Episode Review: The Last of Us 2x2 - "Through the Valley"

Welcome back to the blog readers. It is no secret that I absolutely love The Last of Us (2023-) in almost every regard. The action, the horror, the character work, all of it is stunning on every level. Last week's episode was a reminder that this show is the king of the small screen right now as it introduced characters and plotlines from The Last of Us Part II (2020) to beautiful effect. Would we be able to keep up the momentum in this episode, titled "Through the Valley," written by Craig Mazin, and directed by Mark Mylod? Stick around to find out if a certain character decides to go golfing this week (if you know, you know).

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 in which the season is based.

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You know how much I have been waiting for this show to come back, and last week's episode was absolutely stunning. Like I said, it may not have been the flashiest episode but it was amazing character work that lit the way. And with this being the episode I assumed Abby would be "going golfing," I have very high expectations for it. And I have to say that this episode was nothing short of a masterpiece. This is the best episode of television of the year by a mile, and it feels like a marriage of two episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-19). The performances of Bela Ramsey and Kaitlyn Dever were masterful and the action was as tense as ever, and I loved every second of what we got.

Before I begin my paragraph about Kaitlyn Dever's performance. I obviously have to address the muscular-sized elephant in the room. When The Last of Us Part II came out in 2020, the actor who played Abby, Laura Bailey, received death threats over the negative fan reception to the character. Now here is where I stand on this. I believe it is 100% okay for someone to not like a character in a project, or even to not like the performance (similar to my thoughts on Tahar Rahim's performance in Madame Web (2024)). What it is absolutely NOT okay to do is threaten the performer in any way, shape or form. They are doing a job and this is their livelihood. If you are one of those people, I do not want you on this page because that is not what we do here. I treat performers with respect and judge the work they do and not their character. And if you air a threat anywhere near Dever's direction, you are an actual piece of shit and you do not deserve to watch this series. And last laugh went to Bailey because she won the Best Performance Game Award.

Now with that being said, I want to talk about the performance of Dever as Abby. Knowing that Abby is a more muscular character in the game, I was surprised that they got someone like Dever to play the character in the show. But it is not about the physique at all. Do you want to know why? Because while Dever may not have the muscles, she absolutely has the intensity, the fury, the rage, and the drive to complete her mission. We really did not get to see much of her in last week's episode, but she really makes up for it by absolutely delivering in the areas she needed to. From the desperation she feels when trying to get away from the infected at the beginning of the episode all the way to the end of the episode when she lets it all out, Dever really gets to shine as the character who is able to get it done. I cannot wait to see how her story gets fleshed out in this and next season.

Finally, we need to talk about Bella Ramsey's performance as Ellie. You know how much I have loved them as Ellie over the run of this show, and not one of you mouth-breathers can say otherwise. Their pivotal scenes in the first season all hit and she absolutely broke out for me. If you thought Ellie's reunion with Joel in the eighth episode in the first season was an emotional rollercoaster, oh baby, you are not prepared to watch this episode. From the snappiness Ellie has with the homophobe Seth at the beginning of the episode, to all the playful banter Ramsey is able to pull off with Young Mazino's Jesse, it is more of the same. But the end of the episode is really where we should be giving them their flowers. There is regret, pain, guilt, anger, and sadness all in this performance, and hearing those screams almost brought a tear to my eye. I do not need to see another frame of this season to say that if Ramsey does not get an Emmy nomination after this episode, then I don't know what the fuck those voters are doing.

Now we need to talk about the story of this episode because it is definitely the lynchpin of the entire story of the game and the rest of the show. We start the episode with a dream Abby has, where she warns her younger self not to enter the room in which her father was killed. Startled, she wakes up as her crew is stationed in a lodge up on the mountain and is still committed to her mission of killing Joel. The crew are startled at the level of security Jackson has and realize they will never be able to get in. Abby leaves on her own to do recon (and follow a two-person patrol when she sees them), while Owen admits to the rest of the crew that his plan to infiltrate Jackson to get Joel has nothing to do with that; he secretly plans to convince Abby to turn back and return to Seattle before she gets them all killed.

