This recap will have spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of The Last of Us, “Future Days.”

Hello and WELCOME BACK to our The Last of Us recaps! It’s been two long years, but we made it through. As we did back in season one, Nic and I (Valerie Anne) are going to do joint recaps of this season, and invite you to chat with us in the comments about all the goings-on as we watch Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel (Pedro Pascal), and the people they meet along the way endure and survive the only way they know how: together.

Before we begin, one note: while both of us have played both video games, we are only going to compare and contrast the show and the games for things that have already happened on the show; we will not spoil anything that happens in the games past where the show is, and we ask you to do the same in the comments. Most people watching this show do not know any of the future story beats — and, frankly, in terms of the show neither do we — and we’d like to keep it that way!

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

After briefly revisiting the last scene of season one, this episode starts with a group of Fireflies mourning their dead outside the hospital. Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) makes it clear she intends to seek revenge on Joel, having lost someone important to her in the fight.

Hell hath no fury like a Firefly scorned.

This is sooner that we both meet and know Abby’s motives than in the video game. What do you think of Abby so far, and of this change?

Nic: You know what, I actually really like that they’ve introduced us to Abby in the beginning of the season rather than meeting her later as in the game. (It was a bit rude to remind us where we were chronologically and geographically with the use of “Ellie’s” giraffes, but I digress.) I think even casual fans have heard about Abby as a new character, and immediately showing us the very real human collateral damage from Joel’s brutal attack on the Fireflies adds stakes that remain in the back of our minds as we watch Joel and Ellie move through this episode, completely unaware that the former is essentially being hunted.

Valerie: I agree, this scene really set up a lot of tension for the season right off the bat. You can feel it coiled barely under the surface of Abby’s skin. Everyone else is so…sad. But she’s more than sad. She’s angry. She’s FURIOUS. She says they’re going to find Joel, and shouts “yes we are” before anyone can even protest.

Nic: To get this out of the way now, as someone who’s played these games multiple times, I’m very aware that Kaitlyn Dever is very physically different from Game Abby. I’ve also loved everything I’ve seen Kaitlyn Dever in, so I’m not at all worried about her stepping into Abby’s emotional shoes. For all I know, the story they’re telling this season doesn’t require the amount of muscles and physicality we see from Abby in the game. Either way, Kaitlyn is acting her ass off, and as a viewer, I believed the rage simmering beneath her grief.

Valerie: I literally also had that in my notes. “Kaitlyn Dever is acting her whole ass off.”

Nic: When we meet Abby, that grief is so real and raw and palpable, and she’s ready to abandon reason to get her revenge immediately until her friends talk her down and promise to have her back once they can get settled. And speaking of those friends, not only does Abby appear early, but we also get to meet some other Fireflies who aren’t name-dropped until much farther into the game, and I’m excited to see if and how they get fleshed out for television, especially since we’ve been gifted Tati Gabrielle and Ariela Barer as Nora and Mel, respectively!

Valerie: It’s a miracle they managed to convince her to go to Seattle with them, instead of just blindly storming through the trees. I was a little afraid she was about to murder one of those giraffes out of spite. And yes! I am SO EXCITED for Ariela Barer and Tati Gabrielle to be part of this season!!

Next, we hit a time jump! We go to Jackson, where Joel and Ellie have been living alongside Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Maria (Rutina Wesley), and the rest of the community.

Can’t let down her guard.

What do you think about Jackson as a community, and about where Joel and Ellie are now, both individually and re: their relationship?

Nic: So far my favorite thing about Joel in this episode is how much growth he seems to have had. Pedro is giving us every single emotion that Joel didn’t show in season one. He’s in therapy, he’s using his words, and sure he still has his knee-jerk reactions to conflict, but he’s also displaying more emotional intelligence than we’ve ever seen from him. I love his lil concentration glasses, and how cute he is with his nephew Benji! It’s almost like getting a window into who Joel was in the years before Outbreak Day.

