The first season of The Last Of Us was about survival. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) slowly made their way from Boston to Salt Lake City, battling corrupt revolutionaries, unhinged cult leaders, and, of course, hordes of infected—all in the hopes of turning her immunity into humanity’s survival. But when Joel realized a cure would come at the cost of Ellie’s life, he did what he needed to do to ensure her survival, murdering dozens of Firefly members in the process. As someone who’d already lost one daughter at the start of the mushroom-zombie outbreak, Joel’s only driving impulse was to keep his new daughter alive, no matter the cost. 

As most post-apocalyptic series eventually realize, however, the question isn’t whether you can survive but whether you can thrive in the new world you’ve been left with. Is it possible to rebuild something new out of the burned-out pieces of what came before? Or is hanging on as long as you can the best you can ever hope for?  

That’s very much the theme of the show’s second-season premiere, which picks up five years in the future in the safe haven of Jackson, Wyoming—the place where Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) carved out a world that didn’t just offer safety and protection but also movie screenings and Christmas decorations. While Joel and Ellie basically never stopped moving during season one, they’ve now been hunkered down for half a decade, immersing themselves in community, carving out roles for themselves, and forging new identities that aren’t just defined by survival. 

For Joel, that means trying to return to who he was before the outbreak happened. Instead of smuggling and shooting, he’s now working as a construction foreman, building homes for the ever-increasing number of refugees that Jackson brings into its walls. He’s still got his ornery, self-protective streak, like when he warns Maria that it’s dangerous to bring too many new people to Jackson. But this is a much softer, gentler Joel than we saw in season one. He works in an office; he plays guitar; he’s even trying to better himself by starting up therapy with Jackson’s resident psychotherapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara—more on her in a minute). 

Ellie, however, is leaning into the identity she forged on the road with Joel. She works on Jackson’s recon patrol, and she’s training to be the best, toughest sharp-shooting wrestler she can be. (During a training exercise with a much-bigger opponent, her only complaint is that he didn’t punch her in the face harder.) She’s still got the sarcastic, pun-loving, impulsive side we know and love. But she’s moved from someone who needs protecting to someone who wants to do the protecting. She essentially wants to be Joel, even if, ironically, the two of them are as distant as we’ve ever seen them.

In some ways, the distance between Joel and Ellie is its own sign of normalcy. As Gail points out, most 19-year-old girls go through a phase where they can’t stand their parents. And Ellie’s desire to strike out on her own could be seen as a reassuring marker of normal teenage development. The fact that she feels emotionally stable enough to rebel is a win in a world where it once seemed like co-dependence was her only option. 

Except we know there’s more going on beneath the surface. This premiere starts by reminding us of season one’s eerily subversive “happy ending.” Joel and Ellie ended that season together, bathed in sunshine and on the way to safety, which should have felt like a win. Except that happiness was built on a violent secret. Ellie asks Joel to swear that everything he told her about the Fireflies was true—that they couldn’t use her to make the cure and he saved her when raiders attacked the hospital. He lies and she nods “okay,” more in acceptance than belief. But it’s clear that moment shifted their relationship. Whatever the specifics of their current estrangement, there’s a fundamental emotional wedge between them that won’t budge, no matter how much Joel tries to reconnect with his surrogate daughter. 

Indeed, “Future Days” is an episode where what goes unspoken is just as important as what’s said. On the lighter side, that includes Ellie’s crush on plucky fellow recon patroller Dina (Isabela Merced), which she assumes is one-sided until a stoned Dina kisses her at Jackson’s big New Year’s Eve dance. And on the heavier side, that includes Joel’s refusal to admit what’s actually causing the rift between him and Ellie. 

The show explores that theme directly in perhaps the most unexpected addition to the series: therapy sessions! The fact that therapy even exists in Jackson is another testament to the community’s ability to provide more than just basic survival. Yet the fact that Gail takes her payment in pot, shares whiskey with her clients, and isn’t afraid to get a little passive aggressive in her sessions is a reminder that Jackson is still operating far outside the norm too. Case in point: Joel is Gail’s client even though sometime within the last year he shot and killed her husband, Eugene, the man she was married to for 41 years (which would include over a decade before the outbreak even began). 

We don’t know exactly what went down with Joel and Eugene, other than the fact that Gail understands that Joel had no choice but can’t forgive him because of how he did it. And while it’s a mystery I’m intrigued to see the show unravel (particularly if it also had an impact on Joel and Ellie’s current fracture), it’s secondary to the point the show wants to make here. Voicing uncomfortable truths is better than letting them silently fester. “You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud,” Gail tells Joel before confessing she irrationally hates him. (O’Hara is great at capturing a sense of mania bubbling just beneath Gail’s placid surface.) “Now maybe there’s a chance I can make things right with you.”

