Spoilers ahead for the rest of Season 2, be aware!

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“You don’t get to rush this.”

Once that infamous phrase was uttered, my heart sank to new lows I didn’t know it could reach. The uncomfortably long torture sequence that resulted in Joel’s death in the game was agonizing to sit through – it damn sure elicited those same feelings when it happened on the show. Before we get to that climactic end, let’s look back at everything that transpired before the final moments of this tearjerker of an episode.

The second episode of the second season of The Last of Us saw Ellie recovering from a long night on New Year’s eve. Jesse awakens Ellie as they prepare to do some patrolling and everyone who played the game should have instantly known what was about to happen when she’s confronted with Seth from the night before. It all played out exactly as I remembered it…except for one piece of dialogue that wasn’t said. “Bigot sandwiches” didn’t leave Ellie’s lips, which was disappointing, but most fans hated that line (not me, though!), so I can see why it was omitted here. As Ellie and Jesse headed out into an oncoming snowstorm, they took refuge from the vicious cold by staying inside a warm dispensary (this episode happened on 4/20, so I see what they did there!). The major change from the game I noticed here was how Ellie and Dina were originally the ones who got…well, “distracted” as they hung out inside the dispensary. The show made a major change regarding that twosome by making Ellie and Jesse patrol buddies, while Dina accompanied Joel for their separate patrolling duties.

Another major change to the second game’s lore from this episode (that would have been amazing to play, I might add!) was the “Infected” horde attack that forced the denizens of Jackson to go into defense mode. The indirect cause of that flood of rabid Infected was Abby, since she took a huge tumble into an area filled with them. Abby hauled ass as an overwhelming mass of Infected came to life and kept pace with her. The scene from the game where Abby crawls alongside a gate that the Infected are ravaging played out on this episode, which was one of the sequences I was hoping to see here. Then...it happened. As Abby fought for her life against an Infected that managed to grab hold of her, Joel showed up just in time to rescue her by headshotting the diseased attacker. As the three of them made their escape via horseback, a separate horde entered the scene to create an even bigger flood of Infected. All of a sudden, they switched paths and began making their way toward the walls of Jackson. That’s when all hell broke loose…

Madness ensued as the armed denizens of Jackson rang the front gate’s alarm bells and prepared for the worst, as they locked eyes with the seemingly insurmountable army of Infected coming their way. As they violently slammed against Jackson’s fortified walls, the humans blasted them from up high with carefully placed shots and lit up barrels of gasoline that began leaking across the battlefield, which they quickly ignited. It looked as if Jackson’s gun-toting citizens had the upper hand…that is, until a “Bloater” smashed its way through a weak point in the wall.

Remember how I mentioned that I would have loved to have been an active member of this sequence as a playable defender? It didn’t happen in the game, and my god, I wish it did! I couldn’t help but root for the humans as they picked off Infected from the rooftops, used flamethrowers to burn them to a crisp, and released attack dogs to even the odds. There was a tense scene where Tommy used every bit of his flamethrower to eliminate the sole Bloater – as he ran low on ammo, it felt as if I was about to witness his gruesome death at the hands of that massive Infected. Thankfully, the Bloater succumbed to its burns, and the remaining survivors of the Jackson community emerged victorious.

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Now let’s have a chat about another part of this episode that played out just how I remembered it from the game. Once Joel, Dina, and Abby finally made it to Abby’s safehouse, the heartbreaking death of the game and show’s most beloved character came to pass. The show switched out Joel’s brother Tommy for Dina, who ended up getting put to sleep after getting injected with a strange fluid that quickly knocked her out. Abby finally got the chance to speak her mind to the man who’s responsible for the death of her father (her dad was the doctor that Joel shot in the head during his attack on the “Fireflies”). At the start of this episode, a dream sequence played out showing Abby talking to herself as she wandered through the hallways of the Fireflies’ medical facility after Joel’s rampage. After I saw that transpire, I had a gut feeling that her mission would elicit the result she’d been seeking since the first episode. It turns out I was right, sadly – Abby gave a chilling monologue about her reasoning for wanting to kill Joel, then proceeded to blast him in the leg with a shotgun and further punish his disfigured limb with a golf club.

Later on, Ellie finally made her way into the seemingly abandoned mansion that housed Abby and her group. Eventually, she overheard the attack and spotted the haunting image of her father figure on the verge of death. As Ellie was held down, she was forced to watch Joel take his final breath as Abby stuck the sharp end of a golf club right into his neck to bring this macabre scene to an end. Ellie soon made it clear that everyone who aided Abby during her mugging of Joel would die by her hands, and I can’t wait to see how the rest of this season replicates the events that result in Ellie eliminating her newest adversaries - Abby and her allies from the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). The final images of Ellie holding Joel’s bruised body, the people of Jackson coming to terms with the storming of the Infected, and Joel’s body being pulled along by Ellie, Jesse, and Dina left me with an overwhelming sense of sorrow.

The next episode will see Ellie building herself up for a quest fueled by revenge, rivaling the one that Abby sought for herself. And with the cult-like “Seraphites” to contend with, Ellie and Abby will have to deal with more sinister human threats as they continue to fend off hordes of Infected. This second episode was some quality stuff, as expected.