Entertainment of the 6th episode of The Last of Us: How we were Flashback Episode allows us to see how Joel was created – and what really happened between him and Ellie before Abby was reveled newsroom

This post (via Rolling Stone) Contains spoilers of this week’s episode of The Last of Usnow available in Max.

In the first season, The Last of Us deviated from the adventures of Joel and Ellie to present the beautiful post-apocalyptic love story of Bill and Frank. It was the most acclaimed episode of the first year of the series, although it is barely Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. But, no matter how much the public has loved, no one was asking the series to abandon their protagonists in favor of more stories about the old friends of Joel.

The penultimate chapter of season two is a different type of “deviation episode”: a look at what happened in the five years between seasons, and a return to the time when the series revolved entirely around the relationship between Joel and Ellie. But while “For a long time”It looked like a complete story about Bill and Frank that did not need continuation, the opportunity to see Paschal and Ramsey Together again only reinforces the feeling that the series – if not the game before it – chose badly by killing Joel to send Ellie and Dina in a mission of self -destructive and meaningless revenge.

The episode aims to reinforce why Ellie is committed to this journey, reminding us how much Joel It meant to her and finally show the discussion they had about his actions in Salt Lake City. But it fulfills its role quite too much: as the episode approached the end, all I wanted was more stories set in Jackson During those five years lost, instead of returning to Seattle and watching Ellie keep chasing Abby.

Outside the most problematic context of season two, however, this was a spectacular television episode, and it really was up to the standard established by “For a long time”.

The opening is not set inside the five -year jump, but in Austin in 1983, when Joel was a teenager. He is Tommy live in fear of the police father, played brilliantly by Tony Dalton (Better Call Saul), and when the brothers get involved in a fight because Tommy tried to buy drugs, Joel He decides to take the blame, knowing that he can handle a better beating than his younger brother. But when their father comes home to deal with the problem, it is not taken with anger. He is just tired and sad, especially when he counts Joel about his own father, who was much more abusive than he never went with Joel and Tommy. He describes once his jaw was broken by his father for stealing a chocolate bar at age 10 and admits that he has already hit his children, “but never that way.” While telling the story, he is not the scary man who Joel He knows, but the 10 -year -old boy whose jaw was injured for two months. It’s an amazing moment, and when Dalton It looks frightenedly like Paschal. Injured people hurt people, and sometimes the best you can do is hurt the next generation a little less than it was hurt.

From there, we followed two months after Joel and Ellie Return from Salt Lake City to Jackson. At this point, the episode begins to fill several gaps mentioned earlier in the series. Sethfor example, is a former police officer of Milwaukeeand we see Ellie The day she deliberately burned her arm so she could wear short sleeves without anyone noting her bite marks. Joel customize the guitar of Ellie Like the first of many beautiful birthday gifts of the episode, and even sings “Future Days”, From Pearl JamFor her – the same song she played at the Seattle Theater, earlier this season. While he sings, we are remembered that the look of Ellie to Joelfull of pure and overwhelming love, it has always been the biggest asset in the series, which helps justify the terrible course she took after her loss – but, above all, it seems a huge waste of resources to give up it.

The song is from a 2013 album. In the series timeline, Cordyceps pandemic began in 2003. Now we have to ask ourselves what is different in the reality of the series in relation to ours. Did Mad Men have at least one season before the world is over? The present year’s gift is even more impressive: a visit to a nearby museum, where the command capsule ofApollo 15 aEndeavor was on display when the apocalypse happened . Nerd devotion of

Ellie

(**) The space race remains captivating, and here we see that her imagination is so powerful that she really can feel as if taking off for space – and beyond.

In our world, you need to go to the Wright-Patterson air base in Ohio to see it. (**) She is not the nerd to the point of ignoring the error of wearing a Gemini -program helmet within an Apollo program. This birthday suggests that Joel It has not yet realized thatEllie Yeah, and when you take it with the tattoo artist Kat he defines everything as “experimentation” and insists that Ellie You don’t know what you are saying by stating that it is who she is. The debut of the season was vague enough about the reasons for the removal between Joel and Ellie to assume that she left the main house because of Salt Lake City events. Instead, it was because of this fight, which also helps to explain why Joel reacted so exaggeratedly when Seth launched a homophobic insult against

Ellie

and DinaIn the debut episode. By packing things, we see that the collection of records by Ellie includes an album from Zamfir, master of the Pan Flute. In the post-timely, you sometimes need to be content with what you find musically.

Another leap in time leads us to the 19th anniversary Ellie when she finally creates courage to confront JoelAbout what you already know, even if he has never counted directly. Before that, however, the gift of the year is to take her to her first patrol, which does not run at all as well as the visit to the museum. The first episode of the season had already established that Joel killed Gail’s husband, Eugene, and here we see Eugene in the physical form of the great actorJoe Pantoliano . Eugene It was already a Firefly But now it’s just an old man who wants to go home and say goodbye to his wife – if he hadn’t been infected while he was out. He begs Joel take you back to Jackson to say goodbye to Gail Before being executed, and Ellie Also beg. But Joel will always put the protection of Ellie above all in the world – including the fate of the world itself – and the risk of Eugene Turning before they arrive is too high for him. Joel

he sends Ellie though and takes Eugene for execution. Like this Dalton At the beginning of the episode,Joe Pantoliano can convey a lifetime in a few minutes, so when trying to visualize the face of Gail One last time before being killed, we seem to see exactly what he is seeing, even before he said, “I see her,” just before the shot. Joel tries to lie toGail

but one Ellie bitter reveals the truth, and we are remembered another superpower of Bella Ramsey : The way your face seems to change shape when Ellie feels betrayed by someone she trusted. Our final leap in time is less than a year old for the season’s debut events, now seen from other angles. The most significant addition is the conclusion of the episode, in which we see that, after Ellie go through Joel

Without saying a word when he gets home, she then comes back to talk to him. Finally he can make him talk about Salt Lake City, and gets understandably furious when he tries to justify his actions by saying that healing would have killed her. “So I should have died!” She shouts. “This was my purpose. My life would have a meaning! But you took it out of me!” And this is where we return to the opening scene lesson, when Joelsuggests that if Ellie Have a child someday, you will understand his choice, and add: “I hope you do a little better than me.” Both actors are at their height, especially Paschal when Joel starts to cry. And the scene reconfigures what happened next. Until then, it seemed that Ellie

had lost JoelAt a time when they were not talking, so there was no emotional closure. Instead, we see that they had this last conversation, who faced the biggest point of tension between them, and that even ended with a note of hope, with Elliesaying, “I don’t know if I can forgive you for it. But I would like to try.” This is the first episode of the season directed by Neil Druckmann which extracts exceptional performances from all actors, such as Catherine O’Hara at the moment when Ellie Tell the truth and starts your heart. With this season, he andCraig Mazin are following the choice that Druckmann I had already done with The Last of Us Part II . When the creator of the original material is involved in adaptation, it is no surprise that he tries to be as faithful as possible. But every second ofJoel and Ellie

In this episode it seems to scream to Druckmann ,

Mazin