Ellie and Joel walked through the valley of the shadow of death in every episode of the first season of The Last of Us. They were often in the presence of enemies, and at times they feared evil. 

But Joel was with Ellie, and Ellie was with Joel.

By the end of that season, the pair found that a table had been prepared for them in Jackson. And although last week’s season 2 premiere showed that something was terribly wrong between them, for five years, they found a measure of comfort in that valley in western Wyoming.

“Through the Valley” reminds us that in this new world, comfort is fleeting. And as the credits roll, Joel’s not with Ellie anymore.

We open with a dream flashback that finds one Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) trying in vain to convince a second Abby not to proceed through the Salt Lake City hospital doors as the sirens wail. 

“His brains are on the floor,” first Abby warns. Second Abby doesn’t listen.

Does knowing her motivations make what’s to come easier? Of course not. But she had her reasons. So did Joel. This collision course is nothing but shades of gray that inevitably lead to slowly oozing red.

In the present, Abby and company wake up in a palatial mountain lodge, and they’re astounded to see that Jackson’s a thriving city with power lines, guards, mounted patrol, and guard dogs, all well trained and efficiently run.

Abby’s focused on finding Joel and seems unconcerned about her promise to the others that no one other than her quarry of five years will be hurt in her quest for vengeance. Owen (Spencer Lord) assures Abby that he has a plan to find Joel.

Once she steps out into the bitter cold alone, Owen tells the rest of them that the real plan is to drop everything and return to Seattle so they don’t bring the wrath of Jackson Hole down on them.

Rutina Wesley and Ezra Agbonkhese in ‘The Last of Us’.

In that bustling city, Jesse (Young Mazino) pulls a groggy Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of bed for patrol, and our girl blurts out all kinds of denial about being responsible for the kiss she and Dina (Isabela Merced) shared the night before. Jesse busts her chops a bit before blowing it off and hustling her out the door.

They engage in some Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk exposition as they head through town, which is on alert because a pile of dead, frozen infected were found nearby, and while the town’s patrol watched, 30 live infested burst out from the snow. They’re using their dead brethren as insulation — and camouflage, maybe?

I raise this question because Ellie herself has the town in an uproar thanks to her “ghost story” about the world’s smartest infected she tangled with the day before.

Ellie asserts the accuracy of her story and says she’d like to do patrol with Joel (Pedro Pascal), daddy/daughter day-style. No, they haven’t cleared the air between them, but despite the complicated and sometimes bad things going on, it’s still the two of them. 

“Nothing’s ever gonna change that, ever,” she says. Oh, baby girl.

But Joel’s already on patrol with Dina, so she and Jesse swing by the restaurant before heading out together. There, Tommy’s (Gabriel Luna) giving an upbeat drill on safety protocols: who shelters where, who grabs guns and goes to the second stories. And if the worst happens, for god’s sake, stay off the main street.

I’m sure this won’t come in handy anytime soon!

Maria (Rutina Wesley) spots Ellie and whisks her over to Seth (Robert John Burke), who’s cooking that morning. He apologizes for what he said about Ellie and Dina the night before, and for even thinking it. 

Young Mazino in ‘The Last of Us’.

He also made Ellie “I’m sorry” steak sandwiches to take with her. You know, I’d forgive a lot of infractions for a good steak sandwich, but rampant homophobia isn’t one of them. Ellie appears to feel similarly, and she and Jesse head out on horseback.

But snow has joined the frigid temperatures, and Tommy’s frustrated by the garbled updates he’s getting on his walkie talkie. He issues an order to Amy in the radio room to crank the signals and call the patrols back.

Caught in the middle of what’s turning into a blizzard, Jesse manages to communicate to Amy that they’ll shelter in the closest abandoned town until the storm passes. They stash the horses in a garage and head into a former 7-Eleven that’s been turned into an impressive grow operation.

The weed farm belonged to Eugene, therapist Gail’s husband, before Joel had to “put him down.” Ellie finds a Firefly medallion with Eugene’s name on it, and Jesse says he quit years before his death.

As the storm worsens, Tommy’s concerned that the only team they haven’t reached is Joel and Dina, and he orders Amy to keep trying. “Every 10 seconds,” he says after fruitlessly bellowing his own message to Joel into the radio. 

Abby knows where Joel is, although at this point, he’s just one of two people riding out of Jackson on horseback. She heads down the mountain, sometimes on foot and sometimes sliding on her butt, in pursuit of the scouts who can help her locate the man she’s been pursuing for so long.

