Then, while sheltering from the blizzard in an abandoned 7-Eleven, Ellie and Jesse hear over the radio that Joel and Dina have neither returned to Jackson nor checked in. They split up and head back into the storm, where Ellie is able to pick up Joel’s trail leading to the W.L.F. bunker, in a mountaintop lodge. She arrives just in time to see Joel lying in a bloody heap, still alive but barely. After a brief struggle, she is captured and pinned to the floor, forced to watch as Abby jams the broken end of the golf club into the back of Joel’s neck, killing him. Ellie is stricken with agony, her reaction almost feral. She vows to kill them all.
Abby and the other W.L.F. members let her live anyway, kicking her on their way out the door. Ellie lies beside Joel’s corpse for a while sobbing. In the episode’s haunting final shot, we see her, Jesse and Dina dragging his wrapped body through the snow back to Jackson.
Last week I suggested that the busted pipe into Jackson — with its suspiciously writhing collection of roots and weeds — might serve as a symbol of something unsettled within the community and within Joel and Ellie’s relationship. As it happened, it took only one episode for that rot to lead to a total collapse … and not just symbolically.
This brings me back to the siege of Jackson, which happens at the same time as Abby’s smug speechifying and Joel-torturing up at the lodge. (In fact, Joel can see Jackson burning off in the distance, which seems to worry him more than his own imminent demise.) The infected arrive en masse at the community’s gates, called to action perhaps by the cordyceps hive-mind within those decaying pipes. They run full speed into the wooden walls, even when doused in flaming gasoline, until eventually — with the help of a double-size, flame-resistant mushroom monster — they breach the barriers and run every which way, killing and destroying indiscriminately.
Jackson survives the attack but at enormous cost. With Tommy and Maria still in charge, it may be able to rebuild. But will Ellie still want to be a part of this, or is she about to become another Abby, driven only by revenge?
Back in Season 1, Joel comforted a depressed and traumatized Ellie — still reeling from the horrors she had witnessed and experienced in Silver Lake — by confessing that he once had tried to kill himself, after the death of his daughter. The attempt failed, and in the years since, Joel found other people not only to care for but also to live for — people like Tommy, Tess and Ellie.
