The Last of Us season 2 episode 2 review: the ballad that broke us

TL;DR:
In Season 2, Episode 2 of The Last of Us, HBO didn’t just break our hearts — they crushed them into ash, strummed them like an old six-string, and whispered “this is just the beginning” as the credits rolled. Anchored by Ashley Johnson’s gut-wrenching cover of “Through the Valley,” this episode doesn’t just honor the game’s emotional legacy — it deepens it, stretches it, and reintroduces the pain in a way that feels devastatingly human.

Let’s get one thing straight: I knew it was coming.

I knew it.

I knew that Joel’s brutal death — the violent, world-shattering linchpin of The Last of Us Part II — was looming on the HBO horizon like a thunderstorm we all had to walk straight into. I’d played the game. Twice. I’d seen the trailers. I’d felt the cold dread settle in my chest when Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby first appeared on screen last week. I’d whispered, “they’re really doing it” like some tragic mantra.

And yet… none of that prepared me. Watching Pedro Pascal’s Joel meet his fate in The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2 wasn’t just hard — it was surgical. It was intimate in its brutality, performed with a quiet viciousness that made me feel like I was complicit just for watching. Bella Ramsey’s Ellie screams in anguish, Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby radiates a quiet storm of conflicting rage and regret, and somewhere amid the blood and snow and silence… a song starts to play.

Not just any song.

Ashley Johnson’s voice floats in: mournful, familiar, and time-bending. It’s “Through the Valley,” the Shawn James track that’s been synonymous with Ellie’s vengeance-fueled descent since The Last of Us Part II was revealed to the world in 2016. Only now, it’s not a preview. It’s an elegy.

This wasn’t just an easter egg. This was a funeral dirge in digital form — and it hit like a bullet to the soul. Here’s the thing about legacy: in most franchises, it’s a word tossed around to excuse nostalgia bait and unnecessary reboots. But in The Last of Us, legacy is carved into every corner of its world — especially when it comes to Ellie.

And no one embodies that legacy more than Ashley Johnson.

For nearly a decade, Johnson was Ellie. Her voice, her eyes (thanks, performance capture), her quiet fury and fragile hope — they became the heartbeat of Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece. When Bella Ramsey took over the live-action role, she didn’t replace Johnson. She inherited her.

Which makes this moment — her cover of “Through the Valley” gently ushering us out of Joel’s final moments — so quietly devastating. There’s something unspeakably powerful about hearing the “original” Ellie sing the outro to the moment that shapes the “new” Ellie forever. As if Johnson’s Ellie is reaching across timelines, across realities, to hold Ramsey’s Ellie in her arms and whisper, “I’ve been here too.”

It’s not just a neat callback. It’s a passing of the torch, soaked in grief.

This is showrunner Craig Mazin and game co-creator Neil Druckmann at their best — not adapting for the sake of fanservice, but building bridges between mediums and timelines to craft a unified emotional universe. And it works. It really works.

Let’s go back to 2016 for a second — the moment The Last of Us Part II was first announced. It was just a teaser, but what a teaser. Ellie, older, harder, bloodied. Her hands tremble as she plays a haunting melody on an acoustic guitar in a ruined house. The camera pans slowly. Joel enters, ghostlike. “What are you doing, kiddo?” he asks, like a father who already knows the answer but can’t bear to hear it.

Ellie looks up.

“I’m gonna find… and I’m gonna kill… every last one of them.” Even then, it was clear this wasn’t going to be another simple survival story. This was a tale about vengeance. About what happens after the world ends, when the only thing left is the hole someone left in your chest.

To hear that song again now, as Joel’s lifeless body is dragged through snow and blood and memory? It’s chilling. Not because it’s foreshadowing anymore — because it was always meant to be here. As if the series has been spiraling toward this moment since that first trailer dropped, like a tragedy written in reverse.

Let’s talk about the music.

TV scores are often forgettable, designed to disappear behind dialogue and set dressing. Not here. Not ever in The Last of Us. From Gustavo Santaolalla’s aching string work to licensed songs that feel like poetic intrusions from another dimension, the HBO adaptation understands that music in this world isn’t just background — it’s backbone.

Ashley Johnson’s rendition of “Through the Valley” isn’t just emotionally resonant — it’s narratively loaded. The lyrics themselves — about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, about fear and survival and violence — are Ellie’s internal monologue. They always have been.

And here, placed just after the most traumatic event of her life, they feel like a psychological overture. A mourning song and a mission statement, wrapped in one.

You don’t just hear it. You feel it in your ribs.

When I watched this episode, I didn’t cry right away. I sat there stunned. The way you do after a car crash. The way your brain short-circuits when your heart’s still processing. Joel’s death was quick, brutal, inevitable — but the aftermath, the stillness, the emptiness in Bella Ramsey’s eyes?

That’s what broke me.

And as the credits rolled, and Ashley Johnson’s voice filled the silence, I finally lost it. Because that’s what this episode does best. It doesn’t just hurt you. It understands the anatomy of pain. It shows you grief not as a single moment, but as an echo that follows you into every hallway, every guitar chord, every decision.

There’s a quiet gospel to Ellie’s story. A holy text written in blood and revenge and shattered innocence. This episode is the second verse of that song. And it ends with a whisper from the past, telling us that the road ahead only gets darker.

The second episode of The Last of Us Season 2 doesn’t just recreate a pivotal moment from the game. It recontextualizes it, sharpens it, and then drops it in our laps like a live grenade disguised as a lullaby. Pedro Pascal’s Joel may be gone, but the resonance of his story — and Ellie’s spiraling need to make meaning out of that loss — is only just beginning. Bella Ramsey steps fully into the tortured boots of Ellie, and with Ashley Johnson’s ghostly voice haunting the final frames, the show dares us to remember: this is not a story of redemption. This is a story of consequences.