The Last Of Us Season 2's Most Jaw-Dropping Sequence Brings The Show To Game Of Thrones Territory

Stop reading right now if you haven't watched the second episode of season 2 of "The Last of Us" — major spoilers lie ahead.

In the second episode of the sophomore season of "The Last of Us," something massive happens ... and I'm not talking about the major death that happens just before the end of the episode. What I am talking about is the assault on the protected fortress in Jackson, Wyoming where pretty much all of the show's main characters now live, including Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Tommy's wife Maria (Rutina Wesley), and Ellie's friends (and newcomers in season 2) Dina and Jesse, played respectively by Isabela Merced and Young Mazino.

While Joel and Dina are out on a tracking mission, and Ellie and Jesse are also stranded out in the same snowstorm affecting the prior duo's visibility in the woods, Tommy, Maria, and the rest of Jackson face an invasion from a host of Infected. (In the season premiere, "Future Days," we see some tendrils emerging from a pipe in the center of Jackson, and we know from season 1 that those basically act as a homing beacon for Infected hordes). As women and children huddle into a bunker to hide from the Infected "army," Tommy and other fighters take to the ramparts, armed with explosives, flamethrowers, and all sorts of long-range tools meant to attack the Infected; once the extremely heavy reinforced door to Jackson is breached, Tommy fights on the ground with everyone else and Jackson's dogs even join the fray (though thankfully, it doesn't seem like any of them were seriously injured). 

Co-showrunner Craig Mazin (who wrote the script) and director Mark Mylod's audacious choice to include this scene — which, notably, does not happen in the Naughty Dog game "The Last of Us Part II" — in the episode that features Joel's death is bold, and yet, the episode doesn't feel overstuffed. Instead, it simply feels like an ode to great battle scenes we've seen before ... paired with the culmination of Abby's (Kaitlyn Dever) vengeful mission.

An interesting thing about "The Last of Us" is that, at face value, it's a show about "a zombie apocalypse," but the show is much more about the emotional inner lives of survivors of a zombie apocalypse with a few action and fight scenes thrown in every now and then. That's why the battle scene in this episode feels so important — and again, this was a setpiece created exclusively for the HBO series (which is overseen by Mazin and the original game's director, Neil Druckmann. While watching this episode, "Game of Thrones" came to mind, as did "The Two Towers," the second installment in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

"Game of Thrones" featured a ton of battles throughout its run, from season 2's first big battle sequence "Blackwater" to the Battle of the Bastards in season 6 between Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) to the Battle of Winterfell in the series' final season. The siege on Jackson felt like it took inspiration from several of those, from women and children hiding off the battlefield (like they do in both Blackwater and the Battle of Winterfell) to the massive scale of the bloodshed, but it's also important to remember that those battles were mostly fought between humans (with a few dragons thrown in for good measure). 

The Battle of Helm's Deep, which is the main focus of "The Two Towers," was also clearly an inspiration here — particularly because that battle is one of the most famous and influential on-screen battles in any movie or TV show in the modern era. The point here is that Mark Mylod, who directed this episode (and worked on non-battle episodes of "Game of Thrones"), drew inspiration from major TV and film battles for this sequence, and it shows; it's a spectacular sequence and unforgettable even when you consider what else happens in this episode.

I mentioned earlier that, in this episode of "The Last of Us," Joel dies. He's brutally murdered by Abby, who's been hunting him for several years after Joel killed her father in a murderous rampage at a Firefly hospital. (He did it to save Ellie, but not only does Abby not know that, he still probably shouldn't have killed all those people.) Joel's death at Abby's hands is a major part of "The Last of Us Part II," so anyone who's familiar with the game knows that's coming in the second season of the HBO adaptation (and probably started bracing themselves after Abby and Joel meet and narrowly escape a horde of Infected in the wilderness). Obviously, Joel's death will have a lasting impact on the show going forward ... but so will the siege on Jackson!

As Joel and Ellie have traversed a broken-down United States, they've been in near-constant danger — and Jackson, before the siege, is one of the only safe places we've seen on the show. It was, until the attack, very well-protected, and considering that Tommy and many other fighters do survive the assault, their protections also clearly worked, to a degree ... but what happens now? Jackson is still home to a whole group of survivors, and they need a place to live that's functional and not a weak target. This battle scene is incredible to behold, but it also has major ramifications for the season, and proves that nowhere is truly safe within the world of "The Last of Us."

You can watch new episodes of "The Last of Us" every Sunday on HBO and Max at 9 P.M. EST.