Joel’s Surprise Return In The Last Of Us Season 2, Episode 5 Ending, Explained

The following story contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 5, “Feel Her Love.”

EPISODE FIVE OF The Last of Us season 2 opens with a tough conversation that we later learn is all about families, and the tough experiences, decisions, and choices that come along with them—especially when the world being populated is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The opening scene of “Feel Her Love” finds Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), one of the WLF’s leaders, debriefing with a new character, sergeant Elise Park (Hannibal and The Outsider star Hettienne Park), about a difficult choice she had to make.

The WLF is largely based in Seattle’s Lakehill hospital, and, as Elise recounts, one of her best men—a guy named Leon—was running a mission and realized that the infection had expanded to spores. It’s airborne, and he, and all of his men, were screwed. Elise faced the brutal decision—and Leon insisted—to seal them all inside, dooming them but saving everyone else from them getting out. At the end of the conversation, we learn that Leon wasn’t just Elise’s best man; He was her son, too.

Part of what The Last of Us seems to really be building toward from all angles is the idea of accepting your loved ones for who they are and what they’ve lived and done, all bumps along the road included. Did Leon deserve his fate? We’ll never know, and we can tell just from Elise’s face and how she’s carrying herself how much it hurt. But in this world, the choices and decisions are what everyone lives by and has to deal with. And so she does.

Ellie, for weeks now, has been very much in the same place. Ellie is still grieving Joel’s loss, and no one could possibly blame her. But Joel made his choices—and, in killing all those Fireflies, effectively dug his own grave. And so Abby’s seeking revenge is something Ellie had to live with. And now Ellie seeking revenge on Abby is something that Abby and all the WLF will have to live with. It’s a brutal world, and a brutal cycle, but one that’s ultimately driven by love and loss. It’s a tricky, interesting dynamic, and one that The Last of Us is making its viewers think a lot about each and every week.

The episode winds up circling back on the importance of the opening scene for a number of reasons. In her pursuit of revenge, Ellie catches up with Nora (Tati Gabrielle) in Lakehill, whom she wants to use for information to find Abby. In their chase, we not only see the airborne spore infection that Elise described in the episode’s opening scene, but we see someone, for the first time, tell Ellie what Joel did to the Fireflies. And, as Ellie claims, she knows.

In not getting infected by the spores, Ellie also reveals herself to be “her,” as Nora says. She’s the famous (or infamous) one who’s immune. And suddenly both know all about each other’s stories, and once again it means accepting that and adjusting. As Ellie begins to torture and attack Nora for information on Abby’s whereabouts, we cut to black and suddenly see Ellie getting out of bed, and a smiling Joel (Pedro Pascal). And we’re going to bet that we’re about to see—if she was telling the truth—what happened when Ellie really found out about Joel’s choices.

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What exactly is going on at the end of The Last of Us season 2, episode 5—and what does it mean?

First of all, we hate to be the bearers of bad news, but we need to make one thing clear: Joel is not alive. He is still very much dead. This is a sudden flashback to better times in Jackson, Wyoming, perhaps the best of times for Ellie and Joel. This closing scene exists to set up the forthcoming episode 6, which will explore some of the time we have’t seen in the five year gap between season 1 and season 2 for Ellie and Joel, showing us more of their relationship and also, presumably, telling us what we need to know about Eugene, Gail, and whoever else.

But it also comes as an extreme juxtaposition to what is, now, the last time we’ve seen both characters. We cut right from Ellie inflicting extreme violence on someone; The last time we saw Joel, he was getting brutally murdered in retaliation for his own acts of extreme violence. The innocence in the present has been entirely lost. But in this flashback, we see the life that could have been: Joel and Ellie as happy surrogate father and surrogate daughter. This isn’t the way the world was originally set up, but it could have been two people in extreme circumstances making the best of things. And, seemingly, for a while, it was.

It brings us back to our ultimate theme of The Last of Us season 2 revolving around accepting people for who they are. Episode 6 will almost certainly feature a dramatic moment where Ellie finds out that Joel massacred the Fireflies, and it will also likely come with a gradual acceptance that he didn’t do it because he’s a maniac—he did it for her. And, sure, he did it a little selfishly because he knew that it took him 20 years in the wilderness to connect to anyone else even close to the way that he related to his late daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker). But this is a show about forgiveness, nuance, and reflection.

And seeing the best of these characters so soon after seeing how violent they could be really strikes the tragedy at the heart of this upsetting and nuanced story.