The Last of Us TV show did the thing

Note: Big ole spoilers for the thing you probably already know about in The Last of Us Season 2.

Well, the thing happened in The Last of Us Season 2, the thing we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the thing even me, a guy who only played three hours of the first TLOU game and only played zero hours of the second TLOU game, has known about since 2020 because, collectively, we are all pretty bad about keeping major events in pop-culture a secret. I am continuing the trend right now.

After watching the episode, “Through the Valley,” I’m left wondering just one thing: how many HBO executives brainstormed different ways to avoid doing what The Last of Us Season 2 did last night? I’m guessing all of them.

I know the creatives behind the series wouldn’t dare rewrite the show to save Joel, but I bet some suits at the network tried like hell to talk them into it. You’ve got the hottest Hollywood commodity, super-zaddie Pedro Pascal, Mr. Fantastic, the flippin’ Mandalorian—and you want to do what to him? In episode two? There must have been a ton of meetings about how to put it off until the final episode or change the script altogether so he can keep being our favorite sexy Sunday night sad dad.

As Tim Clark put it when we were discussing the episode this morning: “Killing Pedro? In this economy?”

As for how it all goes down in the show, after all that anticipation… I was pretty unimpressed, honestly. Abby and her revenge crew had no idea how to get to Joel in the heavily guarded Jackson Hole, so I was interested in what plan she’d come up with. Her plan, ultimately, is just to become the luckiest person in the entire world and capitalize on about a hundred convenient coincidences. Huh! Good for her.

After Abby’s friend (I dunno his name, who cares) ponders how they’re gonna get into the town past all the walls and guards and dogs, Joel conveniently comes out of the town for one of the casual two-person patrols Jackson Hole is really stupid to send out on a daily basis—even though Ellie just reported a completely new type of scary mushroom monster in the first episode of the season. Eh, whatever, no need to send a bigger group out, I guess.

Then there’s a huge storm all these expert mountain folk ignore until it’s too late even though it looks like literal death hovering over the mountains, and that storm conveniently means walkie-talkies don’t work and the Joel/Dina patrol and the Ellie/Young patrol have to hole up in separate abandoned buildings because the patrols extend so far from Jackson Hole they can’t get back to the town. Okay, sure?

Then Abby makes the excellent tactical decision to accidentally fall down a hill and activate the biggest mushroom zombie flash mob in history that she only escapes because she runs into—surprise!—Joel, the one man she’s been hunting across the entire country for five fruitless years. Wow, amazing!

The zombies all head straight for Jackson Hole, I assume because the pipes are filled with mushroom sensors the town found last episode but didn’t think anything of because they’re all too busy spending their time wondering: “What’s with this rift between Ellie and Joel? Why is it the only thing any of us ever talk about? Don’t we have our own inner lives?”

So, Abby gets Joel alone and surrounded, the town is too busy to help, and the walkie-talkies conveniently work just long enough so Ellie can conveniently split up with her partner and conveniently show up just in time to watch Joel get golf club-clubbed and then golf club-stabbed.

(Forgive me if I’m missing something, but was Abby’s dad a golfer? Is that why she used golf clubs? He was a doctor, so it’s possible, but she hasn’t been lugging around his golf clubs for five years just to murder Joel with, has she?)

It’s a shame about the shoddy plot fixins’ (and by the way, the deadly storm completely ends the second Abby and her friends finish up their murderin’, must be one of them-there famous twenty-minute deadly storms Wyoming is known for) because the actual confrontation is good. To be fair, this is fairly close to how it goes down in the game (I am told).

I know some fans aren’t thrilled about Kaitlyn Dever playing Abby because she’s not as physically imposing as her in-game counterpart, but I think she’s great here (she’s great in everything). I like that it’s not some big glorious death for our sad zaddie hero, he’s just beaten to death on the floor in some random house like Joel has done countless times to other survivors with families, then dragged home behind a horse. And Joel and Ellie being stubborn idiots for five entire years meant they never got to patch up their rift, and now it’s too late. Suitably brutal.

As far as the Jackson Hole zombie mob… I have to admit, I spent most of Season 1 thinking “You know what might be good in this zombie show? Some zombies.” Well, I guess I got my wish in this episode but turns out I don’t think the zombies add all that much.

A big mob of mindless monsters just isn’t interesting or exciting, and the one big boss zombie was either a guy in a rubber suit or CGI that looked like a guy in a rubber suit. It doesn’t help that I don’t care about any of the characters in Jackson Hole except Catherine O’Hara (if this show hurts her I will burn the studio down) but she wasn’t even in the episode.

Back to dead Pedro and those HBO executives I imagined trying to save his life… I do feel like they have a point. No offense meant to Bella Ramsey because they’re a fantastic actor, but without Joel in the story I’m not super interested in continuing to watch the show (I will still watch the show, I can’t pretend I have anything better to do Sunday nights). Pascal was probably about 80% of the reason I was tuning in, considering I don’t have any attachment to the game.

I expect Mando might not be gone gone, though: if there’s one thing a five-year time jump between seasons allows for it’s flashbacks, and that might be a concession the creatives gave to those imaginary HBO suits desperate to cling to Pascal’s warm body. “Don’t worry, it’ll be like he was never killed in a weirdly golf-themed murder. We can flash back to him a bunch of times throughout this season! And in The Last of Us Season 3, and Season 4, and Season 5. Relax. Stop crying. Pedro Pascal will never truly die.”