I would like to be able to say “The trouble with The Last of Us is,” and have a really solid, clear, simple end to that sentence. But as this week’s episode, “The Price,” demonstrates, the problem is more of a series of choices that feel as if they’ve backed the show into emotional corners. This was meant to be a big emotional revelation episode, and to be fair, it does have some really lovely moments. It’s a treat to have Pedro Pascal back for an hour, with all his warmth and hope for Ellie—and we really do need that hope at this point in the narrative.
But “The Price” has a lot of connective tissue jammed in, and maybe too much ground to cover. In one hour of flashbacks, writers Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin try to cram in the entirety of Joel and Ellie’s relationship over five years, and it doesn’t fit. The conflicts feel forced, because each moment of conflict has to stand in for years of their relationship. And yet the moments of joy are so precisely crafted that they feel singular. The result feels unbalanced: vague teen rebellion that is meant to show us Ellie growing up and developing her suspicions about Salt Lake, and loving acts of care on Joel’s part that show how much he pays attention to what Ellie cares about. But only when he wants to see it.
I keep wanting to say that the episode begins with Ellie’s 15th birthday, because I want to ignore the opening flashback, which puts the episode’s theme up in lights. I have run out of patience for the tired shorthand of childhood flashbacks that attempt to give us a protagonist’s personality in one moment—usually a terrible one—from their childhood. But here we are. Back in 1983, teenage Joel (Andrew Diaz) is already a protector; he tells young Tommy (David Miranda) he won’t let their father hurt him. When their dad (Tony Dalton, from Hawkeye) comes home, Joel stands up to him, and instead of violence, the man sits down for a chat (first giving his teenage son a beer, a clear sign that he’s maybe not the best dad in the world). Papa Miller is doing his best, he says, and he’s doing better than his own dad, who beat him so badly that he broke his jaw once. He hopes that Joel, if he’s ever a father, will do a little better.
This feels like an abrupt rewrite for Joel’s concerns, a trite theme to tack on, and to be blunt, I hate it. I hate it both because it tries to offer an unneeded and simple explanation for Joel’s complicated choices—he’s just trying to do better than his shitty dad!—and because it so clearly is setting us up for this line to reverberate through the rest of the show. It’s not even a good line. It’s a weak justification from an abusive father. It ties the idea of “doing better” to parenthood in a way that doesn’t track with how people are, but does track with how this show so rarely has Joel interacting meaningfully with another adult. Joel is Dad, and the show doesn’t want to let him be more than that.
To be fair, when he’s a good dad, he’s a pretty good dad. But I wish the show would let him be a whole person.
In the next scene, Ellie turns 15, two months after the pair arrive in Jackson. Joel’s efforts to get Ellie a birthday cake demonstrate more of Jackson’s barter economy, and the amount of care he puts into fixing up a guitar for her is lovingly detailed. Details matter, and these details show he’s been paying attention.
Meanwhile, Ellie takes control of her body, burning her arm to hide her bite scar and trying to play it off like an accident. To Joel, she makes her confession about wanting to wear short sleeves—the same line she gives Dina, years later. When no one else is around, Joel tells her he understands. (And he sings “Future Days” for her, of course.)
Sixteen: Joel takes Ellie to see dinosaurs and space. (I generally regret watching the overly explanatory inside-the-episode bits, but I loved learning that the hall of stars is made of velvet and rhinestones.) On the way to his latest birthday surprise, the topic of the birds and the bees comes up, and Ellie, who seems to be enjoying Joel’s discomfort, says, “Oh, you mean dicks and vaginas?” Their entire exchange—him awkward and clueless about what she knows and who she likes, her unfazed—is a delight, especially when she says she won’t get pregnant if he lets her go on patrol. Clever, clever girl.
