WARNING: Major spoilers for season two episode six ahead.

We open in Austin, Texas, 1983. A young Joel and Tommy hear their father pulling into their drive, and Tommy begins to panic, fearing he’ll beat him. Joel tells him to go upstairs and promises to take the fall for him. As their father, Javier Miller (Tony Dalton) enters, we see he’s a cop. He impatiently asks Joel for his side of the story. Joel explains he was buying weed from a dealer who tried to rip him off, which caused a fight. Javier doesn’t buy it for a second, saying he’s already interviewed the other kid and heard from other officers on the scene, who told him Tommy instigated the fight. Joel stands firm, telling Javier that he won’t hurt Tommy.

To Joel’s surprise, Javier doesn’t hurt anyone. Instead, he heads to the fridge, pulls out two beers and sits with Joel. He tearfully explains that his father before him once broke his jaw over a petty infraction. He acknowledges that he goes too far and is too violent with Joel and Tommy but takes some solace in that at least he’s a little better than his father was. And he hopes, when the time comes, Joel will be a little better than him.

Two months after arriving in Jackson, Joel trades with Seth for a couple of items for Ellie’s birthday – a birthday cake (misspelled as for “Eli”) and a bone, which he uses to make a custom-made guitar which he plans to teach Ellie to play. Meanwhile, Ellie intentionally burns her arm to hide her bite mark. On the morning of her birthday, Ellie gleefully wolfs down the cake and asks Joel to play and sing a song with the guitar. He reluctantly sings “Future Days” by Pearl Jam. He tells her he understands why she burned her arm.

One year later, Joel takes Ellie on a hike for her sixteenth birthday. Ellie is eager to start joining the patrols, but Joel is not willing to allow that until she is older. When she puts forward that Jesse started going on patrols when he was sixteen, he misinterprets it as her having a crush on him.

Finally, they reach the big surprise – a dinosaur! Or rather, a statue of one outside an abandoned museum. Joel reveals he found the place on patrol and has been secretly bringing some of the exhibits back to working order. They head inside to find a working model of the solar system, and Ellie dons an astronaut helmet, sits in the Apollo 15 lunar module, and imagines blasting into space courtesy of a cassette recording of the Apollo 11 space launch that Joel sourced.

At the end of the day they leave, with Joel saying they should do things like this more often. Ellie agrees but hesitates when she notices some fireflies in the evening air.

Another year on, Joel attempts to surprise Ellie with another cake but is shocked to find her smoking pot and making out with Kat (another member of the patrol Ellie joined at the start of the season) in her room. He angrily ejects her and finds she has tattooed Ellie’s arm with the moth and fern design she has had since the start of the season.

Angrily, he accuses her of doing “All the teenage s*** at once” with doing drugs and “experimenting” with women. Ellie is outraged and tells him she’s not experimenting. Joel starts to give her the “my house, my rules” speech but is reminded by Ellie that he owns nothing – he was given this house by the Jackson council. Later, Joel is disturbed by a dragging sound from Ellie’s room. She is attempting to move her stuff into the garage. Having reflected, Joel acquiesces and agrees that maybe she needs her own space but asks her for a couple of days just so he can make the garage more liveable, with running water and electricity.

Attempting to quell the growing hostility, Joel takes an interest in the moth designs that Ellie sketches. She tells him they’ve been appearing in her dreams lately, which Joel interprets as a sign of change. However, when he asks Gail about it the next day, she tells him that butterflies represent change... moths are signs of death.

On her nineteenth birthday, Ellie attempts to pluck up the courage to confront Joel about Salt Lake City, arming herself with various holes in Joel’s version of events. However, before she can, Joel surprises her by saying he’s taking her out on her first patrol. They saddle up their horses and arm themselves before heading out.

While Joel intentionally takes Ellie on a quiet route, they receive a distress call from Jackson asking them to assist another patrol that has called in an emergency. They reach a ravine too steep for the horses, so dismount and head down on foot. On the way, they see a distressed horse dragging a dead scout behind it. Pressing on, they find a dead infected, and then an injured resident of Jackson – Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). Joel immediately asks him if he’s been bit, and Eugene admits that he has.

Joel raises his rifle, knowing that he needs to be euthanised. However, Eugene asks for time. He believes he might have an hour left before turning, so asks to be allowed to see his wife, Gail, one last time. Joel refuses, and Eugene attempts to threaten him with his own sidearm. The bluff fails, as it’s obvious Eugene spent his last bullet fending off the infected attack.

