I honestly don’t know where to start.
So let’s just start by saying this will have all the spoilers.
What I knew about the second season of The Last of Us before it began was very basic: Joel would die at Abby’s hands.
In no way did I expect that to happen in the second episode, or in the manner in which it happened, or with poor Ellie right there and helpless. I thought: penultimate episode. Season finale. Especially since it’s been made pretty clear that the story from the second Last of Us game is going to stretch over more than one season of television, I thought: That will happen later, after we’ve seen more of this divide between Ellie and Joel.
Nope.
And it makes sense, in hindsight, because for the rest of this short, seven-episode season, Ellie is almost certainly going to send herself on Abby’s journey in reverse. (I don’t know this. I don’t know any other spoilers. I am just going by how this one ended.) The first episode set the five-years-later stage for our survivors. This one kind of throws them all in a wood chipper. Artfully.
And it starts, appropriately, with Abby, dreaming of the hospital hallway in Salt Lake City with the horrors at the end of it. Dreaming of herself telling herself not to go in there and look. If you watched the-after-the-episode interviews last week, you already learned what this is hinting at, what becomes explicit later: The doctor Joel shot in the head was her dad. Abby’s quest for vengeance is personal and painful and despite the fact that it’s been five years, she still doesn’t want to look at it too closely.
And yet, five years down the line, all the people who were with in Salt Lake are still with her in Wyoming. What do they feel they owe her? What hold does she have over them? What are the odds that not one of them would peel off and refuse to return? They are freezing half to death in a lodge on the edge of a mountain because Abby wants revenge. But what do they want, when they’re not freaking out over the size of Jackson by daylight, or beginning to wonder if they can get Abby to just give up and go home?
Abby, though, is beyond stubborn. It’s a stubbornness that edges over into foolishness. Surely that doesn’t remind us of anyone.
The casting on this show is universally excellent, but so far this season a quiet VIP nod goes to Young Mazino as Jesse, who has the unpleasant job of waking up a very crabby Ellie for patrol. Their relationship feels lived-in: Jesse knows when to back off, and when to call Ellie on her shit. Their banter, even as she tries to be too tough for banter, is perfect: the way he pretends to be horrified that Ellie and Dina kissed, the way he points out her tendency toward “certainty masquerading as knowledge.” In the midst of their conversation there are two glaring details. One is the mention of infected using their own dead as bait while hiding under the snow. The other is Ellie’s insistence that, contrary to all appearances, she and Joel are fine. Complicated, but “better now.” Nothing will ever change who they are to each other.
There is a clear suggestion here that more happened between Ellie and Joel the night before than we’ve seen yet. I suspect heartbreak city is coming in the form of a flashback—and also in Ellie having to deal with the fact that she wanted to go on patrol with Joel, and Joel wanted to go on patrol with her, but in an act of kindness, he said to let her sleep.
Overall, “Through the Valley” constantly tells us what is going to happen, and then makes it happen in ways that are no less shocking for knowing what’s coming. In the restaurant, Tommy calls the whole town together for a drill on what they do in an emergency. Bells, flares, shelter, guns. Maria makes Seth apologize to Ellie for using a slur at her and Dina, and Seth almost sounds like he means it. I’m beginning to wonder if there is a story through-line with Seth, if he wasn’t just a one-off rude-man appearance at the New Year’s dance.
I don’t really understand why the town sends out two-person patrols when Jesse just told Ellie about the snow pit full of infected—and also when Ellie’s last patrol was five people. I don’t understand sending two-person patrols out into a growing snowstorm. But there’s a theme here of underestimation. Abby isn’t that deadly. The snowstorm isn’t that bad. The smart infected was a ghost story. Maybe the snow-murder-pit was a fluke. No one wants to believe the horrible thing happening right in front of them even as it’s happening.
