Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry No, Netflix Isn't Saving Hollywood (But It Isn't Killing It, Either)This column contains spoilers for Season 2 of The Last of Us on HBO Max as well as The Last of Us Part II game. When Joel was brutally killed in the second episode of HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2, it confirmed what many fans of the games expected was coming. But as the season progressed after that point, Joel’s death came and went without any significance. Replacing it was, for me, a certainty: what was a controversial decision for the The Last of Us game franchise would prove to be a killing blow for the television series.Now, I realize that an adaptation fundamentally deviating from its source material can be polarizing in and of itself, but the HBO series simply did not need to kill Joel to successfully tell its story.First and foremost, I think it’s important to note that there’s a reason that this column is being written at the end of the season rather than immediately after Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) death in Episode 2. I did want to be wrong, for whatever that sentiment might be worth. I dutifully watched the rest of the season, hoping that the show’s writers would find a way to reset their story and carry on their narrative in any kind of meaningful way. But, despite the best efforts of Bella Ramsey and newcomers Isabela Merced, Kaitlyn Dever and Young Mazino, there’s little to be done when your blockbuster show’s first season was fully reliant on a relationship that no longer exists. The show’s audience — which is made up of plenty of folks who have never played the games — signed up for a series that no longer exists. The Last Of Us Series Messes With Canon, But the Wrong PartsThe Last of Us has implemented a series of story elements that deviate from the game, and vary in impact, but have broadly served the medium shift. Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank’s (Murray Bartlet) Season 1 episode wasn’t just the best of the series, it was one of the best episodes of television that year, it hasn’t mattered at all that Dever’s Abby isn’t jacked the way she is in the game, Season 1 had tendrils instead of spores, Stalkers play more of a role in the series than they did during gameplay, etc.But the Big Joel Death Scene™ features both 1:1 scenes and major canon divergence, and the core problem with the majority of Season 2 is that the series stayed loyal where it shouldn’t have and diverted where it should have remained true to story. In killing Joel and revealing Abby’s motives from the start, The Last of Us series removed any reason for the audience to return in Season 3.In the game, players stuck around when it came time to play Abby because they needed to know why the hell she did what she did. By the time that information is revealed, Abby had become interesting enough for people to keep playing. In the series, since Abby’s motivations were revealed pretty much in the series premiere, all viewers have to look forward to now is wondering who’s going to shoot who or who is going to forgive who first. And, with respect to what I know is a long adored franchise, I’m forced to ask why should the television audience care?The series either needed to keep Joel alive, choosing to have Abby beat him within an inch of his life and have Ellie believe that he was dead before leaving Jackson on her revenge tour, or leave Abby’s motives a mystery. Joel may have been the inciting incident that made the forgiveness meaningful in the game, but let’s not pretend it’s the only way to get to the desired end result. This series has wildly talented writers attached. It can be done. Meanwhile, while the mystery of Abby’s motivations wouldn’t have been enough to keep me around personally, I can see why it would appeal to a broader television audience. Now though, we’re all stuck in an impending future of no catharsis.Not One, Not Two, But Three Shows in One [Derogatory]Ellie spent much of this season insisting she’s not like Abby despite her rising body count and similar obsession. This will remain a throughline for the upcoming season (or seasons, if co-creator Craig Mazin has his way) even though Ellie will continue to make rash decisions on her quest for revenge. All of this will come after Ellie’s current pickle, as we left her with Abby’s gun pointed squarely at her face. Season 2’s odd “cliffhanger” is another 1:1 pull from the game, as this is the moment where you shift from playing Ellie to playing Abby. This means that we can likely expect the central focus of the series to shift yet again, giving us not one show, not two shows, but a surprise third show. The thing about these focus and perspective shifts is that they totally could have worked if they had billed The Last of Us as an anthology series with the overall wrap-around (the narrative treatment surrounding the individual stories that ties everything together) being the apocalypse they’re all sharing. But because this was presented as a traditional prestige series, there are rules and expectations as to how the story is meant to play out. Storytelling rules are made to be broken, but Season 2 does not inspire any faith that the rest of The Last of Us series will succeed in doing so.Television has always played with the death of the mentor. It’s a trope that often offers more meaning than most, forcing the protagonist to finally take said mentor’s lessons to heart or otherwise reckon with the devastation of their loss. The difference here is that there is typically a broader ensemble to rely on to avoid shaking up the core of the series. We get a little bit of that from Season 2 in Merced’s Dina and Manzino’s Jesse, but they aren’t meaningfully established before the core relationship of the series is destroyed. By introducing them later — and then giving us little reason to care about them until after that still — the foundation of the series remains fractured in a way that seems beyond repair. But that fracture was always avoidable.All signs point to Season 3 being told from Abby’s perspective.Season 1 set the expectation for television viewers that this was a show about Joel and Ellie. Season 2 haphazardly shifted that focus to a story about Ellie, Dina and their quest for revenge against Abby. All signs point to Season 3 being told from Abby’s perspective as she rescues defecting Seraphites Lev and Yara three days before murdering Jesse and holding Ellie and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) at gunpoint. While I cannot stress enough that Kaitlyn Dever is doing great work with the material she has been given, what reason do folks have to stick around at this point? Television viewers with no knowledge of the games aren’t going to buy into the show suddenly being told from the perspective of someone that they’ve been given no reason to care about. I am from the outside looking in when it comes to the game, but it doesn’t seem likely that the WLF vs. Seraphites war was engaging enough to watch a second time in TV form, even with Isaac’s (Jeffrey Wright) expanded involvement in the series. Is there enough interest in seeing Ellie and Abby’s anticlimactic ending to keep viewers already in the know around?It’s All a CompetitionGames as a medium have plenty of hurdles, but they have the benefit of fewer releases than television by a remarkable margin and, whether the audience loves or hates a game, it’s already bought and paid for. The Last of Us Part II may be plenty controversial (all of the best art is!) but a key factor in any television show’s success is giving the audience a reason to return episode after episode. The story format's constantly shifting perspective is a tremendous hurdle in and of itself. Add in The Last of Us’ wildly short seasons, long hiatuses, and Season 2’s lackluster story, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a pickle when it comes to getting fans back for Season 3. The rest of The Last of Us Part II’s arc is one focused on forgiveness and how being hellbent on revenge tears everything apart. Sometimes the journey on the way to an already well-known ending is worth it for the ride (looking at you, Andor)! But given that The Last of Us Season 2 featured exactly one compelling episode focused on a flashback with its now long-dead protagonist, is that journey worth it? The cast sure is doing their damndest to ensure that’s the case, but will that be enough for the audience?Season 2’s penultimate episode may have been great, and Neil Druckmann has confirmed that we’ll have more Joel flashbacks to come, but it’s just not a bandaid to the show’s problem. No amount of strong performances or stellar production value can fix a failure to adapt your story to a new medium. Joel ain’t coming back to life and there’s no putting Abby’s reveal back in the proverbial bag. The Season 2 finale was lackluster at best, the rest of the season wasn’t much better, and knowing where the story heads next forces me to wonder if The Last of Us’ best days are behind it. It’s a dog eat dog world in the land of TV, and people’s time is a zero-sum game. With such high competition and waning interest from viewers, maybe it’s just time to take the show to look at a pretty lake while it rides out its last moments before losing itself to the infection…

The Last of Us showrunners discuss where season three will go Once spore unto the breach. Image credit: HBO News by Victoria Phillips Kennedy News Reporter Published on May 26, 2025 The Last of Us' cast and crew have shed some insight into where the show will go during its third season. Please note, there will be major spoilers for The Last of Us season two finale below. The Death of Console Exclusives Is Inevitable and I Don't Know How I Feel About It. Watch on YouTube Earlier today, The Last of Us' second season wrapped. It ended with a cliffhanger, showing Kaitlyn Dever's Abby shooting Jesse dead, before she points her gun at Ellie. She fires again, and the screen cuts to black. We are then transported back to "Seattle: Day One", but this time we are not seeing events through the eyes of Ellie. This time, we are with Abby, who walks out into the massive football stadium the WLF have made their base camp. Speaking about season two's finale during a press conference held earlier this month, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann said they don't currently know how much viewers can expect to see Ellie, Dina, Tommy and Jesse during the show's third season. However, even if these characters aren't on screen as much as they were during season two, their presence will still be felt. Image credit: HBO "Even if I thought I knew now exactly how it was going to go, I'm experienced enough to know that two weeks from now we may have a different idea of how it should go," Mazin said (thanks, Variety). "All I can say is we haven't seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever and we haven't seen the last of Bella Ramsey, and we haven't seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven't seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story." Meanwhile, Mazin affirmed The Last of Us season three will provide more clarity to some of the events that were playing off in the background of season two, including the WLF's war with the Seraphites. "Those questions are correct and will be answered," Mazin noted. "How did that war start? Why? How did the Seraphites start? Who is [their] prophet? What happened to her? What does Isaac want? What's happening at the end of Episode 7? What is this explosion? All of it will become clear." Image credit: HBO Now, don't get your hopes up here, but during this same conference Druckman didn't rule out Pedro Pascal making a return as Joel via flashbacks. In season one, we saw Anna Torv's Tess pop up again, despite her character being killed off earlier in the show. Meanwhile, season two featured an episode made up almost entirely of flashbacks, which included the introduction of Joel's father, a character not seen in the games. "I wouldn't have guessed we would have a short story about Joel's dad before we wrote the season, so there you go," Druckmann said of that scene, adding: "You can't predict these things." Image credit: HBO In a separate interview with the publication, Ramsey added they "most likely" expect their presence in the show to be smaller than in previous seasons when series three rolls around. "I haven't seen any scripts, but yes, I do expect that," Ramsey said. "I think that I'm going to be there, but not a whole bunch. We've had conversations about that. I sort of have a rough idea of what it's going to be, but I can't tell you." For more on the show, you can check out my discussion feature: The Last of Us season two wraps with episode seven, but was it a satisfying finale?