Meanwhile, Ellie is looking to do a patrol with Joel, but Jesse, who woke her up, reveals he already left on patrol with Dina. He also tells her Maria is looking to talk to her. She listens in on Tommy, who is discussing with and quizzing the community on what to do in the event of an infected invasion, and half-heartedly accepts an apology (and a sandwich) from Seth. She prepares to ride out with Jesse on patrol as she explains to him that even though they are on the ends right now, she is still Ellie and Joel is still Joel. The two wind up getting caught in a blizzard as radio services are shotty at best, and they wind up putting their horses in a car wash and take refuge in an abandoned 7-Eleven (which winds up being the hideout of former Firefly and later Jackson resident Eugene). Jesse then vaguely tells Ellie the story of Eugene and also tells her that Joel did not have a choice in killing him. More on that later. While this is happening, Abby gets caught in the same blizzard and rolls down a hill after trying to go down to get the two people on patrol. She finds herself in a "graveyard" of dead infected, only to find that there are live ones underneath that have burrowed down there (which adds up to what Jesse told Ellie before).

Abby runs for her life from the infected ad finds herself near a fence that the infected are trying to get her from, and she is forced to crawl through when they collapse it. One manages to beak through and get to her but she is saved by Joel, who takes her to their hideout where he and Dina have been sheltering from the storm. After hearing Dina say his name, Abby convinces the two of them to return to the lodge so they can regroup and return to Jackson. While all of this is happening, one of the members of the town breaks open the pipe from last episode and sees the infected tendrils, leading to a new group of infected burrowing out from the ground and rerouting the infected currently chasing Joel, Dina, and Abby, and all of them descend on Jackson. Tommy galvanizes the town into getting ready for this attack, and the plan is set into motion: the unable and children are to go to lower levels where the infected cannot get them, and anyone who is able goes up to the rooves. Using barrels full of gasoline and rifles, the shooters on the wall are able to create explosions and walls of fire for the infected to slow them down, but the infected move to a more vulnerable area of the wall which a Bloater breaches. Tommy and some flamethrower people (two of them run away) try to hold them off while Maria and others on the rooves create a chokepoint, but this fails when the infected make their way to the rooves. Tommy is able to isolate the Bloater into an alley and incinerate it with his flamethrower as the battle is won despite heavy casualties.

Meanwhile, Joel, Dina, and Abby are close to the lodge, and Joel wants to return back to help and fight, but Abby insists they make it to the lodge. They eventually do and Abby reunites with Owen, Manny, Mel, and Nora, who had just initiated a search for her. All of them make it inside and Mel tends to Dina's frostbite wound as Abby introduces her and her crew to the two, and she introduces them to hers, making sure to point out Joel. Manny holds Dina at gunpoint and allows her to live by Mel injecting her with something to make her sleep for an hour. Abby then confronts Joel, explaining that they were ex-Fireflies that fled to Seattle when he killed all but them, and that the doctor he executed was her father. When Joel brings up that he saved her life, she responds by asking "What life?" and shooting Joel in the knee with a shotgun. She tells him that the WLF (which stands for Washington Liberation Front) has a code which prevents them from killing people who cannot defend themselves, but she will kill him. Her reasoning: whether Joel has a code like them or is a "lawless piece of shit like you, there are things we can all agree are just fucking wrong." He tells her to shut up and do it already, and she tells him that he does not get to rush this and smacks him in the leg with a golf club.

Jesse had returned to Jackson and Ellie went to find Joel, and she stumbles on the lodge to the sound of someone getting beat up. She stumbles on the scene, Abby beating Joel to a pulp and the golf club being broken in half. She is pinned down to the ground begging Joel to get up as she is forced to watch what Abby does: when Owen tells her to end it, she takes the broken end of the golf club and jams it into Joel's neck, killing him. When Ellie screams that she will kill Abby, Manny kicks her hard in the chest, leaving her unable to breathe. She crawls over to Joel's corpse and expects to die there. In the aftermath, Abby and her crew depart for Seattle, Jackson cleans up the mess from the attack and after learning of what happened, Tommy breaks down in Maria's arms, and Ellie, Dina, and Jesse return to Jackson with the lifeless body of Joel. And all I can do is stand up and clap at what I has just witnessed. It may have been a somber one, but it was applause nonetheless.