In the snowy, frigid calm before everything goes to absolute shit, Jesse and Ellie hole up in a 7-11 full of weed plants that once belonged to the oft-mentioned Eugene, who, it turns out, used to be a Firefly. This, maybe, puts another wrinkle into his death at Joel’s hands. The implication seems to be that Eugene got bitten—Jesse says he “couldn’t be saved”—but given Joel’s past with the Fireflies, he can’t have been comfortable having even a former member around.
There’s a part of me that wishes the show hadn’t told us to expect the snow-pit full of infected, and also a part of me that thinks throwing that at us as a shocking surprise might have been over the top in this particular episode. My notes from that scene are incoherent and all caps as it is (OH MY GUFKC IT’S LIKE LIQUIFYING AROUND THE DEAD OMG HORRIBLE ZOMBIE PIT). Having heard about it does not fully prepare a person for seeing it, though, for seeing the snow just churn like that. Abby’s escape seems impossible—whoever thought up that wilting cyclone fence is an evil genius—until it doesn’t. Until she’s saved, and there’s an epic-tragedy angle on who saves her.
Because of course it’s Joel. He sees a young woman—who looks like a kid to him—in mortal peril and immediately leaps to her aid. You could assume, fairly, that he was in that building with Dina already because Dina was clearly suffering from the cold. Joel’s choices, one after the other, have led him here. Not just the massive choices like Salt Lake, but the little ones, too.
We know Abby wants to kill Joel because she said so. And yet in that whole sequence, from the pit of doom to the infected pounding on a door that will not hold, it feels impossible to not be invested in her survival. There is a bigger picture here, one hard to see among all the intimate drama: humanity is in tatters. The infected are displaying new behaviors. Shit is getting wild. I don’t want anyone to die. But that’s not how the end of the world works. Or a quest for vengeance.
There’s an absolutely gorgeous shot of the infected horde chasing Dina, Joel, and Abby as they race away on horseback that feels like a perfect crystallization of this episode: Full of horrors, and yet beautiful, sometimes. In so many moments, people demonstrate care and act on their love for others: Tommy insists that Amy (Reedan Elizabeth) radio for Joel every ten seconds. Tommy and Maria constantly look out for each other amid the battle for Jackson. Ellie, hearing that Joel is in trouble, tears out like she could single-handedly save him from anything and everything that might be on his tail. Even Abby is driven by love and grief.
(I am, amid all the feelings and horrors, a little bit confused about why the tendrils in the pipe summoned the second infected horde now, and not when they were exposed to the air the previous night. I had to watch twice to fully understand that the second infected pack claws up from the snow after the tendrils wiggle, and the first pack peels off from their chase to join the second, presumably all summoned by the mysteries of the mycelial network. But why now? Why not last night?)
This felt like a season-finale level episode, a season-finale-grade peak of impressive set pieces and emotional devastation, and it left me a little terrified of how the showrunners are going to follow it. In Jackson, the tactic of telling us what would happen before showing it proves at once terrifying, effective, and briefly comforting. For a few minutes, we watch the residents move into position, so prepared for this inevitable attack, and then it all goes to shit, like it always does. But there is a brief moment of appreciating the preparations, the plans, the way that this community works together. (Also, exploding infected. It’s grotesquely satisfying.) In an episode full of spectacular performances, Gabriel Luna and Rutina Wesley hold everything together, steady and fierce, the necessary center of that town. I worried so much that one of them would die. But they couldn’t do that to us. Not this week.
Up in the lodge, there’s a moment of softness from Mel (Ariela Barer) as she tends to Dina; there’s a streak of care in that woman that I don’t think Abby can strip out, and I wonder how that is going to play out in the long run. I wonder how long it is until any of them turn on her, honestly. But for now, they’re under her command, and the minute Abby names Joel, everything shifts. These militia members are swift, practiced, determined, and Abby’s whole demeanor goes cold and terrible once she’s out of danger and has her prey well and truly captured. Kaitlyn Dever is incredible in this, moving with a steely viciousness that we know, from that opening scene, is masking a world of hurt. Hurt she doesn’t bother to hide, once she has the upper hand. There are tears in her eyes from the start.
