‘The Last of Us’ Writer on Joel & Ellie’s Heartbreaking Porch Reconciliation and Cut Episode 6 Scene

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6, “The Price.”]

The Last of Us delivered one of its most heart-wrenching installments yet with Season 2’s sixth entry, “The Price,” which revisits several birthdays of Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) over the years in Jackson with her adoptive father, Joel (Pedro Pascal).

But before the episode unfolded, it opened with a flashback to Joel’s own childhood in Austin in 1983 on an occasion where he was prepared to take the heat for something Tommy had done with their father (played by guest star Tony Dalton). The father and son have a candid conversation, and Joel learned his own dad had been on the receiving end of abuse, and despite his own draw to violence, he tries to do better with Joel and Tommy and conveys that hopefully Joel would do better with his own kids.

Of course, viewers know that Joel had become a violent man himself, but that didn’t make his actions wholly malicious. In a flashforward to Joel and Ellie’s early days in Jackson, she burns her arm to hide the bite marks that would reveal her immunity, and Joel surprises her with a cake and new guitar for her first birthday in their new home.

As the episode unravels, Joel continues to celebrate Ellie, most memorably bringing her to a museum hidden in the woods around Jackson, where they take in the sights and he helps set up a makeshift space simulator by gifting her a tape recording of a space mission and sitting in the museum’s space capsule on display.

But every sweet moment is tinged with an uneasiness as Ellie doubts Joel’s previous promise about the Fireflies. As the show depicts more birthdays, Joel and Ellie’s relationship is strained by her older teen years as she gets a tattoo to cover up her scar and engages in relationships. Ultimately, Joel tries to repair their relationship, and Ellie is on the verge of confronting him about what happened with the Fireflies when they embark on a patrol together.

This happens to be the day Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) dies. After finding the man bitten in the woods, he asks Joel and Ellie to escort him back to the settlement where he can share his final words with Gail (Catherine O’Hara) before getting killed. Joel seemingly agrees and sends Ellie ahead of him, but Joel lies and shoots the man in the woods.

When they arrive back at Jackson with Eugene’s body, Joel tells Gail that her husband didn’t want to put her in danger and ended things himself, but Ellie can’t swallow the lie and tells Gail the truth. This was the breaking point for her, but as viewers see the episode continue, Ellie’s final night with Joel on New Year’s Eve didn’t see her abandon him on the porch, as she did speak candidly to him and finally confront him about the Fireflies.

Ellie is angry, but she admits that she wants to fix their relationship; even if she can’t forgive him, she wants to try. It makes Joel’s death the next day that much more devastating. Below, episode co-writer and game co-writer Halley Gross breaks down the emotional episode.

The opening sequence is a flashback to Joel and Tommy’s childhood. What led you to introduce that moment as a framing narrative for this episode?

Halley Gross: I think for us it was exactly what you’re saying, this beautiful framing device. So much of this show is about parenthood and about the impact of love on the people closest to us. So you get this opportunity to see Joel, and you see where he came from, and you see this lecture. He’s done some illegal things and has an expectation that his dad’s going to come home and beat the s**t out of him. And for the first time, his dad doesn’t. His dad sits him down as a man and says, “Listen, my dad was worse, and I see your fear, and I’m doing the best I can, and maybe you can do a little better than me.” And that’s the throughline that we’re going to see Joel go on a journey about.

In that scene with Kat (Noah Lamanna), we see the dad he impulsively is, we see the programming, we see the reaction, and then we get to see Joel be the parent he wants to be, make a conscious choice to slow down and see Ellie more clearly than his dad saw him and treat her with more respect than he might otherwise be trained to do. And that’s the message that he’s going to leave Ellie with at the end of the episode. And it really… there’s this beautiful shape because we’re going to watch Ellie make some really hard choices and lose herself to this revenge quest. What Joel is giving us, the audience, and Ellie is this hope that there is a way that we are able to grow and change if we put our intentionality to it. It’s a really beautiful way of showing how Joel is this flawed person who is constantly trying to be better out of love for Ellie.

When Ellie spoke to Gail in Episode 3 of this season, she mentioned how she wished she’d spoken to Joel before he died on the porch. Ultimately, this episode revealed that Ellie did speak to Joel on New Year’s Eve. Why did Ellie lie about that to Gail?

This is their secret between them. She will protect Joel even if she doesn’t agree with anything that Joel has done. She will protect Joel to the ends of the earth, and this is such a sin, right? He made a choice to protect her over millions of people, and that is a weight that she’s going to carry. But to talk about that would require talking about her immunity, would require talking about the ugliness of Joel’s choices. And that’s not something that she can safely do even in a community like Jackson. So she’s forced to bury that as she’s forced to bury so much. But as with everything, it eventually vomits out of her.