Antoo Member May 1, 2019 4,507 Full on spoilers for TLOU1, TLOU2, and both seasons of the show ahead I saw this clip on the TLOU subreddit making the rounds. Neil goes into the viability of the cure, and he says this: "Could the Fireflies make a cure? Our intent was that, yes, they could. Now, is our science a little shaky that now people are questioning it? Yeah, it was a little shaky and now people are questioning that. I can't say anything. All I can say is that our intent is that they would have made a cure. That makes it a more interesting philosophical question for what Joel does." Click to expand... Click to shrink... https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastofus/comments/1krqoz0/neil_debunks_the_cure_viability_debate_once_for/ I can't post the interview due to the interviewer, however, if you are a fan of TLOU, I would suggest maybe looking for articles/posts covering it or finding the interview yourself. Neil goes into A LOT. I'll bullet point some highlights. Show highlights: - Neil says Ellie and Dina's relationship was intentionally static in the game. The same approach wouldn't work for the show because shows need movement. - The series needs constant conflict/progression because story is everything in the medium. In games, you can have nothing of high importance going on for a while and still be invested due to interactivity. - He recognizes the divisiveness of the second season from game fans. He's appreciative of their love for the material and finds it cool how people see a game as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a HBO show. He thinks it highlights how gaming has elevated as a medium. - Abby's motivation and the porch scene were moved up due to the reality that the second game needed multiple seasons to be fully adapted. Neil and Craig felt these elements wouldn't land if they kept the game's structure due to how long TV viewers would have to wait to get to them. There was a fear that the impact of these elements would have been lost due to people not remembering the previous season clearly enough to draw connections. - Craig is very intrigued by the idea of the prophet and wants to expand on who she is in the future. Game highlights: - There was originally a sequence planned for one of the flashbacks in TLOU2 where we would play through an infected attack on Jackson as Ellie alongside Joel. - There was no intent for the WLF/Seraphite conflict to serve as an allegory for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He took inspiration from the latter but he also took inspiration from other conflicts. Neil feels certain people online were cherry-picking statements to fit a narrative. He views the game conflict as a secular group clashing against a religious group. - He confirms he would be open to TLOU3 like he said in the documentary but wants to ensure he has the right idea for it that lives up to the series' pedigree - Neil's top priority right now is Intergalactic above all else. He claims it has the deepest gameplay they've ever done.  Last edited: Today at 2:57 AM Red Kong XIX Member Oct 11, 2020 13,276 Never understood why people thought they couldn't. That's the whole point of the ending. Joel being selfish, not willing to sacrifice someone he cares about for the greater good.  ConflictResolver Member Jan 1, 2024 4,907 Midgar I thought it was left vague in both the game and the show until the show's latest episode.   Philippo Developer Verified Oct 28, 2017 8,836 Heh, I liked the ambiguity of not knowing if there was a 100% success guarantee out of sacrificing Ellie.   Lotus One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 124,081 I'm still saving her.   FTF Member Oct 28, 2017 33,203 New York Philippo said: Heh, I liked the ambiguity of not knowing if there was a 100% success guarantee out of sacrificing Ellie. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Agreed. It should be left unknown.   Bansai Teyvat Traveler Member Oct 28, 2017 14,176 Maaan Neil really needs to stop, feels like he's stripping away what's left of the nuance with those latest comments on the story. Then again, his story, his right I suppose, my headcannon remains strong and stubborn though. :P btw. interesting interview 🤔  Risev "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 3,896 Red Kong XIX said: Never understood why people thought they couldn't. That's the whole point of the ending. Joel being selfish, not willing to sacrifice someone he cares about for the greater good. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I always got the impression the game wanted you to skip through the bullshit and just assume the cure would work, but it's still mediocre writing at best: - the lead doctor was a veterinarian. - the fireflies were desperate, lacking man power, and funds. - literally almost zero testing on Ellie before Just wanting to rip her brain out of her skull - literally zero attention given to the special circumstances that could have led to ellie being immune  The Quentulated Mox Corrupted by Vengeance Member Jun 10, 2022 6,565 hell yeah, next we should ask christopher nolan if the top was gonna fall down   Mauricio_Magus Member Oct 25, 2017 15,827 Death of the author applies here, I don't really care what he has to say if it's not in the original game/text. It's clearly supposed to be ambiguous and it's staying that way for me.  Axiom Member Oct 25, 2017 308 Neil knowing the answer isn't the same as Joel knowing the answer - the only guarantee was that Ellie was going to die.   FTF Member Oct 28, 2017 33,203 New York The Quentulated Mox said: hell yeah, next we should ask christopher nolan if the top was gonna fall down Click to expand... Click to shrink... lol   Threadmarks Clarification on cure New Index OP OP Antoo Member May 1, 2019 4,507 For further context, he also states that if you had a different takeaway on the ending scenario of the first game, that's fully valid as well. He's just clarifying his authorial intent while also acknowledging that a player/viewer may read the situation much differently. I think he finds the philosophical question of saving a loved one versus saving the world more interesting than the specifics of how they got to that point.   New Index harleyvwarren Member Oct 31, 2022 5,299 Illinois I always assumed there was a shot at a cure and that's what Joel denied humanity with his selfish, murderous behavior. There was no ambiguity about it for me playing the second game. It's just not subtle at all.   behOemoth Member Oct 27, 2017 6,687 ConflictResolver said: I thought it was left vague in both the game and the show until the show's latest episode. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I think his answer still keeps it vague, but emphasising that serious possibilities existed   Besiktas Member Sep 2, 2024 914 Why creators their own productruin years after a good product releases. Man just focus on making new stuff instead of clarifying theories.   Risev "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 3,896 Antoo said: For further context, he also states that if you had a different takeaway on the ending scenario of the first game, that's fully valid as well. He's just clarifying his authorial intent while also acknowledging that a player/viewer may read the situation much differently. Click to expand... Click to shrink... With all due respect to Niel, but that'a bullshit lmao. He also said the exact same thing about Ellie forgiving Joel / knowing he killed the fireflies at the end of the first game just a month or so before the release of Part 2 which gives a clear answer and renders any other interpretation invalid   Kenzodielocke Member Oct 25, 2017 13,948 It's kind of moot if you make this so technichal Could they make it, could they deliver it, etc.  Lotus One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 124,081 FTF said: Agreed. It should be left unknown. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The game came out over 12 years ago. The idea that a creator/author should just shut up and literally never comment on an ambiguous ending or complicated choice is so weird to me, especially when it's just his opinion at the end of the day.  Shoot Member Oct 25, 2017 5,909 Red Kong XIX said: Never understood why people thought they couldn't. That's the whole point of the ending. Joel being selfish, not willing to sacrifice someone he cares about for the greater good. Click to expand... Click to shrink... This. I was surprised to see people online saying they couldn't make a cure. It also obviously had no bearing on Joel's decision to massacre the hospital either. He just went back to doing what he used to do with Tommy for 20 years. Definitely makes Druckmann's recent comment about doing what Joel did sound sociopathic.  VAD Member Oct 28, 2017 6,099 Philippo said: Heh, I liked the ambiguity of not knowing if there was a 100% success guarantee out of sacrificing Ellie. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yes, me too. I liked that the Fireflies were acting on the basis of hope rather than hard facts. Maybe Joel was right to save Ellie from pointless sacrifice. Maybe Ellie's savior complex was based on nothing and she was right to just live and enjoy life as it was.  Khanimus Avenger Oct 25, 2017 46,469 Greater Vancouver Woah Woah Woah... You mean Joel is a shitty self-serving asshole??!! Say it ain't so...  Zemoco Member Jan 12, 2021 2,621 Death of the author and all that, he really shouldn't confirm something like that. I suppose it's his right, but it hampers the discussion irrevocably. In either case, it does not make any sense on any level to kill the one girl with immunity milliseconds after making the deduction. Not to mention since the Fireflies are murderous, lying pricks anyway, it doesn't make any sense why Joel should believe them just because an omniscient entity (as far as the universe is concerned) confirmed it.  SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,181 Washington Will never understand why people split hairs over this or claim the supposed "ambiguity" of the vaccine viability adds anything to the story. In BOTH games, every character that matters is confident in the possibility of the vaccine, and that is what is important. People so DESPERATELY want to be morally vindicated that siding with Joel is not just righteous, but also rational even pursuit of a vaccine, even though the most passing glance interpretation of the ending is OBVIOUSLY written to not satisfy that perspective. It's a trolley problem, and the trolley problem is what makes the ending, and Joel's decision, interesting. If it's not actually a trolley problem, the ending and the story lose a lot of their depth and impact.   Last edited: Today at 3:02 AM Risev "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 3,896 Khanimus said: Woah Woah Woah... You mean Joel is a shitty self-serving asshole??!! Say it ain't so... Click to expand... Click to shrink... if only he picked up the phone when Neil was calling to tell him the cure works...   SCUMMbag Prophet of Truth - Chicken Chaser Member Oct 25, 2017 7,199 Red Kong XIX said: Never understood why people thought they couldn't. That's the whole point of the ending. Joel being selfish, not willing to sacrifice someone he cares about for the greater good. Click to expand... Click to shrink... This. TLOU isn't a written masterpiece so there's some holes but the intention of those scenes were pretty clear. A lot of the ambiguity comes from things like "they did no testing" and "they decided this far too quick" which are just leaps you'd make to keep the pacing of your game.  Milk Prophet of Truth Avenger Oct 25, 2017 4,292 No shit. People trying to "um achually ☝️🤓" their way out of Joel's choice ruins the entire point of the ending in the first place. If there's no realistic way to create and disperse a vaccine then there's no choice in the first place. At the same time, I get it. Obviously you want to realistically analyze parts of a story you're experiencing. But story intent still applies, in this instance, it's literally just better to accept the Fireflies at their word and assume a cure would work.  Kalentan Member Oct 25, 2017 50,658 I feel like the cure having been likely possible is far more interesting because it means Joel's decision has more around it. Cause yeah, his decision to kill them all means a lot more than if the cure was never possible and they were just a bunch idiots cause then Joel was 100% in the right to stop them.   Glio Member Oct 27, 2017 27,779 Spain Red Kong XIX said: Never understood why people thought they couldn't. That's the whole point of the ending. Joel being selfish, not willing to sacrifice someone he cares about for the greater good. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Because the science behind it was pretty stupid, tbh. But you're right, from a dramatic point of view, it needs to be that way.  bob1001 ▲ Legend ▲ Member May 7, 2020 2,109 If they can make a cure: The ending is a moral dilemma, where Joel is willing to sacrifice humanity to save the person he loves. If they can't make a cure: Joel is saving a child from child murderers. I never understood why anyone would prefer a Mario saves Peach style ending instead of the actual interesting ending we got. When you question their ability to make a cure you are arguing the ending is worse than it is.  Kalentan Member Oct 25, 2017 50,658 bob1001 said: If they can make a cure: The ending is a moral dilemma, where Joel is willing to sacrifice humanity to save the person he loves. If they can't make a cure: Joel is saving a child from child murderers. I never understood why anyone would prefer a Mario saves Peach style ending instead of the actual interesting ending we got. When you question their ability to make a cure you are arguing the ending is worse than it is. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Exactly.  Risev "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 3,896 Milk said: No shit. People trying to "um achually ☝️🤓" their way out of Joel's choice ruins the entire point of the ending in the first place. If there's no realistic way to create and disperse a vaccine then there's no choice in the first place. At the same time, I get it. Obviously you want to realistically analyze parts of a story you're experiencing. But story intent still applies, in this instance, it's literally just better to accept the Fireflies at their word and assume a cure would work. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'd say this is Neil's biggest shortcoming as a writer and is worth criticizing: wanting you to make leaps and just skip through some plot holes for the service of the plot. Uncharted 4 also contains an extremely glaring plot hole that you have to gloss over to enjoy the story  Kenzodielocke Member Oct 25, 2017 13,948 The arguments about if the cure would have worked come usually from people who want to justify hie actions. The justification there actually is, love. Edit: "They didn't even ask her" point is also kind of moot because how often we heard from Ellies mouth that she would have done it.  mbpm Member Oct 25, 2017 29,491 I thought it was more interesting leaving it unknown   psynergyadept Shinra Employee Member Oct 26, 2017 19,044 It was always the case; people just obscured things to make themselves feel better about Joel's decision. The whole point of the games ending was dealing with the "Save many by the cost of one/few" trope we've seen before.  EatChildren Wonder from Down Under Member Oct 27, 2017 7,595 Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo The story is infinitely more interesting and thought provoking, particularly in regards to character motivations, actions, and subsequent consequences, when the climax of the first game is viewed through the lens of the unknown; that people and groups make decisions and take actions, sometimes decisively and recklessly, without knowing for sure what the totality of consequence will be, or being fundamentally unable to know if the risks taken are worth the cost. I don't even care about the science behind it (which is dumb). Knowing the cure would/wouldn't work sucks shit and is a boring lame framing of the narrative. Not knowing adds a hefty ambiguity and weight to the choices made. People making decisions, or committing to causes, without ever fully knowing for sure how subsequent events will transpire, is literally how life works is is the ultimate fuel and weight behind our personal journey through guilt and accountability.  SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,181 Washington Risev said: I'd say this is Neil's biggest shortcoming as a writer and is worth criticizing: wanting you to make leaps and just skip through some plot holes for the service of the plot. Uncharted 4 also contains an extremely glaring plot hole that you have to gloss over to enjoy the story Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'm not a Neil defender, but that's not a shortcoming of a writer; that's just an extremely basic aspect of storytelling to motivate the drama and create interesting circumstances. Pretty much no long-form story that depends on exceptional scenarios is going to be free of contrivance or convenience. Some stories obviously take it too far and it can make the narrative feel too arbitrarily authored and unnatural, and every individual person has their own threshold for how far they can suspend their disbelief, but the willingness to trust writers by suspending our disbelief is what makes stories strong and effective, and a writer depending on their audience to be able to do that, at least to some extent, is not a weakness.  