In contrast, Ellie seems to have maintained the somberness she exhibited in the aftermath of The Attack on the Hospital while also showing us the sweet and silly side of her that’s endured and survived. She reacts to Caleb pulling punches and Tommy telling her Joel doesn’t want her on patrol in a way that feels like she’s sick and tired of everyone else underestimating her. I love that she’s getting stronger and improving her fighting while also still being awkward as FUCK around her crush. She gets to write in her journal which is something she scoffed at a season ago (“is this all they had to worry about?”); she was robbed of a childhood, and now she’s getting to experience a level of normalcy she never thought possible.

But even though they’ve grown individually, Joel and Ellie’s relationship has clearly become strained. It’s killing me to watch Ellie close a door that Joel is trying so desperately to hold open; I don’t want my Father/Daughter Apocalypse Duo to be fighting!

Valerie: I love that they have shown two sides of Ellie already. On one hand, she’s still scrappy as hell. She is fighting (and successfully taking down) men twice her size, she’s giving Joel the cold shoulder, she’s taking unnecessary risks on scouting missions. But like you said, she also has glimpses of being a “normal” teenager; she’s hanging out with her cool uncle Tommy (granted, they’re sniping infected, BUT STILL), she personalized the garage and made it her own space, she has a best friend who is close with her father figure and knows when something’s wrong, she learned how to play guitar, she journals and doodles in her notebook. She doesn’t have both feet in the Jackson community, but she doesn’t have both feet out of it, either.

Just a girl out hunting with her uncle, who she has wrapped around her little finger.

Valerie: It’s also interesting to see Foreman Joel. With his little glasses, doing such gentle work like fixing the breaker, doing such paper-pushing work as organizing the building so Maria can let in as many refugees as she wants. It’s such a stark contrast to the fighter we met last season, and like you said, I think it’s a bit of a glimpse at the Joel we knew oh so briefly from The Before Times.

Though of course, Ellie and Joel fighting makes my heart hurt, too. They’ve been through so much together, it’s hard to imagine there’s anything they can’t get past, but every relationship has its breaking point.

Jackson itself is so beautiful, literally and figuratively. Literally it looks plucked directly from the game in a way that made my heart skip a beat, but figuratively it’s so nice to see people laughing and working together and thriving and not having to sleep with one eye open and one hand on a shotgun. They made a real community in a hellscape, and I find it very inspiring. Maria and her council are killing it.

Nic: At the risk of being extremely cliche, Jackson has long been one of my favorite aspects of The Last of Us because it feels like a character in and of itself. It’s a perfect example of like you said, a group of people working together to build a community, and also of how much of their survival is kind of down to luck. Like, where did you happen to be on Outbreak Day? Did you live in an area with existing infrastructure to utilize? How handy are you with a weapon? In season one, Maria explained that they picked this location because it was already a gated community and they expanded on it. It took a whole lot of people working together for Jackson to exist, and it requires even more work to maintain. And to add to that work, it appears that Jackson is now facing more frequent influxes of refugees who, for one reason or another, haven’t had the luxury of this kind of community, and I’m really interested to see how that particular storyline develops.

Besides Abby, another new player this season is Dina (Isabela Merced), a plucky ball of energy who seems to have a good rapport with Joel, and who Joel calls Ellie’s best friend.

:insert TikTok sound: My Shayla!

What did you think of Dina’s entrance, and her character overall so far?

Nic: My friend, if you thought that because I’ve yelled at and with you so many times IRL about Isabela Merced as Dina that I’d be out of words by now, you would sadly be incorrect. I love Game Dina. “Plucky” is the perfect word to describe her; she’s a breath of fresh air and an excellent foil to the older and more hardened version of Ellie we see in the game. Yet somehow Isabela manages to fully embody the Dina we know and love AND THEN add in her own brand of snark and silliness and life in a way that still feels true to who Dina is. She’s such a joy to watch and the MVP of this episode in my opinion.

