The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 1 Review – “Future Days”

There’s no more fitting image for “Future Days”, The Last of Us‘s methodical, understated season premiere, than watching a slightly-older Joel fumble with a broken circuit breaker. As he explains, all it takes is too much heat and pressure along one critical part of the circuit’s foundation, before a spring triggers and the circuit faults. Over time, the repeating overheating and faults lead the spring itself to weaken and eventually fail; it’s a rather elegant metaphor, a moment that stands out amongst some of the more obvious, leaden developments shown in the hour-long premiere, an ingenious bit of foreshadowing detailing a world full of these critical circuits, many of which are beginning to silently overheat and trip throughout the course of the episode, to rather effective ominous effect.

Before its jump to New Year’s 2029 where most of the premiere is set, The Last of Us season two begins where season one ended; with Joel lying to Ellie after he killed the Fireflies trying to sacrifice her to find a cure, the two uneasily heading back to Wyoming. Before the time jump, however, “Future Days” offers a brief introduction to the first fault triggered by Joel’s decision to ‘save’ Ellie (his words, not mine!), in the form of a grieving group of Fireflies, led by a young woman who insists that when they do hunt down Joel, that they make his death a painfully slow one.

From there, we move into the first and second acts of the premiere, a surprisingly restrained, strong portrayal of a Jackson finding itself at a series of crossroads. As other settlements fall and more refugees find their way to camp, the growing council making decisions for the town are struggling to find resources (even in an apocalypse, there’s a housing crisis), to the point Joel can’t even find caulk to keep Maria, Tommy’s wife and the town’s de-facto leader, from being cold in her own office. Plans to get the school and library up and running are behind, housing supplies are low – and unbeknownst to anyone in town, there’s a rather active strain of cordyceps strands weaving and pulsating their way through the pipes running underground. The heat’s already being raised underneath Jackson’s leadership – and when “Future Days” is at its most effective, its slowly teasing out these underlying tensions, as it refocuses its attention on the many dangerous variables inside and outside of the settlement.

For Joel, “Future Days” finds him a a little more weary and aged – but still insisting that he’s a “good guy”, which only festers the building resentment he has to the now 19-year-old Ellie, living in the garage and generally ignoring Joel as much as humanly possible. His anger and fury of the past has been placed with mostly resentment at the teen not-daughter he feels owes him in some way, a way he can’t express because that would require him admitting to what he did in Salt Lake City at the end of season one.

So instead, he brings himself into season two’s dumbest development; the addition of Eugene’s wife Gail (Catherine O’Hara) as Joel’s widowed, slowly-unraveling therapist is a silly proposition from the start, even before it is revealed that sometime in the past year, Joel killed Gail’s husband. Putting aside that once again, every single show has to have a therapy character, it seems reductive to bring a character like Gail into the story – not because Gail’s weird, slowly-coming-apart-at-the-hinges vibes doesn’t add another ticking time bomb to season two’s already-crowded pile, but because it is a quick cop-out that allows The Last of Us to explain its emotions, rather than let the actions of its characters define themselves.

In theory, this should help soften one of season one’s big problems, the deterministic nihilism that infected every character, every story, every coiffed hair on Joel’s head with the same singular focus to infect, destroy and unwind. But we don’t need to sit Joel down to try and resolve the death of his daughter and Ellie’s maturity; Ellie’s distant nature and Dina’s attempts to mediate between the two of them are strong enough indicators of Joel’s emotional arc in these early episodes. It’s a tired idea, and one layered with the unnecessary complication of revealing Eugene’s death, apparently at the hands of Joel; it clouds the purpose of these scenes, one of many examples in this hour where the narrative demands of the story seem to outweigh the more propulsive, rewarding exploration of character.

It’s too bad the unnecessary therapy scene is inserted into the middle of the episode – because when “Future Days” is focused on the worn down Joel or the increasingly impetuous and careless Ellie, it does a really good job showing the still-lasting frictions of these two, hardened by a world determined to kill their optimism, trying to fit into a world trying to find its way back to some kind of normalcy… and even begin to grow.

Ellie’s become an even more challenging protagonist in the five years since “Look to the Light”; she listens to Nirvana while she hides out in Joel’s garage (“I never should have let her move in there”), she crushes on fellow recon girl Dina (who just broke up with her boyfriend Jesse again), and she moves with reckless abandon through the camp, in rebellion against her not-father who keeps telling everyone to keep an eye on her. Though The Last of Us certainly doesn’t play her anger towards Joel as a big mystery, the ambiguity of her seething rage towards him – either for the lie laying unspoken between them, or for what she considers overprotective restrictions – adds a layer to Joel’s frustrations, which come boiling over in his therapy session with Maria, the one where he insists he’s a “good guy” and that he “saved” her.