Altairre Member Oct 25, 2017 5,211 Risev said: With all due respect to Niel, but that'a bullshit lmao. He also said the exact same thing about Ellie forgiving Joel / knowing he killed the fireflies at the end of the first game just a month or so before the release of Part 2 which gives a clear answer and renders any other interpretation invalid Click to expand... Click to shrink... It doesn't really matter what he says because within the text there clearly is ambiguity and there is basically no way to retcon that away. Considering their situation, what the audio logs say and the state of the world it's definitely a long shot but it's also THE long shot. Risev said: I'd say this is Neil's biggest shortcoming as a writer and is worth criticizing: wanting you to make leaps and just skip through some plot holes for the service of the plot. Uncharted 4 also contains an extremely glaring plot hole that you have to gloss over to enjoy the story Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'm not sure that the situation in LoU qualifies as a plot hole tbh.   Jubern Member Oct 25, 2017 1,597 Mauricio_Magus said: Death of the author applies here, I don't really care what he has to say if it's not in the original game/text. It's clearly supposed to be ambiguous and it's staying that way for me. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Exactly where I stand. Why he would want to clarify/comment on this so long after the fact leaves me dumbfounded.   FTF Member Oct 28, 2017 33,203 New York EatChildren said: Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo The story is infinitely more interesting and thought provoking, particularly in regards to character motivations, actions, and subsequent consequences, when the climax of the first game is viewed through the lens of the unknown; that people and groups make decisions and take actions, sometimes decisively and recklessly, without knowing for sure what the totality of consequence will be, or being fundamentally unable to know if the risks taken are worth the cost. I don't even care about the science behind it (which is dumb). Knowing the cure would/wouldn't work sucks shit and is a boring lame framing of the narrative. Not knowing adds a hefty ambiguity and weight to the choices made. People making decisions, or committing to causes, without ever fully knowing for sure how subsequent events will transpire, is literally how life works is is the ultimate fuel and weight behind our personal journey through guilt and accountability. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yeah, this is what I meant and said sooo much better lol.   Cantaim Member Oct 25, 2017 35,072 The Stussining I always thought it would have worked as well. The entire game is building up to Joel facing the Trolley problem but with Ellie on the track. I don't think it really has any teeth if you just say killing Ellie doesn't do anything.   Crossing Eden Member Oct 26, 2017 58,520 Kenzodielocke said: It's kind of moot if you make this so technichal Click to expand... Click to shrink... You aren't supposed to because it's not real life Cantaim said: I always thought it would have worked as well. The entire game is building up to Joel facing the Trolley problem but with Ellie on the track. I don't think it really has any teeth if you just say killing Ellie doesn't do anything. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's funny because literally nothing about the story ever implies that the cure wouldn't work. For every single thing that gets addressed in a "grounded" way that particular tidbit has never been more than people using it as an excuse to justify/lighten the severity of Joel's actions. "Eh does it really matter that he shot up the hospital at the end of the day? Not like the cure would've worked anyways. I, the player/Joel did nothing wrong."  TacoSupreme Member Jul 26, 2019 2,092 SirKai said: I'm not a Neil defender, but that's not a shortcoming of a writer; that's just an extremely basic aspect of storytelling to motivate the drama and create interesting circumstances. Pretty much no long-form story that depends on exceptional scenarios is going to be free of contrivance or convenience. Some stories obviously take it too far and it can make the narrative feel too arbitrarily authored and unnatural, and every individual person has their own threshold for how far they can suspend their disbelief, but the willingness to trust writers by suspending our disbelief is what makes stories strong and effective, and a writer depending on their audience to be able to do that, at least to some extent, is not a weakness. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with this. It's not about suspending disbelief, it's about the game deliberately making the whole situation with the Fireflies seem sketchy. I genuinely spit out my drink and started laughing when it was revealed that they were going to instantly take the precious immune person and dissect her almost immediately after getting their hands on her. This goes beyond contrivance or convenience and into the realm of deliberately misleading the player into thinking there's ambiguity. All it would have taken is something denoting the passage of time prior to wanting to scoop out her brain and it would have been fine. It's not about suspending disbelief, it's about making unneeded decisions that mislead the player.  GMM Member Oct 27, 2017 5,797 If they really would have made a cure or not kinda doesn't matter in the context of the story, it's about how Joel put himself over the needs of the world. Everyone out there trying to survive would agree that Ellie's sacrifice would be worth restoring some semblance of peace to the world even if it wasn't a safe bet, Ellie herself would have wanted to save the world but Joel made that choice for her. It's all about Joel being the selfish person he is, he chose himself over everyone else.  Terbinator Member Oct 29, 2017 13,379 Honestly don't think the cure being viable or not matters at all. Joel makes the decision to save Ellie to save his second daughter. It's really not that deep and you also have no agency over this in the game. Whether that's the moral thing to do on the promise of a cure is an open question.  MrKlaw Member Oct 25, 2017 36,871 Reality doesn't matter (I disagree - they are barely properly staffed, they've never done this before or seen it before so its a hail mary at best etc etc all the discussion) but from a story perspective it makes sense that at least Joel believes its possible to have a cure - it makes the narrative and his reaction stronger, and the 'my life could have meant something' from Ellie's side stronger to create that necessary tension. But I don't like it.  Sinah Member Jun 2, 2022 1,254 I mean yeah so? Honestly personally i don't think it even really matters at that point world was already in a absolute shit state with literal cannibal and murderers everywhere and the infected can not be cured so you still have millions of monsters running around everywhere ripping ppl apart. There was nothing worth saving even if they did manage to make a cure and actually distribute it which is definitely the bigger problem here considering the state the Fireflys where in and the logistics involved.  Last edited: Today at 3:24 AM Vyse One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 1,641 Joel might have pressed a 100% cure button that kills his daughter but even a 1% chance it was a hail mary by sketchy people guaranteed the slaughter.   Agni Kai Member Nov 2, 2017 10,001 None of you (and I do mean none of you) would let your child die to save other people. This new piece of information changes nothing. Joel could've never know.  Crossing Eden Member Oct 26, 2017 58,520 Agni Kai said: None of you (and I do mean none of you) would let your child die to save other people. This new piece of information changes nothing. Joel could've never know. Click to expand... Click to shrink... He never once doubted that it would work though.  

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh. Kyle: Going from a sudden shot of beatific Pedro Pascal at the end of the last episode to a semi-related flashback with a young Joel Miller and his brother was certainly a choice. I almost respect how overtly they are just screwing with audience expectations here. As for the opening flashback scene itself, I guess the message is "Hey, look at the generational trauma his family was dealing with—isn't it great he overcame that to love Ellie?" But I'm not sure I can draw a straight line from "he got beat by his dad" to "he condemned the entire human race for his surrogate daughter." Andrew: I do not have the same problems you did with either the Joel pop-in at the end of the last episode or the flashback at the start of this episode—last week, the show was signaling "here comes Joel!" and this week the show is signaling "look, it's Joel!" Maybe I'm just responding to Tony Dalton as Joel's dad, who I know best as the charismatic lunatic Lalo Salamanca from Better Call Saul. I do agree that the throughline between these two events is shaky, though, and without the flashback to fill us in, the "I hope you can do a little better than me" sentiment feels like something way out of left field. But I dunno, it's Joel week. Joel's back! This is the Duality of Joel: you can simultaneously think that he is horrible for failing a civilization-scale trolley problem when he killed a building full of Fireflies to save Ellie, and you can't help but be utterly charmed by Pedro Pascal enthusiastically describing the many ways to use a Dremel. (He's right! It's a versatile tool!) Truly, there's pretty much nothing in this episode that we couldn't have inferred or guessed at based on the information the show has already made available to us. And I say this as a non-game-player—I didn't need to see exactly how their relationship became as strained as it was by the beginning of the season to have some idea of why it happened, nor did I need to see The Porch Scene to understand that their bond nevertheless endured. But this is also the dynamic that everybody came to the show for last season, so I can only make myself complain about it to a point. Kyle: It's true, Joel Week is a time worth celebrating. If I'm coming across as cranky about it at the outset, it's probably because this whole episode is a realization of what we're missing out on this season thanks to Joel's death. As you said, a lot of this episode was filling in gaps that could well have been inferred from events we did see. But I would have easily taken a full season (or a full second game) of Ellie growing up and Joel dealing with Ellie growing up. You could throw in some zombie attacks or an overarching Big Bad enemy or something if you want, but the development of Joel and Ellie's relationship deserves more than just some condensed flashbacks. "It works?!" Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery "It works?!" Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery Andrew: Yeah, it's hard not to be upset about the original sin of The Last of Us Part 2 which is (assuming it's like the show) that having some boring underbaked villain crawl out of the woodwork to kill the show's main character is kind of a cheap shot. Sure, you shock the hell out of viewers like me who didn't see it coming! But part of the reason I didn't see it coming is because if you kill Joel, you need to do a whole bunch of your show without Joel and why on Earth would you decide to do that? To be clear, I don't mind this season so much and I've found things to like about it, though Ellie does sometimes veer into being a protagonist so short-sighted and impulsive and occasionally just-plain-stupid that it's hard to be in her corner. But yeah, flashing back to a time just two months after the end of season 1 really does make you wonder, "Why couldn't the story just be this?" Kyle: In the gaming space, I understand the desire to not have your sequel game be just "more of the same" from the last game. But I've always felt The Last of Us Part 2 veered too hard in the other direction and became something almost entirely unrecognizable from the original game I loved. But let's focus on what we do get in this episode, which is an able recreation of my favorite moment from the second game, Ellie enjoying the heck out of a ruined science museum. The childlike wonder she shows here is a great respite from a lot of action-heavy scenes in the game, and I think it serves the same purpose here. It's also much more drawn out in the game—I could have luxuriated in just this part of the flashback for an entire episode! Andrew: The only thing that kept me from being fully on board with that scene was that I think Ellie was acting quite a bit younger than 16, with her pantomimed launch noises and flipping of switches, But I could believe that a kid who had such a rough and abbreviated childhood would have some fun sitting in an Apollo module. For someone with no memories of the pre-outbreak society, it must seem like science fiction, and the show gives us some lovely visuals to go with it. The things I like best here are the little moments in between scenes rather than the parts where the show insists on showing us events that it had already alluded to in other episodes. What sticks with me the most, as we jump between Ellie's birthdays, is Joel's insistence that "we could do this kind of thing more often" as they go to a museum or patrol the trails together. That it needs to be stated multiple times suggests that they are not, in fact, doing this kind of thing more often in between birthdays. Joel is thoughtful and attentive in his way—a little better than his father—but It's such a bittersweet little note, a surrogate dad's clumsy effort to bridge a gap that he knows is there but doesn't fully understand. Why can't it be like this forever? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery Why can't it be like this forever? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery Kyle: Yeah, I'm OK with a little arrested development in a girl that has been forced to miss so many of the markers of a "normal" pre-apocalypse childhood. But yeah, Joel is pretty clumsy about this. And as we see all of these attempts with his surrogate daughter, it's easy to forget what happened to his real daughter way back at the beginning of the first season. The trauma of that event shapes Joel in a way that I feel the narrative sometimes forgets about for long stretches. But then we get moments like Joel leading Gail's newly infected husband to a death that the poor guy would very much like to delay by an hour for one final moment with his wife. When Joel says that you can always close your eyes and see the face of the one you love, he may have been thinking about Ellie. But I like to think he was thinking about his actual daughter. Andrew: Yes to the extent that Joel's actions are relatable (I won't say "excusable," but "relatable") it's because the undercurrent of his relationship with Ellie is that he can't watch another daughter die in his arms. I watched the first episode again recently, and that whole scene remains a masterfully executed gut-punch. But it's a tough tightrope to walk because if the story spends too much time focusing on it, you draw attention to how unhealthy it is for Joel to be forcing Ellie to play that role in his life. Don't get me wrong, Ellie was looking for a father figure, too, and that's why it works! It's a "found family" dynamic that they were both looking for. But I can't hear Joel's soothing "baby girl" epithet without it rubbing me the wrong way a little. My gut reaction was that it was right for Joel not to fully trust Gail's husband, but then I realized I can never not suspect Joe Pantoliano of treachery because of his role as betrayer in the 26-year-old movie The Matrix. Brains are weird. Kyle: I did like the way Ellie tells Joel off for lying to her (and to Gail) about the killing; it's a real "growing up" moment for the character. And of course it transitions well into The Porch Scene, Ellie's ultimate moment of confronting Joel on his ultimate betrayal. While I'm not a fan of the head-fake "this scene isn't going to happen" thing they did earlier this season, I think the TV show once again did justice to one of the most impactful parts of the game. But the game also managed to spread out these Joel-centric flashbacks a little more, so we're not transitioning from "museum fun" to "porch confrontation" quite so quickly. Here, it feels like they're trying hard to rush through all of their "bring back Pedro Pascal" requirements in a single episode. When you've only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery When you've only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery Andrew: Yeah, because you don't need to pay a 3D model's appearance fees if you want to use it in a bunch of scenes of your video game. Pedro Pascal has other stuff going on! Kyle: That's probably part of it. But without giving too much away, I think we're seeing the limits of stretching the events of "Part 2" into what is essentially two seasons. While there have been some cuts, on the whole, it feels like there's also been a lot of filler to "round out" these characters in ways that have been more harmful than helpful at points. Andrew: Yeah, our episode ends by depositing us back in the main action, as Ellie returns to the abandoned theater where she and Dina have holed up. I'm curious to see what we're in for in this last run of almost-certainly-Joel-less episodes, but I suspect it involves a bunch of non-Joel characters ping-ponging between the WLF forces and the local cultists. There will probably be some villain monologuing, probably some zombie hordes, probably another named character death or two. Pretty standard issue. What I don't expect is for anyone to lovingly and accurately describe the process of refurbishing a guitar. And that's the other issue with putting this episode where it is—just as you're getting used to a show without Joel, you're reminded that he's missing all over again.