Valerie: You’re stealing the words right out of my brain again. “Breath of fresh air” is how I would describe her, too! Dina doesn’t seem to carry around as much darkness as the characters we met in season one, at least not on the outside. If the little girl we saw in season one that we all theorized could be Dina actually was, it could mean Dina grew up in Jackson, so even though she knows the harsh realities of life outside the walls, she hasn’t seen quite as much as Ellie or Joel, and it shows. She has some things in common with Ellie – her eagerness to learn, her endless questions, her love of puns – but she has a brightness to her and I can see why Ellie is drawn to her, if you’ll pardon the expression, like a moth to a flame.

Nic: *rimshot* When Dina comes to Joel early in the episode while he’s working on circuits, we first think by his “hey kiddo” welcome it’s going to be Ellie, but it turning out to be Dina feels like such an interesting addition because in a way (and Joel mentions this later), Dina’s behaving the way younger Ellie did when she and Joel first started journeying together. Dina’s open, curious, and inquisitive in the way Ellie was before she shut Joel out. It’s such a brilliant choice, and Isabela is absolutely killing it. I mean, between her delivery of “I…lick them?” and immediately clocking that Joel is in therapy?! A queen!

As far as “best friend” goes, it was clear as soon as Dina asked “Why is she angry with you?” that those gals be a little more than pal’ing.

Valerie: I won’t lie, I didn’t replay The Last of Us 2 as recently as you did, so I really only remember big story beats, and I don’t remember Dina and Joel interacting in the game, so their relationship took me by surprise and I liked it. Him calling her kiddo, him puffing up when he talked about how she respects him, his patience with her when he’s telling her about breakers and she is changing the subject. I think it’s very cute!

Ellie (on her horse Shimmer!) goes out on patrol with Dina, encountering Clickers and also a new kind of infected Ellie later calls a Stalker.

Maybe she’s barn with it, maybe it’s neighbelline. (Yes I did Google horse puns just for Nic.)

Let’s talk about that sequence!

Nic: There’s one thing I want to mention before we chat about the patrol itself! Dina and Ellie’s interactions from the moment Dina hit Ellie with the “Hiiii” in the garage to Ellie ignoring Dina’s movie invitation and walking away, had me giggling and kicking my feet. The juxtaposition of Dina just being Dina with (seemingly) no awareness of her effect, while Ellie has an entire Gay Panic™ was one of the best moments of the episode.

Valerie: It’s amazing how quickly they perfectly told us exactly what Ellie and Dina’s dynamic is. Dina softens Ellie’s edges, while also having her back when she chooses chaos. It’s almost like early on Dina realized there was no convincing Ellie NOT to climb into the building where there are almost definitely infected, so she decided “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” and became Ellie’s perfect companion. They keep each other safe, and they make each other laugh while they’re doing it. I had a stupid smile on my face the whole time, from Dina calling Kat “the other one” to the bad bear-b-que pun to her delivery of “What if there’s family in there? What if there’s a toddler?!” Obsessed. I agree with what you said earlier, Isabela Merced is the perfect person for this role. Well, I had a stupid smile on my face until Ellie fell through the floor, at least. Nic, I hate Stalkers so much. Why are they QUIET and why do they MOVE LIKE THAT???? They’re too smart, I don’t like them, and the show has the added bonus of being able to linger on the horrible way they walk and the added HORROR of the TENDRILS coming out of her NOSE SOCKET. No thank you!!!

But also this scene showed us some really cool moments that were pulled right from the game, like Ellie cleaning her gun at a workbench, the way they climbed onto the truck, and the bottle throw distraction tactic. Little moments like that delight me.

Nic: Okay, FIRST of all, “bear-b-que” is a FANTASTIC pun, thank you very much! Dina’s taste in jokes is one of my favorite things about her! Along with how well she knows Ellie. Which, SECOND of all, “Dina softens Ellie’s edges”?! Save some of those emotional punches for the rest of the season, sheesh. Anyway, like you said, it was never “Ellie, don’t”; it was “Ellie, let’s.” Even once they’re inside, they communicate using a hilarious set of soundless hand motions and miming of murdering clickers that I just KNOW they’ve spent multiple patrols perfecting this shorthand.

Valerie: Their stabbing mimes reminded me of the Buffy episode “Hush” and it tickled me.