Hurt people hurt people, as they say. And the hypocrisy of her insistence on there being things everyone knows are “just fucking wrong”—saying this, moments before she beats a man to death with a golf club—it’s palpable. It’s not subtle, and it isn’t trying to be. The show told us this was coming, and then delivered exactly what Abby promised: Joel’s slow death. That doesn’t make it right. There is no right. Joel acted out of love, and now Abby does the same, and it still ends up with people dead.
It’s heartbreaking but understandable that Joel doesn’t try to defend himself or explain, because what can he explain? Ellie’s immunity is a secret from Jackson; he’s certainly not going to share it with this crew. His actions are still to protect her. He doesn’t argue with Abby, either. He nods. It’s debatable whether that means he agrees with her, or if he’s just nodding in acceptance: This is what she believes, and what she’s going to act on. He acted from his own sense of belief.
Director Mark Mylod—a Game of Thrones vet who does a stunning job here with impossible material—and writer Craig Mazin make sure that we’re watching not just Abby’s pulping of Joel, but everyone watching her. Those faces are not unmoved. They came here with Abby, they knew what she wanted to do, but knowing is not the same as watching. We hardly know anything about them, especially quiet Nora (Tati Gabrielle, of The 100 and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and quick-to-violence Manny (Danny Ramirez, the Falcon himself). The show doesn’t make us watch every minute as Abby beats Joel to the point of breaking a golf club. But it makes us very aware that they watched.
Even though it would solve nothing, fix nothing, I felt that wish for Ellie to storm in and take out Abby. But then Abby’s friends would just kill Ellie, and maybe Dina too, and nothing would change, the cycle going on and on and on. Still, it’s in so many stories, this rush and drive for revenge, for some broken version of “justice,” the pointlessness of “an eye for an eye,” that it feels like resolution, narratively. The illusion is there; the story lets us feel it, and then reminds us how impossible it is. Ellie does not storm in and save the day. Ellie storms in and is immediately disarmed for the crushing, brutal finale, which is all the more brutal for the almost casual way Abby ends Joel’s life. And then she just walks away, not realizing she’s just turned Ellie into her mirror image.
The rest of this episode is so heartbreaking it is hard to find words for it. The quiet through which Abby’s team moves as they depart is a standout choice, a moment of silence for the audience to sit with what we’ve just seen. Bella Ramsey’s performance of Ellie’s heartbreak is gut-wrenching, and Pedro Pascal bruisingly embodies that moment when Joel tries to rise. He has almost nothing left, but it’s all for Ellie. The closure is full of love and horror and loss, shot through with a terrible thread of practicality: Jesse arriving, the horse towing Joel’s body, the blood-soaked streets in Jackson, the additional deaths of those bitten in the fight. Violence doesn’t just end; it has repercussions, and this is only the beginning.
After the first season of The Last of Us, I wasn’t sure I was going to keep watching. I felt burnt out, exhausted, tired of all the horrors and feeling as if I had spent enough time in various desolate post-apocalyptic worlds. Why watch the horrors on the TV when there are so many horrors happening every day?
But I was curious, and I loved Pascal and Ramsey together, and I kind of wanted to know the hows and whys of what I knew would happen with Abby. Now, I’m glad I came back to it. This episode, of all things, made me glad I came back to it. It’s a masterful display of balance when it could have been a numbing onslaught of cruelty and violence. It’s beautifully pieced together, dealing ugliness with one hand and community with the other, and it’s crafted in such a way that the almost inevitable comparisons to the battle of Helm’s Deep or Game of Thrones’ “Hardhome” are more than earned. “Through the Valley” is the clearest example of what this show can be, of the story it wants to tell, and that story involves a willingness to leave its audience in discomfort. We’re mourning along with the characters, hoping they can rebuild—but fearing there’s a lot more violence to come.