This review contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 episode 6. After last week’s brutal and violent installment, The Last of Us season 2 takes us back in time for episode 6. “Feel Her Love” teased the return of Pedro Pascal, and now we get to see what memories Ellie might be looking back on as she avenges Joel’s death. That’s right, it’s time for a flashback episode. It may seem a little strange to pause the action of the season for an entire episode dedicated to Joel and Ellie’s recent past, but this episode is actually taking a page straight out of The Last of Us Part II. While not all of the flashbacks here are replicated exactly as they are in the game, flashbacks are used periodically in The Last of Us Part II as a sort of palate cleanser to all of the violence the player experiences and as a narrative device to show us key moments of Joel and Ellie’s relationship in the time between the first and second games. This episode essentially serves the same purpose. The first flashback of the hour takes us back to Austin, Texas in 1983, and we get to see Tommy and Joel as kids for the first time. Tommy was buying pot and got into an altercation with the dealer, Joel saw and came to his brother’s defense. Tommy is worried about getting the belt from their dad, so Joel offers to take the fall for him. Their police officer father (played brilliantly by Tony Dalton) takes a break from his shift after hearing about what happened. He sees through Joel’s lie, and the two have a heart-to-heart. He tells Joel about how hard his father was on him, and admits that although he tried to do better, he knows he’s still been harder than he should be on Joel and Tommy. He tells Joel that if he ever becomes a father, he hopes he does a little better than he did. In the next flashback, we get to see a little bit of that. Two months after Joel and Ellie arrived in Jackson, we see Joel trading LEGOs with Seth for some kind of surprise for Ellie. He then goes home and works on refurbishing a guitar for her, the very same guitar we see in the season 2 premiere. While he’s working, Tommy brings Ellie home because she deliberately burned her arm while on kitchen duty to cover up evidence of her immunity. After Tommy leaves, she’s apologetic to Joel, saying, while slightly loopy on pain meds, that she just really wanted to wear short sleeves again. A cake arrives at their house moments later, and Joel gives Ellie her birthday surprise, which she happily digs into. She asks him to play a song for her on the guitar he made for her, and he plays the song “Future Days” by Pearl Jam. As mentioned in last week’s review, this song becomes an important part of their relationship. A year later it’s Ellie’s 16th birthday, and Joel is taking her into the woods for a surprise. Fans of The Last of Us Part II will recognize this scene, and it’s one of the game’s best. Joel has found an abandoned museum with a space exhibit that’s still somewhat intact. He invites Ellie to join him in the capsule on display, and he even found a recording of an actual shuttle launch to really give Ellie an immersive experience. But even though Ellie seems overjoyed at this surprise, we can start to see the tension brewing between them. Ellie wants to start going on patrol and Joel is still hesitant. And on their way back, Ellie sees fireflies – the insect not the people – and pauses, something clearly on her mind even if she doesn’t admit it to Joel. The next year, Joel arrives home from patrol early, bringing home another cake to surprise Ellie. To his surprise, however, he finds her alone in her room with Cat, who is giving her a tattoo over her burn scar. Joel gets upset and chases Cat out. Ellie responds by angrily moving her stuff into the garage while Joel is asleep. He stops her, but instead of forcing her to stay in the house, he offers to help clean up the garage for her to help her move. Pedro Pascal is so good at Joel’s subtle expressions that we can tell this bothers him, but he’d rather give Ellie the space she wants than lose her entirely. Two years later, Ellie is in her garage apartment, rehearsing how to ask Joel about what really happened in Salt Lake City. Joel knocks on her door, offering to finally take her on her first patrol for her 19th birthday. While on the trail, Joel tells Ellie that he’d like to do this more often, spend time together like they used to. It’s clear that Ellie still has her questions about Salt Lake on her mind, but Joel is barely able to ask her what’s on her mind before they’re interrupted by a radio call – Eugene and Adam are in trouble and need help. Joel tells Ellie to go back, but she replies “I’m not your fucking kid, Joel, I’m your partner. We stick together.” When Joel and Ellie arrive, Adam is already dead and Eugene has been bit. He begs for them to take him to Jackson’s gates so he can tell Gail goodbye, but Joel refuses. Ellie pleads with him too, and Joel appears to relent. He tells Ellie to go get the horses and bring them down the trail. He looks her in the eye and promises that he and Eugene will meet up with her. But while Ellie is gone, he takes Eugene to a clearing and shoots him. They return to Jackson, and Ellie watches Joel lie through his teeth to Gail about what happened, that Eugene shot himself to save them. Furious, she tells Gail the truth, and we can see on her face that she doesn’t have to ask Joel about Salt Lake City anymore – she’s already confirmed that Joel lied to her about what happened. When she says “You swore,” to Joel, she’s not just talking about his promise that day. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Nine months later we’re back to where the season started – New Year’s Eve. We get to see the party and its aftermath from Joel’s perspective. The scene on the porch plays out a little differently this time around – when Ellie storms past him she comes back around. The two have a heart-to-heart. Ellie demands that Joel doesn’t go behind her back and take her off patrol, which he agrees to. He then asks her about Dina, and her feelings for her. Ellie then calls Joel an asshole and confronts him about his lies. She tells him that that day with Eugene confirmed what she already knew, and gives him one last chance to tell her the truth about what happened with the Fireflies. Joel admits to everything, though his face says more than his words. He tells Ellie that he would do it all over again. Ellie thinks it’s because he’s selfish, but Joel replies with a variation of what his father told him at the beginning of the episode. He says “Because I love you, in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will. But if that day should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me” Ellie’s last words to him in that moment are “I don’t think I can forgive you for this, but I would like to try.” And we now know that these were likely her final words to Joel before his death. It explains why she was willing to go on patrol with him that morning – she was trying to take a step toward forgiving him. Getting to watch Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey on screen together again is such a treat, even if they are dealing an immense amount of emotional damage to each other and the audience. The way they capture Joel and Ellie’s physicality and emotions is spot on. These characters aren’t great at communicating verbally – we see it takes years for Ellie to ask Joel about Salt Lake City. But there’s still so much language in what they don’t say that defines their relationship. This episode may have given us a break from the violence of the last two, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a little brutal to watch. Just because we’re not actively watching Joel get beaten to death again, doesn’t mean these flashbacks don’t drive the broken golf club in even deeper into our hearts. We watch Joel and Ellie’s relationship break and start to mend itself again, knowing that they won’t have a chance to fully reconcile. Ellie’s desire for revenge makes all the more sense knowing that Abby took away her chance to forgive Joel – all she has left to forgive now is his memory. New episodes of The Last of Us season 2 premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, culminating with the finale on May 25, 2025. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.

Episode 6 of season 2 of The Last of Us is directed by Neil Druckmann, and when viewed through that lens, its intentions become clearer. It contains some of the scenes that fans of The Last of Us Part 2, and presumably its creator, hold dearest. This allows Druckmann to tightly control the sacred bond between Joel and Ellie, as well as giving space to further explore characters barely present in the game – the final moments of Eugene’s life strains the connection between the protagonists in new ways. Joe Pantoliano imbues the doomed Eugene with a dash of class, Bella Ramsey slots nicely back into the role of a younger Ellie, and Druckmann steadily steers the whole ship, but this chapter is undeniably Pedro Pascal’s. His pitch-perfect portrayal of Joel reminds us of what both Ellie and the show have lost.Framed around each of Ellie’s birthdays following their return to Jackson, episode 6 delicately displays Joel’s urge to fulfil his role as a father. It's rooted in the very first scene, in which we see him as a teenage boy: The conversation between Joel and his father, played with warmth yet underlying hardness by Better Call Saul’s Tony Dalton, presents the poisoned chalice passed down from Miller to Miller. That struggle of generational fatherhood is what has driven Joel ever since. Sarah was his world before the outbreak. Then he grieved her, holding onto her memories until Ellie arrived. By the end of this episode, she’s 17, and he’s on the brink of losing another daughter. It’s a crossroads he’s contending with, and one brilliantly displayed by Pascal throughout, as he battles to do the right thing by her.PlayIt’s perhaps best conveyed in the final moment between them – and the very last conversation between Ellie and Joel before his death. Their porchside chat is perhaps the most affecting in all of the game, so it's a huge relief to see it recreated so well here. The vulnerability in Pascal’s face is all-consuming, as he barely utters a word but lets his eyes speak for him. He’s terrified of losing Ellie, but he’s expressing it in a way that he can’t really control, and a way that will infect her, too – his tears filling that cursed cup once more, ready for Ellie to sip from and make the same selfish mistakes he did. It adds extra heartbreaking context to her “I’m gonna be a dad” quip from earlier in the season. She’ll aim to break this cycle, but little in her present-day actions suggests this.Though that’s giving more thought to the present day than episode 6 can muster, which is my major reservation about this episode. The series of flashbacks is heartfelt and works excellently when it comes to building out the protagonists of The Last of Us’ past and future, but I can’t help but feel like momentum has stalled here. It feels off to spend a whole episode exploring Ellie’s history when we’ve just ratcheted the tension on who she’s become. And with only one episode left to go in the season, it feels like the only road to a satisfying finale will involve covering a lot of ground in a short period of time. It’s not so much a criticism of what this episode does, but more of its place within season 2.It feels like some of that season 1 magic has been rebottled.“Bella Ramsey feels much more at home as a younger Ellie, portraying a wide-eyed, excitable version of the character with a far greater verve than the more fearsome evolution we got last week. It’s best shown in her and Joel’s visit to a nearby museum, where Ellie takes a heartstring-tugging trip into orbit, thanks to a tape recording and a long-forgotten space capsule. The smile that dances across her face is a rare moment of levity in a show, that, up until this moment, has been irrepressibly bleak. As we watch the pair enjoy their respite, it feels like some of that season 1 magic has been rebottled.But, as ever, what The Last of Us giveth with one hand, it taketh with the other, not letting us sit with this flash of joy for long. Episode 6 finally answers a question posed in the season premiere: What did Joel do to Eugene to make Gail resent him so much? Pantoliano is given his time to shine as Eugene, a member of the Jackson community whose time is ticking away thanks to an infected’s bite. His introduction enables Joel and Ellie’s dynamic from season 1 to resurface, and echoes of their experience in Salt Lake City can be felt. Joel has lived long enough in this world to be wary of Eugene – any sense of optimism (or hope that Eugene can be healed) is long gone. Not Ellie, though: She still carries an element of naivety and wants to help Eugene.PlayThe mercy killing carried out by Joel only sows more seeds of distrust between him and his surrogate daughter. In his lie to Gail about it, Ellie realises just how easy it is for Joel to hide the truth. It’s in this moment that the fissures in their relationship really start to crack wide open. What Joel did isn’t necessarily wrong, but it runs counter to Ellie’s moral code and how she would’ve dealt with Eugene. It effectively means that she now knows that Joel has been lying about what happened in that Firefly hospital, and the revelation of him lying about Eugene is a great choice by Druckmann. It’s an example of adaptation for the better – which this season largely hasn’t landed for me – and a much more impactful, and logical, option than having Joel and Ellie traipse all the way back to Salt Lake City as they do in The Last of Us Part 2. It’s something the episode as a whole does to great effect as it further explores the intervening years and Joel and Ellie’s dynamic, offering new glimpses into previously unseen moments. Joel catching Ellie doing things she maybe shouldn’t be doing at 17 and his built-in resentment for Seth (due to his former life as a policeman, like Joel’s dad) add more shades to the character, even though he’s long gone in the present day. These little touches and grandstand speeches combine to great effect to help us fully understand why Joel made every decision that led to his death, all the way up to rescuing his eventual killer from a horde of infected. Above all else, it’s the desire to be a protector that forged the Millers’ poisoned chalice – and eventually led to his downfall.

