How do you come back from an episode like “Through the Valley”? How do you move forward after an event that reshapes your main character’s life? How do people grieve not just a lost loved one, but a lost sense of security?
The answer to the first question, at least, seems to be “by skipping time again.”
The first few minutes of “The Path”—which is written by Craig Mazin and directed by Peter Hoar—are rich and moving. That ominous red light of still-burning fires lighting the room where Jackson’s dead are prepared for burial. Recognizing Joel’s body by the watch. The heaviness with which Gabriel Luna plays Tommy, his movements slow, considered, heartbroken. The first line of the episode is “Give Sarah my love,” It’s an effective reminder of continuing loss—and that Tommy is Joel’s family. We’ve spent so much time with Joel and Ellie, alone, over the course of this show, that that reminder does feel needed.
And then there’s Ellie, bandaged up, physically hurting, and mentally still on that cabin floor, watching Joel’s demise over and over again. It’s a crushing scene, with her agonizing screams, and is the right tone for what could have been an episode about grief and trauma and the difficulty of coming back—not just from the loss of Joel, but from the destruction to Jackson.
But that’s not what this episode is. It takes a shortcut, a three-month jump over the meaty, chewy, character-developing parts of this situation. To be fair, this tracks for Ellie, who basically demonstrates her commitment to not-dealing in her conversation with Gail. Gail wants her to talk about her feelings, Ellie pretends not to have any. They are both playing each other, and I found myself more annoyed at Gail for being nosy about New Year’s Eve than I was at Ellie for her blatant lying. She definitely knows about Joel and the Fireflies, right? The awkwardness of her denial strongly suggests this.
I don’t trust Gail at all, and I trust her even less after she turns Ellie’s perfectly parroted therapy-speak—“Your final moment with someone doesn’t define your whole time with them”—around on her, saying that sometimes it does. She can only talk about herself and Eugene. And later in the episode, we’re reminded why that is: Because she’s the town’s only therapist, and she has no one to go to. So she smokes and drinks and knows everyone’s secrets. (No judgment, honestly, what else is she going to do? Plus she’s hardly even had time to mourn the loss of her longtime partner.)
Gail’s later scene with Tommy is a little too on-the-nose for me. It exists to highlight the similarities between Ellie and Joel, to show how she’s stepped into his shoes, and to remind us how Joel used to be: quick to violence, raw and traumatized by the loss of his daughter. “Some people just can’t be saved,” Gail says. But some people clearly can.
Ellie’s walk through Joel’s house—her house now, presumably, though she is still staying in the garage—is beautiful. Cinematographer Ksenia Sereda does an excellent job highlighting the emptiness of the space, which swirls with dust and a transitional sort of light, bright and dark at once. The floors creak. The rooms are so empty. Someone, presumably Tommy, has left a box on the bed, and while it is full of memories, Ellie goes straight for the gun. Rage before grief. It’s not until she has that weapon that she goes to weep into Joel’s jacket in the closet.
Bella Ramsey regularly does outstanding work on this show, but this episode in particular requires a lot of them, from the screaming realization of Joel’s death to the nuance of lying to Gail to the closet breakdown—and then the fraught conversation with Dina. Isabela Merced brings much-needed warmth, and every conversation between these two rings true in a lived-in way. Dina’s behavior always hints at a friendship that exists even when we’re not seeing these two on screen. She knows how Ellie will react to things and plans accordingly. Here, she brings cookies in an attempt to sweeten the delivery of some news Ellie does not appreciate: Dina lied to her, telling Ellie that she didn’t learn anything about Abby’s gang. But of course she did. And she’s right that it makes more sense to wait for the WLF members to get back to Seattle before going after them.
She’s wrong about their size, of course, because out in the middle of Wyoming, having never heard of a group means absolutely jack. But Dina’s practicality is a necessary foil for Ellie’s rage and impulsiveness. She loved Joel too, she says.
Also, cookies. They’re such a fun symbol: When Ellie forgives Dina, she eats one. When she’s ready to accept Dina’s intel and welcome her back as a friend, she passes the box back.
Ellie’s tendency to act like Joel was hers alone gets another highlight in her conversation with Tommy, who is tired of Ellie talking to him like he didn’t know his own brother. He too has a lot to balance, fully relating to Ellie’s desire for revenge but also noting that Dina kept information from him. He embodies the connective tissue between the systems and structures of Jackson and the outsidery desires of his brother and Ellie, understanding both. It makes me wish the show could spend even more time with him.
Between Ellie’s conversations with her most trusted town leaders—she goes to Jesse next, to talk training and strategy, and get some very necessary advice about what she’s going to say at the council meeting—we take a little detour to meet some new folks who don’t seem fun at all. They have scars on their faces, carry bows and hammers, and talk about a prophet who is technically dead but also eternal. They use neat whistle codes to communicate across distance, and I respect that, but everything about these people says Oh no run the other way except for how gently the main guy talks to the young redhead at his side.
The strange robed folks are trying to get away from their home. They fear wolves more than demons. I’m sure this is all just fine.
The council meeting is really nicely filmed—you get a real sense of the whole town’s presence—but the arguments feel a little typical. I’m glad we got the reminder that Joel wasn’t the only person who died, and that Jackson is full of grieving folks who are worried about what’s next for them as a town. Carlisle (Hiro Kanagawa) speaks up to say that “our capacity for mercy” is what separates the townspeople from the raiders and murderers.
