The Calm Before the Next Storm: <i>The Last of Us</i>, &#8220;Future Days&#8221;

Whenever I’ve thought about the first season of The Last of Us, over the last couple of years, I’ve thought about the giraffes. It’s not the terrible tragedies, or the devastating moments, or the dramatic and elaborate sequences with an array of infected. Nope: giraffes. That moment of beauty and levity and ordinary kid-ness after all that came before. Ellie’s giggle. There’s nothing quite like a pause for beauty amid a pile of chaos, narratively speaking.

The second season of The Last of Us will, I am absolutely certain, re-up on chaos. Probably more chaos and horror than last time. But first, before a five-year time-jump, it returns to the giraffes. They’re still there, untouched by the human violence that ended the first season, but now watched by a new set of humans. Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and a quartet of as-yet nameless characters have shown up in Salt Lake City, too late to do anything but clean up the mess Joel left. They seem to know a lot about Joel for reasons not yet revealed. Abby knows one thing for sure: She wants to kill him. Slowly. It’s an important reminder that Ellie isn’t the only person whose life is affected by Joel’s choices.

I’ve not played The Last of Us or its sequel game, because I am a video game loyalist to one series (The Legend of Zelda, all incarnations). But I do know one big thing going into season two; I know it because I cover news for Reactor, and I needed to understand all the vitriol about one of the new characters. If you don’t know, all the better for you. If you do know, you probably have an opinion about where this is all going. None of us knows, exactly, where season two is going to end; the third season has already been announced, and some press has said that it will continue the plot of the second game. This season is only seven episodes, and yet the “this season, on The Last of Us” teaser seems to have enough plot for dozens.

The second season premiere is, as is so often the case with continuing shows, a re-situating, an introduction to the new status quo. Five years ago, Joel (Pedro Pascal) saved Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from death at the hands of the Fireflies, who wanted to use the tissues in her brain in hopes of creating a cure for the cordyceps infection. Now, the pair are settled in Jackson, Wyoming, alongside Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Tommy’s wife Maria (Rutina Wesley), and the rest of the town. Joel is doing what Joel does: building things, teaching teenagers how to fix stuff, being practical almost to a fault, and not talking about what happened five years ago. Not even to his therapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara), who can tell he’s hiding something.

Trying to get him to reveal his big secret after telling him how much she resents him for killing her husband, Eugene, was maybe not the best move. But to be fair, Gail is having a fairly shitty birthday. (As soon as I saw the whiskey, I thought, this is an occasion, you don’t just get that out for no reason when you might never get any more.)

The episode—written and directed by co-creator Craig Mazin—makes you wait to see Joel and Ellie together, and with good reason. He’s introduced fixing stuff, alone, not exactly doing his job, but still trying to help. She’s introduced mid-fight. The show pretends it’s a serious fight, but it’s practice: She’s tussling another Jackson resident under the watchful eye of Jesse (Young Mazino), whom she berates when she finds out he told her opponent to pull his punches. “Don’t pull punches,” she insists. I sense a theme. But Mazin doesn’t linger: Jesse gives Ellie a brief hard time about not really being part of the community, and then she pushes open a door into bright sunlight, right in the middle of it all. Jackson is thriving. Which, in this kind of story, immediately makes a person think: For how long?

“Future Days” is such a beautifully laid-out season premiere that it feels like dominos, both in the way Mazin sets scenes up and then knocks them out—and in a sense of inevitability. The town is thriving, the main characters are fighting; things are on the brink of change, one way or another. So here it all comes, one step at a time. 

Joel is deeply hurt by Ellie’s resistance to him; it’s all he wants to talk about with Gail, but she dismisses it as the most boring problem ever. What 19-year-old hasn’t given her father figure the cold shoulder? This is not actually the most boring problem ever, or an inevitability, but it does feel almost like a luxury. A normal-kid problem, this long after the world as they know it ended? If he were a normal parent, Gail might have a point. But he’s not a normal parent (if there is such a thing).

The show is playing it a little coy as to whether Ellie knows about those murders or not. The trailers for this season showed Ellie saying “You swore,” with tears in her eyes, but it’s pretty clear almost from the start that this season is not going to unfold in perfect linearity. Gail references her husband, who we’ve never seen, but an actor has been cast to play him. If we’re going back to that moment, why would we not go back to other important moments? Does Ellie know, and is that the real source of this rift, not just some “boring” young adult resistance? Or is that moment still to come? Or did Ellie never really believe him in the first place?

Ellie, fighting to be her own person, does all the things she wants to do, ignoring Joel’s wishes, getting around the restrictions he tries to place on her. She shoots infected with Tommy, writes in her journal, bullies Tommy into letting her go on patrol with her best friend Dina (Isabela Merced is pure delight), jokes with her bestie about murdering infected, doesn’t follow the rules or listen to authority—you know. The usual stuff. Just in a post-apocalyptic world full of undead murder machines. There’s a nice moment with Tommy where he says that stubborn as hell Ellie and stubborn as hell Joel—who both also tend more to actions than words—are the same person. He says it with a little more force, though.