Her descent quickly turns into an uncontrolled fall that dumps her into a frozen pile of infected. Unlike the city residents, though, she doesn’t know about the danger lurking underneath and is entirely unprepared when the snow starts to shift and live infected claw out from under their unmoving companions.

Before long, the pristine snow erupts into a dark mass that spews a stream of writhing, hungry predators.

Abby flees her pursuers and barely makes it up a ladder and over a barbed wire-fortified wall where she seeks additional shelter. As she skirts the edge of a building, the infected rush the chain link fence, mashing themselves against it — sometimes even slicing their hands open on it — until it collapses onto Abby and one by one, they crawl through.

She’s trapped, pinned, about to be devoured, and — as one fellow human being watching another struggle to stay alive — were you rooting for her to make it? And how does that feel now?

Just as she’s about to succumb to the monster on top of her, a bullet drops the infected, and a hand reaches down to pull her to her feet. The man hustles her to (relative) safety, and it’s not until she’s inside a building that she hears Dina call him “Joel.”

Kaitlyn Dever in ‘The Last of Us’.

He saved another lost girl. That’s what Joel does. And as the infected bash down the door, she again takes his hand, mounting his horse and urging them both to join her friends in the lodge where they have blankets and weapons.

There are no other options, so Joel, Dina, and Abby race from the advancing horde, which has been joined by a second, equally large mass of bodies.

It’s too much for three people on horseback. And it’s too much for one town.

Inside Jackson’s walls, the alert hasn’t stopped the crew from shoring up the infrastructure, and a worker in a hat and a hoodie cracks open a problematic clay pipe to discover tendrils still wriggling through it.

The lookout sounds the alarm, pulling him and the rest of his crew away from their work to assume their defensive positions. Tommy takes charge, although he kisses Maria slightly longer than they probably should given the circumstances. Good for them.

He jumps on a horse and races through town, a Paul Revere for this new world, using his bullhorn to bark orders. She takes the roof, he takes the wall and Main Street. And in the tense few minutes before the assault reaches the walls, Tommy checks on his people. He’s scared and determined as he shouts, “Jackson Hole!”

Then the infected slam full force into the walls.

The city’s defense is positively medieval — or Middle-earth or Westeros. They shore up the walls, then roll barrels of oil down ramps into the surging bass of bodies, shooting holes into the sides and then flinging torches to set them ablaze.

The explosions vaporize some infected and turn others into walking pyres, and the people on the walls slip on spent shell casings as they fire unceasingly.

A massive bloater changes the stakes, breaking through the wall and allowing the infected to pour inside. Jackson Hole’s ready for them, though. Main Street turns into a different kind of valley, one that funnels them into a line straight toward the four men holding flame throwers, ready to mow them down.

When two of the men turn and run, Tommy’s left with one other man to defend against the onslaught as the people on the rooftops fire into the street and the non-combatants cower inside.

From her vantage point, Maria watches as nearby buildings are overtaken by infected and as her husband targets the bloater, luring him into an empty side street.

Tommy tries to take shelter, but the buildings are blocked. With no other choices, he unloads his flame thrower onto the monster, retreating step by step until his back’s against a wall and his fuel is gone.

The bloater advances, blackened and burning, until it finally drops at Tommy’s feet. As they don’t live in a time that saw the release of the movie Zombieland, Tommy doesn’t employ the double tap and instead heads back to Main Street, where Maria’s left the roof to release the shockingly effective attack dogs. (DO NOT SMELL LIKE MUSHROOMS AROUND THESE VERY GOOD BOYS AND VERY GOOD GIRLS.)

As the battle rages in Jackson, Joel, Dina, and Abby have reached the lodge. The explosions are visible from the mountain, and Joel wants to return immediately to help. But Abby urges him to go inside, and it’s not a stretch to say that part of the reason he agrees is that Dina’s already experiencing frostbite and Abby’s presumably not far from that, too.

Inside, Joel helps Dina toward the fire, where Mel (Ariela Barer) starts to fuss over her injuries. And then Abby announces, “Her name is Dina. And he is Joel.” 

The room snaps to action, with Manny (Danny Ramirez) holding a gun to Dina’s head and (Tati Gabrielle) taking his gun. Joel quickly realizes that these are former Fireflies, and he might be in more jeopardy here than he was in that warehouse of infected.

Mel injects a sedative into Dina’s hand, knocking her out. It’s a kindness, Abby says. It’ll spare her hearing and seeing and remembering what’s about to happen.