The second half of the episode focuses much of its attention and Ellie’s, on Dina, a charismatic young woman and Ellie’s frequent partner on recon missions outside the fortified walls of Jackson. Impulsive and practical, Dina makes for a solid catalyst alongside Ellie, not only to offer Ellie new romantic interest (after a supposed failed pursuit of fellow recon member Kat, this after her tragic first crush in season one’s “Left Behind”, but also as a way to start introducing other members of Jackson’s younger generation, their searches for identity and purpose an interesting parallel for a town trying to figure out the exact same thing about itself.

Though the second half of “Future Days” is distinctly designed to build to Ellie and Dina’s kiss at the town’s New Year’s Eve event, the real meat of their plot comes when they head into a grocery store to kill a few rogue clickers left over from a bear attack they’d passed on their way out of town. The scene allows The Last of Us to tap into some of its video game sensibilities (throwing bottles for stealth kills) and to inject a bit of tension into an otherwise muted hour-long episode – but more importantly, it wordlessly fills in the comfortable dynamic the two of them have built together over the five years since season one, and their abilities to operate when things begin to go to shit, after Ellie falls through a degraded floor and discovers that the clickers are getting more intelligent, clearly beginning to evolve as one let out human-like screams before luring Ellie into a trap (where she gets bitten again, which she tries to hide by cutting a shape out of her skin later on).

It’s an incredibly effective sequence – though one that is denied a little bit of tension, since it’s clear The Last of Us is just skimming the surface with Dina and the various tensions she introduces across the show’s suddenly-large cast of characters inside Jackson. But it sets the stage wonderfully for the episode’s big scene from The Last of Us Part II – the town dance, where a drunk Dina and amorous Ellie share a first kiss in front of everyone, drawing out Seth, the town’s one homophobe, and triggering Joel into doing the only thing he knows how; protecting Ellie through violence, immediately and wordlessly shoving the bigot to the ground the second he hears what’s going on. Though it comes in incredibly predictable, trite form, the scene is a great reminder that the more and more Jackson tries to find its way back to normalcy, the more it tries to ignore the festering rot lying underneath its foundation – and in some of its people, including Joel, whose days of killin’ clearly aren’t completely behind him (though Eugene’s death may have been justified by potentially being Infected, the ambiguity serves its purpose well in reminding us what still lies within Joel, dormant but very much within reach).

“Future Days” could be a little more exciting, a little more nuanced, and a little bit shorter (again – love Catherine O’Hara, but the therapy angle is such a lazy shortcut for actual character development), but there are some signs that The Last of Us‘s nascent attempts to expand on its story may lead to a show with a little more to offer in terms of its character dynamics, and hopefully a little more variety in how it depicts the cycles of life and how they play out in this post apocalyptic world (season one adhered to a pretty strict formula: show something good, turn it to absolute shit, then deliver the most depressing end possible for maximum effect).

Though the dangers looming are large and ominous (and that’s before the episode closes with Abby and her group making it to the edges of Jackson), The Last of Us, at least briefly, gave itself a little bit of room to explore something other than pure misery – and while I’m incredibly skeptical any of these pursuits will last once Part II‘s main story arc kicks into action, it at least briefly provides a respite from the miseries of season one, the depiction of a society desperately trying to find their lost senses of optimism and hope making for a solid reintroduction to its world.

Grade: B

Other thoughts/observations:

• Welcome to season two reviews! Like a surprising number of other publications, I did not receive screeners this season, so reviews will publish Sunday night or Monday morning.
  
• Perhaps the biggest creative change in the adaptation of season two is the decision to reveal Abby’s motivations at the beginning of the narrative – when in the game, it doesn’t occur until it’s second half, when players are dropped into her world and given control of her for most of the rest of the game. As players control Abby, they slowly learn that she was the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed at the end of Part I – that fact is just dropped at the beginning here, which completely changes the dramatic tambor of some of the expected events to come. Will the change work? Only time will tell, of course.
  
• Ellie and Dina’s silent conversation as they plan out their stealth attack on the clicker is another one of those odd moments of humor The Last of Us randomly throws in – but it works here, both as a shared moment for the two characters, and a reminder that these are still teens who don’t take everything seriously, making them as dangerous as their more careful, mature counterparts.
  
• “Boom, motherfucker.” “You don’t say boom, motherfucker to someone who got the first punch on you.” – I think I’m going to like Jesse.
  
• The other big thing festering in Jackson is Ellie’s immunity; the only people who know about it are Joel, Maria, and Tommy – and even though Ellie jokes about revealing it to everyone, she goes to great lengths to hide her bite from everyone.
  
• Joel pays Gail in weed… which I hope is not a nod to the video game, because that would mean he’s paying her with her dead husband’s own crops.