We then get perhaps Pascal’s finest acting work to date, as an emotionally wrought Joel skirts just up to the edge of confessing his big secret only to pull himself back. His lips move as if he’s about to speak, and then his face suddenly hardens into the steely look we saw so often last season. “I saved her,” is all he can say—a half-truth that’s keeping him locked in a state of self-made purgatory because that’s safer than running the risk of Ellie rejecting him entirely. 

While The Last Of Us can be a bit overwritten at times (something I felt at various moments throughout this premiere), it really excels in quiet, observational character beats. So while there are bigger, showier moments in this episode (including Joel shoving a homophobic bigot to the ground—you truly love to see it), it’s the end of that therapy scene that’s really going to stick with me. It’s a welcome reminder of what made the show’s first season so special, even if this premiere lacks the propulsive urgency of that season’s debut hour.   

Indeed, rather than throw us into the deep end, “Future Days” gently eases us into the show’s stable new status quo, town hall dances and all. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still threats lurking around its edges too. That includes maybe the single creepiest sequence in the show’s entire run: Ellie’s discovery of a “smart” infected lurking in an old grocery store. Writer-director Craig Mazin really makes you feel the show’s horror-movie roots as the “stalker” silent crawls behind Ellie, who’s too distracted by People magazine’s 2003 “Best And Worst Dressed” issue to notice (fair). Even knowing Ellie is immune, it’s an incredibly tense sequence, thanks largely to the fantastic movement work of the performer playing the stalker. And the fact that we see little fungus tendrils on Ellie’s initial bite wound makes me nervous about how far her immunity extends. 

That also goes for the tendrils that start to grow from the roots crammed into the old water line Joel’s crew uncover during their construction process. I really don’t relish the thought of Jackson getting torn down from within, which seems like a distinct possibility if an infection gets into the town’s water supply. But maybe we should be more worried about threats from the outside. 

This episode is bookended by brief scenes featuring a new character named Abby—and even non-gamers can tell she’ll be important because she’s played by Booksmart star Kaitlyn Dever. She’s one of five Fireflies who survived Joel’s siege on the hospital; and though she wants to track him down and kill him immediately, she agrees to regroup in Seattle under a leader named Isaac first. Still, she makes her friends swear they’ll eventually find Joel and kill him “slowly.” So it doesn’t bode well that, five years later, the crew are now making their way towards Jackson. If revenge is a dish best served cold, Abby’s return is a chilling sign of things to come.  

Stray observations

• • Welcome to weekly coverage of The Last Of Us season two! I’m very excited to discuss this show with you all. I haven’t played the game myself, but there were enough think pieces and reactions to Part II when it debuted that I have a basic understanding of its plot. I’m very curious to see where and how the show will change/adapt that story for TV (some of which is already at play in this episode). And it would be great if you could mark any game spoilers in your comments so that TV-only viewers can avoid them.  
• • I’m equally excited for the return of the official Last Of Us companion podcast, which features showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who also created the game) breaking down each episode with host Troy Baker, who plays Joel in the games. It’s absolutely essential listening for fans of the show. 
• • Indeed, one of the things that hadn’t occurred to me until I listened to the podcast is that because the outbreak happened in 2003, the show’s world didn’t experience the acceleration of queer acceptance we’ve experienced in our real world over the past 20-plus years. That helps explain the way this episode frames Ellie/Dina’s burgeoning romance. 
• • Speaking of which: What do we think of Dina? She’s leaning just a tad too plucky for me, but it’s possible that’s more of a defense mechanism than her true personality. On the other hand, the way Ellie absolutely beams when she hears her make a bad pun totally sold me on their dynamic. Bella Ramsey is so great in that moment. 
• • Other new characters we meet in this episode include Dina’s ex Jesse (Young Mazino), who’s an earnest leader of the patrol group, and Ellie’s ex Kat (Noah Lamanna), who’s the only other openly gay young woman living in Jackson. 
• • Though Joel and Ellie only share two brief scenes late into this episode, we can tell how much they miss each other by the surrogate bonds they’re forming with other people. Joel teaches Dina how to fix a broken circuit breaker, while Tommy helps Ellie work on her sharp shooting skills, both of which feel like the sort of scenes Joel and Ellie would’ve shared in season one. 
• • It’s cool to see Jackson’s nine-person council in action (albeit, with some rather ominous lighting). I also loved Maria immediately taking Ellie’s side when Tommy tries to tell her that him and Joel taking risks is different than Ellie and Dina doing the same. 
• • Thanks to the time jump, Pedro Pascal is now a full 10 years younger than the character he’s playing, but they do a nice job aging him up with make-up, hair, and physicality. 
• • Though Joel didn’t have the best reaction to learning Tommy was having a baby last season, he’s now got a wonderfully sweet relationship with his nephew Benji. They shoot finger guns while playing the apocalyptic version of cops and robbers: humans and monsters. 
• • We get another shout-out to Joel’s favorite (fictional) ’80s action series, Curtis And Viper, which he watched with his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) before the outbreak. I love the idea that he’s now turned all of Jackson into fans.