Look, y’all, I try to start these recaps with lighthearted jokes and gags that all of us, both lovers and haters of The Last of Us season two, can enjoy, to set a welcoming and pleasant tone before I start unleashing my critiques of a given episode. However, I don’t think I have it in me this week. I’ve been dreading writing a recap for the sixth episode of this season because it is exactly the kind of sentimental, dramatic episode of television that often captivates audiences and gets award show buzz, but it is also one of the most nauseating adaptations of the original work the show has given us yet. This is where all of showrunner Craig Mazin’s odd creative choices collide like the gnarliest 10-car pileup you’ve ever witnessed, and the result is the absolute bastardization of the most important scene in all of The Last of Us Part II.Suggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishSuggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go HigherDoing betterAlmost all of this episode is told in flashbacks that, in the game, were sprinkled throughout Ellie’s bloody quest for revenge in Seattle (and after, but we’ll get to that), but here are condensed into a single hour of television. But before we get to that, we start out with a brand new scene of a young Joel (Andrew Diaz) and Tommy (David Miranda) in their home, long before the cordyceps fungus was a concern. It’s 1983, and the younger brother tearfully tells his brother that he’s scared of their father, and that he’s going to get “the belt” whenever dad gets home from work. Joel assures Tommy that he will take the fall for whatever it was his brother did, and sends him up to his room to wait for their father alone.When J. Miller Sr. (Tony Dalton) arrives, it’s in a cop car. He walks into the kitchen and doesn’t so much as say hello to Joel, instead telling him to “talk fast” about what happened. Joel tells him he got into a fight with a pot dealer, but his father already talked to the witnesses and knows Tommy was the one buying the drugs. Joel stands firm and tells his dad he’s not going to hurt his little brother. Rather than getting the belt, Officer Miller grabs two beers out of the fridge and hands one to his son. He then tells a story about a time he shoplifted as a kid, and his father, Joel’s grandfather, broke his jaw for it.“If you know what it feels like, then why?” Joel asks. He then proceeds to justify his own abuse by saying his was “never like that,” never as bad as what his father inflicted upon him. He says he might go too far at times, but he’s doing a little better than his father did. “When it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me,” he says as he heads back out on patrol without having laid a hand on his son, this time.So, I hate this. Depending on how cynical or charitable I’m feeling, I read this as both an uninspired explanation for Joel’s misguided, violent act of “love” at the end of season one, when he “saved” Ellie from her death at the hands of Abby’s father, the Firefly surgeon, and then lied to her about it, and a tragic reason for why he’s so hellbent on giving Ellie a better childhood, even in the apocalypse. Last of Us fans will likely run with both interpretations, but in the broader scope of the series, this previously undisclosed bit of backstory is the exact kind of shit that lets people excuse Joel’s actions and place the blame on something or someone else. This sympathetic backstory is the kind of out the show has been oddly fixated on giving viewers since season one as it tries to soften the world’s views of Joel and Ellie, even as they do horrific things to those around them. First, it was players and viewers creating their own justifications, telling themselves that the Fireflies wouldn’t have been able to distribute a vaccine anyway, or that they couldn’t be trusted with such a world-shifting resource, though Joel clearly doesn’t give a fuck about the prospect if it means Ellie’s life. Now, it will be “Joel was just perpetuating the same violence his father put on him and his brother, but at least he didn’t hurt Ellie. He’s doing better, and Ellie will in turn do better as well, and this cycle of generational trauma will eventually be broken.” What is with this show’s inability to confidently lay blame at its leads’ feet without cushioning it with endless justifications and explanations?The maddening part of this addition is that it’s much harder to just call this another overwrought Mazin embellishment because this episode is co-written by Last of Us director Neil Druckmann (who also directs the episode) and Part II narrative lead Halley Gross, alongside Mazin. I’ll never know how some of these scenes came to be, but I’ve seen what this story looks like when Mazin’s not in the room, and many of his worst tendencies are still on display, even with Druckmann and Gross writing on this episode. But I’ll be real, if I had been rewriting what is essentially my magnum opus for television, I would have fought to keep the kid gloves off. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Giving Joel even more tragic backstory to justify his actions is hardly the worst crime this episode commits.We jump forward a couple decades to the small town of Jackson, just two months after Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) settled in following season one. Joel’s putting his old smuggling skills to use to make deals with local bigot Seth (Robert John Burke). He found a bag of Legos for Seth’s grandkids, and he wants something in return. Whatever it is, he needs it by tomorrow, and he needs it in vanilla flavor. Before he goes, however, he says there’s one more thing he needs, but Seth has plenty of it, so it shouldn’t be a problem.Image: HBOJoel sneaks through his house and verifies Ellie isn’t in her room, then takes his prize out from his coat pocket: a bone. He takes it to his workshop and starts carving it into the shapes he needs to finish a woodworking project he’s been saving for this day: a refurbished tobacco sunburst acoustic guitar with a moth decal on the fretboard. The guitar’s origin is more or less the same as the game, but with a few added details like Joel carving in the moth based on one of Ellie’s sketches. It inverts the origins of Ellie’s moth tattoo, which was originally implied to have been designed based on the guitar Joel found rather than the other way around, but it’s a cute personal touch for the show to add.Joel gives the guitar a quick once-over before his work is interrupted by Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Ellie arriving with the latter loopy on painkillers. While working in town, Ellie intentionally burned off the bite mark that kicked off this whole series. She apologizes before finally passing out in her bed. As we saw in Seattle, Ellie justified this as wanting to wear long sleeves again without an infected bite mark scaring the hoes, but I still prefer the interpretation that she did this because being constantly reminded of the cure she never got to be was more painful than a chemical burn. When she wakes up, the pain has mostly subsided, which is good, because today’s not a day for pain: It’s Eli’s 15th birthday. At least, that’s what the vanilla cake Seth baked says on top. An illiterate bigot ex-cop who can’t spell “Ellie”? This is who survives in the post-apocalypse?Ellie, still a bit doped up, is unfazed, shoves a fistful of the cake into her mouth and says it’s good. Sure, queen. It’s your day, and silverware is for people who aren’t the birthday girl. One of the surprises Joel has is not edible, though. He brings the guitar into the kitchen and reminds Ellie that he promised to teach her how to play last season. Ellie wants to hear something and insists that Joel sing. He protests, but Ellie reminds him that it’s her birthday. So Joel huffs and puffs, then sits down and finally sings Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.” Well, I mean, I guess it’s a Pearl Jam song? As we went over last week, this song should not exist in the show’s timeline because the album it came from wasn’t released until 2013, and the apocalypse began 10 years earlier in the show for no real discernible reason beyond some weird Bush-era anti-terrorism hoopla in the pilot. So maybe “Future Days” is a Joel Miller original in The Last of Us? Eddie Vedder, who?Pascal’s performance, like Troy Baker’s in the game, is very understated and sweet, and sounds like a person who can’t really sing doing his best. Ellie says the impromptu song didn’t suck, and he hands her the gee-tar. She holds it in her lap and accidentally touches her bandaged arm with it. Joel tells her he understands why she burned the bite mark off, and they’re not gonna let that ruin her birthday.Sweet 16Next, we jump to one year later for Ellie’s 16th birthday. The duo is walking through a forest as Ellie tries to guess what Joel’s surprise is for her big day. He says he found whatever they’re traveling to see while on patrol, which prompts Ellie to bring up that she’s tired of working inside Jackson when she could be fighting infected alongside Joel and others. She says Jesse told her he’d train her to help expedite the process, but Joel changes the subject by asking if something is going on between the teens. Our funky little lesbian chuckles at the notion, and Joel insists he has an eye for these things. “I don’t think you do,” Ellie laughs.This interaction is pulled from The Last of Us Part II, and I love it because it says a lot about the two’s relationship. Most queer kids have stories of their parents assuming that any person of the opposite gender you’re standing near must be a potential romantic flame, and in the best case scenarios this comes from a place of ignorance rather than malice. I had always attributed Joel’s extremely off-base theory to a growing distance between the two after they made their way to Jackson, and a sort of southern dad obliviousness that’s incredibly real and also endearing. Yes, yes, Joel did terrible things, but he is also Ellie’s surrogate peepaw who wants to be part of her life, and when he’s not being a violent bastard, he has a softer side which Naughty Dog developed brilliantly, and it’s a huge part of why millions of players still stand by him after all the mass murder and deception. HBO’s show? Well...put a pin in this, we’ll get back to it.Image: HBOWe finally arrive at our destination, and it’s an abandoned museum. Right out front, Ellie finds an overgrown T-Rex statue. Immediately, she climbs up to the top, which just about gives Joel a heart attack. Standing on top of its head, she sees the museum in the distance, and Joel tells her that’s the main attraction, if she doesn’t break her neck falling off the dinosaur. Once inside, we see what Joel wanted Ellie to see: a huge exhibit dedicated to space travel. So far, Ellie has only really fueled her passion for astronomy through textbooks and sci-fi comics, so getting to see a full diorama of the solar system is a dream come true. But her real dream is to go to space. In another life, one in which a fungal infection hadn’t leveled the world, she would’ve been an astronaut going on intergalactic adventures.Joel can’t take her to space, but he can give her a chance to imagine what it was like. He walks her a bit further into the exhibit and shows her the remains of the Apollo 15 Command Module, which went to space and back in 1971. Ellie is speechless as she excitedly climbs inside, but before she gets in, Joel points out that any astronaut worthy of the title needs a helmet. He hands her a rock to break into one of the suit displays, and she picks her favorite helmet of the bunch.“How’s it smell in there?” Joel asks.“Like space...and dust,” Ellie replies.The two get inside, and Ellie starts flipping switches and narrating her space trip. However, Joel has a better idea. He pulls out an old cassette tape, and Ellie asks what’s on it. He says it took a great deal of effort to find in this fucked up world, but doesn’t answer. When Ellie puts the tape in her Walkman, Joel tells her to close her eyes as she listens. When she presses play, she doesn’t get some old world music Joel liked as a teen; instead she hears the countdown of a real orbital launch. She closes her eyes and imagines herself flying up into space. We see the spacecraft shake, the lighting change as it passes through the atmosphere, and then finally, the sun shine over her helmet as she comes back down to Earth. Joel asks if he did okay, and Ellie just lets out a flabbergasted “Are you kidding me?”Alright, yeah. This scene is still incredible, and I imagine it’ll hit even harder for newcomers who haven’t played the games because they didn’t get a similar scene in season one in which Ellie imagines playing a fighting game. Even before Joel or her first love, Riley (Storm Reid), died, Ellie was a girl in a constant state of grief. She mourns a life she never got to have as she gets nostalgic for a world whose remains she gets to rummage through while scavenging, but that she will never truly experience. Joel can’t give her the world, but he can give her the chance to imagine it, just for a little bit. Joel’s love languages are obviously acts of service and gift giving, and my guy knows how to make a grand gesture even in the apocalypse. God, I know there’s someone out there wagging their fingers about the war crimes but leave me alone, that’s fucking ohana. He’s just a baby girl trying to do nice things for his baby girl.As the two head back to Jackson, Joel says they should do trips like this more often. Ellie agrees, but then briefly stops as something catches her eye: a group of fireflies gathering in the woods. For a show that loves to just say things to the camera, it’s a nice bit of unspoken storytelling. Ellie stares at them long enough to convey that what happened at Salt Lake City still haunts her, but it’s subtle enough that a viewer who isn’t paying close attention might not catch it.Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit has a body countNow it’s time for the 17th birthday. Joel comes home with another cake, but this one spells Ellie’s name right. He heads upstairs to give it to Ellie, but hears giggling inside her bedroom and barges in without so much as a warning. He finds Ellie on her bed with Kat (Noah Lamanna), freshly tattooed, smoking weed and fooling around. Joel goes into full-blown angry dad mode and tells Kat to get out.