The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6 Review – “The Price”

The Last of Us did not need “The Price”, its emotional penultimate sophomore episode. Its story, the forming and fracturing of Ellie and Joel’s deep bond, was already described so well in the space between “Look for the Light” and “Future Days”. It’s certainly not an episode that needs to set a series of flashbacks on Ellie’s birthday celebrations through the years – and it definitely doesn’t need the addition of Gail into the proceedings, to further blunt the already overt thematic underpinnings of Joel and Ellie’s crumbling relationship. And on some level, “The Price” doesn’t quite work narratively; throughout the series, acts of love and sacrifice have been greeted with humanity’s cold shoulder and/or bullet holes to the back of the head – and to eulogize it, through the lens of Joel’s remaining years, ends up being a choice the series never quite justifies.

When taken in the very specific context The Last of Us asks us to engage with it – memories fading in and out through time, observing the festering fungi of unresolved conflicts and emotions – “The Price” largely works in its assumed role as a reflective, emotionally driven episode (at least, until the ending – we’ll get there, though). Much of this is accomplished simply by bringing Pedro Pascal back on screen; it’s no surprise The Last of Us springs to life and takes on a completely different tone when Joel re-emerges from Ellie’s memories, and begins to detail the birthday celebrations Joel prepared for Ellie during their years in Jackson. Some of this no doubt can be attributed to that season two largely follows around a group of impulsive teenagers and their violent choices – however, Joel’s contemplative nature in this episode takes a different tenor posthumously, each unresolved bit of tension or regret understandably feeling more existential than explicit.

Before we see Joel in the broken, exhausted form as we know him throughout the series, “The Price” opens by bringing us back to 1983, our first glimpse (in any form) of Joel’s childhood, in the form of him and his cop father sharing an awkward beer together, after a young Joel violently defends his brother, during an apparent weed deal gone wrong. His father (played by Tony Dalton, just seen in Daredevil: Born Again as Jack Duquesne), makes for an interesting presence in a world with the miserable, depressing pathos at the heart of the series; at first, Papa Miller is depicted as a fearsome presence in his house, with Joel insisting to a young, scared Tommy that he’s going to take the incoming beating in his place – the genesis of Joel’s willingness to punish himself to save someone else, of course. But as Joel and his father’s conversation continues, Joel slowly watches his fathers eyes fill with tears of regret, as he admits that yes, he does beat his children, but less than his jaw-breaking father did – and hopes that his decisions, those that make his children resent and fear him, are something that ultimately drives them to be better than he was.

Though not a scene delivered with any type of nuance, it sets a tone for the episode to follow, essentially a series of vignettes tied together by Joel and Ellie’s evolving – and then devolving – relationship during their time in Jackson. As expected, Pascal’s return to The Last of Us returns it to its purest, most functional form, its eyes squarely focused on the fantastic performances these two performers endear from each other; season two’s done a lot of work to find a new rhythm with characters like Jesse and Dina and their interactions with Ellie – but, of course, it’s nothing like the surrogate parental bond formed between the two protagonists of the series.

And for awhile, Joel’s attempts to be better and find peace seemed to be working; we see Ellie’s 15th and 16th birthdays, where Joel, respectively, buys her a guitar (“some call it a gee-tar”, he says affectionately) and takes her to an abandoned museum full of space exhibits. The former allows The Last of Us a rare view of Joel as a truly empathetic character, in a wonderful montage of him restoring and preparing the guitar for her, only to be interrupted when Ellie comes back after trying to burn her infected bite scar off her arm; it’s a great scene, only outshone by her next birthday, where Joel takes Ellie to see a dinosaur statue, and to bring her inside the remains of the Apollo 15 launch pod.

The launch pod sequence is easily my favorite of the season; it engages in the simple concept of wonder, something The Last of Us rarely allows itself to have. After letting Ellie pick out a helmet, he gives her a tape recording of the Apollo 11 launch for her to listen to while she lays down in the pilot seat of the pod; and for a brief moment, “The Price” brings us inside Ellie’s imagination, her eyes pinched tightly shut as she experiences leaving Earth’s atmosphere and enters the darkness of space. In a world where happiness is always temporary, and love only seems to make the pain of living more difficult, we get to see a character dream for a moment; it is as beautiful a moment The Last of Us has ever offered itself, and is easily the emotional high point for a season that’s been pretty dour since the events of “Through the Valley”.

Of course, that happiness was only temporary; by Ellie’s 17th birthday, she’s become a full-on teen, and Joel catches her hooking up with the local tattoo artist who just tattooed her scarred arm and smoke a joint in her bedroom with her. At first, what appears to be an incredibly cliched moment between Joel and Ellie begins to blossom into something a lot more poisonous than a cordyceps infection; as Joel struggles to contend with his not-daughters burgeoning sexuality, we can see the panic in his eyes as his tightly-held grasp over the reality he’s created for him and Ellie (one where some raiders killed all the doctors and Fireflies, and not just a man afraid of losing the last person he’d ever know how to love) begins to fray at the edges – and when we return two years later for Ellie’s first patrol on her 19th birthday, it all falls apart in horrifying fashion.

We’ve known season two of The Last of Us would explicitly deal with the death of Eugene, Gail’s husband and Jackson’s local weed guy. During Ellie’s first patrol (on what Joel considered the safest, quietest path outside the settlement’s walls), the pair find themselves catching the tail end of an Infected attack on another group, before coming upon Eugene (portrayed phenomenally by Joe Pantoliano), who admits he’s been recently bitten and most likely only has an hour or so left to live. Once Joel promises Ellie he’s going to keep him alive until he can say goodbye to his wife, it becomes very obvious Joel is not going to let that happen – no matter what the cost, Joel once again proves he’s willing to sacrifice anything to keep the person (and now, the people) he loves alive, a list that includes his inner peace, his relationships, and as we see here, even his soul, lying to Gail about what actually happened before Ellie, gritting through tears, describes what he did.

