I’ll say this for The Last of Us’s explosive latest instalment – it’ll get people talking. HBO’s post-apocalyptic video game adaptation began its second season in no mood to idle: last night’s tortuous and violence-crammed second episode was pure Event Television, precision-engineered to muster viewers around the now entirely hypothetical watercooler. It has been received obligingly – GQ rather hyperbolically dubbed it “one of the best TV episodes of the century”, comparing it favourably to Game of Thrones’s battlefield blow-out “The Long Night”. A better point of comparison might be “Baelor”, the season one Thrones episode in which Sean Bean bids adieu to his own head. That is to say – and spoilers follow, in case you couldn’t tell – things ain’t looking so peachy for Pedro Pascal.
The bulk of the episode centres on a protracted action sequence, as the snow-capped town of Jackson is besieged by a horde of “infected”. Events take a turn towards the end, however, and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) – one of a gang of outsiders who’ve come in from Salt Lake City – gets the drop on Joel (Pascal), heretofore the series’ lead character alongside Bella Ramsey’s plucky Ellie. Exacting revenge for the murder of her father in the finale of season one, Abby shoots him in the kneecap before torturing and, finally, killing him. It’s traumatising and gruesome, and a rather seismic twist to detonate so early into a show’s run. At least, seismic is what it was going for. But now that it’s reached its big watercooler moment, The Last of Us has never seemed more hamstrung.
