GET DIRECTV

The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: “The Price” Breakdown & Key Moments

The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: “The Price” Breakdown & Key Moments

SPOILER ALERT! This post will contain detailed information about Season 2 of The Last of Us, and more specifically Episode 6.

We thought the shocking events in the second episode of Season 2 of HBO’s hit series The Last of Us might have been the last we were going to see of Pedro Pascal’s iconic character Joel Miller. We thought wrong.

Episode 6, titled “The Price,” answered our questions about the dynamic between Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and featured Pascal’s late character for nearly the entirety of the episode. Beginning with a flashback to Joel’s childhood relationship with his own father, Episode 6 expands on the surrogate father-daughter relationship the pair had built throughout the first season, using Ellie’s birthdays over the five years since they arrived in Jackson as a lens. Considering that we know how their story together comes to an end, this one hits the heartstrings on so many levels.

In this recap, we’ll walk through the episode’s key moments, unpack some of the biggest fan questions, and look ahead to what may be lurking around the next corner in this emotionally devastating — and sharply maturing — sophomore season (check out our guide to The Last of Us Season 2 here).


The Last of Us: Season 2, Episode 6 Overview

  • Episode title: “The Price”
  • Air date: May 18, 2025
  • Writers: Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross & Craig Mazin
  • Director: Neil Druckmann

Recap: “The Price” – The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6

Despite the action-packed zombie attack sequences, desperate escapes and striking visuals of a pandemic-devastated world in The Last of Us Season 1, the relationship that Joel and Ellie was the real core of the show.At the series’ outset, Joel begrudgingly agrees to ferry Ellie across the United States for the Fireflies, a resistance group fighting the U.S. government. By season’s end, it had morphed into a partnership with a spirited young girl who came to fill the void left by the daughter he had lost early in the pandemic and Joel had reclaimed his identity as a protective father that he thought he’d lost forever, leading to one of the season’s most shocking scenes during the season finale.

That act — slaughtering an entire medical facility full of Fireflies in Salt Lake City, Utah to save Ellie’s life — set the stage for one of the series’ most shocking and emotional moments in Season 2, Episode 2: a team of soldiers, remnants of that same Fireflies group, show up to exact revenge, brutally murdering Joel right in front of Ellie. Her presence during the murder was set up to be extra gut-wrenching after the first episode made it clear that Joel and Ellie were not on speaking terms due to some unexplored earlier conflict between them. When Joel was killed, it seemed as though Ellie was prepared to make amends but would never get the chance.

So far, the season has followed Ellie and her girlfriend Dina’s efforts, aided by Jesse (Young Manzino), to hunt down the group that killed Joel in Seattle and avenge his death. “The Price” took a completely different route: no action and only, a single look at an Infected. Our questions about Joel and Ellie’s relationship were answered through flashbacks to each of Ellie’s birthdays in Jackson.

Flashback to Joel’s Childhood

The episode opens with a flashback to Joel’s teenage years in Austin, Texas. His younger brother Tommy has gotten himself into trouble, and he’s terrified that their father is going to come home and beat him. Joel tells him he won’t let that happen.

When the boys’ father, a police officer, arrives, he asks Joel what happened, and Joel attempts to take the blame himself for the incident. His father knows that this is a lie, having already received the information from the officers who responded. Joel drops the act and tells him plainly that he’s not going to let him hurt Tommy.

Joel’s father cracks a pair of beers, offering one to Joel, and tells him about how Joel’s grandfather beat him as a child, at one point breaking his jaw. He transforms from what we are expected to believe is a stern, abusive father into a tender man trying to be better, as he puts it, than his own father, even if he sometimes resorts to the same tactics. He tells Joel he hopes that if one day he is a father, he’ll do it “just a little better than I did.”

This scene taps into the themes of generational trauma that the showrunners said would be a focus of the season and sets the episode up for its most visceral moment later.

Ellie’s Birthdays in Jackson

When Ellie turns 15, Joel surprises her by restoring an acoustic guitar and engraving in the fretboard a moth motif that Ellie had drawn. Joel had promised to teach Ellie to play and strums and sings Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” to her. For those who have seen Episode 5, we know that Ellie attempted to sing the same song using a guitar she found in an abandoned Seattle theater but couldn’t bring herself to sing more than the first line, “If I were to lose you…”

On Ellie’s 16th birthday, Joel takes her on a hike into the nearby wilderness, where he surprises her with an abandoned museum that he found on patrol. Ellie has always dreamed of going to space, and Joel found an old command module on display from the Apollo mission. He gives her a cassette tape that plays audio from the Apollo launch sequence, allowing Ellie to immerse herself in her imagination, vicariously experiencing the launch to space. Seeing her joy, Joel sheds a tear.