“So all the teenage shit all at once,” he barks. “Drugs, tattoos, and sex...experimenting with girls?”Ellie says it wasn’t sex, and it certainly wasn’t an “experiment.” Joel says she doesn’t know what she’s saying and storms out.Well, homophobic Joel Miller was not on my bingo card for this show, but it’s done almost nothing but disappoint me, so maybe it should have been. As I wrote when we learned about Dina’s bigoted mother in episode four, the way The Last of Us weaves old-school homophobia into its world has far more long-standing consequences to the series’ worldbuilding than I think Mazin, and now Druckmann and Gross, considered. The more people who are shown to have carried bigotry into the apocalypse, the more it makes it odd that Dina and Ellie have no idea what Pride flags are. The more that queerness is othered in this world, the more its indiscriminate, post-apocalyptic loss of culture instead reads like a targeted one for queer people specifically. I already wrote about that enough for episode four, though, so I want to focus on what it means for Joel to dabble in active bigotry rather than exude the passive ignorance he did in The Last of Us Part II.There’s an argument to be made that adding this layer of disconnect between Joel and Ellie helps add weight to their reconciliation. If your dad has had homophobic outbursts most of his life, then starts wearing an “I love my lesbian daughter” t-shirt, that’s a feel-good story of redemption worth celebrating. However, was it necessary? Did we need Joel to become a late-in-life homophobe on top of all the other questionable things he’s done? The reason I love him asking if Ellie is interested in Jesse is that it’s a silly, light-hearted interaction. In Part II, the fact that he hasn’t picked up on her being a raging lesbian when he asks about Jesse speaks to how distant the two have become by the time she’s turned 17, and ultimately underlines that he’s a clueless dad at heart. This change for the show, however, replaces ignorance with malice, and the dynamic is entirely different. Yeah, homophobia is inherently ignorant, but Joel asking about Jesse isn’t malicious, it’s just dumb. My man is not reading the room. Here, Joel is reading the room and doesn’t like what he sees.It’s another example of the show not being willing to leave well enough alone. HBO can’t be content with all the subtle shades of grey the game provided, so it has to expound on everything, no matter how unnecessary or damaging it is for the characters. Joel is no longer just a well-meaning (albeit overbearing and violent) dad to TV viewers, he’s a well-meaning (albeit overbearing and violent) dad who also was secretly a bigot the whole time. Fuck this.Image: HBOEllie heads out to the shed in the backyard to get away for a bit. It’s dusty and full of tools, but Ellie’s got a vision and starts to move her mattress out of her room. Joel wakes up and asks what’s going on, and he says Ellie can’t move into the shed overnight because there’s no heat or running water. Ellie says she’s not sorry she smoked weed, got a tattoo, or fooled around with Kat. Rather than admit that homophobia is so 2003, Joel agrees that she should have her own space and says that he’ll spend a few days making it livable. As they put the mattress back on the bed, Joel asks to see the tattoo. It’s not quite finished, but the moth illustration is already inked over the mostly healed burn mark. He asks why she’s so fixated on moths, and she says she read they’re symbolic in dreams. Joel asks if it represents change, and Ellie, clearly not wanting to dig into what it actually means, just says it’s late to get him to leave.Ah, crap, I forgot about Gail. Hello Catherine O’Hara, I wish you were playing a less frustrating character. Joel ambushes the doctor at the local diner and asks what moths mean in dreams. Gail says moths usually symbolize death “if you believe in that shit.” When Joel seems paralyzed by the answer, Gail, annoyed, asks why he wants to know. He doesn’t answer and heads home.Ellie has wasted no time getting her shit together to start moving out. The camera lingers over some of her moth sketches, including one that reads “You have a greater purpose” in between the drawings. She grabs them and puts them in a box, but it’s clear the purpose she thought she had weighs on her mind when we see her next.All the promises at sundownThe show jumps forward two years, almost bringing us to the “present” of the show. A 19-year-old Ellie sits in her hut and rehearses a speech she wants to give Joel. She’s been thinking about his Salt Lake City story and some of the odd inconsistencies with what he told her four years ago. How were the Fireflies surprised by a group of raiders when they saw the pair from a mile away in the city? How did Joel get away from the raiders while carrying her when she was unconscious? Why haven’t they heard from any of the other supposed immune people besides her? Before she can finish her spiel, Joel knocks on her door and says her birthday present this year is that she’s finally getting to go on a patrol. All the animosity melts off of Ellie’s face and is replaced by a childlike glee. She grabs her coat and a gun, and they head out.The pair head onto what Joel describes as the safest route they’ve got so she can learn the ropes. Ellie’s clearly dissatisfied with wearing training wheels, but the two banter and scout out the area until Joel says it would be nice if they could spend more time together. Ellie hesitantly agrees, clearly once again thinking about Salt Lake City. Joel asks if she’s alright, but the conversation is derailed by a radio call informing them that Gail’s husband Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) spotted some infected and needs backup. Joel tells Ellie to head back to Jackson but she protests, reminding him that she’s not his kid, but his scouting partner. Joel realizes he’s losing time arguing, so they head out.Image: HBOAs the two scale down the side of the Jackson mountainside, they hear gunfire and infected screeches in the distance. They follow the noise and see the corpse of Eugene’s patrol partner, Adam, being dragged by his horse, but Gail’s husband is nowhere to be found. Joel leads them down the path the horse came from, and they soon find the aftermath of the scrap, and Eugene leaning up against a tree. Joel asks if he got bit, and while it seems like he considers hiding it for a moment, he shows a bite mark on his side. Joel keeps his gun trained on Eugene, who asks if he can go back to the Jackson gate to say goodbye to his wife before he turns. While Joel isn’t entertaining it, Ellie asks Eugene to hold out his hand and count to 10, and verifies that the infection hasn’t spread to his brain yet. There’s time for him to see Gail. They just need to tie him up and bring him back. Joel hesitates, then tells Ellie to go get the horses, and they’ll meet up. She starts to leave but then stops and turns to Joel with an expectant look. He sends her off with a promise that they’ll be there soon. But he’s promised her plenty of things before.Joel directs Eugene to a clearing next to a gorgeous lake. But the awe is short-lived as he realizes that Joel never had any intention of taking him back to the town to see Gail. Joel says if he has any last words for his wife, he’ll pass them along. But Eugene didn’t have anything to tell her; he just wanted to hear her last words for him.“I’m dying!” he shouts. “I’m terrified. I don’t need a view. I need Gail. To see her face, please. Please let that be the last thing I see.”Joel doesn’t relent and says that if you love someone, you can always see their face. Eugene gives in and stares off into the distance until he dissociates. Then, finally, he tells Joel that he sees her. We never hear the gun go off, but we see a flock of birds fly away from the scene.Image: HBOEllie finally arrives with the horses, and Joel merely apologizes as she stares in horror at what he’s done. He ties Eugene to one of the horses and says he’ll tell Gail just what she needs to know. Ellie is dead silent. She tearfully realizes that Joel’s promises mean nothing as they slowly make their way back to Jackson.Inside the Jackson wall, Gail cries as she stands over Eugene’s body. Joel tells her that he wanted to see her, but didn’t want to put her in danger as the cordyceps overtook him.“He wasn’t scared,” Joel says. “He was brave, and he ended it himself.”Gail hugs Joel both for her own comfort and as thanks for his kind words. But it’s all bullshit. If there’s one thing Joel is good at other than gift giving and torture, it’s lying. But Ellie is here and knows this better than she ever has, and she’s not about to let him get away with it.“That’s not what happened,” she says. “He begged to see you. He had time. Joel promised to take him to you. He promised us both. And then Joel shot him in the head.”Joel is stunned, then turns to Gail to try to explain himself, but she slaps him right across the face and tells him to get away from her.“You swore,” Ellie growls at him before walking away.For the uninitiated, this entire side story with Eugene is new for the show, and I have mixed feelings on it. It’s well acted, with Pantoliano giving us one of the season’s best performances in just a few minutes of screentime, but it’s also a very roundabout way for the show to finally create what seems like an unmendable rift between Joel and Ellie without them, you know, actually talking about what happened between them. Yes, it’s an extension of that conflict, as Ellie realizes that Joel is a liar who will do what he wants, when he wants, and anyone who feels differently will find themselves on the wrong side of a rifle or with a bogus story to justify it. But we’re not directly reckoning with what happened in Salt Lake City here. As illustrated in the first episode, Joel doesn’t even realize that Ellie’s anger is rooted in what he did to her, and he chalks the distance between them up to teen angst. If I didn’t know any better, I would also be confused as to why Ellie didn’t talk to him for nine months. My guy doesn’t even know that Ellie is on to the fact that he committed the greatest betrayal she’s ever suffered. Which makes the show’s actual unpacking of it all the more oddly paced, and dare I say, nonsensical?With one more leap forward, we finally reach something familiar from episode one. It’s New Year’s Eve, and Dina (Isabela Merced) is the life of the town’s celebration. Joel is sitting with Tommy and his family and watching Ellie from an acceptable distance. Tommy’s wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), says that her calling him a “refugee” five episodes ago was out of line, and that he’s still family and has done a lot for Jackson in the years since he and Ellie moved to the town. The sentimental moment is interrupted by Seth calling Ellie and Dina a slur for kissing in the middle of the crowd, and Joel remembers that homophobia is not it and shoves the illiterate, cake-baking, bigoted ex-cop to the ground. He quickly leaves after Ellie shouts at him for interfering, but hey, at least you decided to remember not to be a bigot yourself in your final 24 hours.Oh my god, I’m bracing myself. I have spent weeks trying to gather the words for talking about this next scene. I work with words for a living, and they usually come naturally to me. But when I first watched this scene recreated in live action, all I could do was fire off expletives as my skin crawled off my body. The tragic part is, this scene is my favorite in all of the Last of Us games. It is the foundation of everything that happens in Part II, and originally, it is only shown to you in the last five minutes, after hours of violent conquest for which the game refuses to provide neat, softening explanations. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s version of this interaction is everything that makes The Last of Us Part II work, condensed into a stunning five-minute scene of career-defining performances, sublime writing that says everything it has to without having to explain it to the viewer like they’re talking down to a child, and a devastating reveal that explains every painful thing you’ve witnessed and done in this game with heartbreaking, bittersweet clarity. I’m talking about Joel and Ellie’s final conversation before his death, and y’all, I cannot believe how badly the show tarnished this scene, and that Druckmann and Gross let it happen.Part of the issue is that the show’s version of what has become colloquially known as “The Porch Scene” not only has to bear the weight of what was originally Joel and Ellie’s final conversation, but also that it mashes the original scene together with another in such a condensed fashion that it kinda undermines the entire point of Joel and Ellie’s year of no contact. In Part II, there was an entire playable flashback dedicated to Ellie traveling back to the Salt Lake City hospital and discovering the remnants of the Firefly’s base to confirm her worst fears about what Joel had done. It’s much more straightforward than the game’s approach to driving a wedge between the characters, but maybe Mazin and co. thought it was too implausible for show audiences to buy, or they didn’t have the Salt Lake City base set to use anymore. Who’s to say? Instead, we got the Eugene subplot to serve a similar purpose, and Ellie lives with mostly certain but never confirmed suspicions that Joel lied to her about what happened at the hospital. So, on top of the two talking out the Eugene stuff, they also have to lay out the entire foundational conflict between them at once. The result is an extremely rushed revelation and reconciliation, while the show is also juggling Mazin’s overwrought annotated explainer-style writing. So the once-perfect scene is now a structural mess on top of being the show’s usual brand of patronizing.At first, Ellie walks past the back porch where Joel is playing her guitar, as we saw in episode one. Long-time fans were worried this brief moment might mean the show was going to skip this scene entirely, but it turns out that was just a bit of structural misdirection. The two stand side-by-side at the edge of the porch with their hands on the railing. They occasionally look at each other, but never outright face each other as they talk. Neither of them is quite ready to look the other in the eye just yet.Ellie asks what’s in the mug Joel’s sipping on, and he says he managed to get some coffee from some people passing through the settlement last week. My king, it is past midnight. We all have our vices, but do you think you need to be wide awake at this hour? Anyway, Ellie’s not here to scold him for his coffee habits; she’s here to set some boundaries. She says she had Seth under control, and tells Joel that she better not hear about him telling Jesse to take her off patrols again. Joel agrees to the terms, and there’s a brief, awkward silence before he asks if Dina and Ellie are girlfriends now. Ellie, clearly embarrassed, rambles about how it was only one kiss and how Dina is a notorious flirt when intoxicated, and asserts that it didn’t mean anything. Joel hears all this self-doubt and asks a new question: “But you do like her?” Ellie once again gets self-deprecating and says she’s “so stupid.” Then Joel goes into sweet dad mode.