This article contains spoilers for HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6 and The Last of Us Part II.
The sixth episode of HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2 is already one of the highest-rated episodes of the series. It’s comprised entirely of flashbacks featuring Joel and Ellie, and gives viewers some insight into how their relationship has progressed and deteriorated since the events of Season 1.
For all intents and purposes, it’s a solid episode. It’s easily the best episode of Season 2 right now, and I’m sure that’s largely attributable to the fact that game creator and director Neil Druckmann was heavily involved in its writing and directing. Whereas the first five episodes have felt like an unceremonious butchering of the most beloved character in The Last of Us, episode 6 — titled The Price — feels like a return to form. These are the characters we fell in love with. This is what makes The Last of Us so special.
The episode is almost perfect. It would’ve been perfect, if not for the fact that the show clearly continues to demonstrate that it has zero faith in its viewers.
An Easy, Breezy Road to Forgiveness
Quick disclaimer here so you don’t think I’m just a total hater who hates on everything. I’m not, I swear! I’m a huge fan of how episode 6 was structured. Watching Joel and Ellie’s relationship through the lens of all these birthday celebrations was utterly devastating. It’s clear that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey were the right casting choices for this show, and they prove it over and over again here.
The problem, as you may have surmised, is in the writing.
At the end of the episode, we get a very important scene between the two. The Porch Scene, as it’s referred to by the community, is a pivotal one because it tells us exactly why Ellie is so wrecked over Joel’s death. It’s not as simple as she’s just grieving the loss of her father figure. It’s because she was just about to start fixing her relationship with Joel and learning that there’s more to her life than just the potential of a vaccine, and Abby killing him the next day takes away her chance for reconciliation. But more on that later.
The transition from the Eugene incident to the Porch Scene is weird. It feels like the show missed a step somehow. While I’m a fan of how Eugene’s death was the inciting incident for Ellie to confront Joel about his lie all those years ago, it was still crucial that we got a separate scene with him confessing to what really happened in Salt Lake City.
In The Last of Us Part II, Ellie eventually runs off to St. Mary’s Hospital on her own. She discovers the truth, and confronts Joel when he comes running after her. The conversation plays out almost exactly like how it does in the show, but with one key difference: the confession is what causes Ellie to push Joel away.
By putting the confession in the Porch Scene, Ellie processes all of this for maybe about 15 seconds before telling Joel she’s ready to start trying to forgive him. While, yes, you can argue that she’s already kinda known what happened for a while now and she’s been sitting with it, the confession itself is still a big deal. The confession hits Ellie so unbelievably hard in the game that she’s unable to even breathe when she hears it from him directly, even though her suspicions have been brewing for a while. That’s powerful stuff. So to have Ellie try to forgive him immediately after that in the show feels unrealistic and rushed, which is crazy considering that Craig Mazin wants to stretch this story out for another season.
Ideally, I’d like to have seen an extra scene between the Eugene incident and the Porch conversation. Maybe Joel’s lie about Eugene could’ve been what drove Ellie to go to Salt Lake City the next day. There, she finds out the truth. Then, she confronts Joel, comes back to Jackson and she still gets to tell Gail about Eugene, and the story would still work. I don’t even think we really needed that whole Gail subplot, but I’m no writer.
Either way, 15 seconds between the confession and forgiveness is a little silly. I certainly didn’t need Ellie to spell out for me that he’s selfish. Like we all haven’t known this since Season 1? The writing in that specific instance was, quite frankly, ridiculous.
“Patience”
This is where I’ll get into major spoiler territory for The Last of Us Part II, so look away now if you’re only watching the show and don’t want to be spoiled.
The Porch Scene isn’t just important because of its contents; it’s important because of where it’s placed in the game. In The Last of Us Part II, the Porch Scene is only revealed at the very end, once Ellie’s revenge quest has been resolved.
