‘The Last of Us’ Episode 6 Recap: The City of Brotherly Love

If there were an award given out for the year’s most adequate hour of television, The Last of Us Episode 6 (“Kin”) would be a contender. Basically competent, mildly engaging, largely inoffensive, gesturing in the direction of emotional power without ever running the risk of triggering it directly, it comes nowhere near the highs nor the lows of the five episodes that preceded it. Some lovely scenery, some cursory worldbuilding, a reunion and a farewell, a bunch of wild animals in a post-apocalyptic city, an unsuspenseful cliffhanger, and that’s a wrap. It’s a fresh installment of the biggest show on TV right now, and it’s pretty much just there.

Which is no great sin, I guess. From a political standpoint I certainly prefer this episode’s portrayal of a literal commune to its weird jury-rigging in favor of, if not fascism, then at least anti-antifascism last go-round. 

The lowercase-c communism comes courtesy of Jackson Hole, the idyllic post-apocalyptic community where — to my surprise and delight — Joel actually finds his brother Tommy after all this time and all this mileage. 

And for once, there’s no dark secret being harbored by this community, no secret zombie gladiator arena or all-cannibal dining menu or secret arrangement with a military dictatorship or a clan of road warriors or anything like that, despite the dire warnings of an elderly couple Joel and Ellie run into first some distance from the city. It’s just Tommy, his gal Maria (Rutina Wesley), and a pleasant Christmastime town full of kids who sit at rapt attention while watching screenings of The Goodbye Girl. In a genre where the answer to “Can’t we all just get along?” is “no” 95% of the time these days, it’s nice to get a “yes” for a change.

There isn’t even a betrayal on a simple personal level, as opposed to a societal one. Tommy doesn’t rat out Ellie’s secret, Joel doesn’t ditch Ellie despite his announced intention to do so due to his age-dulled senses and feelings of cowardice, Maria doesn’t turn out to be some kind of monster willing to throw them all to the wolves for whatever reason. Sure, this means that all the back-and-forth between the characters meant to suggest these outcomes as possibilities amounts to nothing, hence the sort of wheel-spinning vibe alluded to at the beginning of this review, but considering the been-there-done-that alternatives, I’ll take it.

Which is not to say the episode passes without incident. On the contrary, Joel is badly wounded after he and Ellie arrive at an abandoned Firefly medical facility in Colorado, populated only by abandoned apes from the lab and a group of four goons, one of whom stabs Joel before getting his neck snapped in turn. Our heroes escape only for Joel to collapse in the snow after reaching apparent safety. Cue a breathy-voiced movie-trailer cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down,” roll credits.

There are a couple of personal notes to the story along the way to this lackluster climax (show of hands: Who thinks Pedro Pascal is going to die his way out of this show next episode? Anyone? Bueller???) that seem worth mentioning. For one, Ellie finally finds out that Joel once had a daughter her age, which as she notes explains him a bit. For another, Joel starts having heart murmurs or something, as if writer Craig Mazin had to increase the difficulty setting for the story as we get closer to the final boss. Finally and most importantly, we learn unequivocally that Joel really does believe Ellie is immune and really is convinced that the Fireflies can derive some kind of cure or vaccine from her blood, based on his trust in the Firefly leader who told him so back in Boston.

More interesting to me, though, is the simple shift in the color palette. The white snows that replace the green wildnerness and green-brown urban decay that we’ve seen in forty million other post-apocalyptic stories are a welcome sight — like, I could almost physically feel my eyeballs responding to seeing something different. The western iconography, the rifles and horses and wooden forts and whatnot, all that I can take or leave; the snow is, simply put, pretty, and therefore welcome.

But I don’t think a respite-style episode is an excuse to have more or less nothing interesting or surprising happen within it. Tommy and Maria could have been livelier, harder to predict. Other characters in Jackson Hole could have been introduced and developed. The goons in Colorado could have been cooler or weirder or, conversely, developed into actual characters. I dunno, the monkeys could have done something fun. I’d have taken anything that livened things up (including the infected, who don’t show up at all). Instead we get 60 minutes of terse dialogue, acoustic guitar plucking, boots in snow, rifles at the ready, blah blah blah. I don’t really know if The Last of Us can do better, the charming but overrated Episode 3 notwithstanding, but we’re certainly free to ask.

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.