Things change a bit on Ellie’s 17th birthday. Joel comes home early with a chocolate cake, hoping to surprise Ellie, but he finds her in her room with a friend, getting a tattoo, smoking marijuana and becoming intimate with the friend, who is also female. His unexpected arrival led to a spat between the two, as prior to this scene, Joel was not aware of Ellie’s sexuality, revealed in the first season. Ellie, incensed, decides to move out to the garage, which Joel agrees to fix up for her after the two reconcile following the argument.

Eugene’s Fate Revealed

On her 19th birthday, Joel finally allows Ellie to go on patrol. Joel tries to choose the safest route for Ellie’s first outing, but soon they’re radioed and asked to go assist another patrol group that was attacked by Infected. When they arrive, they find Eugene, Gail’s husband, has been bitten. Eugene begs to be allowed to speak to his wife again before he is executed, as is protocol for anyone who is infected, but Joel denies his request at first. Ellie begs him to allow Eugene, who still has time before he begins to succumb to his infection, to return to Jackson.

Joel promises Eugene and Ellie that he will make sure that Eugene can say goodbye to Gail, telling Ellie to retrieve their horses before, instead, taking Eugene deeper into the woods and executing him. Ellie is horrified both by his actions and the fact that he lied to her, using the same look and tone he did when he lied to her about the Firefly murder at the end of Season 1. She has recently come to realize that Joel’s story didn’t quite add up and planned to confront him about it.

When they return to Jackson, Joel lies to Gail and tells her that Eugene was brave and took his own life. Ellie, enraged, exposes the truth and tells Gail the truth about Eugene’s execution, fracturing two of Joel’s relationships in Jackson.

Joel’s Confession About What Happened in Salt Lake City

The episode flashes forward to New Year’s Eve in Jackson, when Dina and Ellie were accosted by Seth, and fills a gap in the first episode’s scene where an angry Ellie returns home from the party and heads wordlessly to the garage.

This scene is easily one of the series’ heaviest so far, where it’s revealed that Ellie did not, in fact, retreat to her room after the party, but instead confronted Joel on his porch, forcing him to fess up to his lies about the Fireflies or lose her forever. With each of Ellie’s pointed questions, Joel either nods or shakes his head, becoming more and more emotional with each answer. Ellie asks if the Fireflies really could have used her immunity to cure the Cordyceps infection, a process that would have killed her, and Joel admits that it was true, and he killed the only person who could achieve that.

Ellie accuses him of selfishly stealing from her the opportunity to sacrifice herself to save humanity, but Joel retorts, doubling down on his actions. In his view, he did it “because he loves her, in ways she can’t understand” before telling her that he hopes if she has a child of her own someday that she would try to be “a little bit better than he was,” recalling his own father’s line from the season’s opening scene. He also tells her that he’ll “pay a price” for what he did, referring presumably to the damage it caused to his relationship with Ellie, but also retroactively foreshadowing the Fireflies’ foray to Jackson depicted in the season’s opening episodes.

The episode ends with Ellie saying that she’s unsure if she can ever forgive him, but that she is willing to try, rewriting the impression from the beginning of the season, which suggested that the two had never had a chance to heal their fractured relationship. Unfortunately, as we now know all too well, they never got the chance.


An Emotional Episode, and a Fitting Tribute to a Beloved Character

It’s clear the showrunners weren’t about to let The Last of Us‘s second season end without resolving the tension they set up between Joel and Ellie in the first episode, and they did a masterful job of closing that loop in “The Price.”

This was one of The Last of Us Season 2’s most emotionally heavy episodes outside of the end of the infamous second episode. It rivals some of Season 1’s most well-written, emotionally deep episodes, especially Season 1, Episode 3, “Long, Long Time.” That episode, which featured the love story of Bill and Frank, won Nick Offerman an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor. “The Price” bucks the tension-building, zombie-dodging brutality of earlier episodes in favor of a heartfelt narrative exploring deeper themes of parent-child relationships and generational strife.

At the end of the episode, we see Ellie, having somehow escaped the spore-filled basement and the WLF hospital, making her way back to the theater and, presumably, Dina and Jesse (and Tommy, we hope!), setting up the season’s penultimate episode.

Catch up on all Things ‘The Last of Us’

Find more The Last of Us recaps, character guides and more right here:

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the moths symbolize in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6?

The moths that Ellie is obsessed with in The Last of Us symbolize death, according to Gail. Ellie believes she should have died in Season 1 if it would have saved humanity, and that death follows her.

What song does Joel play for Ellie in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6?

"Future Days" by Pearl Jam, which is also the title of the season's first episode, and the song Ellie tries to play in Seattle.

DIRECTV Insider brings you our views on what’s happening in streaming, t.v., movies and sports. Companies and persons mentioned are not necessarily associated with and do not necessarily endorse DIRECTV. We will disclose sponsored content on our site when we show it to you, and some of the links on the site may be ads or affiliate links which means DIRECTV may earn compensation from your purchases.