Before that, however, we get a final showdown between Ellie and Abby. For context, the Seattle arc eventually ends with Ellie and Dina almost dying at Abby’s hands. Ellie only survives because Lev persuades Abby to spare them. Ellie and Dina live out their days on a farmhouse, but Ellie’s still haunted by her nightmares of Joel getting beaten to death. For the entirety of the game, that’s the only way Ellie remembers Joel. So, she tracks down Abby again and leaves Dina and her baby behind to restart her revenge quest.
When she fights Abby for the second time, she has the upper hand. She’s this close to finally killing Abby, but just as she’s about to beat her to death, she recalls her actual final memory of Joel — the conversation on the porch. Here, we learn that she did actually try to make amends with him. She still hates him for what he did and she doesn’t know if she can ever forgive him, but she wants to try. Now that’s devastating.
After all this time, we finally understand why Ellie is so distraught. Her journal is full of pages and drawings of Joel with his eyes blacked out. She’s not angry because she regrets not making amends with Joel. She’s angry because she had only just started on the road to forgiveness and it was taken away from her. Ellie has lived her entire life with a really bad case of survivor’s guilt. Ever since Riley’s death — subsequently followed by the deaths of Tess, Henry, Sam, and eventually Marlene — Ellie has believed that the purpose of her life was to help engineer a vaccine. Without it, she’s nothing.
Ignoring the level of depression and melancholy she must’ve been at to feel like she’s only worth something if she’s dead, this is why the Porch Scene is so pivotal. Joel tells her that yes, he took away her reason for surviving, but no, that’s not her only purpose. Joel wants her to see that her life is worth living, and it’s during the Porch Scene where Ellie finally starts to try accepting that. She finally starts forgiving herself for being alive. When Joel is killed, she’s left feeling worthless again and thinking that she should’ve died so that Joel could live.
More pertinently, however, her final conversation with Joel also comes back to her at a very crucial point in time. Her recalling this memory is the whole reason why she decides to spare Abby and Lev at the end. In a game that constantly pushes the theme of revenge in your face, the Porch Scene is about forgiveness.
There are many possible reasons as to why Ellie decides to spare Abby based on this memory. The obvious one is that she realizes revenge is bad and nothing good comes from it. But if we dig a little deeper, I think it’s because Ellie recognizes the dynamic between Abby and Lev and it’s a reminder of her own relationship with Joel. While drowning Abby, she’s finally forced to face her feelings of loss and regret. At the same time, recalling this memory also allows her to finally accept what happened and forgive herself. She accepts that her life is worth living, even after losing so many people. She then decides to spare Abby, breaking the cycle of revenge and refusing to be the perpetrator who separates Abby and Lev.
Ellie chooses to remember the good parts of her time with Joel as she realizes that nothing can ever fill that void, not even Abby’s death. It’s worth noting that Abby reaches this point in her character arc at the very start of the game after she kills Joel, and Ellie has only now arrived at the same place.
The Porch Scene is a fantastic bookend to The Last of Us Part II, and it’s only this impactful because of where it’s placed in the story. Cramming it into a flashback episode when we’re not even halfway done with the story in Season 2 feels criminal, especially because you just know it was done this way so that Ellie’s character could be softened even further. Viewers need justification for Ellie’s behavior. We need to be reminded of what Ellie lost. Oh and also, we need to do all this flashback stuff now because Pedro Pascal doesn’t want to be in Season 3.
Honestly, I get it. Video games are a very different medium from TV. The pacing is completely different. You’re not having to wait a week between each episode when you can just play the game whenever you want. Viewers are going to forget what happened last season, especially if they have to wait two years for the next one. The show needs to spoonfeed all this information to its viewers because it doesn’t want them to lose the plot.
I get it. It makes sense. It also makes for a much weaker product, and that’s the real shame of it all.
The Last of Us is now available for streaming on HBO Max.
I wonder what Neil Druckmann thoughts would be if he ever read this.
I enjoyed this episode especially the added tiny bits of Joel childhood and with the porch conservation ending with “I hope you do a little better than me.”