The first thing I want to talk about here is a bit of speculation on what I think will happen with the character of Eugene. This series is painting this guy to be drastically different than he was in the game, and if it makes narrative sense I am all for it. I will not be spoiling Part II but Eugene is only seen in a photographed and referenced. In this show, what we have gathered is that he was the husband of Joel's therapist Gail and Joel killed him a year prior to this season. We even get the hint that Joel was forced to kill him. My personal theory is he either deduced Ellie was immune to the Cordyceps and Joel silenced him or he was infected himself and he asked Joel to kill him before he turned. The problem with the second theory is that Gail would not resent Joel as much as she does if it was that reason. Which is why I am leaning towards the former theory to be true. And we will find out what happened to Eugene (here played by Joe Pantoliano) in a future episode of this season.

Next I want to talk about the other major change from the game, which includes the fact that the way the infected act has been altered as well. There is only a reference to this, but in the show, the infected use their dead as a shelter from the elements and burrow underneath them. This, along with the Stalker we see in last week's episode, means the infected and the Cordyceps fungus are absolutely evolving in a terrifying way. It is almost like the fungus is fighting back against the humans in its unstoppable quest in bringing down all of humanity. I can only imagine what kind of insane things are bound to be revealed in the future of this show. One thing has to stay the same. I will not spoil what it is, but I will be damned if I am no longer the king of the rat people in the sewers. If you know, you know.

This episode also does a brilliant job of again posing this moral dilemma of whether Joel was right to do what he did. Now I told you I will not really pose my answer to this question until the end of the season, but this episode also does a great job of bringing up the idea that actions have consequences and your demons will come back to haunt you. In another change from the game, we get an idea from the get-go about Abby and her motivations, which again make us think about that question. John Campea said it best, and we are seeing the rumblings of something insane, but this second game is a masterclass in discussing what pain can do to people, even the best of us. And in the same way that a monster was born when Joel killed Abby's father, a monster has been born with Abby's killing of Ellie's father. The cycle of violence continues.

Next up I need to discuss the idea I introduced all the way at the beginning of this review that this was a marriage of two great episodes of Game of Thrones. The first episode that this episode really reminded me of was the fantastic fourth season one "The Watchers on the Wall" (2014), an episode written by series creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and directed by Neil Marshall. In that episode, Mance Ryder and his army of wildlings attack the Night's Watch and Castle Black. The defense of the town really gave me those flashbacks, and I even got some flashbacks from the fifth season's "Hardhome" (2015), written by Benioff and Weiss and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, when the undead breach the walls of Hardhome while the Night's Watch is trying to retreat. Even HBO Max themselves made a TikTok reference to this episode on their platform. These are both great episodes and I can see where the inspiration came from.

Then the second episode that I get vibes of in this episode is the infamous and critically acclaimed third season episode "The Rains of Castamere" (2013), again written by Benioff and Weiss and directed by David Nutter (side note, notice how all the best episodes of Game of Thrones were written by Benioff and Weiss?). I don't even need to describe this episode more than just these two words. Red. Wedding. Now you know what I'm talking about. And the emotional gut-punch that this episode leaves us on is eerily similar to what Benioff and Weiss did in that episode. And I have even seen reaction videos of people reacting to this scene with enough heartache and just as much sadness and tears as the reception to that episode of Game of Thrones that made even Richard Madden cry.

And finally (I know, right? I told you all that I was compensating for what I failed to deliver in my analysis and review of last season), I want to reflect on how this episode ends. And it is not what we see on the screen, it is what we hear on the speakers. The song that plays is a cover of the Shawn James song "Through the Valley," performed by former Ellie actor and Ellie's mother Anna in the first season Ashley Johnson. This was a song that Johnson performed herself for the second game, and hearing her put a new spin on this song made the point of loss and grief and especially pain hit a whole lot harder than it had any reason to. And whoever had the bright idea to put THAT song at the end of this episode is a bonafide genius. Hats off to you, person, because the waterworks continued when people realized who was singing. A+.

The Last of Us delivers the best episode of television all year with one that has it all: action, emotion, and that feeling of Game of Thrones at its very best. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you all for the next post. Also, side note, god damn you Earl.