The sixth and penultimate episode of season two of The Last of Us gave us a whole episode dedicated to Joel and the influence he had on Ellie, both positive and negative. It was a powerhouse episode, with the best acting of the show to date by both of the leads. But it also continues season two’s trend of showing things out of order relative to the game, making me wonder where things are going.

I’ll start with that last comment. For those who never played The Last of Us Part II, this will seem maybe surprising or irrelevant, but the porch scene at the end, where Ellie says she can’t forgive Joel for Salt Lake City, but is open to trying to forgive him, is actually how the game ends. I think it works better as an epilogue as well. After everything that goes on in the game (keeping that spoiler-free), to flashback and see that there was a sliver of hope that Joel and Ellie maybe could have patched things up lands harder on the end of the narrative. I think the reason we got it now is that this episode served as an amalgamation of the various flashbacks found in the game, focusing on Joel, and as such, I don’t think we’ll be seeing Pedro Pascal in the series again, as they’ve finally sent him off properly from the series.

Which is a shame, as Pascal crushed it this week. His confession to Ellie about what really happened, the fear in his eyes knowing that he may lose her forever, and the conviction to say he’d do it all over again due to the love a parent has for a child was intense. I want to emphasize how much Pascal was able to convey with his eyes alone in that scene. Throughout the years, Joel goes from trying to make Ellie happy to trying to impart his parenting on her and the pushback he gets when she enters her “rebellious” teenage phase. There’s a lot of challenging and strain going on in these years, and you can see Joel is trying to be the hardline dad while not fully understanding his surrogate daughter (as evident by him saying he thinks Jesse is into Ellie and her laughing him off for being so off base). We also finally got to hear Joel sing Future Days, which was the name of the season two premiere.

The episode covers a few years in the lives of Joel and Ellie after they arrive in Jackson, with each segment covering one of Ellie’s birthdays. The trip to the museum was, much like the game, incredibly touching and Bella Ramsay brought back a spark in her acting not really seen this season. She plays inquisitive and salty Ellie quite well, somewhere between youthful curiosity and adult mentality. In short, she taps into the game version of the character really well in the opening two years of the flashbacks. Not only that, though, but you can tell that she bounces very well off of Pascal.

The episode was directed and co-written by Neil Druckmann, who has been pretty hands-off this season, likely due to working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. He co-wrote this episode and next week’s episode alongside co-showrunner Craig Mazin (who has written every episode this season) and Halley Gross, a producer on the show and the co-writer of The Last of Us Part II. So the team felt that this episode and the finale needed to be more of a team effort. I’m not sure if Craig is more of a collaborator, but this episode felt so much stronger than a lot of what we’ve seen this season in terms of writing.

While there was a lot pulled from the games, the writers fleshed out the world and back stories quite well too, chiefly with us finally knowing what happened to Eugene, played by Joe Pantoliano. Bitten by one of the Infected, he urges Joel to bring him back to Jackson so he can say goodbye to Gail, and to comfort Ellie, he agrees, only to give Eugene a mercy kill in isolation. Ellie knew that Eugene likely had enough time to make it back safely before the infection spread, whereas Joel wasn’t going to take that chance. Like Salt Lake City, Joel covers up his dirty work for Gail’s sake, only for Ellie to realize how easy he covered his tracks and called him out on it by telling Gail the truth, that Joel shot him instead of bringing him back. It fleshes out their dynamic a bit more in a way that works for television, since there’s less time relative to a video game narrative.

So it was a great episode of acting and writing, especially relative to the last few, but I’m also a bit iffy on the ending of the episode, knowing where this narrative goes and wondering how it’ll close out now. There have been some strange choices made this season in restructuring the narrative, and none of them have been for the better, so I’m curious but cautious about the final ending now as a result. But let’s see how they do next week for the finale.