Nic: HA! OMG yes! Re: moments from the game though, I’m not going to lie to you, when Dina pointed to the beer bottle, I screamed knowing that Ellie was about to use the “throw a bottle to misdirect a clicker” technique. I sometimes forget this show is based on a video game until they lift a mechanic or a setting so directly that it seems odd I don’t have a controller in my hand. I saw someone online make a joke that Dina even hit the R1 listen maneuver!

Just when I thought the Bloater from season one was bad, they somehow made infected creepier than a Victorian child in Blumhouse movie. What do you MEAN they can STALK us now? Absolutely not. How are they TOO FAST but also TOO stealthy??

Jackson is celebrating New Year’s, and the church has been transformed with string lights and general merriment. And despite everyone kind of assuming she wouldn’t, Ellie does show up.

“Slowly learnin’ that life is okay.”

So, of course, we have to talk about The Dance.

Valerie: Actually, before we get there, in the moments before the dance, Ellie uses her knife to connect the teeth holes so no one can tell she once again got bitten without getting infected (similar to how she tattooed her arm to cover that one) and then writes Dina’s joke in her journal. She write “don’t fuck it up” over and over and first of all, RELATABLE, second of all, HEARTBREAKING.

Then Joel comes in and does two of the most dad things possible: turns on a light she didn’t need on and says “that better?” and takes the guitar to fix its strings even though she tells him it’s fine. It’s awkward but by golly he’s trying.

Nic: These two are KILLING me, I tell you. And I also had “relatable” in my notes about Ellie’s general reaction to Dina! We get it, girl.

When we cut to The Dance, my breath caught seeing how completely they captured the vibes of this moment in the game. We got it as a cut scene later in the game than we do here, but whew am I glad they decided to make that timing change.

Valerie: Ellie watching Dina dance was such a beautiful moment to me. Ellie is so reserved and internal, and Dina is so open and…free. Her energy is contagious and everyone around her is just beaming. But Dina leaves them all behind to grab Ellie by the hand (after finishing Jesse’s drink for him). My heart rate skyrocketed along with Ellie’s when Dina pulls her in for the slow dance, then even closer after they make each other laugh a little more. Ellie looks almost afraid to breathe, like if she makes a sudden movement she’ll wake up and realize it’s just a dream.

Nic: Yes! Dina had me beaming from my couch! I felt so many parallels between this scene with Dina and the scene from the costume shop with Riley in season one. In both instances, Ellie holds back while her more confident partner takes the lead. But where Ellie excitedly made the first romantic move on Riley, she instead looked at Dina’s interest as if she was afraid if she hoped too loudly, Dina would leave her too. If only Ellie could see that while her face was disbelief and “don’t fuck it up”, Dina’s was comfort, contentment, and “I feel safe with her.”

Valerie: When Dina says everyone is jealous of Ellie, Ellie says the most out of character thing, out of context. “I’m not a threat.” In every other aspect of her life, that’s all Ellie wants to be perceived as. She wants men to know she can take them down, she wants infected to know she can eliminate them. But this little firecracker can’t fathom that she could be a threat in this way.

Isabela’s delivery of, “I think they should be terrified of you” sent chills down my side. It’s everything Ellie’s ever wanted to hear, in every imaginable way.

“In from the snow, your touch brought forth an incandescent glow.”

Valerie: And frankly, fuck that homophobe for interrupting their very sweet little makeout sesh. I would bemoan the existence of such bigotry in the face of much, much bigger problems, but I think we all know this is not unrealistic.

Nic: A giant “RETWEET!” to all of this. Plus Dina’s “Oh, Ellie” before “I think they should be terrified of you” as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world?! I’m going to need 5-7 business days to recover from this scene alone.

I know we’re going out of order but Dina HAD to be discussed. So let’s go back a little: we learn that Joel is going to Jackson’s best attempts at therapy, provided by a woman named Gail (Catherine O’Hara), and it wasn’t her…best showing as a professional.

“How was I to know you were in peril? You keep everything inside, like a bashful clam!”

