The Last of Us – Feel Her Love Review

This week’s episode of The Last of Us had a delightful smattering of what makes the series work, as well as all the elements that drive me nuts. Which, to be honest, is a pretty impressive combination for a single hour of television. And the tease of a flashback episode next week? Yeah, that’s something that I would place in the latter camp of The Last of Us’ storytelling strengths and weaknesses.

The introduction of spores as the new massive threat to survivors was done in such a smart, clean, and clear way that I was hopeful that the series had once again found its way back to the strong storytelling from season one. Having Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach, looking every inch the annoyed military leader) learn about them from her sergeant, Elise Park (Hettienne Park, doing a lot with very little sreen time), and then ending that scene with the gut punch reveal that the Leon that Elise sent down to investigate (and who we later see consumed by the cordyceps and puffing out spores) was her son? That is an excellently constructed scene. We get to finally hear Hanrahan (who we saw last week) in command (and start to understand a bit about why Isaac chose to kill his team and follow her) and we get to learn a bit more about the Wolf operation and chain of command. And, most importantly, we learn about a new threat lurking in the basement of the hospital without it feeling like heavy-handed exposition. It’s told to us through the story of soldiers losing their lives – and a mother knowingly sending her son into the battle. Impactful and well-written.

We also get a similar introduction to just how deadly those Seraphites can be later in the episode, as Craig Mazin’s script opts for the “show, don’t tell” approach to storytelling. Seeing their leader (or, at least a high-ranking member of the group) ritualistically murder a Wolf who trespassed into their territory (which appears to be the woods directly outside of the city) was, well, terrifying. I had been wondering just what these seemingly backwards cultists could do when facing automatic weapons and trained militias, and you know what? Camouflage and arrows are not a bad way to take out interlopers. That being said, Ellie was still able to evade them (and presumably Jesse and Dina also made it out), so I’m not sure they’re as dangerous as Wolves when one is on the run and not captured.

But then we come to the parts of the episode that felt, well, more heavy-handed in terms of trying to provide us with enough information to make sure we’re prepped for future episodes while meeting episodic quota of threats to Ellie and Dina’s lives. The revelation that Jesse and Tommy did, in fact, follow the girls to Seattle wasn’t a shock – I called it out in my review last week, as both actors continued to remain in the opening credits despite presumably being back in Jackson and out of the story for the time being. But they’re still here and don’t seem to be all that happy that Ellie and Dina took matters into their own hands. Now, I don’t blame Jesse for that, but still – he didn’t have to come? His anger seems strangely over the top for someone who just trekked halfway across the country to try to find two people and managed to actually find them, alive and mostly well. Maybe he also found all the pregnancy tests and is going to be all angry dad now? I don’t know, but this doesn’t seem to be the happy, chill bro we last saw in Jackson.

And then there’s the confrontation between Ellie and Nora. Sometimes on the series, sequences feel like they totally came right out of the video game, for good and for ill. This sequence was absolutely one of them. From Ellie somehow magically finding Nora, cornering her, and then chasing her down into the spore basement, none of that felt at all organic to me. How did she find Nora in the hospital after crawling inside (at least I presume that’s what she did)? How did she make it through the floors to reach her? How did she know what floor she was on? And if the assumption is that she was looking for supplies to take back to Dina, well, what luck to stumble across no armed resistance and find one of the few people you want to kill? It just felt so forced for that to happen out of the blue like that.

And then there was the fight down to the basement. Sure, if you tell us about a spore infestation in act one, someone better crack open the elevator doors, jump onto the roof of the elevator, and become consumed by the spores in act three. But aside from some really cool, trippy visuals, what was the purpose of that? To kill Nora? To see that Ellie is serious about her quest for revenge? As if we doubted it at all after she had plenty of time to cool off and rethink her choices over any of the past three episodes. It was a nice touch to see that Nora also has zero regrets over the killing of Joel – it helps to put Abby’s side of the argument into perspective. To them, the murder of Abby’s father was a death knell toward potentially saving the entire world. But to Ellie, it saved her life. She knows what Joel did. She knows it was to save her. And she doesn’t want to be the savior of the world. And, you know what? She shouldn’t have to be if she doesn’t want to be.

There’s a hell of a lot of interesting morality baked into this impasse Ellie and Abby find themselves at. Objectively, neither one is wrong. Abby wanted revenge for the death of her father, and, outside of that, the destruction of the one person who could turn Ellie into a cure. And Ellie, well, she didn’t want to be that cure, so she tacitly approves of what Joel did (or, at least approves now – we’ll see what happens in the flashback to tell us just what caused their rift and if it was related to Joel’s actions at the hospital in season one). And she definitely wants Abby and her crew to pay for killing her father. So, no one has the moral high ground (such as it is – with a revenge tragedy, there’s never much ground to stand on, since it so often gets covered in blood before too long). When two immovable objects collide, they destroy one another, and I suspect that’s where we’re headed with the eventual Ellie and Abby showdown.

I will say, however, that the speech Nora gave would have had a heck of a lot more impact had we not already known all of it. Sure, Ellie didn’t know, but since we all knew, it just felt like rehashing a story we’d seen before in a much more effective manner one more time. I’m not sure if this is the place in the game where the player learns just why Abby killed Joel, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that was the case since that whole scene felt like it could have been lifted directly from a video game.

But the most annoying part of the episode was that final tag. We have Ellie going to town on Nora with a golf club-like pipe, a cut to black, and then the start of a flashback with Pedro Pascal’s smiling face (and, for what it’s worth, the first real smile we’ve gotten out of Ellie all season, too). Now, I don’t hate the prospect of a flashback – we desperately need it to really understand what was going on with Ellie and Joel prior to his death. But that’s such a cheesy way to segue into it. Why is Ellie having this flashback? Is it the spores? Is she not having this flashback and it’s just a narrative device? It certainly didn’t feel organic in terms of linking it to the previous moments. It just felt like a tease to try and get people who might have left the show at the death of Joel to watch this episode to see him again (and to hook them for next week).

So much of this season has felt off structurally, and this episode was a great example of that. Yes, we had some stellar moments that felt like a well-structured series, with great writing and smart reveals that didn’t feel formulaic or overly expositional. And then there were other moments – I didn’t even get to talk about Dina’s origin story speech which is the definition of telling, not showing, and felt so incredibly clunky and forced into the episode just to help us know her better quickly – that played as choppy and disconnected. The narrative should flow from one scene to the next, telling a story that links together. Instead, this episode felt like scenes pulled from a hat about a generalized location and the people that inhabit it. There’s still too much going on and too little time spent on actually exploring these new people and new places. Until we get a grasp on just who and what Ellie and Dina (and Jesse and Tommy) are in the midst of, I don’t think the series is going to be able to churn out a coherent story arc. But we’ll see how the flashback next week helps to illuminate (or confuse) things.