This episode tracks various birthdays Ellie celebrates, from the time she and Joel arrive in Jackson to the present day. What inspired that expansion of a concept introduced in the game?

The birthday thing actually came in really late in the script. We knew we wanted to do a bottle episode about Joel and Ellie and the best moments of their relationship, and the disintegration of their relationship over time in Jackson. Initially, we just sort of put the beats together. But Craig [Mazin], I think very wisely, wanted to have a sort of narrative device that connected everybody together, and using the birthdays as this means of both showing a passage of time, but showing ways in which Joel thinks about Ellie first, in which he tries to bring her joy was just a beautiful way to hang the moments that already exist together.

Later on in the episode, when Ellie learns the truth about the Fireflies, she tells Joel she was meant to die. Was that something that was lingering in the back of her mind on that day each year, as she was uncertain about what unfolded in Salt Lake City? 

Sure. I mean, I think what we’re seeing in this structure is the happiest days of their relationship together. And what we’re saying is even on their best days together — and I think the museum can be considered one, if not the most wonderful day that they have together — she cannot escape the lie between them. She sees the beautiful fireflies floating over the pond, which we were originally going to do in the game, and then we shifted to something else, and then later on, she’s getting this tattoo with Kat. She’s hiding this bite mark that is evidence of the truth of who she is, but she’s covering it with a moth that represents looking for the light. There is this inescapable life festering even in their rightest moments. And so it gives us this beautiful passage of time, but it also allows us to empathize with how unavoidable it is for her. She’s trying to ignore it for years, and she cannot.

What motivates Ellie to reveal Joel’s lie about Eugene’s death to Gail before she ever confronts him about the Fireflies?

The incident with Eugene gives Ellie confirmation of something she’s been afraid to deal with for so long, and at the beginning of that particular sequence, we’re seeing her practice her questions. These are things that she needs to get out, but she’s too afraid to do it. She needs to practice. She needs to feel some sense of security there. And in that moment, Joel is lying to Gail, Ellie doesn’t even need to ask those questions at this point because immediately she knows he’s lied, and then we have more passage of time where she’s sitting with the truth of that lie and all the implications that lie entails.

And so after a lot of time of dealing with it, she goes to this dance where, even as estranged as they are, Joel’s first instinct is to protect her, and her first instinct is to push him away, but she can’t; even in that dance sequence, she can’t avoid the dichotomy of what Joel is. He is a good man who has done horrible things out of love for her. She can’t paint him as if he were a bad guy wholly. This would be easier. She could cut him out, she could be done with him. But this is one of the loves of her life. That moment in the dance is that intrinsic reminder of the good and the bad mixed into one, and finally having the chutzpah to get those answers because she’s also feeling the loss of him. They’d been estranged at that point for a year or so, and she’s seeing what life without Joel is like, and it’s not what she wants.

What was a moment you were most excited to see Pedro and Bella tackle in the script for this episode?

They’re both unbelievable, and they’re both such talented technicians that it was always about excavating the truth for them. They bring authenticity to every moment, so it is truly just a pleasure to watch them work. The moment I was most excited about was that museum, seeing them on their best day, and there’s a whole sequence that didn’t make it into this episode that they shot, where you see the dinosaur museum and you watch her put hats on dinosaurs, but for pacing, they pulled it out.

Hopefully, they’ll release it at some other time. It’s just the cutest little thing, but it was about showing them at their best. It is about that beauty, it is the best of humanity, and it is the thing that everybody is striving for. It is why everybody sacrifices what they do to have these quiet, beautiful moments with the people they love. And so giving our characters who have been through so much and will go through so much, these moments of reprieve to enjoy life, gives the whole narrative a balance that’s really important.

Are there any easter eggs or moments you enjoyed planting for fans to find in this episode? If so, what should they look out for?

We have the flashback scene where Joel’s dad is wearing the watch. The museum is pretty spot on to what the game is. You don’t even see it in the show. They built a whole rover, which is exactly what’s in the game, and you don’t see it just because the camera angles didn’t require seeing it. But it is the museum section, the space section is one for one, what was built into the game, which is just incredible.

Originally, this is more for people who were fans of the game, but Kat was also a character that we originally had in the game, who, for timing and pacing, you didn’t end up seeing. We had gameplay sections where you could, as an option, meet. So it’s really exciting that in this season, we’re not so locked into the rigid playable path of the characters; we get to see more about who Ellie was over the course of these four or five years in Jackson and the people who sparked her along the way.

The Last of Us, Season 2, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and HBO Max