Elon Musk’s Ex Ashley St. Clair Reveals Name of Their Baby
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The Last of Us’ New Season Presents an Even Greater Threat Than the Infected
There’s not a single viscerally upsetting human death in the first episode of Season 2.
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This article contains spoilers for the first episode of The Last of Us, Season 2, “Future Days.”
Even in the apocalypse, teenage girls are a pain in the ass. The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us picks up five years after the events of the last—a significant span of time in anyone’s life, but an eon in a budding adult’s. Vulnerable, traumatized Ellie (Bella Ramsey) has matured into a combat-ready badass with a bulletproof hide, a necessary evolution in a world where life is under constant threat, but a tough break for her surrogate father Joel (Pedro Pascal), who doesn’t understand why the girl whose life he saved seems to be so mad at him all the time. Now living in the fortified settlement of Jackson, Wyoming, Joel and Ellie are leading the closest thing to a normal life that a world overrun with fungus-infected zombies can offer. But the return of normalcy also means a resurgence in the kinds of mundane domestic issues that one might hope would have perished along with most of civilization, including the age-old battle of wills between a protective parent and a teenager yearning to make their own mistakes. The standoff gets so bad that the terminally taciturn Joel is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice: going to therapy. But while resident shrink Gail (Catherine O’Hara) is game to hear him talk through his complaints, she can barely suppress an eye roll as he fumes about his 19-year-old acting temperamental and withdrawn. Congratulations, she quips, “you have the most boring problem ever.”
“Future Days,” the second season’s first episode, features only a handful of infected and not a single viscerally upsetting human death. And while there’s plenty of carnage to come—fret not, fans of flesh-ripping—the show is intent on finding moments of quiet emotion and mundane familiarity between epic battles for existence. Urged on, perhaps, by the viral success of the first season’s “Long, Long Time,” a breakaway episode devoted to a tragic love story between two characters who barely appear in the video game on which the series is based, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann regularly digress from the principal story in order to enrich our understanding of their characters and the turbulent world they inhabit, even if it means shifting perspective and time.
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The new season, in fact, begins at the precise instant the previous one left off, with Ellie, on the verge of entering Jackson for the first time, confronting Joel about what really happened at the Firefly base in Salt Lake City. All she knows is that after traveling across the country in hopes that her unique immunity to the Cordyceps plague might allow for the development of a cure, she woke up on the outskirts of Salt Lake, with Joel telling her everyone they’d come to meet with was dead. What she doesn’t know is that the Fireflies, a paramilitary band with designs on saving humanity at any cost, planned to kill her, since the only way to study her brain’s antifungal properties was to harvest it from her skull. Joel reacted poorly to this development, in the sense that he slaughtered every Firefly soldier in the hospital and, for good measure, put down the unarmed doctor who might have been the only living person capable of curing the infection that threatens to wipe out the human race.
Joel saved Ellie’s life, but he also extinguished what might have been humanity’s last, best hope. And more importantly, he did it without allowing her to decide whether she wanted to be sacrificed for the greater good. It’s not clear if Ellie knows that Joel is hiding the truth, but she seems to sense, at least, that he’s capable of it—that this man who has come to love her, and who might well give his life for hers, can look her right in the eyes and lie to her. And after five years of dissembling, that hairline crack of mistrust has widened into a chasm. Life in Jackson seems to be pretty good, at least as things go at the end of the world: There’s food and shelter, a burgeoning community of a few hundred or so, even a healthy crop of weed for when things get too tense. But Ellie’s moved out of her bedroom and into Joel’s garage, where she blasts Nirvana from a collection of painstakingly salvaged cassette tapes. (Jackson has electricity, too.) She’s grown into a formidable warrior, but Joel still sees her as a little girl in need of his protection, and because his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) organizes the settlement’s security details, he intervenes to keep her out of harm’s way, while she’d much rather be killing the infected outside Jackson’s walls. So she’s perpetually furious at her surrogate dad, even though he feels like all he’s done is try to keep her alive. As Gail tries to suss out the source of their contentious relationship, she asks Joel, “Did you hurt her?” His eyes grow wide, almost teary, before he answers, “I saved her.”