We sure did learn a lot in one “session” didn’t we?

Nic: I mean look, therapists are people too! Now, perhaps therapists also shouldn’t drink with their clients especially when those clients killed their husbands for unclear reasons, but it’s the end of the world and it’s CATHERINE FREAKING O’HARA! (That said, if you’re reading this and your therapist does any of those things, probably you should find a new therapist). Speaking of, Moira Rose acted the hell out of this entire scene. I never knew what was going to come out of her mouth, but I was delighted every single time.

Valerie: Catherine O’Hara had me holding my breath for this entire scene. I thought she was going to snap at any moment. But she was so calm. Out of it and broken and angry and sad but strangely still and calm and it was eerie and unsettling!!! I don’t know a lot about the actual art of acting, but this felt like a masterclass to me. Pedro was also doing the work; I think it’s so sweet that Joel’s main conflict is his fight with Ellie. And that the closer he gets to the truth of it, the more wounded he looks. Broke my damn heart.

But also…what did Joel do to Eugene!!!!! No matter what it was, call me crazy but, I think that might be a conflict of interest and perhaps she shouldn’t be Joel’s therapist? I do like that she gets paid in weed though. And has Opinions about it.

Nic: I love your assertion that there could be a vast pool of in-network therapists in this medium-sized community with whom Joel has ZERO history, but you’re right!

Valerie: I’m just saying, I feel like maybe no therapy would be better than therapy with someone who hates your guts, but what do I know!

Nic: It’s wild that this would be allowed, almost as wild as Gail saying the quiet part out loud. But I kind of love her for it? Because Joel knows very well why Ellie is shutting him out especially when it comes to making decisions for and about her, and he has to acknowledge that. I’ve learned a lot in my therapy journey, and one of those things is that lying to your therapist only prolongs your own healing process. I do think he genuinely knows giving the whole story will get him closer to repairing his relationship with Ellie though, so I hope we see more of him working through this. Plus we’ve got to get more Catherine O’Hara, right??

In the final moments of the episode, we get too ominous shots: one of cordyceps wiggling their way out of a draining pipe inside Jackson, and one of Abby and her merry band of Fireflies cresting over the hill outside Jackson.

“Somebody’s watching me, it’s my anxiety.”

What do you think of these threats and what they can mean for the future?

Valerie: In season one, we talked a little about how there were spores in certain locations in the game that require people to wear gas masks so they don’t get infected by airborne particles, and it added a level of fear of the environment ON TOP OF fear that an infected humanoid could be lurking around any given corner. Part of me was almost relieved we didn’t have this secondary level of fear in the show in the first season. BUT HEY WHAT’S UP WITH THESE WIGGLY ROOTS? ARE WE IN DANGER?

Nic: As Whoopi Goldberg once said, “you are for SURE in danger, girl!” (or something like that.) When they introduced the concept of a connected network of cordyceps last season, I had a feeling it would come back around, but I sure do not like being correct at this moment! What was it that Joel said? If you step on a tendril in one place, you might activate a hoard miles away? So how do I feel about this threat? I FEEL SCARED AND BAD ABOUT IT, VALERIE! I was prepared to be anxious about story beats I knew were coming; I was NOT prepared to be anxious about a completely new way for cordyceps to spread.

I’m less scared and more curious about the Abby of it all, mostly because the writers have already thrown us for such a loop by introducing her this early, that there’s no telling how much of her story will look different than we’re used to. I’ll tell you what though, homegirl said a whole lot with that little smirk in the final frame.

Valerie: As for Abby, despite her not being ripped like she is in the game after this time jump, like you said, I’m not worried about Kaitlyn Dever being able to pull this off. I guarantee we’ll still see and feel every single moment of work she has dedicated to finding Joel in the past five years without her beefing up. Probably not a lot of protein powder left over in the apocalypse, anyway. And as for that final shot, I like that it mirrored the end of last season, and while Joel and Abby probably both felt hopeful as they saw Jackson in the distance, they are for VERY different reasons.

The Last of Us season two premiere is now on Max.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!