“Look, I don’t know what Dina’s intentions are, but, well, she’d be lucky to have you,” Joel says.Naughty Dog / HotoP GaminGThen Ellie says he’s “such an asshole” and gets to what she actually wants to talk about. He lied to her about Eugene and had “the same fucking look” on his face that he had when she asked about the Fireflies all those years ago. But she says she always knew, so she’s giving him one last chance to come clean. “If you lie to me again, we’re done,” she says.Then Ellie asks every question she wanted to ask on the morning Eugene died. Were there other immune people? Did raiders actually hit the Firefly base? Could they have made a cure? Did he kill the Fireflies and Marlene? For the first time, Joel gives honest answers to all of her questions, and says that making a cure would have killed Ellie, to which she says that she should have died in that hospital then. It was the purpose she felt she was missing in this fucked up world, and he took that from her. He took it from everyone.All right, so here we go. Most of what’s happened up to this point is, bar for bar, the original script. And then Pascal just...keeps talking, prattling off embellishments and clarifications in keeping with Mazin’s writing style, massacring what was once an excellent example of natural, restrained writing and conflict resolution, all so there’s no danger that the audience watching could possibly misinterpret it. Incredibly complicated characters who once spoke directly to each other without poetic flair are now spoonfeeding all the nuances to viewers like they’re in an after-school special about how to talk to your estranged family members.I’m going to type up a transcript of this interaction, bolding the dialogue that is new for the show. Take my hand, follow me.Joel: I’ll pay the price because you’re gonna turn away from me. But if somehow I had a second chance at that moment, I would do it all over again.Ellie: Because you’re selfish.Joel: Because I love you in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will, but if that should come, if you should ever have one of your own, well then, I hope you do a little better than me.Ellie: I don’t think I can forgive you for this...But I would like to try.Welp, glad that’s resolved. Ellie learned about the greatest betrayal of her life and is ready to try moving past it in all of five minutes, rather than taking a full year to sit with that pain before even considering talking to Joel again. Yeah, maybe at this point Ellie is just trying to resolve things with her surrogate father, and that’s less about one thing that transpired than it is everything they’ve been through, but it still feels like the show is rushing through the biggest point of tension these two face in favor of a secondary conflict.Besties, there are bars on my apartment windows put there by the building owners, and if they hadn’t been there, I cannot guarantee I would not have thrown myself out of my second-story home and suffered an inconvenient leg sprain watching this scene. In just a few additional lines, The Last of Us manages to turn the game’s best scene into one of the most weirdly condescending ones in the show, spelling out every nuance of Joel’s motivations, and explaining his distorted view of what love is with all the subtlety of a Disney Channel Original Movie. It’s not enough for Joel to boldly say he’s seen the fallout of what he’s done and would still have saved Ellie’s life, the show has to make sure you understand that he did it not because he’s a selfish bastard trying to replace one daughter with another like all the meanies who hate him say online, but because he loves her…while also quoting his newly-revealed abusive father. God, I can already hear Ellie likely quoting this “doing better” line when she makes a big decision at the end of Part II’s story in a hokey attempt to bring all of this full circle. I already hate it, HBO. It’s not too late to not have her quote an abusive cop when talking about her as-of-yet unborn child.Watching this scene feels like having an English teacher’s hand violently gripping my shoulder, hammering down every detail, and making sure I grasp how important the scene is. It’s somehow both lacking confidence in the moment to speak for itself while also feeling somewhat self-important, echoing how The Last of Us as a whole has been publicly presented in the past five years. Sony and HBO’s messaging around the franchise has been exhaustingly self-aggrandizing in recent years, as they’ve constantly marketed it as a cultural moment too important to be missed. That’s why it’s been remastered and repackaged more times than I care to count, and why we’ve reached peak Last of Us fatigue.The Last of Us has reached a point of self-important oversaturation that even I, a diehard fan, can’t justify. But while Sony’s marketing has often felt overbearingly self-important, that quality never felt reflected in the actual text. Here, however, the Last of Us show insists upon driving home the lessons it wants to teach so blatantly and clumsily that I once again find myself feeling that this adaptation was shaped by discourse, reacting to potential bad-faith (or just plain bad) responses in advance rather than blazing trails on its own. It knows this moment is important to fans who spent a whole game fearing Joel and Ellie parted on bad terms before his death, so it’s gotta make sure viewers, who only had to wait halfway through the story, know how significant it is, too, by laying the schmaltzy theatrics on real thick when understated sentimentality would’ve sufficed. Even the best moment in the game isn’t immune to the show’s worst tendencies.I’ve spent the whole season racking my brain about why Mazin chose to rewrite The Last of Us Part II’s dialogue this way, because the only explanations I can come up with are that he believes this to be an improvement on the source material or that he thinks the audience couldn’t follow the nuances of this story if they weren’t written out for them like in a middle school book report. But after seeing how the show butchers Joel and Ellie’s final talk, I don’t think his motivations matter anymore. The end result is the same. Even though HBO is stretching Part II’s story out for at least one or two more seasons, I don’t think there’s any coming back from this haughty dumbing down of the game’s dialogue. The Last of Us has already fumbled the landing before the story’s even halfway over. The show will continue, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a failed experiment, and it’s fucking over.Now, we’re back in the present day. As Ellie walks through a rainy Seattle back to the theater where Dina and Jesse are waiting, and we’re back in the midst of her revenge tour, I have whiplash. HBO has already shown its hand. We’re at least another season away from seeing the resolution to this entire conflict, but we already know…almost everything? We know Abby killed Joel as revenge for him killing her father. We know Ellie is so hellbent on revenge (well, that’s debatable, considering the show has drained her of that drive and given it to Dina instead) because she was denied the opportunity to truly reconcile with Joel. The show has demolished so much of its narrative runway that I don’t know what the tension is supposed to be anymore. Wondering who lives and dies? Well, fucking fine. I’ll watch the show aimlessly and artlessly recount the events of the game, knowing its ending, which feels more predictable than ever, is coming in a few years.

Andor‘s final batch of episodes had to walk a steady balancing act, tying together myriad swirling character arcs into the overarching looming shadow of not just the events of Rogue One, but the events of Star Wars itself. In navigating those final climactic days where Andor could be itself as well as the passer of the torch, the show managed to give us and its characters alike the endings that perhaps mattered most. Luthen © Lucasfilm It’s impossible to talk about the final arc of Andor without talking about the ending it gets out of the way first. Luthen’s long-awaited confrontation with Dedra is tragic in many ways, not just because of his choice to sacrifice himself to deny her the information she craves, but because, in contrast to the other rebellious stories we see climax here, it’s so incredibly lonely. There is no grand exit, no long goodbye—he gets a brief moment with Kleya when he sends her away, and of course, Dedra’s attempts to keep him alive make the actual moment of his end occur after the course of episode 10, “Make It Stop.” He dies quietly, he dies unable to really know just what an impact he’s about to have on the people he knew, the people he loved, the Rebellion, and the fate of the galaxy itself. But Luthen’s final moment standing, before he takes the knife to himself, as sad as it is, is also a beautiful one—one that thematically then ties the endings of the rest of the rebels across Andor‘s final act together brilliantly. “The Rebellion isn’t here anymore, it’s flown away,” he tells Dedra. “It’s everywhere now… there’s a whole galaxy out there, waiting to disgust you.” The work Luthen did may have been isolatory by design, playing cells and operatives off each other, the paranoia of all the secrets he helped keep. But as he burns brightly, for that sunrise he knew he’d never see, he is defiantly steadfast that what he has helped create has connected voices all over the galaxy. That there are, as his agents’ code phrase said, friends everywhere. Partagaz and the ISB © Lucasfilm It is this particular thematic throughline sparked by Luthen’s words that also defines the endings of our Imperial antagonists across the arc in stark contrast. We’ll get to Dedra separately, but it’s interesting that the endings we get for Andor‘s ISB apparatus—represented by her, Partagaz, and Heert in these episodes, and to a lesser extent double-agent Lonni—are lonely for very different reasons than Luthen’s was. Syril’s death on Ghorman laid the blueprint here: Andor‘s vision of the Empire is defined in equal parts the abuse of its systems for personal glorification, and the deadly threat of that system subsuming even its most ardent supports and benefactors, because that’s exactly what the Empire is designed to do. Lonni might die at Luthen’s hands, it’s implied, but he dies because his use as a tool of the system he’d turned on is over. Heert’s grand chase of Kleya—a mirror to Dedra’s obsession with Axis that he’d sneered at her for—is rewarded with K2 tossing his lifeless body around as a meatshield, crumpled and forgotten. Partagaz’s is perhaps the most deliciously bitter, not just for the system he helped create crashing down around him, but because, again, his final moments are spent realizing that the rebellion is so much bigger than the “disease” he thought he could contain and sterilize. He’s alone in a room, committing suicide, after hearing Nemik’s manifesto: he has no idea who it is. He just knows, again, that it’s getting out everywhere. Kleya © Lucasfilm Kleya’s end is not so much an end, but a continuation of a legacy that she’s followed her whole life. Luthen’s sacrifice gives her a chance to flee and tell the Rebellion about the Death Star, but it also pushes her out from under his lonely world of cloak and daggers, in a way. In the flashbacks that are woven throughout her solo mission to lay Luthen to rest before the Empire can pull him from the brink, we see her story start alone and afraid and angry—and in choosing to save this orphaned child and help her point that anger somewhere as she grows up, Luthen’s final gift to Kleya is to give her something bigger to be part of. Perhaps it’s a story we’ll revisit someday, of Kleya’s life in the Rebellion, but in this moment that set of facts doesn’t really matter, it’s that she gets to carry on his spirit as the Rebellion flourishes. Dedra © Lucasfilm It’s fitting and so telling then, that Kleya and Dedra’s final moments on-screen in Andor are side-by-side. If Kleya wakes up to on the new dawn of being part of the thing her mentor helped build, then Dedra—clad in those white-and-orange scrubs of the Imperial prison system—is to witness the structure that she helped build and champion chew her up and spit her out into some forgotten hole. We know from season one’s arc on Narkina-5 that the Empire has now designed these facilities to never really grant freedom. There’s a fascinating parallel to Syril’s own death in her ultimate punishment, the idea that her obsession with Axis, as his was with Cassian, pushed her and pushed her to a point where the Empire itself could turn on her and discard her, and she’d be too blinkered to notice it until it was too late. It’s not just that Dedra’s hoarding of information she shouldn’t have lands her in Krennic’s crosshairs, it’s her drive to get Luthen, to keep him alive once he mortally wounds himself, in the hopes that she will be rewarded regardless of any transgression she’s made to get there. That the Imperial system she believed in will work for her, rather than her for it. But the Empire exists to consume even its most loyal adherents, and so her punishment for championing it so ardently is as satisfying to watch as it was inevitable. Bix © Lucasfilm If any of Andor‘s endings might prove controversial, it’s perhaps its very last one. In some ways, Bix’s isolation from the final act of Andor (a decision she makes, but one that still takes her out of the broader fight she had previously yearned to be part of), only for her to part the series with the revelation that she’s given birth to Cassian’s child—a child he’ll never know—treats her story as less her own, and more in the service of Cassian’s. But it’s likewise also compelling that Bix is the rare character who ends the series given the chance of peace, of not having to fight and struggle. Many of the journeys that close out Andor are ones that we know will continue, and more specifically that continue in the sense that their fight isn’t over yet. That she is the final vision we have the show feels, in part, that this is what it was all for: to be free to live life with loved ones, a generation that can grow up in the hope that they in turn don’t have to fight and struggle to maintain that peace. Bail Organa © Lucasfilm But wait! Bail Organa’s journey doesn’t end in Andor. He’s in Rogue One! He’s technically in A New Hope, or at least very, very tiny atomized parts of him are! But while those stories are, chronologically speaking, Bail’s last moments in the Star Wars saga, it feels like Andor actually gives the man himself a proper sendoff—more proper than the hasty one he gets in Rogue One to go meet his explosive destiny—in his brief chat with Cassian. It’s short and sweet but laden with meaning, to give Bail a little teeth, and a moment of bonding with Cassian after their initial disagreements. We don’t ever get to see Bail’s final moments from his own perspective on screen (they’re retold, if you’re interested, in the From a Certain Point of View anthology), but giving him a goal to go out swinging feels like a fitting coda. The Stories Left Untold © Lucasfilm But for all the above stories that Andor wraps up in its last act, there’s just as many—and it’s just as important—that it leaves so many paths open. There’s characters we just simply don’t see again, like Leida after her wedding, or even further flung characters like Kino Loy from season one. There’s characters for who the story just continues elsewhere, like Cassian and K2 themselves, or Mon Mothma, last seen chatting to Vel amid the hubbub of Yavin IV, or Saw, staring down the Imperial occupation of Jedha. Some of these are famous Star Wars figures, and we know where they end up, but just as important is getting flashes like Wilmon and Dreena sharing food, or, in a grimly hilarious fashion, a drunken Perrin hanging off the arm of Davro Sculden’s wife. Perhaps most fitting then is an end we glimpse, but never get: when Cassian wakes from his slumber to go on his mission to Kafrene, he dreams of his long-missing sister. Andor‘s first major story thread, the focus of its opening scenes to put this whole story into motion, never gets resolved. Some people may be frustrated by that, in an age when Star Wars fans and Star Wars itself, at times, is obsessed with checking off the facts and details of its world. But we get everything we need to know: Cassian still thinks about her. He dies never getting the answer. We will, perhaps rightfully, never learn ourselves. Not all ends definitively. Life goes on. Even as we know the broad strokes of what’s about to go down in this moment in Star Wars, some answers are just never found. But there’s a whole texture of existence beneath that sweeping saga and those big questions, and that’s what Andor was always reminding us of. