The next vignette is short and sour. On Ellie’s 17th birthday, Joel finds her in her room with Kat (“the other one,” according to Dina in the Season 2 premiere), smoking pot, fooling around and getting a tattoo. Joel registers this as typical teenage rebellion and “experimenting.”
Ellie, though, does not like him trying to assert any kind of parental authority. As far as she is concerned, their house in Jackson was given to them jointly — “You don’t own anything,” she says to him after he tries to give her some “my house, my rules” talk — and she is free to live her own life there. She may feel bad that he feels bad, but she is not sorry for anything. She announces her plan to move into the garage so that Joel will stop hovering.
Of particular note in this segment is the tattoo itself: twisting vines leading to an image of a moth, just like the one Joel engraved into her guitar. (Ellie wants the ink to cover up her burn, which she used to cover up her bite.) Joel pesters the psychologist Gail at lunch, asking if moths are a symbol of change and growth. Gail answers that moths typically symbolize death — a sentiment eerily echoed in Ellie’s notebooks, which feature many sketches of moths surrounding the words, “You have a greater purpose.” Ellie, perhaps, believes she was meant to save the world by ding at the hands of the Fireflies.
This sets up the episode’s longest and weightiest segment, set two years later, on Ellie’s 19th birthday. By this point, Ellie has decided she has to confront Joel about the many discrepancies between his version of what happened in Salt Lake City and what any reasonable person would believe, given the facts. Before she can question Joel, though, he fulfills one of her birthday wishes by taking her out on her first patrol. (Ellie, overeager: “What’s the record for number of kills on a training run?”)
They initially get back some of their old “affectionately antagonistic” dynamic while on this run; but everything goes awry when an emergency call comes in, saying that Eugene has run across an infected horde.
We know from the Season 2 premiere that Joel will end up killing Eugene, and that Gail — Eugene’s wife — will have some lingering beef with how it all goes down. But the details are still unexpectedly chilling.