Out on that patrol—the one Joel didn’t want her to go on—Ellie, Dina, and three others (including Ellie’s ex of sorts) run across a nasty discovery: blood in the snow that leads to a bunch of dead infected and the bear they took down. But maybe there’s more. Maybe following the blood is exactly what two skilled but impulsive teens want to do. So much for listening to their (ineffective) captain.

As an adult with a healthy sense of self-preservation, I find it very hard to watch Dina and Ellie climb into an abandoned grocery store and gleefully go off to stab themselves some infected. (As a person with a practical bent, I also find it  hard not to wonder exactly how they avoided getting any blood on their coats, which presumably are somewhat difficult to replace.) And it’s supposed to be hard to watch them do this—hard to watch them think themselves immortal and above it all, especially Ellie, whose immunity is not widely known.

In the dark caverns of that grocery store, Ellie gets bitten, which is unpleasant, but also not the point. The creature that bites her doesn’t act right. It doesn’t just run at her, oblivious to its own mortality. It sneaks. It creeps and skitters and stalks. (The sound design in this scene, and the way the score shifts from a low groan to a rhythm like a heartbeat, is fantastic.) It seems maybe a little less transformed than some of the other infected. It gets the jump on her despite her fight practice. Whatever else Ellie may be at this point, she’s not stupid: She tells the town council about it when the patrol returns to Jackson. Dina backs her up, despite having seen none of this. Maria knows Dina is lying, but this lie demonstrates something more important: Where Ellie goes, Dina follows. I am already worried about her and her bright smile and her ability to give Ellie wonderfully terrible puns. (Bear-B-Q was a nice callback to Ellie’s book of puns from the first season.)

All of this happens on New Year’s Eve, because of course it does. There’s a sort of poetry to starting a new season, a new story, as a year ends. Jackson has a nice little New Year’s Eve celebration complete with a metric ton of glowing Christmas lights, a band, and what seems like copious weed and alcohol. (Someone’s set up a still, right? They can’t have nursed pre-apocalyptic booze this long.) Everyone’s talked about it all day with all the faux-indifference of high schoolers going to a dance. “Are you going to the thing?” Everyone is going to the thing. 

First, though, Ellie has a moment alone. Just a girl and her bite marks. The scar on her arm has been transformed into a large tattoo, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when she takes a knife to the little ring of teeth marks on her stomach. We don’t get to see the results of her painful work, but this scene is key: Ellie makes her own choices. In Salt Lake City, no one let her choose. Not Marlene, who put her under for surgery without telling her she would never wake up, and not Joel, who took her out of that place and left just bodies behind. Her choices aren’t always great, but they’re hers. (There’s also the simple practicality of making the bite mark look less like what it is.)

At the dance, Jesse watches Dina, his ex, throw herself across the dance floor with glee. Ellie lurks in the back until Dina draws her out. If it’s about hunting infected, Ellie goes first. Socially, Dina leads. Their charming, sweet chemistry leads to a dance, and then to a kiss, one that starts small and then quickly grows more intense. Even before a man’s voice interrupted, I worried: Are there still homophobes in this future? And of course there are. When the large grumpy man throws a slur at them, Ellie clearly wants to fight her own battle. When Joel jumps in—once again unasked for, once again taking the choice away from her—he’s beyond unwelcome. The way Ellie shuts him down is viscerally uncomfortable, their divide made clear and painful for everyone to see. And that divide is the last we see of them this week: Joel on the porch with the guitar he’s restrung for Ellie (because he deals in actions, always trying to fix things), and Ellie heading to her garage, alone.

There’s the emotional ending, and then there’s the plot-building ending. In a blocked pipe, some of the tendrils that looked like roots begin to move, awakened by the warmth of a carelessly dropped sparkler. On a hillside—probably the same hillside on which Joel swore he was telling the truth to Ellie—Abby and her pals show up to look ominously out at the lights of Jackson. The stage is more than set for everything to fall apart, and we haven’t even met Jeffrey Wright’s character yet. 

Random Thoughts Like Fallen Sparklers

• “Don’t tell anyone I’m in therapy” was a laugh I really needed. I mean, everyone on this show should be in therapy. But still. Of course actions-over-words Joel doesn’t want anyone to know he’s talking it out.

• One suspects the little side conversation Joel has with Maria about whether they’re letting in too many refugees will become a bigger issue.

• Gotta love a dog employee of the month.

• Joel clearly doesn’t know not to turn on the big light.

• All of the casting in this show is spot-on, but I can’t say enough good things about Isabela Merced as Dina; she brings so much warmth and a sort of fizzy joy to a series that can get real dark real fast (and real often).

• If you watched the little post-show recap thing, you may have learned something about Abby that is not made clear in the episode. I sure did. Weird choice, HBO!