In the strictest sense, that’s true: Ellie would be dead if not for Joel. But the fact that he won’t tell her what he did shows he understands that, even 25 years after the infection broke out, there is more to life than mere survival. The primary objective of the video game on which The Last of Us is based is to stay alive—or at least that’s the objective without which none of its other objectives can be accomplished. (As the player controlling Joel, you can’t save Ellie if you let the Fireflies take you out.) But that doesn’t exempt you from the consequences of your actions, and that goes double for the game’s sequel, the plot of which the show’s second season parallels. (Critics have been cautioned not to reveal just how much of the game’s story the seven new episodes encompass, although since the show has already been renewed for a third season, it’s safe to say: not all of it.) After it recapitulates the first season’s ending, “Future Days” cuts abruptly to black—always an ominous sign for an HBO Sunday night show—and when the image fades back in, we’re with an entirely new group of characters, a young band of Fireflies. It’s only a few days after the hospital massacre, and they’re only just gathering to bury their dead, but Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the survivors’ de facto leader, already has her eyes on a future goal: tracking down Joel and extracting vengeance as slowly and painfully as possible. Game players already know where this goes next, but for the rest, suffice it to say that while Ellie’s teenage petulance may make some viewers as irritated with her as her surrogate dad, the season offers ample opportunity to explore both the origins and the cost of Ellie’s abrasiveness, and Ramsey’s performance takes us inside Ellie’s skin without softening her armor-plated exterior.
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“Future Days” introduces a new breed of infected, known as a stalker, a cunning evolution that can lie silently in wait rather than running directly at its prey. The humans have been upping their game, but the Cordyceps herd has too, with even more formidable (and ickier) variations to come. But there are also episodes in the second season where the infected make little to no appearance at all, and the greatest threat to humankind’s existence comes from humans themselves. The Last of Us isn’t as nihilistic a show as The Walking Dead, where compassion was inevitably treated as a form of weakness—a nice enough gesture, but one most likely to get you killed. From what we see of Jackson, it’s a stable community whose people are eager for the chance to make a small display of kindness. Even the homophobic bartender who yells at Ellie when she kisses another woman in public turns out to be more of a drunk loudmouth than anything else. Even in the worst circumstances imaginable—far worse than anyone with access to an HBO subscription is likely to face in their lifetime—they’ve found something to fight for that’s bigger than themselves.
How The Last of Us Fans Turned Against Its Breakout Star A Crackerjack New Thriller That’s So Ridiculous, I Couldn’t Resist No Other Show Better Captures What It Means to Be Human Now. It Just Had a Perfect Season Finale. Amazon’s New Movie About a Heroic POTUS Is Just EmbarrassingJoel and Ellie are both uneasy fits in Jackson. He’s a rugged survivalist with no qualms about killing anyone who gets in his way—he doesn’t enjoy it, but he doesn’t hesitate, either. And she’s too traumatized to feel comfortable as part of a larger group, and too stubborn to abide by anyone else’s rules. They’ve also both seen what happens when communities go wrong, when groups of people encourage each other’s worst impulse rather than their best. (In the first season, one of those groups tried to eat Ellie.) But Ellie’s instinct for mistrust doesn’t just come from the brutally transformed world in which she has lived her entire life. It comes from Joel. She’s learned from his example to be ruthless and hard, and she’s learned from his behavior that even the people who love you the most can’t wholly be trusted. Abby has learned from Joel as well, even though they’ve never met; she’s learned to hate and lust for vengeance, to never assume there’s any situation in which you or your loved ones can count on being safe. “Future Days” ends with her and her group gazing down on Jackson from the mountains above, just as Joel and Ellie did five years before. But instead of a place to call home, she’s looking for the person who destroyed hers. When Joel massacred the Fireflies, Abby was the age that Ellie is when the story picks up again, and she’s fixing to teach him a lesson in return: Cross a 19-year-old, and they’ll never let you forget it.
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