‘The Last of Us’ Episode 2 Review: The Three Amigos

I’ll say this much for The Last of Us: This episode, the show’s second, is a vast improvement over the pilot. Titled “Infected” after the primary source of horror for the whole show and helmed by the core creative team of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who write and direct respectively, it’s a tighter, fresher, tenser, scarier, grosser, and altogether more vital hour of television than its predecessor. Yes, it’s weighed down by bog-standard post-apocalyptic tough-guy dialogue and the kind of enervated performances that go with that. But its narrow focus on three characters instead of the whole of society, and its inevitable — even predictable — yet still narratively bold climax give it the juice that the show’s opening installment lacked.

This ep does have one thing in common with the premiere, though: an opening flashback from a different time and place. In this case it’s Jakarta in 2003, where a professor of mycology is commandeered by the army to diagnose and offer a remedy for what is apparently the first fatal outbreak of the cordyceps infection. Instead, she advises the military to bomb the entire city back to the Stone Age, then asks simply to be brought home to her family. 

Which is cool, I guess? I dunno, given that we’ve already seen that the entire world is still devastated 20 years after the initial outbreak I’m not sure we needed to spend several minutes of screentime establishing the fact that the infection is in fact very dangerous. But if the show were to open every episode with a flashback, it would give the episodes some consistency and allow the filmmakers to establish the basics of the infection without interrupting the main narrative for huge gobs of exposition. So it’s okay in my book.

The rest of the episode, and this is definitely the cool thing about it, stars a grand total of three characters and three characters only: Joel, Tess, and Ellie, trekking through the overrun ruins of Boston in order to exchange the girl for the battery the adults will need to fire up a truck and take it cross country. That’s right: no resistance fighters, no jackbooted security personnel, no working stiffs, no fellow smugglers, not even extras save for the infected. It’s all Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, and Bella Ramsey, which sets up the unconscious expectation in the audience that if enough of these three characters die, so too will our story. It’s smart filmmaking.

Smart enough, I think, that it can power through a lot of objections you might have as to the been-there-done-that nature of what they say and do. I’ll state for the record once again that I have not played the Last of Us video games; I’ll state for the record once again that this doesn’t matter, since I’m reviewing a TV show and not the games it’s based on. As such, well, it’s 2023: You’ve seen crumbling cities overrun by vegetation a million times before (Netflix’s Alice in Borderland Season 2 got there just a few weeks ago!). Ditto plant/fungus-based humanoid monsters. Ditto dialogue like “This is your chance, you get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right,” which when delivered by an infected and doomed Tess is supposed to come across like a major moment instead of throwaway text from a cutscene. It’s way more the latter than it is the former, I’m afraid.

And given that Tess dies in this episode, committing suicide by explosives in order to prevent a horde of infected from reaching the un-bitten Joel and Ellie, I suppose now’s the time to point out that Anna Torv brings way more to the table than either Pascal or Ramsey in the other two roles. There’s a vicious intensity to her speech, facial expressions, and even body language that the others can’t match. Pascal is entirely too comfortable in this sort of hardbitten hardass role (I’ve enjoyed his work across multiple shows but you’ve gotta admit how much more interesting he was in Game of Thrones, when he was allowed to be horny as well as dangerous).

And I continue to believe that Ramsey was somehow miscast. The writing does her no favors, as mentioned earlier, but there’s something kind of high-school drama-club about her character’s sardonic toughness. I have yet to meet a 14 year old from after armageddon, to be fair, but I like to think they’d be a bit less quippy than this. There’s a stiffness to her performance that elides the possibility of vulnerability until there’s no other choice for her but to bring it forward; the fluid back-and-forth between those poles that you might expect or prefer is simply not there.

But it’s commendably bold for a show this huge to scale itself down to a three-hander in its second episode ever. Some of the visuals are impressively disgusting as well, from the zombie-like mushroom-headed “clickers” (everyone who got mad at me on Twitter for having the temerity to suggest that this show is part of the horror genre owes me an apology) to the incredible tendril kiss shared between an infected and Tess right near the end. A repulsive, invasive, perversely intimate visual, it takes this concept about as far as it can go, to its great credit.

It would be too generous to say I’m more bullish on The Last of Us than I was last week. The dialogue, the plot, and the bulk of the post-apocalyptic visuals simply aren’t doing anything new, and those are all huge marks against the overall work. But this episode proves that Mazin and Druckmann are both willing and able to innovate, if only sporadically. And that’s where hope for the future of this show will grow, like a, well, you know.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.