Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Last Of Us Season 2’s “The Price.”
The Last of Us saved all the Ellie and Joel flashbacks interspersed throughout The Last of Us Part II for one episode: Season 2, Episode 6, “The Price.” For better or for worse, we saw a collection of Ellie’s birthdays, including that science museum trip and her first patrol. But not every flashback was pulled directly from the game. One was changed heavily to finally reveal the answer to the season’s biggest mystery: what happened to Eugene, and how did it cause a rift between Joel and Ellie?
The answer to both of these questions is the same, and shows just how the series can create more interesting tensions, even if it means it’s not the most faithful adaptation.
In The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6, Ellie and Joel are out on Ellie’s first patrol. It’s the safest trail outside the wall, but nevertheless, Joel gets an alert that Eugene and Adam need backup on their patrol. Joel originally tries to send Ellie back to town, but she reminds him that in this context, she’s not his kid, she’s his partner.
They eventually find Eugene alone, but he tells them he’s been bitten by an Infected. He asks Joel to let him see his wife, Gail, one last time, but Joel refuses, citing the ironclad laws of the town. Ellie walks him through the infection test she went through in the very first episode of the season and tells Joel there’s enough time before he turns, to bring him back to town.
Joel agrees and sends Ellie ahead to start walking with the horses, but instead of following her, he leads Eugene to an outlook. He says he could pass along his last words to Gail, but that’s not enough for Eugene. “Last words for her?” Eugene says. “No, no, I need... I need her last words! For me! I'm dying. I'm terrified. I, uh... I don't need a view. I need Gail.”
But Joel remains unconvinced, shooting him in the head right then and there. When he returns to Jackson to tell Gail what happened, with some fabrications — Joel says Eugene was brave and shot himself. But Ellie is shocked to see him lie straight to her face, and interrupts to tell Gail the truth. “That's not what happened,” Ellie immediately says. “He begged to see you. He had time. Joel promised to take him to you. He promised us both. And then, Joel shot him in the head.”
It’s in this moment that Ellie realizes the man she idolized since she met him all those years ago isn’t the bastion of truth she thought. Later, on the porch after the New Year’s party, Ellie confronts him about this. The way his face looked when he told Ellie he would catch up with her with Eugene was exactly the same as the face he had when he told her what happened with the Fireflies in Salt Lake City.
In the game, Eugene lives until his 70s and passes away from a stroke. Changing his fate doesn’t just hammer home how even the residents of Jackson aren’t exempt from the Infected, but it also gives Joel and Ellie an immediate event to disagree over — and a motivation for Ellie to finally get the truth about what her survival means. To Joel, rescuing her means a second chance at being a father. To Ellie, it means avoiding what could have been her true purpose in life: sacrificing herself for the greater good of humanity.
Eugene’s role in the series may have been short, but it’s still an improvement on the game, where he only appeared in a photograph. Even in these short moments, his new ending provides so much for the show as a whole — and for Joel and Ellie’s heartbreaking final conversation in the episode.
