch. But those who have played the game know that a discussion took place. The famous confrontation about Joel's lie that took place five years earlier. This sequence is offered to players as a reward for completing the adventure. Here, Neil Druckmann (on the advice of Craig Mazin, the other writer of the series) decides to bring the exchange forward and integrate it into this episode, in order to offer an emotional conclusion to the episode, and thus respond to the opening scene between Joel and his father with this same sentence: "I hope you'll do a little better than me if you have a child." We thought that Ellie hadn't gotten the end of the story and Joel's confession before his murderous hunt in Seattle and his confrontation with Nora in the previous episode. We thought she was bluffing by masking her surprise at Abby's friend's revelation, but it was actually HBO that wowed its audience.
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