Who is Eugene in ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 and What Happened to Him?
We’re back in the Wyoming compound, safe from the mushroom-headed zombies that lurk outside. That won't last long, but while we're here, now's as good a time as any to catch up on what’s gone down in the five (on-screen) years since we last saw Joel and Ellie.
It turns out… things aren’t great between the two. In fact, 19-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) can barely stand to be in the same room as Joel (Pedro Pascal), who – as we established from series one – is essentially her dad now.
But there have been other developments, too. Namely, that the gruff and closed-off Joel is now in therapy. Even better, Schitt's Creek's Catherine O’Hara is playing his whiskey-swilling, weed-smoking therapist, Gail, who certainly has her own unique way of helping her patients sit with their own psychological trauma.
Midway through their session, there’s a weird moment where Gail talks about Joel murdering her husband, Eugene. Both Gail and Eugene are new characters to this series, which makes things slightly confusing. No matter: we're here to answer your questions.
Who is Eugene?
The first mention of Eugene springs up when Joel pays for his session with weed and she complains that it’s just “shake and stems”. Joel defends his offering, pointing out that it’s winter, but Gail replies: “That never stopped Eugene. January, February. That man would grow buds the size of pine cones.” Maybe Eugene was into hydroponics?
Gail reveals that today is her birthday, and that she’s sad as “it's my first birthday without my husband in 41 years.” That’ll be Eugene, who she was married to for most of her life, and Joel reacts incredibly awkwardly to the news.
As their hour-long chat continues, Joel talks about the distance between him and Ellie, but Gail doesn’t have the bandwidth to get into a pity party with him today. She urges Joel to be honest, and reveal the secret that he’s obviously withholding from her. Understandably, he doesn’t want to tell her that he potentially could have saved humanity by sacrificing Ellie to make a vaccine, so he fudges it.
What happened to Eugene?
Gail’s clearly a few drinks in by now, as she then starts on her own truth-telling speech: “You shot and killed my husband. You killed Eugene. And I resent you for it. No. Maybe a little more than that. I hate you for it. I hate you for it. And yes, I know you had no choice. I know that. I know I should forgive you. Well I've tried, and I can't. Because of how you did it. And looking at your face, sitting in our home, makes me so fucking angry.” Yikes.
We’re still yet to find out exactly what happened to Eugene – this will likely be saved for another episode this season – but given that it’s Joel who killed him, and that Gail, however resentful, would still associate with him and take him on as a client, you have to assume that Eugene had been infected by the cordyceps. Maybe Joel had no choice but to kill him? The fact she admits he “had no choice” also backs that up. We also know that this happened fairly recently, sometime in the past year.
Is it a conflict of interest for the grieving widow to treat her husband's killer? Probably. But then again, it’s not like therapists are going spare in the Jackson compound. There are definitely some unresolved issues going on here that are going to take more than a scrappy eighth bag of weed to work out.
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