But then Seth needs to butt in. It’s his specialty, butting in. He has no capacity for mercy. He is busy doing eye-for-an-eye and hate. He’s not the ally Ellie might have expected, and really he’s not an ally at all; he’s an angry man lashing out. But in this moment, they’re on the same page.
Ellie’s speech is most honest when she says she usually doesn’t think before she talks. She’s talking herself into believing what she says, and once again, the nuance in Ramsey’s performance, as Ellie’s confidence grows with her argument, is admirable. Ellie wants revenge. We know that. Dina knows that. Tommy certainly knows that. But she performs a desire for what she calls justice. (I don’t trust Gail, but I deeply related to the skeptical look on Catherine O’Hara’s face.) In the process, Ellie kind of throws things that matter to other people under the metaphorical bus. Screw your potlucks and your parties; it’s justice—Ellie’s version of it—that matters here. “Do it for us,” she says, but what does this vengeance journey actually do for anyone there?
Another question: What else could we expect from a girl raised in this future? Who has ever talked about any other way to honor or remember or recognize the dead?
At any rate, the council’s “no” decision is all but a foregone conclusion, as is the fact that Ellie is obviously going anyway. Dina’s arrival is also no surprise—but the depths of her knack for practical planning are a delight I didn’t expect. (Also interesting that she knows Joel’s weapon so well.) Ellie’s plan is missing some steps. Like, a lot of steps. Dina has a map. She has a list. I love her, and I love the way she tells Ellie “You could have just asked.” I am deeply worried about her future.
Dina does get some help with her planning. Here comes Seth, whose help Ellie somewhat reluctantly accepts. One way to look at this is that it shows that he’s not all bad. Another is that if you find yourself on the same page as a bigot, you might want to reconsider whether you want to be on that page at all. But Ellie is too sunk into her need for revenge to think like that. Dina, I think, is just using Seth’s resources out of practicality, but she doesn’t seem at all affected by their previous run-in with the man.
The stop at Joel’s grave, in that golden light, is lovingly shot, with that lingering closeup on Ellie’s soft, sad face before she gently sprinkles coffee beans at his (wooden) gravestone. Still, I got distracted by the gravestone. Abby said Joel was described as in his 60s, which could have been false intel, but that 1987 birthdate would make him roughly forty-two, which just doesn’t make sense at all.
Ellie’s little smile, though, is one of the best moments in this episode.
Their trip is a montage of gorgeous landscape shots that often serve as a reminder of just how small these two people are against the world. They talk about musicians; they talk about their first kills. (There are a lot of great contrasts this episode, and that’s sure one of them.) Ellie can’t talk about hers, because it would get into feelings territory—territory she is steering well clear of. (Dina is an excellent backseat rider, keeping an eye on the land and the weather.) Their late night conversation about the kiss is inevitable and the lighthearted way Dina brings it up is just right, though it obviously means more to her than she’s letting on. It’s also a chance for her to once again demonstrate how a person might, you know, talk about feelings, as she shifts gears into wondering about Jesse’s maybe-inherent sadness.
Giving them a couple of moments along the way keeps the journey from feeling too too fast, though it still is only a few beats before they’re north of Seattle and into the territory of the scar-faced people—all of whom are dead now. Even the little redhead. Maybe it was Abby and her crew. And maybe not. There’s obviously more going on here than we know, but it gives Ellie more fuel for her quest if she believes it was Abby and company.
Every post-apocalypse loves its looking-into-the-devastated-city-from-the-highway shot, and I’ll never complain about those, even when they’re familiar. Overgrown Seattle looks believable, and kind of gorgeous—until you realize it’s also crawling with militia members. Given how well supplied and trained Abby and her team were, I assumed the Washington Liberation Front was a serious, and seriously large, organization. But I suspect it’s going to be a surprise to Ellie and Dina, much as the size of Jackson was a shock to Abby and friends. No one ever seems to think another group can be as big or well-organized as their own. But hey, maybe Ellie will also get lucky (if you can call ease of committing murder “luck”).
“The Path” is a solid episode, a well-crafted means of getting two characters from point A to point B with a few side trips to emotional landscapes. I wish it had more time for grief and rebuilding; I wish this show were interested in that side of survival along with its interest in clashing groups and trauma-honed choices. But this season has a pretty single-minded focus on revenge, and what it costs a person. And I expect it’s going to cost Ellie a lot.
BREADCRUMBS ON THE TRAIL
- If you skipped the titles, you may have missed that where there were two figures, there’s now one. This little detail is somehow extra crushing.
- The disconnect between baseball games and murder plans is a nice touch.
- Always happy to see Hiro Kanagawa (The Magicians, Star Trek: Discovery), who has that brief scene as Carlisle; I hope we get more of him.
- I’m driving myself a little bit crazy trying to figure out where you’d be, looking into Seattle from the north, to get that view. The road sign had Tacoma and Portland as well as Seattle, so they’re headed south, but that view looks like what you see from I-5 heading north (or at least the placement of the Space Needle does!).
- I’m going to stop watching the previews for the next episode, which give entirely too much away. They should have held back Ellie screaming, and it seems all too clear what that scene of Dina with the gun indicates for next week.