Though Eugene’s death and its circumstances are not something The Last of Us really needs to get its point across, it is the episode’s other incredibly affecting scene, and a moment where the series offers itself some nuance beyond the typical “humans are the REAL monsters, and happiness is DEATH” shtick that is its forte. Joel’s decision is an awful one – but it’s not one made without careful consideration of the many dangerous variables Ellie’s compromise entails. At the end of the day, Joel’s job is to guide her into the world by showing her the right choices, especially in challenging moments; like his father, he’s not really capable of doing that in a healthy, normal way – and while we are often able to escape some of the toxic cycles our families inherently (and often accidentally) pass down to us, some of them become instinctual in ways we often don’t recognize until its too late.

And, unfortunately, that’s mostly what we see from Joel from there on out, his frustrations as a father meshing with coming to terms with the end of a child’s teenage years (something he never experienced with his daughter in the before times), events only exacerbated by the rift caused as Ellie’s suspicions about Joel’s lies come to life in front of her. It’s unapologetically ugly, and tense, and dramatic – from Joel’s reluctant acceptance of Ellie’s sexuality and independence, to him coming to terms with the fact that no matter how hard he tries to think about it, he knows he would never, ever change the decisions he made to kill all those people in Salt Lake City and deny the world a chance at a cordyceps cure.

Their final scene together, when Ellie comes to speak to Joel after the New Year’s party in the premiere, tries to tie a neat bow on this story, smartly avoiding neat catharsis as the two finally let themselves talk honestly about what happened in Salt Lake City; Joel selfishly killed a bunch of people, taking away the hope of an entire world – and also taking away Ellie’s agency as a person, something that we see her fight harder and harder for as the vignettes pass in “The Price”.

And it’s here where I think “The Price” does feel a bit at odds with itself; the thoroughline, of course, is that Joel took the lessons of his a-bit-too-self-aware father into his own life, fiercely protecting those he loved and occasionally losing control of what that meant, or how to do it in a humane way. The Last of Us wants this to transition to Joel and Ellie; but as the episode closes on the image of her determined face heading back to the Seattle theater, what exactly has she learned in the wake of Joel’s death? Seemingly, the only difference between Joel and herself is that she’s more straightforward about defining what she does; but as we saw in just the previous episode, the generational Miller cycle to “fuck up, but then try to feel bad about it” has been lost in translation, and Ellie’s two decades of conditioning in the shitty world she was born into, have only calcified the worst traits she could inherit from her surrogate father – and even though Ellie is willing to engage in the concept of forgiveness for a moment, is clearly unwilling to commit to it when the prospect of vengeance is within her grasp.

Instead of an inspiring moment, it makes for a rather dark one, their last real interaction occurring in a moment where Joel and Ellie basically admit they’re probably never going to be able to change – though they’re willing to try for each other, an opportunity that’s ripped away from them not hours later. Knowing the path Ellie has been set on since Joel’s death only makes the moments before it even more bitter and hollowed out; it is only thanks to Pascal and Ramsey that the scene works at all, their vulnerability piercing what is a rather leaden scene, complete with Joel explicitly repeating the quote from his father’s monologue in the cold open – it’s not sharp writing, but the underlying performances give it a bit of shape the text doesn’t allow for.

Still, as season two’s penultimate episode, “The Price” feels a bit underwhelming, despite having at least two of the best scenes in the series contained within it. Though it effectively communicates how Joel and Ellie’s feelings for each other define their relationship, what it’s trying to say about how trauma and experience form these intergenerational bonds and teachings falls a bit flat, especially as the episode closes with a promise to return to the more conventional, miserable proceedings laid out in front of it (lest we forget, right now Ellie is stranded, leaving her pregnant girlfriend injured outside Seattle with her best friend and Joel’s brother, all who put their lives on the line to try and rescue her from killing Abby and what’s left of her soul). It works in context; but like Ellie trying to piece together the logic of Joel’s story over years and years, the deeper you dig into each narrative choice, the more it feels like The Last of Us reinforcing things we already know, without any sense of evolution to its sense of self, or some consistent thematic purpose except that maybe, in the end, if you can live with yourself, your worst decisions are just as valuable as the best ones?

This might be an easier pill to swallow, had we not spent the last four episodes watching Ellie fuck up like the impulsive, unprepared teenager Joel always feared she might be; here, it actually feels sadder to watch Joel’s regrets fall onto deaf ears, a man left with the complicated legacy of living with his horrific actions – those that protected people and gave himself a sense of purpose, no less. Instead of letting Ellie decide her own purpose in the world (presumably, by saving them all instead of killing them), Joel’s never able to resolve that conflict within himself; though that holds a lot of resonance for Joel and how his life ultimately ends, how it translates to Ellie (and eventually, Abby) feels lost in translation, the long-term ideas of the series coming into direct conflict with its more immediate emotional and narrative ends.

We will see how it all ends last week, and how The Last of Us tries to end its season by giving this episode resonance through Ellie’s pursuit of Abby (also walking into the middle of a building Seraphite vs. WLF war). As a standalone episode, “The Price” undeniably works; but the harder it works to give itself voice and pathos in the larger context of the series, the more difficult it is to see the picture it’s trying to paint, and what is has to say about humanity that hasn’t been said before.

Grade: B+