The Last of Us 2.1-2.2: The Killing Cold

 [spoilers ahead ... ]

So, Episode 2.1 of The Last of Us, up on Max last week, was pretty quiet. We did learn some important things.  There's a young woman, Abby, who is clearly a counterpart of Ellie -- the two even look somewhat alike -- who is intent on killing Joel.  That intention, of course, will put her on a collision course with Ellie, who therefore also of course gets into a father-daughter type argument with Joel, who also, as we know, is Ellie's de facto father.  We also see Ellie and Dina kiss at a dance in Jackson Hole, the center of the action so far in this second season.

As I say, pretty quiet.  And in a narrative of this calibre, pretty quiet has to be a build-up to something pretty calamitous.   But episode 2.2, just up of Max tonight, was a lot more than that.  I'd say it was one of most exciting, all-hell-breaks-loose, explosive episodes of anything I ever seen on any TV or streaming screen.  Right up there, in other words, with equivalent episodes of Game of Thrones.  And if we add movies into the comparison, with equivalent scenes in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

I mean, the hordes of the infected attacking Jackson Hole are right up there -- or down there -- with the Orcs attacking wherever it was in Lord of The Rings.  And in some ways even more powerful because it came on so suddenly.  And, to add to the knock-down punch of this second episode, it wasn't even the more powerful scene in the near hour.

That would be the killing of Joel, which, although we learned the hard way in the first season that everyone was expendable, nonetheless came as a shockingly horrendously unwelcome stun.  Like I'm sure everyone else who saw the episode, I didn't want to believe it.  I didn't want to believe it so much, I didn't really believe it until I saw the bag with his body being hauled through the snow.   And even now there's a part of me that believes, yeah, if I was writing the story, maybe Joel would get frozen in the snow, so much so that his brain will get frozen before it dies, which means he could be resuscitated, right?  (Actually, I think that sort of happened with Michael C. Hall's "Dexter".)  Yeah, suddenly immense cold can do that.  But, sadly, I'm not writing this series.

But speaking of the cold, it did get nice and warm in New York City the past few days, but the cold was such an impressive character tonight, I actually felt chilled watching this episode -- not just psychologically because of was happened to Joel, but almost physically because of the way in which the snow and the cold was so effectively depicted and played a role in this narrative.

And I'll see you back here with my continuing reviews of this chilling series.

 See also The Last of Us 1.1-1.2: The Fungus Among Us ... 1.3: Bill and Frank ... 1.4: Gun and Pun ... 1.5: Tunnels ... 1.6: Joel ... 1.7: Riley's Wise Advice ... 1.8: Ellie vs. the Resort ... 1.9: The Limits of Utilitarianism