Man, I’ll be honest – when I first fired up The Last of Us back in 2013, I wasn’t expecting much. My daughter had been bugging me to try it for months, kept saying it was different from other zombie games, but come on… how different could it really be? Then I hit that Jackson settlement section around 2 AM one night, been playing for hours straight, and suddenly the whole thing shifted. Joel seeing his brother Tommy again wasn’t just some plot point to move the story along – it was this raw look at who Joel used to be, what he’d lost, and what scared the hell out of him about caring for someone again.
So when HBO said they were making a TV show out of it, you know what scene I was worried about? This one. Could they really capture that mess of emotions – the love, the resentment, the fear – that made the original so damn good?
Episode 6, “Kin,” answered that question with a big fat yes. And honestly? In some ways they did it better than the game did, gave it more room to breathe instead of rushing through it.
First thing that hit me watching Joel and Ellie approach Jackson’s gates – Pedro Pascal just gets it. The way Joel slows down, you can see him fighting with himself about whether he even wants to be there. It’s not just about seeing family again, it’s about facing a version of himself he’s been running from for twenty years. My wife Linda was watching with me (she’s never touched the games) and she leans over and goes, “He looks terrified.” Bingo. She picked up exactly what made this scene work.
The show gives Joel and Tommy’s relationship way more time than the game could. In the game, sure, you get that initial awkwardness, but then infected show up and everything gets pushed into quick conversations between gunfights. Here we get this whole dinner scene that really digs into their history. Gabriel Luna plays Tommy perfectly – you believe he’s the younger brother who both looks up to Joel and needs to keep his distance. There’s this moment where Tommy mentions “the things we did to survive” and his face… you see the shame there, but also the justification. These guys have shared trauma they’re both trying to deal with differently.
What really got me was how they handled Joel’s PTSD. The game hints at it, shows it through his actions, but the TV show just lays it out there. When Joel tells Tommy he’s not sleeping, that he’s scared of how much he cares about Ellie, that he wakes up every morning with this specific dread… Jesus. “I’m worried about what I would do if something happened to her.” Pedro Pascal’s voice cracks just a little on that line and I’m getting choked up sitting on my couch.
My buddy Jake texted me right after this aired: “That’s exactly what I thought Joel was feeling in the game but they never actually said it.” That’s what makes this adaptation work – it’s not just copying scenes, it’s digging into all the emotional stuff that us game players had to figure out on our own and bringing it right to the surface.
They did something smart with Maria too. In the game she’s barely there, just Tommy’s wife who runs things. Here she’s got her own thing going, her own perspective on how to rebuild civilization. That conversation she has with Ellie about birth control and community planning – that’s a woman’s viewpoint we didn’t really get in the original. While Joel’s falling apart talking to Tommy, Maria’s showing Ellie what a future might actually look like. Pretty clever parallel there.
Pedro Pascal and Gabriel Luna… you buy that these guys are brothers with complicated history. When Tommy mentions getting married, Pascal’s face does this tiny thing that shows he’s genuinely happy for Tommy but also hit with pain about everything he’s lost. Luna matches him perfectly – you see Tommy’s guilt about leaving Joel behind, but also his right to build his own life. Watch their body language through the whole reunion. They start far apart, literally keeping distance, and gradually move closer as they hash things out. It’s like watching trust rebuild in real time.
Joel asking Tommy to take Ellie to the Fireflies – man, that’s brutal. This is a guy who never admits weakness, never asks for help, and here he is basically saying “I can’t do this.” There’s this moment where he says “I was supposed to save her” and you realize he’s talking about Sarah as much as Ellie. The show makes it crystal clear that Joel’s mission with Ellie is all tangled up with his failure to save his daughter twenty years ago.
My friend Rick, who’s got two kids, couldn’t shut up about this scene. “That’s exactly how it feels,” he told me. “That constant terror that you won’t be able to keep them safe.” The show taps into something every parent deals with while keeping it specific to Joel’s particular nightmare.
Tommy’s found a way to be responsible to a community, to a wife, to building something for the future. Joel’s been focused purely on day-to-day survival, keeping everyone at arm’s length. The question hanging over their reunion is which brother chose right. Is it better to connect and risk losing everything, like Tommy? Or stay detached and just focus on not dying, like Joel? The show doesn’t give you an easy answer, but it definitely shows both approaches cost you something.
Ellie’s side of this is just as good. Bella Ramsey nails that combination of teenage attitude and real fear when she confronts Joel about dumping her with Tommy. “Everyone I’ve ever cared for has either died or left me.” You hear Riley in that line, her mom, Marlene – everyone who’s shaped her fear of abandonment. It’s perfect dramatic irony – Joel’s terrified of getting too attached, Ellie’s terrified of being abandoned, they’re both afraid of the exact same thing but handling it completely opposite ways.
Jackson itself becomes this character in the episode. The game shows you it’s a functioning settlement – guards, people working together, the basics. The show goes deeper. You see meals being cooked, kids playing, movie nights, all the tiny details that make it feel like an actual community instead of just people hiding behind walls. That dinner scene with the home cooking and normal conversation feels almost shocking after all the tension and violence we’ve been watching.
What makes this sequence so important is how it changes everything between Joel and Ellie. Before Jackson, Joel’s just doing a job, protecting cargo he happened to get attached to. After Jackson – after he tries to abandon her and then chooses to catch up and continue their journey – he’s made a conscious choice to embrace what he’s been fighting against. When he catches up to her after she takes that horse, it’s not about finishing the mission anymore. It’s about Joel choosing to open himself up to getting hurt again.
The HBO version gets what made the game special while expanding it in ways that feel natural. It understands The Last of Us was always about the relationships people form when everything goes to hell, about how survival means different things to different people, about how the scariest things we face aren’t the zombies but our own capacity to love and lose.
When the episode ended, I found myself thinking about my own brother. We’ve taken different paths over the years, had our falling outs and reconciliations, but family ties… they bend but they don’t break easily. That’s what tells me this adaptation really worked – it doesn’t just recreate what made the original good, it finds new ways to hit you emotionally that stick with you after you turn off the TV. Joel and Tommy’s reunion isn’t just a faithful recreation of a game scene, it’s this powerful look at family, forgiveness, and what it costs to open yourself up to caring about someone in a world that punishes you for every emotional risk you take.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
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