Ellie jumps in before Joel can shoot and asks Eugene to perform the same cognitive tests that she had to perform when being studied by the Fireflies. He passes, and she asks Joel to let them bring him back to Jackson. He concedes and asks Ellie to get the horses and meet them on the path halfway. She hesitates, but Joel looks her in the eye and promises.

With Ellie gone, however, Joel directs Eugene to a beautiful, but remote, lakeside location. The penny drops, and Eugene realises Joel has brought him here to kill him. He begs for him to reconsider. Joel asks if there are any messages he wants him to pass on to Gail, but the terrified Eugene tells him all he wanted was to see Gail one more time so she could ease him through dying. Ellie arrives with the horses to find Eugene dead and is heartbroken that Joel has broken his promise.

They return Eugene’s body to Jackson, where Joel lies to Gail and tells her that Eugene was brave throughout, and chose to end his own life, with his last words being those of love for his wife. However, a furious Ellie tells her the truth: that Eugene was scared, he was begging to be allowed to see Gail, and that Joel shot him in the head. Gail slaps Joel hard and tells him to leave so she can grieve over her dead husband.

Nine months later, it’s New Year’s Eve in Jackson, and we’re back at the dance from episode 1 where Joel and Ellie have just fallen out once again over his altercation with Seth.

We relive the scene with Joel on the porch, as Ellie walks past to get to the garage. However, this time the scene plays out and Ellie joins Joel. He awkwardly asks her about Dina, and says she’d be lucky to have Ellie, if those are her intentions. None of this lands for Ellie, as she finally confronts Joel about Salt Lake City. She furiously states that Joel gave her the same look when promising about Eugene as he did when standing by his story about the Fireflies and gives him one more chance to tell the truth. Under questioning, Joel tearfully, and wordlessly, admits he was lying. He killed the Fireflies in order to save Ellie’s life, and in doing so destroyed any chance of them finding a cure for the cordyceps infection.

Furious, Ellie tells him it was her purpose in life to have given humanity a cure, and he selfishly took that from her. Joel shows great remorse but tells her that should he somehow be given a second chance, he would do it all again. He tells her he loves her in a way she might not be able to understand, but should she ever have children one day, he hopes she’ll do a little better than him.

Ellie tells him she doesn’t think she can ever forgive him but would like to try. The two are left standing on the porch, quietly weeping.

Back in 2029, Ellie walks back to the theatre, through the rain-soaked streets of Seattle, after her encounter with Nora.

Javier Miller – an original character for The Last of Us TV series – is played by Tony Dalton. Fans of the Netflix Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul may well recognise him for his memorable role as Mexican cartel gangster Lalo Salamanca, but he has since also appeared in the MCU series Hawkeye and Daredevil: Born Again as Jack Duquesne aka Swordmaster, and he is also set to lend his vocal talents to the new Naughty Dog video game project Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Another original character for the TV show, Eugene finally appears in the episode after being mentioned several times in the season. Eugene is played by Joe Pantoliano, who has quite a storied career behind him, with some of his most well-known roles including several collaborations with the Wachowskis, including Bound and The Matrix. He also has a significant role in Christopher Nolan’s Memento and a recurring part in the Bad Boys franchise. He also has a large television portfolio, with perhaps his most memorable role being that of the unpredictable gangster Ralph "Ralphie" Cifaretto in the classic crime drama The Sopranos.

Some newcomers to the series might be surprised to learn that, despite hitting more emotional notes than action set pieces, much of this episode appears in the video game source material. There are however a few original touches.

The prologue featuring Joel and Tommy’s father, Javier, is a new scene for the show. In the game, we see nothing of Joel or Tommy’s life before the day of the outbreak.

The biggest deviation from the source material is how Ellie finds out the truth about Salt Lake City. In the game, Ellie makes a journey back to the Firefly headquarters to find evidence of what really took place. Even for those playing the game at the time, the teenage Ellie making a dangerous and near 300-mile-long journey between Jackson and Salt Lake felt like a stretch, and indeed the show’s writers agreed, utilising Eugene’s story to come up with another way for Ellie to confirm her suspicions.

The scene with Ellie and Joel on the porch is actually one of the final scenes in the video game. The series has moved it up the queue quite a bit, because despite only having one episode left this season, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we’re caught up with the story of The Last of Us – Part II.

As with Ellie’s brief performance last episode, the song is “Future Days” by Pearl Jam. This presents a bit of a time paradox, as the song was released in 2013, ten years after the 2003 cordyceps outbreak that kicks off the series. So, either Pearl Jam are the most indestructible band in the world, or the producers just really liked the song. (It’s the latter).

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