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This article contains spoilers for the first two seasons of The Last of Us.
Season 2 of The Last of Us was always destined to be an uphill battle. For starters, since the show's inception, fans of the video game have been unfairly targeting lead actor Bella Ramsey for not living up to their fantasies of how Ellie should be and look. Then, as those who played the games already knew, any remotely faithful adaptation would be forced to begin this season by brutally killing off the game's other protagonist, Ellie's surrogate father Joel (Pedro Pascal) -- a development gamers had raised a stink about en masse back in 2020, when the second installment of the game was released. Now, after reckoning with the massive void where Pascal's grounding performance used to be, there's another thing that seems to be missing: What happened to the stand-alone episodes?
The first season of The Last of Us garnered critical acclaim not only for being the video-game adaptation that could (when almost all others couldn't) but also for departing from the game's story and the conventions of mainstream television. The best example of this was Episode 3, "Long, Long Time," which took a break both from our protagonists and from the usual gritty zombie-evading adventures to tell the love story of two men, Bill and Frank. From what, in the game, is a mere glimpse of Bill and Frank's eventual demise, the show extrapolated a series of vignettes that relayed their entire romance. The result was quickly recognized as one of the best stand-alone TV episodes of all time, earning the show its only Emmy nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing (it lost both awards to Succession), as well as two nods for Outstanding Guest Actor, for Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman, the latter of whom went home with the award.
"Long, Long Time" was not the only such episode. There was also "Left Behind," a heartbreaking stand-alone flashback episode toward the end of that season, Unlike "Long, Long Time," "Left Behind" was based on events already fully fleshed out in the games (the story was first released as a downloadable bonus chapter to accompany the original game), but like Bill and Frank's episode, it mostly took a breather from zombie-shooting action sequences to explore humanity, slowing down to tell another sort of love story, in this case the tale of Ellie and her best friend Riley (Storm Reid). That episode did eventually end with Riley's suffering a fatal zombie bite, and it did connect back to the main plot by delivering the backstory of how Ellie learned she was immune to the zombifying Cordyceps fungus, but mostly it was a coming-of-age story about two teenagers exploring the mall. Naturally, the episode also worked so well that Reid too won an Emmy for guest acting.
But Season 2 of The Last of Us has abandoned the tactic that made the first season so special. Gone are the self-contained episodes that helped build out the show's world as more than just two people. And it's not as though this season doesn't present some good candidates for the self-standing-episode treatment. Take, for example, Isaac, played by the incomparable Jeffrey Wright (who also voiced the character in the game). We first meet Isaac in Episode 4, "Day One," with one of the most ruthless character introductions thus far. The episode starts with a flashback to 2018 Seattle, where Isaac is a sergeant for FEDRA, the federal disaster relief agency turned authoritarian government. Within minutes of meeting Isaac, who is disgusted with how FEDRA has abused and disenfranchised the citizenry it's supposed to be helping, we watch as he defects to the opposition in dramatic fashion, locking his subordinates inside a transport truck after casually tossing in a pair of grenades.
Later in the episode, we see Isaac as the cold-blooded leader of that now-dominant resistance group, torturing a captive member of its enemy, a cult known as the Seraphites, for information on where it will strike next. I could spend hours with Wright's Isaac -- in the episode, he delivers a deliciously twisted monologue about wanting a Mauviel pan "with lid" but having spent almost his entire life being too poor to afford one, a speech he concludes by using a hot Mauviel pan to sear the hand of the Seraphite -- but would gladly take just one. As it turns out, he's an interesting case study for his own episode. The Last of Us Part II, the sequel to the first game, is built around the message that violence only begets more violence, a theme it delivers through the stories of a number of sympathetic, well-intentioned characters who are eventually proved capable of indefensible acts of brutality, from Abby to Isaac to, later on, Ellie. And within that moral lesson, the story of a man so beset by an increasingly tyrannical government that he defects to a band of insurgents, which he then turns into a dominating force that may be even more despotic than the one that first radicalized him? Well, that's just good TV. Maybe he'll finally get his stand-alone in Season 3.
This season did give us one episode that deviated from the usual format, and, naturally, it resulted in one of the batch's best offerings. Episode 6, "The Price," is a flashback episode that -- much like "Long, Long Time" -- uses a series of seemingly mundane vignettes to take us through the ups and downs of one relationship, in this case exploring the bonds between Joel and Ellie through five of Ellie's birthdays during their years in Jackson. The festivities start out well, until Ellie becomes increasingly unable to shake the suspicion that Joel lied to her about what happened in the hospital in Salt Lake City, where Joel murdered everyone else in the building rather than let them sacrifice Ellie in order to make a cure for Cordyceps. The episode is successful not only because it reminds us why we first fell for Joel but also because it provides another break from the series' usual themes of barbarity and untimely death. In place of the typical suspenseful shoot-outs and grisly interrogation scenes, "The Price" presents, like "Long, Long Time" and "Left Behind," a sort of love story, this time about a father and a daughter struggling to connect. It was enough to remind so many of us what kept us going through this grim show's first season, and what differentiated The Last of Us from other zombie series -- but it was all too brief.
The show could face even more challenges in Season 3. A big part of why the second game received so much backlash was that it not only killed off Joel but forced players to replay much of the story from the perspective of Abby, his murderer -- and, based on Season 2's cliff-hanger ending, that seems to be exactly where Season 3 is set to begin. Still, that narrative trick of revisiting events we've already seen through the eyes of a different character might be just what The Last of Us needs to get back to being the adventurous show that pushed the boundaries of big-budget genre television -- and captivated us all.