Abby confirms that his description matches the man at the hospital — scar on his temple, now in his 60s, still handsome — and she forces him to confirm that he was in the Salt Lake hospital.

“I saved your life,” Joel reminds her, glancing over his shoulder as his city burns.

“What life?” Abby spits back before raising her gun and blasting off his knee. 

Her friends react in shock, but at Owen’s urging, Nina follows Abby’s order to apply a tourniquet and let her see it through. Unlike Dina, Joel needs to be alert for what’s to come.

And here we learn the identity of the person Abby lost. The person Joel killed. Eighteen soldiers died that day, along with one doctor.

He was unarmed. He was Abby’s dad. He was shot in the head. Joel shot him in the head with barely a second thought, and he left without a backward glance.

But 19-year-old Abby looked at what this stranger did to her father. What Joel did to her father. Of course, she doesn’t know (or maybe doesn’t care) that Joel did this terrible thing for the daughter of his heart, Ellie, who’s 19 now.

She talks to him about the military training she received in Seattle, about codes of honor, about the pleasure she’s going to take in killing someone lawless like Joel. 

A bag of golf clubs propped against the wall catches her eye, and as she turns to choose one, Joel interrupts her, barking that she should shut up and do it already.

“You stupid old man,” she says, brandishing a club. “You don’t get to rush this.”

Then she brings it down on his destroyed knee, again and again and again. He screams, and her friends watch, their expressions a mixture of satisfied, concerned, horrified.

Bella Ramsey in ‘The Last of Us’. Liane Hentscher/HBO

Meanwhile, in the 7-Eleven weed haven, Ellie’s messing around with a terrifying gas mask bong and teasing Jesse about a big ol’ stash into the town he’ll someday be in charge of. But a garbled transmission from radio Amy saying nobody’s heard from Joel and Dina has them both scrambling for the horses.

They split up to speed along the search of Joel and Dina’s last known location, which means’ Ellie’s alone when reaches the lodge.

Time has passed. Abby’s been beating Joel for so long that she’s sluggish, tired, covered in his blood. Joel’s unresponsive on the floor, and Owen calls her name, needing this to be over.

This is what Ellie discovers when she forces her way into the room only to be swiftly disarmed, and pinned to the floor, forced to look at Joel where he lays on the floor. His face is a bloody, unrecognizable pulp, his fingers twitching weakly as Ellie screams his name, screams for him to get up, get up, get up. 

Her screams turn to begging, and although Joel’s barely conscious, he tries. He hears her voice, and he tries to stand so he can reach her and take her away from this danger, and in that moment, the flash of hope on her face is as heartbreaking as anything we’ve witnessed this hour. 

But he can’t stand, and Abby picks up the broken shaft of a golf club. Ellie begs. She begs this woman she’s never met, crying and pleading for her not to do it. And then she wails as Abby sinks the sharp edge into Joel’s neck.

After all Ellie did to keep Joel alive — shooting a man in Kansas City, facing down David and his people to get him medicine, giving him purpose to keep putting one foot in front of the other — she’s pinned down and forced to watch him die, this man who murdered 19 people for her in Salt Lake City and who rode out on his last patrol without resolving the valley of difference between them.

“I’m gonna kill you,” she whispers to Abby. And if her voice is broken, there’s no doubt that she means it. Then she screams it and takes a kick to the stomach courtesy of Manny because of it.

The former Fireflies leave in silence, and Ellie crawls to Joel. She pulls the weapon from his neck and collapses on him, pressing her clean, cold cheek to his swollen, bloody one.

Outside, Abby’s face is still flecked with Joel’s blood as she and her friends walk away, vengeance done.

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In Jackson, the battle’s over, and those who suffered bites accept their fate. Notably, one is the worker who spotted the tendrils in the pipes but didn’t have the opportunity to share that update with anyone.

Tommy walks through the burning town and finds Maria, collapsing into her on Main Street, which is littered with dead, human and infected both.

Jesse rides away from the lodge with an inconsolable Ellie in front of him, their horse dragging Joel’s fabric-wrapped body behind them. The snow falls in silence, and before long it will cover any trace of their journey home to the valley.

Spores for Thought

• None. None this week. Vast appreciation for showrunners Craig Mazin (who also wrote the episode) and Neil Druckmann, as well as director Mark Mylod, for navigating this difficult, moving, terrifying, devastating episode. Take some time. We’ll talk again next Sunday.