The Biggest Improvement 'The Last of Us' Makes to the Game Is How Much Joel Cries

The penultimate episode of season two delivered the flashback we all expected - a look back at how Ellie finally learned the truth about Joel’s actions in Salt Lake City. But “The Price” is a study in form vs. function, as the form that revelation took far exceeded the function of its delivery. At times, the episode was flawlessly accurate to the game, recreating scenes with exacting precision (the museum! the porch!), but the flourishes… ah, the flourishes! In unpacking the source of Ellie’s estrangement from Joel, the show gave Joel the emotional send-off I didn’t know I needed for him.

The episode begins in 1983, as a young Joel protects an even younger Tommy from abuse by their father, a police officer played by Tony Dalton. It’s both the origin of Joel acting as a protector and a glimpse at the father figure he learned from. His father tries to justify his abuse by pointing out that it’s not as harsh as the violence he himself suffered at the hands of Joel’s grandfather, until he seems to recognize how inadequate that sounds. “But I’m doing a little better than my father did,” he concludes, “and when it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.” Joel’s dad then leaves the house without raising his hand to either son. But that theme of being a little better, of how far we’re capable of changing or growing beyond the fabric of who we are and where we come from, hangs over the rest of the episode.

It’s there as we see Joel outdo himself, celebrating each of Ellie’s birthdays in the years after they settle in Jackson. On her fifteenth birthday, just two months after they arrived in Jackson, Joel gifts her a guitar he lovingly refurbished and plays Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” for her. For her sixteenth birthday, Joel takes her to a museum he discovered while patrolling, where they sit in a real Apollo space capsule and Ellie imagines what it would be like to go to space. “I do ok?” Joel asks her, with a tear in his eye — and it turns out that I will absolutely cry when Pedro Pascal does, like some weird sad Pavlovian response. That’s a thing I learned this week. Yes, Joel, you did great! Unfortunately, this is also the happiest memory he’ll ever make with Ellie.

We witness the disintegration of their relationship across the next few birthdays, even as Joel tries to maintain their connection. On her seventeenth birthday, Joel walks in on Ellie making out with a girl after smoking a joint and getting a tattoo, a trifecta he’s unprepared to handle — and flubs horribly, especially when he dismisses Ellie’s sexuality as experimentation. He recovers somewhat later on, though, when he discovers Ellie attempting to move into the garage by herself and offers to help her fix it up first. Respecting her need for boundaries is a solid step in the right direction.

The episode then jumps two years, to Ellie’s nineteenth birthday, and we get a different flashback that we’ve been waiting for: Eugene! Bet you didn’t expect to get a little sad Joe Pantoliano all up in your Joel episode, but it makes sense. The story of how Joel killed Eugene, something completely unique to the show, is used to illustrate Ellie’s dawning realization about Joel’s big lie. The flashback starts with Ellie practicing the questions she has for Joel about Salt Lake City, and it’s clear she’s already worked out the holes in the logic of his lie. She knows the truth, even if he hasn’t admitted it yet. She doesn’t get to ask him about it, though, because for her birthday, Joel decides to take Ellie out on her first patrol — and their training comes to an abrupt end when Joel gets word that Eugene and his partner have been attacked by Infected. The pair rush to aid their friends, but they’re too late. Eugene’s partner is already dead, and Eugene himself was bitten. Eugene asks Joel to take him back to the Jackson wall, so he can say goodbye to Gail before he turns, and Ellie determines that there’s time to do that. Joel is clearly wary, but seems to relent, even promising Ellie that he won’t hurt Eugene while she goes to fetch their horses.

Uh oh. We know how Joel is about promises, and sure enough, as soon as Ellie leaves, he takes Eugene to the ends of a lake and gets ready to shoot him. Eugene begs for mercy, saying that he wants Gail’s face to be the last thing he sees, and Joel counters that when you love someone, you can always see their face. And now I’m sitting here wondering if it was better or worse for Joel that Ellie’s face really was the last thing he saw.

Ellie comes back to find Eugene dead, and helps Joel carry the body back to Jackson. But when Joel lies to Gail about Eugene’s last moments, saying that he wasn’t scared and that he killed himself, she finally snaps and tells the truth. Gail goes from hugging Joel to smacking him, but it’s Ellie who gets the final word: “You swore.” Then she walks away, and even Joel knows she’s talking about more than his promise not to harm Eugene.

Another nine months go by, and we’re back at the New Year’s Eve party, seeing Joel’s perspective as he shoves Seth and gets yelled at by Ellie. But this time we see something new: when Ellie arrives home and sees Joel playing his guitar on the porch, she doesn’t just head straight to the garage. She comes back, and the pair finally has the conversation we’ve been waiting for. Ellie asks Joel point-blank to tell the truth, and he does, just nodding or shaking his head to confirm her suspicions, because saying the words out loud is too hard. When he does find his voice, it’s to confirm the truth that matters to him: “Making a cure would have killed you.” To which Ellie responds, “Then I was supposed to die! That was my purpose!”

When Joel says he’ll pay the price, he means because she’ll turn away from him, but we know it’s because there’s an angry Abby waiting just outside Jackson for revenge. Still, he says he’d do the same exact thing if given a second chance, because he loves her. In a way she doesn’t understand, but if she ever does — if she ever has a kid of her own — “Well then, I hope you’ll do a little better than me.”

Yes, Pedro’s crying here, and yes, I was too.

Ellie isn’t sure she can ever forgive him, but she surprises him when she says she’d like to try. And in finally answering all the questions we had about their relationship and their estrangement, we see the true scope of Ellie’s loss. They were on the verge of rebuilding, of healing. They were so close, and that’s what was taken from her. Just as Ellie showed a capacity for forgiveness, she’s faced with more violence. As we return to the present, to Ellie’s hunt for Abby and the last episode of the season, maybe that’s the question we need to be asking — can Ellie ever find that capacity within herself again, or will violence continue to dominate?

Before I wrap this up, I want to talk a bit about the ways this episode stayed true to the game and some of the departures, because the choices are interesting. As I mentioned, that museum flashback — their happiest memory — is beautifully accurate. The porch scene is also accurate, although it crucially combines two different confrontations between Joel and Ellie. In the game, Ellie discovers the truth for herself by travelling to the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City, then she demands Joel admit it all when he comes to find her. That’s when she talks about how she was supposed to die for the cure. The porch scene itself is just her admitting she wants to try and forgive him, and that moment comes at the very end of the game, in the epilogue.

I imagine there will be differing opinions on this, but I sort of appreciate that in the show, Ellie doesn’t need to hunt for the truth. She figures it out on her own, and her relationship with Joel frays as her suspicions mount to a breaking point. The big confrontations, combined into that one porch scene, are still performed nearly word for word, and the actors perform the everliving hell out of them. I also think it was absolutely necessary to move the scene to this point in the season, if only because it’s information we need about Ellie’s character and her journey. It may have served a different sort of gut-punch in the game’s epilogue, but I have no idea when this series is going to end, and holding this episode for what could amount to years of time wouldn’t work for viewers.

All that stuff about being a little better than your own father? That’s all the show, and I want to hate it for being too on-the-nose, but it just flat-out worked for me. Also, Joel’s tears? Not sure if it’s a show thing or just a Pedro thing, but it’s definitely not something I remember Joel doing in the game. And honestly, it might be my biggest argument in favor of the television adaptation. Whenever I think the show is veering too close to telling instead of showing its themes, I just think of Joel with tears in his eyes and think, “Yeah, but damn did they show us what gruff salty/softie marshmallow-man love looks like.”