It’s been well documented on this site that I’m not much of a gamer. It’s is also well documented that I am a huge and unabashed Pearl Jam fan. Those two facts about me collided during last night’s viewing of the most recent episode of The Last of Us on HBO.

Though I am a non-gamer, I knew enough about the broad strokes of The Last of Us without knowing too much about the details of the story. Needless to say, I’ve been properly shocked by some of this season’s twists and turns. Surely, this is what non-book-readers felt watching the Red Wedding!

One thing I was definitely aware of was the game’s connection to one of my favorite bands. The song “Future Days,” from Pearl Jam’s 2013 album Lightning Bolt, features significantly in the storyline for The Last of Us Part II. I know this because Eddie performed it live during the 2020 Game Awards (ironically during a pandemic).

Now, having not played the game, I don’t know how the song fits into the story. Is it a Pearl Jam song in-universe, or are we to believe it’s a song Joel wrote and taught to Ellie? For the game, it ultimately doesn’t matter. The song is thematically and emotionally resonant to the characters and — as Troy Baker explains in the video above — to the creator, as well.

The other reason that it doesn’t matter in the game is because if it is a Pearl Jam song, the timeline fits since Lightning Bolt was released in the fall of 2013, right around the time of the outbreak in the story of the first game. Joel could have been listening to the album and singing the song to his daughter in the hours and days before the world ended.

But when the game was turned into a TV show, the writers shifted the timeline back by 10 years. Instead of the outbreak happening in 2013, the world ended in the fall of 2003, a full decade — and two albums — before “Future Days” was written. In fact, I assumed the showrunners acknowledged this in season one when they had Ellie listening to the time-appropriate Pearl Jam song “All or None” from the album Riot Act.

I figured this was their way of demonstrating Pearl Jam’s importance to Joel and Ellie without being anachronistic about it. For a while, I even assumed they might be replacing “Future Days” with “All or None” as the song the two bond over. I even said as much back in September when HBO released a (since-removed) trailer featuring “Future Days.” How can the song exist in the show’s timeline?

Well, that question was answered the second Ellie picked up a guitar, strummed those familiar chords, and sang, “If I ever were to lose you…” The next episode will likely be a flashback to Joel teaching her the song on the guitar, and maybe they’ll use that opportunity to explain this rift in the space-time continuum.

In the meantime, the grunge legends have leaned into their connection to The Last of Us by sneak-dropping a four-track EP of the songs that have been featured on the show, including the amazing re-interpretation of “Present Tense” — off 1996’s No Code (my personal fave PJ album) — that played over the credits last night.

That said, the star of the show, of course, is “Future Days.” They even released a brand new animated video for the 12-year old song on their official YouTube channel after the episode aired:

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how they incorporate the song into the show. Knowing how much it means to the characters, and the fans, is enough justification for its inclusion. Sometimes, we nerds care too much about continuity and “canon” — see the current online discourse about Andor and K-2SO’s origins, for example — and forget the story is the most important thing. (Which begs the question, why did they even move the beginning of the outbreak to ’03 anyway? What narrative purpose did that serve?)

Besides, I’m probably the only one watching who gives this much of a shit about late-era Pearl Jam to even be this worked up about it. So go ahead Ellie, sing the song and keep believing in your future days.