This article container article for spoilers for The last of us Season 2, Episode 2, “Through the Valley”.
Not since the red wedding, fans of the source material from an HBO series had this great secret to keep. When The last of us Part II Shipped in June 2020, the video game players were shocked – and, in some cases, furious – to discover that Joel, the protagonist of the extremely successful predecessor of the game, died shortly after the start of the story, and the instrument of his death was not a formidable Zombie Golf but a young woman named Abby, who beat him with a golf club. The players discussed and debated the twist constantly, but they managed to keep it for them, even after the first season of the television adaptation of the game which has become a hit monster. Fans of the game have been speculating for weeks in the place where in the second season of the show, the pivotal moment was going to land, referring to it with Winky coded sentences like “Abby’s Golf Game”, but Sunday evening, the chronologies merged, and players and viewers could finally cry as one.
The HBO series, which was co-created by ChernobylCraig Mazin and the creative director of video games Neil Druckmann, is getting closer to his source, even reproducing certain sequences, such as kissing the dance background between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) in the first episode of the second season, Shot for Shot. But “Through the Valley”, to be known now as “the one where Joel is murdered”, makes a significant modification of history, transforming Joel’s death with an attack by a huge horde of infects on the fortified human camp of Jackson, Wyoming. With Joel (Pedro Pascal) Incapacted and Ellie and Dina on patrol, the Battle of Jackson mainly involves characters that we have just met or spend shortly, like Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). But the fight for Jackson’s survival, made by Game of Thrones The former Mark Mylod, evokes the tensions which manage the Gut, with the future of humanity suspended in the balance alongside Joel.
Joel’s death is brutal and scary slow, anxious to determine the determination by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who spent five years tracking down the man who killed his father. Contrary to The Walking Deadwho lost millions of viewers after giving in the skull of a beloved character on the screen, The last of us Most of the time, we spare the bloody details, cutting after Abby shot Joel on the leg and chooses a murderous weapon in the golf club bag in the abandoned lodge where she and her militia band of Militia have temporarily put on. But that only takes a look at the bloody and bloody face of Pascal and the exploded tree of the golf club to imagine what Abby did with her while our attention was directed elsewhere. As soon as Joel realizes that Abby is the doctor’s daughter whom he killed in the Bastion of Firefly by Salt Lake City, he seems to know that he does not go alive – rather than begging for his life, he simply tells him to finish him. But Ellie, who came across the lodge and was taken captive by the comrades of Abby, is forced to look at the man who became his substitution father is coldly executed, his broken body barely won when Abby stabs the metal rod shredded in his neck.
Joel’s murder is the incident that establishes The last of us“The second half in motion, launching Ellie in a quest for revenge that will threaten to consume it. The first season of the show, which found Joel and Ellie walking through what remains of the United States in search of a healing for the plague which almost wiped out the human race, was defined by hope – a hope that was broken when Joel discovered that the means for the Lucioles to make a cure based on the natural immunity of Ellie was to kill his first. (Like the Doctor who would have carried out the mortal operation, Abby’s father is not as flawless as she likes to believe it.) The second season is defined by the loss of hope, and by the inability of Ellie to see beyond his rage and to live the life that Joel fought and killed, for her.
As a pair of traumatized solitary who can barely trust themselves, not to mention anyone else, Joel and Ellie have experienced a largely lonely existence. And the groups they met on their travels, including a cannibal clan that tried to cut Ellie for meat, have given up the idea that there is a danger in number. But Jackson’s paradise shows that it should not be like that, that people can regroup and serve something bigger than them. Individually, the city’s residents would have no chance against the thousands of infects that launch against its wooden palisades. But they fight them, even if it is at high cost, using defensive tactics, such as the dousing of invaders in a flammable liquid then light it on fire, which resonates more with the Middle Ages than the 21st century. (It is also, of course, which strongly recalls the epic battles on Game of ThronesWith a newly introduced infected breed called Bloater fulfilling the role of the Westeros giants.) The residents of the hard -disputed victory of Jackson provide a note of triumph which also compensates for the horror of Joel’s death. But this also contrasts the consequences of having a rider alone with the protections to be part of a community.
Unlike the game, which initially presents Abby as a purely malicious antagonist, The last of us“The television version takes care to humanize it, otherwise exactly soften, the character. We first meet her a few days after the murder of her father, always in shock from the loss but already fixed on revenge, and her introduction to Joel comes at the end of a sequence where she fights for her life, sparkling through the narrowing gap between a building and a chain link fence collapsed under the weight of an infected horde – a scene that makes it more impossible not to promote If you finish adjusting a little later. Dever is not as physically imposing as Abby of the game, but the formidable intensity of his gaze compensates for his lack of bombed biceps, and his apparent vulnerability makes it more plausible than Joel would see her like a young lady in distress and not as a potential threat.
It will not be time for the public to savor the nuances of the performance of Dever – not when we are still rabid by what she did in Joel, and further by the damage we know how to be forced to watch it will do in Ellie. (This is however the time for the players who questioned Ramsey’s physical form for the role of recognizing how the actor realizes that the actor realizes the desperate anxiety of Ellie and his white heated fury that the death of Joel is not the only thing, “through the valley” continue to withdraw us from remedying what it is the thing that does not do the thing. Tragedies to cry, and even triumphs to savor. The last of us sharing in Ellie’s rage, but he wants us to understand that Abby is no less real.