In a nearby museum waits an orrery which works like magic. “Somebody must have greased it,” Joel says, hinting at all the planning that goes into every one of his surprises. Even more effort is revealed when he gives her the tape of the Apollo 15 mission to listen to while they recline in the space capsule. Her imagination lets her leave Earth, and all we see is the changing light playing across her face. It’s a gorgeous moment, the real centerpiece of this episode—Ellie’s joy in Joel’s gifts, and the joy he takes in giving them to her. You can see that this man would give her the world. In a very real way, he did already. She just doesn’t really know that yet.
On the way home she stops to look at fireflies, which is a little on the nose.
At 17, everything goes sideways. Joel’s birthday surprise—this time the cake has her name spelled correctly—is thwarted by the fact that Ellie is already celebrating her birthday, with Kat and a tattoo and a joint. Joel’s anger may be intended to be a symptom of his disappointment, his effort gone to waste, but I was distracted by his surprise homophobia. Why suggest this? Why add yet another bigot to this future, which seems full of them? Are we meant, then, to think that his support of Ellie’s possible relationship with Dina, at the end, shows character growth? When did that growth happen? It’s half-baked and after-the-fact, and poorly considered. Could not one of these poor queer kids have a queer adult in their life? Surely not everyone in Jackson is straight.
In the background of these scenes Ellie is beginning to understand herself, her desires and her sadness and her body. Her choices—making out with Kat, getting a tattoo, smoking pot, all the “teenage shit”—are steps on a road. So are her drawings of moths and the note she writes to herself about having a greater purpose. So Joel’s insistence that she doesn’t know what she’s saying, that she’s not herself—well, for one thing, it’s not really clear where this anger is coming from, other than that things are not all in his control. But for Ellie, it’s cruel. Everything she’s doing is about becoming herself.
Later, Ellie, who has decided to move into the garage in the middle of the night (for maximum drama), calls Joel out when he says it’s his house. It’s not his house. It’s their house, and it was a gift, and he doesn’t own it or anything, really. It stops him, being reminded that they’re part of this community (which is interesting, and ties back to Jesse ribbing Ellie about not acting like part of it, earlier in the season). She’s right and he knows it. Ellie’s willingness to say a “sorry” that she doesn’t mean is telling: What she means is that she’s sorry she hurt him. Neither of them are in a place where they’re ready to say the things they’re not saying. But Joel also apologizes, in his way: He fixes up the garage.
Two years later, Ellie turns 19, and they (finally!) go on patrol. But first, she practices the questions that she wants to ask him about Salt Lake City. It makes sense that that moment would weigh on her, and that she would have more questions as she grows. Joel’s story never really added up, and we know that. It’s also a really hard thing to depict, someone just musing and thinking about a moment from the past. But her leap to a series of questions still feels a bit abrupt, and convenient, given how this sequence plays out.
When they’re summoned to help with an infected appearance, Joel tries to send her back, but she insists that she’s his partner, not his child—hurtful, but true in this moment. As soon as Eugene appears, his death is a foregone conclusion. We know this. The surprise here is how directly this incident ties into Joel and Ellie’s falling-out.
Joe Pantoliano does excellent work as Eugene, who’s desperate and scared and just wants to live a little bit longer—long enough to see his wife again. But Joel’s commitment to protecting people means following the rules. Even if that means lying to Ellie again. And this time, she knows him well enough to see through him immediately—and angry enough to call him out on it.
When they return to Jackson—Eugene’s body behind their horses, just like Joel’s winds up—Ellie simmers. She watches him. She sees just how easily he lies. It tells her everything she’s been afraid to ask. Ellie’s heartbreak is as real as Gail’s.
Gail, though. She’s going to act as a therapist to Joel after this? Seriously? This concept beggars belief. What’s more, it makes their conversation from the first episode feel absurd. She’s drunk and direct about how Joel killed her husband, but when Joel brings up Ellie, she just brushes it off as normal teenage stuff? She was there; she knows exactly what went down among them as they stood around Eugene’s body. She knows that Ellie called out Joel’s lying and was clearly furious about it. And she just … doesn’t mention that? In hindsight, this omission rings false. The seams are showing, the ways in which truths have been withheld, details omitted. It feels manipulative and cheap, and frankly, Joel and Ellie—and Pascal and Ramsey—deserve better.
