Episode Review: The Last of Us 2x1 - "Future Days"

Welcome back to the blog readers. What a full-circle moment for me this is. If you remember right, this was the first show that I ever reviewed on this blog and I was so satisfied with the product we got in the first season. I may not be satisfied with the product I gave to you back then, but growth and experience are good things. Would the second season start off with a bang? Stick around to find out as I review the second season's premiere episode, titled "Future Days," and written and directed by Craig Mazin.

NOTE: I will be using spoilers for my thoughts, so DO NOT read ahead if you have not seen the episode. I also will not be spoiling the events of the game The Last of Us Part II (2020) in which the season is based.

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It has been way too fucking long since I have gotten to talk about this show, especially since I was not in my prime yet when it came to this blog. I feel like I did not authentically get out what I wanted to, but now I absolutely can. And what an episode to start this "new era" on. While it may not be the flashiest episode to start off a season (we are absolutely getting that next week), it was a strong season opener with strong performances from the entire cast (especially Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Isabela Merced, and Catherine O'Hara). Plus, the story we get in this episode is going to lead us into the future, and I am going to single out one scene that I thought was absolutely brilliant.

I am going to start this review off by talking about Pedro Pascal's performance as Joel Miller. Pascal absolutely deserved all of the love he got for his performance as Joel last season, but Pascal has been tasked with something incredible for this episode, especially with what is still to come (gamers know). He takes a Herculean task and makes it look effortless, because there is a lot of guilt Joel has and has had to live with for five years. Pascal expresses this guilt and grief perfectly, especially in his scene with Catherine O'Hara's Gail. You really are led to believe that he feels he did the right thing by saving Ellie in the hospital, but we know the lie he tells her has put a strain on their relationship and it is eating her alive. Pascal is beginning his Emmy campaign early and I believe he absolutely will be nominated.

Speaking of nominations, Bella Ramsey as Ellie has been absolutely perfect casting. And I do not want any grifters or basement-dwelling cousin-humpers getting on here and trying to say "tHe DoWn Of uS" or any bullshit like that. Ramsey captures the spirit of Ellie perfectly, and they do it again here (yes I am using their preferred pronouns, so suck it to anyone who thinks pronouns are "woke"). Not only does Ramsey have to bring back that youthful charm that makes them perfect casting for Ellie, there is a teenage angst that they have to sell as well, and I think nothing is more evident of that than the dance scene. There will be other emotions that they will present this season, and I cannot wait to see how they do it.

Next up is the performance of series newcomer Isabela Merced as Dina. In the game, Dina is played by Shannon Woodward and is the love interest of Ellie. I have been a fan of Merced for a while, ever since I saw her as a young girl in Transformers: The Last Knight (2017). She is also in Superman (2025) later this year, so I am looking forward to seeing her iteration of Hawkgirl. But as Dina, Merced brings a whole lot of swagger that I did not know she had. She is a character that is a more freewheeling spirit and it rubs off on all the characters. And we even get a change from the game and get a scene between her and Joel, which surprised me given the story being told is similar to the game. She could have come off as the generic love interest but Merced breathes so much life to Dina that I think is going to get her a lot of attention.

Finally, and I have never spoken about more than three individual performances in an episode review before, I want to talk about the aforementioned Catherine O'Hara as therapist Gail. Gail is a new character created for the series, and O'Hara is kind of ruling television right now. Her appearances in The Studio (2025) have been great and her appearance in this episode is just as great. As Joel's therapist and someone who has a connection to him based on something done in the past, Gail has to be strong-willed and vindictive in her ways. O'Hara absolutely does that in this episode and her scene with Pascal's Joel is probably the most heart-shattering scene of the entire episode. She brings strength and weakness together and builds a confidence to her that is infectious to watch. All you need is two lines: "And I resent you for that. Maybe a little more than that, I hate you for it." and "You want me to validate that? No, I won't. In fact, fuck no."

Now, we have to talk about the story of this episode because it definitely is a doozy. We start where we left off last season with Joel lying to Ellie and her making him swear he is telling the truth. which he does and she responds with "Okay." We then cut to a makeshift graveyard outside the hospital in which five survivors: Manny, Mel, Owen, Nora, and their leader Abby, lay the dead to rest and they discuss their failure to save their friends and allies. They talk about how Joel is a monster, and Owen brings up the fact that one of the deceased named Ed has connections in Seattle that can take them in and help them hunt Joel down. With tears in her eyes and a fire hot enough to burn a city down, Abby vows that they will kill Joel slowly.

