This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, now streaming on Max.
This second season of The Last of Us has been simultaneously more complicated and simpler. There are more ongoing characters, between the gang from Jackson and the people in Seattle. And cordyceps itself keeps evolving; this fifth installment pits Ellie and Dina against a group of smart infected who can work together and make traps, and introduces a new cordyceps strain that’s become airborne, and can infect people who are never touched. There are things we know that our heroes don’t, and other things we get hints of but are only fully understood by the various Seattle factions.
Yet the story of the season is so hyper-focused on this single goal of Ellie’s — a goal that seems more misguided with each passing week, this one in particular — that it often feels substantially more straightforward, and at times thinner, than Ellie and Joel’s cross-country journey. Season One had an end goal in mind of getting Ellie to the Firefly base in Salt Lake City, but it had room for various detours and pit stops, where this is all about Ellie and Dina seeking revenge on Abby, with these two latest episodes each spanning a single day. There are action set pieces — this week has the partners battling a group of smart infected and fleeing the Seraphites, followed by Ellie chasing Abby’s sidekick Nora through a hospital — but in terms of moving the story along, not a lot happens.
So if you’re not engaging with the revenge plot, there’s not a lot to hold onto in an episode like this —at least, not until its closing moments, which bring back Pedro Pascal in a glimpse of Ellie’s life with Joel before his murder.
Early on, Ellie thinks some more about Dina’s pregnancy and finally seems to recognize what a terrible decision it was to come to Seattle in the first place, and how particularly stupid it is to stay — not just because both women are excited about the idea of raising a child together, but because the city has proven to be much more dangerous than they assumed when they set out from Jackson. But when she brings her concern to Dina, Dina tells her the story about the first man she killed: a raider who massacred the rest of her family when she was only eight. “Would it make any difference if my family had hurt his people first?” she asks, equating her situation to Ellie’s with Abby. “No. No. And if I hadn’t killed him, if he had gotten away, I promise you, I would have hunted him down forever. Forever.” She says it’s up to Ellie to decide whether to stay or go. And despite desperately wanting to be a dad, Elie can’t bring herself to hop on Shimmer and head home. So on with this stubborn, pointless quest they continue.
Liane Hentscher/HBO
We get some more glimpses of the Wolves on their own, though in this case it’s mostly to provide context for what happens when Ellie chases Nora through the hospital and they wind up on a floor full of airborne infected. That sequence features some of the most memorably creepy and disgusting imagery of the series so far, with cordyceps spores floating through the air and out of the mouths of the poor Wolves who had the bad luck to be on this floor before they realized the nature of this new threat.
Mostly, though, we are in Ellie and Dina’s POV, so when they run into smart infected, or nearly get captured and killed by the Seraphites, we’re as in the dark about what’s going on as they are(*). The Seraphites continue to feel like something out of the sillier later seasons of The Walking Dead, unfortunately. The Wolves are a bit more well-rounded, but it feels like we’re getting the exact wrong amount of them: not enough for any of them feel developed as characters and more than just cannon fodder for this revenge mission, but too much for it to feel like we’re fully embedded within Ellie and Dina’s camp.
(*) In each situation, we’re reminded that each half of the duo has a superpower of sorts: Dina has incredibly acute hearing, so she usually can get a sense of how many infected are in a space, and roughly where they are; while Ellie is so small, she can hide in places that her would-be killers simply can’t enter.
Jesse shows up to rescue his friends when they’re on the verge of being overwhelmed by the smart infected, in a development that feels much too improbable even after he explains how he and Tommy tracked them down. Having more characters means the show in theory isn’t as dependent on any one person the way it was when Ellie and Joel were the only ones who mattered. But contrivances now become necessary to keep some of the new supporting figures in play in a story like this.
When she escapes from the Seraphites, Ellie has a choice between going to catch up with Jesse and Dina, or continuing on to the hospital in hopes of finding Abby. She remains more concerned with the mission than with Dina, so of course she goes to the hospital, where she finds only Nora, who feels bad about Ellie having to watch Joel die, but not about the murder itself. When they wind up on the airborne-infected floor, Nora is startled to realize that Ellie is immune — that she is “the immune girl” the Wolves weren’t entirely sure was real(*).
(*) This raises a question: If Abby knew that Joel had killed her father and the others to protect this allegedly immune girl, and she saw Ellie on the floor of that house in Jackson screaming like Joel was her father, how did Abby not put two and two together? And, given how she responded to Joel killing her dad, why in the world would she leave Ellie alive?
A dying Nora tells Ellie about what Joel did in Salt Lake City, naively thinking that this will convince Ellie of the rightness of their cause, and encourage her to leave the rest of Nora’s friends alone. But we discover that Ellie already knew — whether she figured it out that first time Joel lied to her, or sometime in the ensuing five years — and doesn’t care. She grabs a pipe that’s not unlike a certain golf club, and begins to torture Nora with it to get her to give up Abby’s location.
Hurt people hurt people — even if they should have more important things to worry about at this stage of the story.
