The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 3 Review – “The Path”

“The Path” might be a reference to a song from The Last of Us Part II, but it’s also an incredibly fitting title for a series contending with the loss of one of its main characters, slowly working through the aftermath of Joel’s death in pursuit of whatever comes next. And not just in narrative terms; The Last of Us spent much of its first nine hours hyper focused on Joel’s regrets and his attempts to find logic in an illogical world – without that, what is the The Last of Us outside of the suffocating nihilism existing outside of Jackson’s walls?

The answer, it turns out, is pretty straightforward; after spending the first half of the episode revisiting Jackson and its people, three months after the WLF cell/undead horde assault came and nearly dismantled everything they’ve tried to build. Smartly, “The Path” opens immediately after the assault, with a brief vignette of a somber Tommy saying goodbye to his brother-in-law, while the burning of Infected bodies flickered against the background of their makeshift morgue. He doesn’t cry, or pontificate, or even really speak (outside of telling Joel to “send Sarah my love”); it creates an evocative image, one of equal resignation and resilience, as we watch Tommy say what certainly isn’t his first (or last) difficult goodbye, while the world around him continues to burn and burn and burn, a symbol of the relentless horrors still awaiting everyone outside of the near-utopian walls of Jackson… and in its own way, the long shadows still hanging over the souls of everyone in The Last of Us (and the writer’s room), as they try to pick up the pieces of what’s left, and chart a path forward.

“The Path” quickly moves forward three months, to the day Ellie’s finally able to leave the hospital following the fateful events at the lodge outside Jackson. Still haunted by the images of Abby stabbing Joel in the neck, Ellie’s physical recovery is clearly much faster than her emotional one, a facade just about everyone sees through, even when she tries to convince everyone at the town hall she doesn’t want to hunt down Abby and the WLF for revenge, but rather to reinforce that their community is different, special, and therefore worth protecting.

But it’s the moments between her faux social performances, where Ellie can’t entirely reconcile Joel’s death and where their relationship ended (something we briefly see a cult-ish community contend with, Ellie and Dina later coming upon the horrifying results), that “The Path” begins to come to life. When “The Path” is hanging around Jackson, full of sullen, yet hopeful faces looking to rebuild, it relies heavily on Tommy (with a sprinkle of Buff Jesse) to give the town its voice; through Ellie, however, the restrained grief and anger waiting to spill over feels more palpable, Ramsey’s incredible performance only occasionally betrayed by a few clumsy bits of dialogue – which, smartly, the episode avoids in its most powerful moments, as Ellie’s silent mourning is felt when she walks through his workshop, cleans his gun… or in the episode’s most touching scene, says a bitter goodbye to his grave, a small pile of coffee beans laid to rest on top of just one of many tombstones littering the landscape ten miles south of the city and its still-being-repaired walls.

There are a few clumsy moments as “The Path” works through the aftermath of Joel’s death and what it means to the community; we didn’t necessarily need Tommy reminding Ellie that Joel was his brother, or Seth’s speech reinforcing humanity’s natural instinct to recoil and reign vengeance – it’s pretty clear from the moment Ellie is walking where her focus is, and it’s also where The Last of Us‘s attention clearly is, as it introduces us to the scar-laden Seraphites and the larger mechanism of the Western Liberation Front existing outside Jackson’s walls, mostly abandoning Jackson in the episode’s second half, especially once Ellie and Dina begin their secret road trip to Seattle.

(Just a note before we dig into the road trip; we only get one scene of the quasi-religious cult as they attempt to travel from one location to another, but their introduction gives off the same vibes of any post-apocalyptic cult we see in modern fiction… they follow a prohet, indoctrinate their children to their weird ways, and contend with a lot of violence that reinforces their desired isolation from the world. Not my favorite part of The Last of Us Part II by a long shot, though hopefully the adaptation can find some more interesting wrinkles within this part of the story, les this just become another “post-apocalyptic world with parallel religious and militaristic cults” narrative, like the ones The Walking Dead did a half-dozen times).

The real question for “The Path”, and The Last of Us‘s second season, becomes a bit more crystallized in the episode’s second half, once Ellie and Dina leave Jackson in the middle of the night on a two-woman quest to hunt down and kill Abby. Ellie and Dina’s dynamic is obviously much different than Ellie and Joel’s, and offers The Last of Us a completely different tenor, the weighty resignation of Joel’s corrupted soul replaced with the playful optimism of two young people, who are entirely traumatized and overprepared in ways people their age should never be – but are still naive enough to make the same mistakes everyone their age does. Though they’re pretty careful about their intended path to Seattle (through a national forest, Snake River Canyon, the Snoqualmie pass, and then they approach from the east… easy peesy, right?), their vulnerabilities are still obvious, especially when their assumptions about WLF’s size and influence are quickly challenged by the images of the massacred cult – and what we see later, when an armored group of dozens walks down the streets of Seattle, complete with military vehicles and a tank (which I’m guessing are repurposed FEDRA assets).

Sometimes naivety takes more fun forms, though; when Ellie and Dina hunker down in a tent while rain pours down outside, The Last of Us slows down for an incredibly effective, moving scene of the two talking throughout the night, in ways that nobody is afforded in the terrifying wilderness of the Infected-and-stranger laden wilderness they find themselves in. There’s a bit of romantic tension, of course, but “The Path” leans less on that than I would’ve expected it to, and it gives their dynamic a nice balance; it’s not just Ellie blindly pining after Dina in every scene, her hollowed out emotional state desperately seeking the salve of Dina’s company and touch.

An easy thing to avoid, yes, but The Last of Us embracing any moment of comfort is so rare, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see that moment compromised by something – giving room to resolve some of that tension right away, lets their scenes, and the brief montages tracing them from Jackson to the last 9 miles to Seattle, breathe. It also, importantly, helps to further shape the fragile, complex place Ellie is emotionally; though Gail and Tommy worry that without Joel, there’s nobody left for Ellie to be completely honest with, Dina presence offers a counter to that, a real opportunity for Ellie to redefine herself outside of the circumstances placed upon her throughout life – and though “The Path” doesn’t shy away from the dangerous downside of that (after all, she ignores the town vote and immediately grabs a bunch of guns to go kill people… not exactly the kind of Mercy Carlisle proclaimed defined the Jackson community), it gives Ellie, and the audience, a moment to breathe and find a microscopic beam of hope within that – something the previous 10 episodes of the series never really offered, a brief respite that hopefully The Last of Us continues to engage with, especially as the series appears poised to head directly into a handful of particularly wrought, challenging arcs for the second half of season two.

For a ‘slow’ episode, “The Path” does a fairly good job at filling its extended running time – and its perhaps at its best when doing so silently, stepping aside and letting Bella Ramsey’s incredible performance speak for itself, as Ellie grinds up the sadness, regret, and anger she feels into one homogenous mixture of explosive powder just waiting for a spark. And though The Last of Us will need more than an hour to convince whether there’s enough meat on the bone to keep the story engaging and moving across a much wider ensemble – and whether its ready to truly embrace some of its Western roots, foregrounded in the second half of the hour – “The Path” is a pretty solid first effort, able to find new emotional tenors and dynamics more nimbly than many series do after their Big Twists, even if a few of those aren’t the most ingenious.

Grade: B+