We cut to five years later and Jackson has become a sprawling commune that can bring in multiple survivors. Joel and Ellie have become increasingly estranged, with Ellie being upset even at the mention of his name. We see this when one of her friends named Jesse tells a man she is sparring with to go easy on her at Joel's request. She gets mad when she hears of this request. Meanwhile, Joel has become a bit softer and Ellie's resentment of him is bearing on him. Jesse's ex Dina visits with him and he teaches her how to repair a circuit breaker at her insistence. Dina also asks what is going on between the two and Joel brushes it off as just teenage angst and that she will get over it. He also talks to his brother Tommy and his wife Maria about the overcrowding issue that exists in Jackson, with Maria open to bringing in as many people as possible but Joel is against this because they are running out of room.

Meanwhile, Ellie is training with a sniper rifle with the assistance of Tommy, but is not happy with being taken off patrol at the request of Joel. She threatens to tell people that she is immune, something he forbade her from talking about, and he reluctantly puts her on a patrol led by a former flame of Ellie named Cat. She is also thrilled to learn that Dina is on the patrol, and she makes her attraction for Ellie known when she casually tells her that she broke up with Jesse. The pair defy Cat and inspect an abandoned supermarket where they kill a Clicker and continue to build their chemistry but Ellie falls through the floor and into the supermarket below. Ellie believes she is alone but she discovers a new kind of infected known as a Stalker that hunts her down and attacks her when she is distracted. She is able to kill it but discovers she has been bitten. She later tells a council that includes Tommy and Maria about the ordeal, and they order her to apologize to Jesse.

After being asked by many different people if she is going to an "event," later revealed to be a New Year's celebration, she winds up going, but not before running into Joel, who offers to fix the strings on her guitar. At the dance, she bets that Jesse and Dina will be back together in two weeks time, but Jesse doubts this. Dina approaches Ellie to dance, and is obviously drunk and high, and she makes her move on Ellie. She tells her that everybody should be terrified of her and kisses her, to which she kisses Dina back, before being interrupted by the homophobic bar owner Seth, who calls them a slur. This leads Joel, who is at the party, to shove Seth down to the floor, and Ellie humiliates him by telling him she does not need his help as he leaves in shame. Later that night, Joel is playing her guitar on his porch, and Ellie walks past him as he looks upset. Meanwhile, as the rest of the town celebrates New Year's, infected tendrils come out of an exposed pipe and Abby and company approach Jackson with purpose.

Like I previously mentioned, I will not be revealing details from The Last of Us Part II, but I will talk about what I think is going to happen later on. Players of the game know what Abby's motivations are going to be this season, and I think it was brilliant for the showrunners to put us right back in that moral dilemma they left us in last season: was what Joel did the right thing to do? I will not be answering this question with my own moral opinion until I review the season as a whole, but I love how we are shown that every action has an unintended consequence that follows along with it. I love what Craig Mazin said at the end of the "Inside the Episode," where he says "Who the heroes are and who the villains are depends solely on where you're standing." That is such a powerful line and such a great representation of the events that are going to transpire over the next two seasons.

I next want to talk about the decaying relationship between Joel and Ellie. We can tell what has led us to this point, but players of the game know exactly why Ellie resents Joel right now. I alluded to it when discussing the story but Joel's lie to Ellie has created all of this (the lie is that there were dozens of people like her and the Fireflies stopped looking for a cure when it became clear it was not going to work). Based on how this episode ends, I thought we were going to get the most powerful scene from Part II in the premiere episode, which would leave us even more heartbroken over what is to come in the future. The fact that this lie has consumed Joel so much has led him to cut a lot of people out of the narrative, and he still considers what he did the right thing to do. Again, the showrunners are leaving us this moral question without an answer and leaving the audience to formulate their own answer.

I know this has dragged on for far longer than you would have liked it to, but I only write this much about shows I love. My final point to leave you with today has to be the scene in the supermarket with the Stalker. The game also told this side story involving the fungus adapting and learning how to better hunt humans, but seeing what the Stalkers in this show can do is downright terrifying. That whole scene where one plays a cat-and-mouse game with Ellie is brilliant in every way. You start the sequence with your guard down but in the corner of the screen, you see something different. And as the scene goes on, you start to get that feeling that something is very different with this infected, and when it hides from Ellie, draws her out, and strikes, I was left in awe. The games did not do this Stalker justice, but Craig Mazin (who has horror roots with Chernobyl (2019)) completely delivered.

The Last of Us begins its second season on as high a note as the first season ended on, and while it may not be the flashiest episode, it is definitely carried by its phenomenal character work and storytelling. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next episode. And yes, this is my longest episode review ever. I was definitely compensating for my coverage of last season.