After last week gave us what I found to be a disappointing episode of The Last of Us that tackled the aftermath of a major death and delivered Ellie and Dina to Seattle, this week’s episode was set up to start cutting into the meat of the season’s events. Ellie and Dina are officially on the trail of Abby and her friends, and begin to realize just how tough this task will prove to be.
Let’s dive into my thoughts on the appropriately titled “Day One.”
There is no doubt this was a much better episode than last week’s plodding, boring affair, simply because things happened. The Last of Us got back to the tense action that it does so well, carrying us through expertly crafted recreations of a couple of the game’s signature locations.
The TV station was good, the underground even better. After last week painted the Scars (Seraphites!) in more of a victim role, this episode swung the other way to show us what they are capable of in a fight, as we see their handiwork literally swinging from the ceiling of the TV station. The atmosphere was top-notch, creating the kind of human horror The Last of Us is capable of that rivals any fungus monster or horde of zombies.
The WLF/Seraphite conflict is a brutal one where both sides have done awful things to each other and so will do awful things in turn, with no one really caring at this point who started it. This shows in the scene of Isaac torturing the captured Seraphite, as the two briefly go back and forth about who started it before Isaac dismisses the argument entirely. It genuinely doesn’t matter to either side. Someone did something to make someone else want revenge and so the fight goes back and forth.
The opening scene with Isaac was also excellent, showing a man who once upon a time chose to turn against injustice and oppression, though he did so with the same brutal violence we see in his torture methods. We can reasonably guess that he has become the very kind of oppressive force he once fought to overthrow for the same reason FEDRA did; he responded very poorly to challenges to his authority.
Unfortunately for Ellie and Dina, they have walked right into the middle of a brutal war zone and no one is going to show them mercy. The Seraphites have a form of religious fervor for the fight, as shown by the defiance of the man Isaac tortures, and Isaac is too far gone to stop. Both sides have gone too far.
Thankfully, we also got our dose of infected with the underground tunnel to remind us that they are terrifying, too. This was even better than the TV station, frantic and frightening in all the best ways. The cramped, fervent feeling of Ellie and Dina crawling through the bus (train?) as zombies slam against it from every direction and crawl through the roof was top-notch zombie horror.
I wondered how the scare of Dina thinking Ellie got infected would play out without the spores from the game, and really like what they chose here, with Ellie recklessly bashing her arm into a zombie mouth to take a bite for Dina. It was a good choice to cap off the tension of one scene while creating the conflict for the next, even better scene of Ellie trying to convince a panicked, shattered Dina that she is not infected, and one the actors played off brilliantly.
All in all, these scenes make up the bulk of “Day One” and are just excellent. Add in all the little touches for fans of the Last of Us games, and I was pretty giddy throughout. Ellie’s day one of The Last of Us Part II has a lot of meandering content and this episode picked really good options to narrow that content down to.
My opinion soured a bit towards the end of the episode for the same reason my opinion soured last week, and will likely continue to sour throughout the season, which is the direction these characters are going, and especially Ellie, and the pacing issues that come from squeezing all of this down to seven episodes.
The major problem this episode has is a complete incongruity in tone, as The Last of Us struggles between the changes made to its characters and the story it is adapting. Ellie and Dina’s initial arrival in Seattle last week felt too light, as if they were just on a road trip rather than an explicit mission to kill Joel’s killers. That issue only deepens this week, as Ellie and Dina continue to act as if they are traveling through Seattle with no larger, evil, grief-driven purpose. They set out for Seattle to kill people out of anger for Joel, and we see so little of that.
We’re one episode out from grieving Joel’s death, and he already feels largely forgotten. There’s none of the overbearing sorrow that permeates Ellie’s every scene in The Last of Us Part II. You can feel it in every moment there. Here it’s easy to forget.
People are understandably going to love that Dina and Ellie finally got together at the end of this episode. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with that. Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced have terrific chemistry, and their scenes together spark, but it’s still rushed and weird and weakening the larger story being told.
It’s where the adaptational choices are rearing their ugly head because those choices have robbed certain moments of the pacing and motivation that make them work. Consider the end of this episode; Ellie is thrilled to find out Dina is pregnant. They are talking about a life together raising a child. They have walked into a war zone that quickly revealed the two of them are out of their depth and hopelessly outmatched. Why should they stay?
In the game, there are obvious reasons. Tommy is there, and they are ostensibly in Seattle to retrieve him, and can’t leave until they find him. Ellie is also far more focused on her true, grim purpose of killing Abby.
Neither of those reasons exist right now in the show, and so The Last of Us ending “Day One” with a triumphant couple setting out to find Nora is just…wrong. It requires an entirely different story to work, but I can’t imagine the story is going to change that much. This means rushing these very different characters along the same footsteps their game counterparts walked. It will continue to feel strange because there is so much less of a reason for these characters to make the choices they largely will, especially if The Last of Us keeps changing these moments. It’s either that or changing this to an entirely different story.
Like I said last week, these “little” moments quickly add up as they roll downhill. You can already see it. They keep trying to slow walk the story, realizing they have to hurry to catch up, and find themselves shoving confused characters down paths they shouldn’t be on.
Is this enough to make me dislike the episode? Not at all. Too much of it was spent on fantastic scenes that entertained me. Yes, I’m going to have issues with the rest of the season. So long as enough of it remains this entertaining, I’ll get over it. At this point I can be confident that season 2 will be a somewhat disappointing adaptation. At least it’s still a good show.
Images Courtesy of HBO
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