Okay I got to deal with time management lately, been the one doing interviews at the office has taken a chunk of my energy and time, specially from my daily posts, irl hammering on my door. I have again a ton of backlog and decided to start pushing out recaps of my current favorite series, been episode 6 of The Last of Us season 2 was one them and it was one of those episodes that you know is important but also kinda drags in some parts. We get it there Joel trying to be a good dad but also lying about everything, then this whole flashback episode basically takes us through different birthdays and moments between Joel and Ellie over the years in Jackson and while it answers a lot of questions that have been left hanging across episodes, it also feels a bit repetitive at times because we already knew most of this stuff was gonna happen. The episode starts with this completely new scene showing Joel and Tommy as kids back in Texas in 1983 which was actually pretty cool to see because we never got any of their backstory before, their dad was a cop played by Tony Dalton I specifically remember from Better Call Saul and he has dealing with Tommy getting in trouble for buying weed and getting into fights. Joel being Joel even as a teenager tries to take the blame for his little brother, it kinda makes sense with his character and considering how things have develop during the series the contrast between the two during the scenes at Jackson, always trying to protect people even when they don't ask for it and his dad has this whole conversation about how he is just trying to do better than his own father did with him who went as far as braking his jaw when he was a kid just for stealing candy. This probably reflects on the relationship between Ellie and Joel as how he was trying to do his best to keep her alive and it was the love for her the selfish love that he couldn't let her go like that, he already lost his own daughter and as a cliche end up loving Ellie just as much.
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During the episode they jump around through different years showing Ellie's birthdays and how Joel tries so hard to make each one of them perfect for her, starting when she wass 15 and he is making restoring a guitar with a very custom touch, even carving a little moth into something that I'm not a 100% sure about its definition for Ellie but its super important for her. You tell how much effort he puts into her guitar, from trading Legos to Seth for a birthday cake, spending hours carving bone pieces for the guitar and its a sweet scene to watch even though you know it's all gonna fall apart eventually, this is what I say about it been repetitive, why over extending the explanation of all this? did they ran out of ideas now that we are one episode from the season ending?. Moving forward there is this one scene when Ellie turns 16 Joel takes her to this abandoned museum where there's dinosaurs and space stuff and this whole sequence is basically pulled straight from the game but it looks amazing on screen, especially the part where Ellie gets to sit in the Apollo spacecraft and imagine she is going to space while listening to the actual mission control audio, its a very touching moment but to be honest at a certain point made me want to just move forward since again it was over extending. Although not going to lie, it was a very well crafted scene with the lighting changing to make it look like she is really taking off was very cool and you can see why this memory would be so important to her, it's probably one of the few times she got to feel like a normal kid instead of this immune girl carrying the weight of the world, but even in this happy moment, she spots some fireflies on the way back and you can see her starting to think about what really happened at the hospital, like little seeds of doubt that are gonna grow into this huge confrontation later.
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By the third happy birthday they celebrate it feels so repetitive, its now Ellie 17s, things start getting more complicated because Joel walks in on her with Cat and she's got a tattoo and they're smoking weed, basically doing all the cliche teenage rebellion stuff at once that we see on this type of life stages on tv series which freaks Joel out completely. This whole scene shows how Joel is still thinking of Ellie as his little girl when she is clearly growing up and making her own choices, and his reaction to finding out she might be interested in girls too is a hard reality check for a guy from Texas who grew up in the early 2000s, he is not being malicious that he doesn't like gay people he just feels its too fast for his "little" girl. The conversation they have about the moth tattoo is an interesting one because Joel thinks it represents change and growth but Gail later tells him that moths actually represent death which makes way more sense when you think about Ellie's whole obsession with her purpose and feeling like she should have died to save everyone obviously this is all after her journey with Joel because before that she never had that thought. You can see their relationship starting to crack when Ellie moves out to the garage and Joel's trying to be understanding but he is also clearly struggling with losing control over her life, which is something he never had to deal with when Sarah was alive because she died so young and from the little we saw of Sarah she was not a wild and free as Ellie.
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The ending was the best part of this episode in my opinion, it gives us a full backstory of what went wrong between Gail and Joel, plus Ellie, all in one package. It describes very well how Eugene, Gail's husband, who gets bitten while out on patrol and asks Joel to bring him back to say goodbye to his wife but Joel lies to Ellie and takes Eugene out to kill him instead of honoring his last wish, I can understand why he did it but they could have probably tied him and take him to Jackson without much risk, besides as they mention he probably still had about an hour. This whole sequence is brutal because you can see how Joel thinks he is making the tough decisions to protect everyone back home but he is also taking away people's choices and lying about it, its not that he kill him but that he lied to both Ellie and Joel, thats when she said "You promise!!", its just like he did with the fireflies and Marlene, I was a bit lost at that because I though Gail husband was the Dr. Joel killed at Seattle. When they bring Eugene's body back, Joel tries to lie to Gail about what happened pretending Eugene wanted to tell her he loved her but didn't want to put her in danger but Ellie couldnt take another lie and tells Gail the truth about how Joel promised to bring Eugene back and then shot him instead, this was the final straw for Ellie because she realizes that if Joel can lie so easily about Eugene then he probably lied about everything else too and you can see her putting together all the pieces about what really happened at the hospital, he really didn't have to tell her she is growing up and figure it out by herself.
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