And they deserve better in that last scene, too. At the end of the episode, we return to New Year’s Eve for a conversation I think just about everyone expected, or at least hoped, was coming. Both actors knock it out of the park, especially Pascal. It’s wrenching, the way he holds in sobs while answering all of Ellie’s questions with a tight nod or a shake of the head. But this scene—this finally-here moment in which Ellie demands answers—is too beholden to that opening flashback. It treats Grandpa Miller’s justification for his actions as a meaningful concept that is Joel’s last gift to, or wish for, Ellie: When you have a kid, you’ll understand, and maybe you’ll do better. It’s patronizing, cliched, and heavy-handed, and it’s so hard to go straight from that into Ellie having a line that actually matters: “I don’t think I can forgive you for this. But I would like to try.”
This episode tries to answer the question of why Ellie and Joel grew apart, but it loses that deep interpersonal work in favor of tying up loose ends and wedging in things that have been mentioned but unseen. Yes, when Nora tells Ellie what Joel did, she’s not telling her anything she didn’t know. Yes, Ellie had good reason to be mad at Joel when this season started. But the depiction of her teenage drive for independence, her growing suspicions about the Fireflies-—these are thin and unconvincing.
It’s hard not to feel like this episode gives us the answer to the other looming question: Will Ellie continue the cycle of violence? You don’t stuff in this fraught line about doing better without intending for it to echo through the story. It seems clear that she will recall Joel’s words and decide to do better for the next generation. Ellie’s already passed up one opportunity to say Fuck it, Jackson’s way better than this place, so presumably she will have this lightbulb moment at the last possible second. I would really love to be wrong about this. But this season did start off by telling us what it’s going to do.
The most interesting, rich idea here is that forgiveness isn’t a single choice, but an ongoing act, a thing you can work on. What does it mean to try to forgive someone? What does it take? And how far does it extend? Can you forgive someone you hate as well as someone you love? Is forgiveness something you do for the other person, or for yourself?
I so want to see Ellie work on this. I want to see her trying. But the show would rather tell us that she wants to try, and then show her doing anything else. At the end of the episode, we’re back in Seattle, where she’s miraculously escaped the hospital full of WLF folks and is nearly back to the theater (dark again; smart Dina presumably turned off the dang lights). Next week is the season finale, and I remain moderately convinced that Ellie’s not getting any kind of closure just yet.
CAKE CRUMBS
- This is the first episode this season to have any writers other than Craig Mazin credited.
- Love the little production details, like the bottles of booze labeled with masking tape.
- It hurts me that there’s no bandage on that fresh tattoo.
- It’s a good little detail that Joel’s birthday surprises grow closer to the violence and protectiveness that Ellie associates with him. Patrol is about protection. As she gets older, he brings her into that orbit, but he doesn’t want it for her when she’s a kid.
- Gail was reading Earth Abides, so she’s the kind of person that reads about the post-apocalypse while living in the post-apocalypse. I laughed. (Also appreciated seeing that Gail was always prickly, even before Eugene’s death.)
- The scene with Eugene involved one or two other dead people who we never hear about. Did they not have people back in Jackson? Do their lives not matter because they don’t matter in Joel and Ellie’s story?
- It seemed to me, last season, that the cure was a possibility, not a certainty. Interesting that Joel acts like it was definitely going to happen if he let them kill her.
- I do love that there is no question that Joel sees Ellie as his kid. This show may have very traditional ideas about parenthood in some ways, but it at least understands that family isn’t just blood.
- If you are going to handwave how a character gets out of a very hostile situation, perhaps do not have another character go on at length about how there’s only one exit from said situation? I knew the show wasn’t going to spend any time on Ellie getting out of the hospital in Seattle, but it still doesn’t make any sense how she did so. (Unless she stormed through and single-handedly killed everyone, just like Joel but wolves instead of doctors, and we’re going to get that in flashback. Please don’t, show.)