‘The Last of Us’ S1 E9
This chapter has come to a close.
We learn more about Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) past and future in this dramatic season finale.
I have to be honest: I struggled a bit with this episode. To me, the pacing just felt off. I know that Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie have been bonding over the course of the season and have grown really close, but their relationship had taken a jump between the episodes that we didn’t get to see. And that felt incredibly jarring to me.
The past two episodes have been primarily focused on Ellie, her story, personality, and connection to Joel. He’s been unconscious for most of those two episodes, recovering from being stabbed. But now, in this episode, he is fully leaning into this idea that Ellie is no longer a piece of cargo to him — he has essentially adopted her as his daughter.
While the show was always building to that, I struggled with how quickly it got there. Joel just survived a near-death experience, and maybe this dramatic shift is a result of that. My problem is that the show doesn’t give us any indication of the source of this change. Instead, Joel seems to be a completely different person.
Ellie is coping with the trauma that she endured in the opposite way, which feels much more believable to me. While Joel is opening up and attempting to share…
