Warning: spoilers abound!
The Last of Us ’ second season started quietly, with a first episode that saw a grumpy Joel (Pedro Pascal) finally seek out therapy and an even grumpier Ellie (Bella Ramsey) deal with her teenage angst. Life in Jackson Hole was unfolding at a slow, sluggish pace — and for a moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if the rest of the season was going to follow suit.
And then the second episode dropped.
We’ll get this out of the way: Joel’s dead now. And while fans of the video game series knew that this big scene was definitely coming, that knowledge did little to soften the blow. Show creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann held back no punches when it came to showing Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) take a blunt golf club and beat Joel to an inch of death. She is interrupted for a moment by Ellie, who is eventually held down and forced to watch as Abby delivers the final, devastating strike.
The second episode, titled “Through the Valley,” opens with a false sense of calm — the quiet before the storm. Ellie and Jackson Hole resident Jesse (Young Mazino) set out on a patrol, while Joel and Ellie’s new love interest, Dina (Isabela Merced), cover a different area. Town leaders Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Maria (Rutina Wesley) lead the people in a practice drill in the event Jackson Hole ever finds itself under attack (As if that could happen!). Things are lighthearted: Ellie and Jesse find a gas station filled with weed. The townspeople barely take Tommy’s drill seriously.
Then the snowstorm hits, and everything unravels. While patrolling a cliff away from her ex-Firefly group in a winter lodge, Abby accidentally wakes a horde of infected. She is saved by Dina and Joel, the very person she set out to kill. The horde eventually catches the smell of people in Jackson Hole, and the town is quickly under siege. In a sequence rivaling Game of Thrones’ biggest battles, chaos erupts. While the town is torn apart, Abby leads Joel and Dina to the lodge, where… Well, we know what happens there.
Where does the show go from here? With Joel’s storyline now abruptly wrapped up, the rest of the season turns to the fallout — Ellie’s grief, her anger, and the violent revenge she’s determined to take on Abby. As fans continue to sit in shock and process “Through the Valley,” one thing for Ellie is clear: As Ramsey so aptly put it in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “We gonna kill a bitch.”
The Last of Us is streaming exclusively on Max.
