Violence Breeds Violence In ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Premiere

“Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.”

It’s been just over two years since The Last of Us wrapped up its first season, which could be why the season two premiere kicks off with the last scene of the previous finale: Ellie asking Joel if he’s telling the truth about their escape from the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City. It’s a refresher for us, but it’s also a moment that’s worth repeating. It’s the lie their lives will be based on, moving into this season’s five-year time jump. It’s Joel’s secret shame — not that he doomed humanity to save his surrogate daughter (he feels zero shame about that), but that he stole the chance to decide whether saving humanity was worth dying for from her. That may be the crux of the damage between our main characters, but it’s not the only damage Joel caused. This scene is paired with another to remind us that actions have consequences: newcomer Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and other young survivors of the massacre stand beside the graves of the Fireflies Joel killed, and vow to take revenge. Abby, in particular, wants Joel to die “slowly.” She lost someone she loved, and though we don’t yet know who (unless you’ve played the game), it’s safe to assume they were as important to her as Ellie is to Joel.

From here, the episode, appropriately titled “Future Days,” skips five years into the future. Ellie is now 19 years old and has found her place in the Jackson, Wyoming encampment as a protector, while Joel is putting his old contractor skills to use building new homes for the influx of refugees entering the city. The safety and normalcy of their daily lives stand in contrast to the unsettling chasm that has grown between them. Ellie has moved into the garage and barely speaks to Joel, who has resorted to pressuring his brother Tommy and other higher-ups to keep Ellie out of harm’s way. It does no good, of course, because as Tommy points out: Ellie is just like Joel. She’ll do exactly what she wants and let no one get in her way.

While we wonder what fractured their relationship, Joel is more focused on how to repair it. He’s seeing a therapist named Gail (Catherine O’Hara), who offers him whiskey and accepts weed as payment for her services. Still, she’s good at what she does — good enough to sniff out that there’s something Joel isn’t saying about his relationship with Ellie. So she encourages his honesty by saying her own hard truth. She hates Joel because Joel killed her husband Eugene.

Eugene is a figure from “The Last of Us: Part II,” a former Firefly who settled in Jackson and ran patrols before he died of a stroke. Though we never meet him in the game, the show seems poised to introduce him in flashback since it’s already been announced that Joe Pantoliano has been cast in the part. The Last Of Us tends to flesh out minor characters or story beats when they offer a chance to deepen the narrative themes (looking at you, Bill and Frank), and through Gail, who was invented for the show, we can already see hints of why Eugene’s story will matter. She admits that Joel did what needed to be done, but she resents him anyway. Actions have consequences. Gail is still willing to help Joel, but we know that Abby is out there and feels differently.

Gail thinks Ellie is behaving like a normal 19-year-old, pushing back against Joel’s authority and overprotectiveness, and sure — that could be the case! But a lot can happen in five years. Is there something else Joel isn’t admitting, or did Ellie perhaps learn the truth about Salt Lake City? When Gail asks Joel point-blank if he did something to Ellie, he gets tearful. His only reply, however, is that he “saved her.” It all comes back to that.

Ellie may not be speaking to Joel at the moment, but she’s got other people in her life — particularly Dina (Isabela Merced), another young refugee with a sarcastic streak and a familiar thirst for danger. Their friendship already feels lived-in, with a goofy camaraderie at odds with the serious situations they find themselves in (while approaching a mauled bear, Dina makes a “Bear-B-Que” joke as if she’s the personification of Ellie’s old joke books). While on patrol, the pair decide to investigate a grocery store filled with Infected, and it’s there that Ellie makes a startling discovery: the Infected are evolving. She encounters one that is capable of hiding, strategizing, waiting, hunting. It’s… smart. She reports the news back to Tommy and Maria, before heading off to a New Year’s celebration with Dina as her date.

Ellie’s infatuation with her friend is apparent, but Dina more than reciprocates — she takes the lead in changing their relationship into something more. She pulls Ellie onto the dancefloor, and though their sweet kiss — and what comes after it — should be the most important part of the scene, I keep coming back to something Dina says first. When Ellie points out that every guy in the room is staring, Dina counters that they might be jealous of Ellie. “No reason to be. I’m not a threat,” responds Ellie, to which Dina looks her in the eye and replies, “Oh, Ellie. I think they should be terrified of you.”

Terrified? Of our precious immune little baby?! Oh boy, if that doesn’t feel like foreshadowing, I don’t know what does.

Anyway, Dina and Ellie kiss — and are interrupted by an old coot who could have walked away with a comment about how this is a family event if he didn’t double-down with a homophobic slur. Before Ellie can decide how to respond, Joel comes in out of nowhere and knocks the guy to the ground. Here is his overprotectiveness in action, and Ellie predictably is furious. “I don’t need your f*cking help,” she spits at him in front of everyone. Is she mad because he’s being a total Dad, or is she mad that he, once again, took away her agency?

If most of the premiere felt like (admittedly enjoyable) table-setting, then the closing moments hint at some tangible threats to our heroes and their thriving utopia. That pipe filled with roots? Oh yeah, there’s some wiggling fungal mycelia mixed in there, which means there’s Infected outside Jackson receiving information from inside - and they just may have the brains to know what to do with it. But when the camera pans up into the mountains, it’s not a group of Infected that we see. It’s Abby and her friends. After five years, they’ve finally found Joel.

We’ll get a lot more of Abby in the weeks to come, but so far, I think the casting is perfect. Fans of the game may be more focused on her physicality — for good or for ill, Kaitlyn Dever isn’t as jacked as Abby was in the game — but personally that doesn’t matter to me. We haven’t seen much of her yet, but Abby is going to be a huge presence this season and I think Dever has the chops to pull it off.