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Cruise didn’t stick the landing, but here we are. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the second half of the story launched in 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is a high-wire act gone horribly wrong. The stunts are stunning, as you’d be right to assume due to the mere fact that Cruise showed up to make another M:I movie at all. In what’s been coyly (and in no way definitively) teased as the final curtain call for Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise has played since 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Cruise jumps from barrel-rolling biplane to barrel-rolling biplane, squeezes through a claustrophobic maze of undetonated underwater missiles in a sunken submarine, and knife-fights in booty shorts, in a most John Wickian turn. The Final Reckoning has it all — including two and a half hours of dead-in-the-water character drama and endless platitudes about Ethan’s destiny. The sheer number of flashbacks to previous franchise installments puts The Final Reckoning in a category with Seinfeld’s notorious clip show finale. Seeing two action-movie geniuses like Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie making a movie that is so often deadly boring, I wondered whether wrapping up the M:I series with a sense of finality was the true impossible mission all along. The Final Reckoning (a phrase uttered twice in the movie, with deathly reverence) picks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, in a world that has been nearly consumed by the Entity, an all-powerful AI. Ethan has a plan to take down the robotic overlord, and it once again requires him to pull off a handful of nearly implausible tasks with his team, which includes longtime pals like Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), alongside newer friends from Dead Reckoning, including pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klemintieff). Assuming their skills and a lot of ridiculous coincidences all come together with pinpoint precision, then maaaaybe he can time the execution of their digital overlord juuuuust right. There are obstacles: Mustache-twirling Gabriel (Esai Morales) constantly pops out of nowhere to screw with Ethan in hopes of seizing the Entity for his own control, while returning legacy M:I character Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), now director of the CIA, hopes to arrest the rogue Ethan and save the day his own way. In theory, this should all be another wild M:I ride. But even as a diehard M:I Guy, I was constantly lost among The Final Reckoning’s expositional word salad and aggressive attempts to tie every single story beat back to some event in the franchise’s past. The bar has been raised for Marvel movies that supposedly require too much homework ahead of viewing. Final Reckoning’s most direct references are groan-worthy: It “solves” a long-running series mystery with the grace of Solo’s “We’ll call you Solo” scene. And it turns the Langley NOC-list heist from the 1996 movie into the single most important historical event since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Tom Cruise, typically a mesmerizing charmer, looks beaten and exhausted throughout the talky opening hour of Final Reckoning — perhaps because filming the more thrilling parts of the movie left him literally beaten and exhausted. The leaden dialogue doesn’t help, and McQuarrie’s decision to rarely hold the camera on his leading man for more than a few seconds means Cruise never gets to lock his charisma on the audience. The choppiness of the editing, even during the talky parts, recalls the hyperactive editing tactics that made Taken 3 go viral. A lackluster play-the-hits score makes even Ethan’s required running scenes limp along. The vibes are off. Bless the Final Reckoning actors who have pep in their step anyway! Atwell remains a cunning counterpart to Cruise, all reflexes and wit, and McQuarrie overindulges in her role. Final Reckoning did not need an extended scene where an Inuit woman teaches Grace how to steer a dog sled, but it’s tender. A chunk of the movie plays less like the usual globetrotting spy story than a tense Tom Clancy political thriller. But hey, if circumstances are going to trap Ethan in a submarine, at least it’s with a captain played by Tramell Tillman, who ports over his hilariously mannered presence from Severance to the equally heightened world of Mission: Impossible. And with the U.S. on the brink of atomic war, McQuarrie fills war rooms with cheeky TV actors, gifting Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation), and Holt McCallany (Mindhunter) some much deserved dramatic spotlights. It’s the series’ best that-guy casting since Mission: Impossible III. Still, between bursts of personality, the plot of Final Reckoning spins in circles. There’s little tension in the pursuit of the Entity, an invisible threat and the greatest enemy to the “show, don’t tell” screenwriting adage. McQuarrie stages Ethan’s big confrontation with the evil Siri in a VR chamber that zips through the AI’s master plan like it’s the wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that sequence felt like anything more than an info dump, it could have been a rush based on the visual design alone. But the Entity blathering the same lines over and over about Ethan’s destiny in no way compares to human villains offering inhumane horrors. A talking blue circle isn’t exactly a standoff with Philip Seymour Hoffman holding a gun to Ethan’s wife’s head. To make up for the lack of chase, McQuarrie cranks up every familiar form of Impossible Mission Force-patented heist operation to maximum impossibility, to the point where it’s kind of exhausting. The difference between “thrillingly inconceivable” and “preposterously cartoonish” is the difference between “we need split-second precision” and “we need split-nanosecond precision.” Everything in The Final Reckoning, from pinpointing the needle-in-a-haystack location of a missing submarine to the mind-boggling requirements of incarcerating an AI in the realm of scientific possibility, veers over the edge: Unbelievable coincidence, not skill or precision, drives these plans. Also, there has never been a three-hour movie that needed more than one ticking-time-bomb-defusal sequence. Never! But, my god, the actual stunts. McQuarrie’s set pieces whisk the audience from the streets of London to the Arctic circle to the mountains of South Africa, and it’s progressively more awe-inspiring with each new sequence. A crosscut fight between Ethan and an Entity cultist — yes, we have those now — while his team members are duking it out with goons in a burning building is a spectacle of exactitude. Though Ethan winds up back on an aircraft carrier, in what seems like a shameless callback to Top Gun, Cruise really revives his Maverick do-or-die energy when he descends into the icy depths and contends with elaborate water stunts. The movie’s much-teased climactic plane stunt is the greatest sequence Cruise has ever committed to film. While many of the Mission: Impossible franchise’s set pieces have been anchored by one death-defying moment (Ethan clinging to the side of a jet or motorcycling off a cliff), Ethan’s pursuit of Gabriel through the skies goes on and on and on — and I couldn’t get enough. Cruise clings to the side of two different planes, flopping against their sides with every barrel roll, letting his cheeks flap in the wind, and delivering a few Indiana Jones-style punches as he commandeers each vehicle. There are times when he appears to be in full zero G as the second plane careens through valleys. Anything that goes right for him immediately goes wrong, and with constant escalation. It’s breathtaking.  And it’s the grand finale of a bad watch. Ethan Hunt deserves a proper send-off, and not just in a blaze of action-fueled glory. In 2006, J.J. Abrams gave the character a down-to-Earth quality and a group of close friends in M:I III. McQuarrie ran with that intimacy when he rewrote Ghost Protocol in 2011 then made the franchise his own with 2015’s Rogue Nation. His follow-up, 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, saw Ethan close the book on his marriage, hug it out with his best buds, and sustain a symphony of stunts from start to finish. It was the perfect finale. But it was so successful that Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t resist going back for more, with this two-part story stretched across years. Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters on May 23.

Wing walking is an art older than sound cinema. Before movies included spoken dialogue, they were already filled with daredevils who risked — and sometimes lost — their lives performing incredible feats in and on top of airplanes. So when producer/star Tom Cruise and producer/co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie turned the climax of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning into maybe the greatest display of wing walking and aerial stunt work in the last 50 years, that’s wasn’t a haphazard choice. It was a decision designed to further the mission of this franchise for the last three decades: To thrill moviegoers with old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle on the grandest scale possible.It’s impossible for me to give a negative review to a movie with a climax as good as the one that concludes The Final Reckoning; Cruise hanging off a biplane hundreds of feet in the air is more than worth the price of admission all by itself. But it’s also possible that the rest of The Final Reckoning is a mess, and ranks near the bottom of this long-running franchise.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamount Pictures and Skydanceloading...It’s not just that its story is a confusing jumble, although that is also true. Some of the script’s problems are even more fundamental than that. I do not understand, for instance, how filmmakers of McQuarrie and Cruise’s expertise and experience could make a movie that never explains why one of its key characters spends almost all of his scenes in an underground hospital. Is this person dying? Can they be cured? Despite a runtime of 170 minutes, The Final Reckoning can’t find room to answer those basic questions.That decision is all the more baffling because that same character looked completely fine when they last appeared in the previous Mission: Impossible, 2023’s Dead Reckoning — Part One. The Final Reckoning establishes that two months have passed since the events of the prior film, and while this movie does continue its central conflict, with Cruise’s super spy Ethan Hunt fighting a rogue AI known as “The Entity,” some of The Final Reckoning’s twists feel oddly disconnected from its predecessor (like afflicting a previously healthyDead Reckoning and went back to square one in the middle of shooting — which, to be fair, would be an extremely Ethan Hunt thing to do.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...Of course, Ethan Hunt would have pulled off that kind of on-the-fly salvage operation without breaking a sweat. The Final Reckoning opens with a jarring series of scenes that awkwardly reestablish its key heroes and villains. While the Entity spreads its truth-altering tentacles throughout the internet, Ethan races to rescue various members of his Impossible Mission Force from the computer’s fiendish emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales).The same pattern repeats a couple times; Ethan gets knocked out in one glamorous location and wakes up in another. Gabriel drops Ethan in an inescapable trap in order to force him to do something against his will. Ethan wriggles free, only to find Gabriel has an even more elaborate backup plan waiting for him. (I guess when you can consult a godlike computer, you’re prepared for every eventuality.)Cut to: More running, more chasing, more hazy alliances between assorted members of an enormous cast that includes longtime players Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Henry Czerny, relative newcomers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, and total neophytes like Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham as an Naval officer and Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman as the Secretary of Defense. The whiplash between locations, the bewildering web of character loyalties — some people want to control the Entity, some want to destroy it — is such a muddle I started to wonder whether Ethan was trapped inside an impressive but not wholly convincing computer simulation of reality he would eventually recognize and escape in true impossible mission fashion.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...No such luck. To be sure, when The Final Reckoning finally puts all its pieces in place, it quite literally flies. But there also some truly clunky exchanges — something that has never been the case in the Mission: Impossible franchise before, especially since McQuarrie took over as writer and director with 2015’s Rogue Nation. That includes way too many self-congratulatory Easter eggs from throughout the history of the franchise. The callbacks include multiple clip montages, surprise cameos, and totally unnecessary explanations of unresolved Mission plot threads. Even the date of the first Mission: Impossible’s premiere becomes an crucial plot point.I love these movies as much as anyone on the planet; I’ve seen every single one in a theater, most multiple times. A few of the references made me smile; most felt indicative of a film that’s a bit too clever for its own good. Every single thing in every single movie does not needs to connect to everything else.Mission: Impossible - The Final ReckoningParamountloading...The spectacular aerial climax is one of four do-or-die missions all happening simultaneously in The Final Reckoning’s final minutes. While I appreciated the attempt to top every previous world-saving effort — and Cruise’s commitment to these movies is beyond reproach — I also found myself a little disappointed every time McQuarrie cut away from him dangling off that biplane. The other characters don’t add more tension; they distract from the main event. The old masters of early movie stunts who Cruise and McQuarrie so obviously admire knew that sometimes simpler was better.Additional Thoughts:-Flashbacks sprinkled throughout Dead Reckoning established that Gabriel played a role in a mysterious tragedy that led Ethan to join the IMF. In these flashbacks, Esai Morales appeared as a young man, presumably de-aged using digital technology. The Final Reckoning doesn’t really pay off this subplot (yet another element from the last film that gets dropped) but in the brief snippets that do appear in The Final Reckoning, Cruise’s face is never shown. The “young“ Ethan Hunt only appears from behind or in shadow. In a movie all about Ethan Hunt trying to destroy a truth-manipulating computer that can alter reality, that feels notable.-Also notable: Ethan Hunt wants to destroy the Entity, but because the Entity has infiltrated every corner of cyberspace, that means Tom Cruise may have to destroy the entire internet in the process.RATING: 6/10Guilty Pleasure Movies From the ’90sThese ’90s films do not have good reputations. Most are cheesy and a few are really dated. We love them anyway.