‘The Last of Us’ Explained: Who Are the Seraphites, a.k.a. the Scars?

This may sound outrageous, given the horror of last week’s episode, but The Last of Us has actually been quite kind to viewers in its adaptation of the video game. The show explained Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and her motivation for murdering Joel (Pedro Pascal) up front. The Last of Us Part II waits much longer to reveal why Abby killed Joel, preferring instead to linger on Ellie’s (played on the show by Bella Ramsey) rage and confusion over Joel’s death.

That’s kind of the whole deal of The Last of Us: It’s a franchise about flawed people with imperfect information who are driven by emotion to do terrible things. The audience can expect to eventually get a more complete picture of why they’ve done those things, even if the characters themselves do not. The tension of the story—and the adaptive choices that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are making—lie in when that information comes.

All this is to say: The mysterious new group of bow-wielding hunters we meet this week? They’re called the Seraphites, and The Last of Us will explore them in time. However, it might be a long time before the show explains exactly who they are and what they want. So if you’re looking for a little clarity and limited spoilers, read on.

As the man at the head of the pack of Seraphites explains to the young girl he’s teaching—it’s unclear if she’s his daughter—the Seraphites are a religious cult who believe in a prophet. We’re not told much more about this prophet, other than the fact that she’s been dead for years. Still, her teachings hold strong. According to the game, the Seraphite prophet viewed the cordyceps infection as divine judgment. It inspired her to begin a practice of nomadic asceticism, eschewing modern technology and living off the land. Later in the episode, the Seraphites we met are seemingly killed by Abby’s people—known as the WLF, or the Wolves—which gets at some of the thematic groundwork being laid here. Those two Seraphites might have been in a religious cult, but they seemed all right, and they didn’t deserve to die for it. Right?

Here is where things get thorny. Unlike The Last of Us, a straightforward character drama, its sequel was seemingly more interested in commentary about the real world. According to Druckmann, who is Israeli American, The Last of Us Part II was meant to explore tribalism. He’s given (spoiler-heavy) interviews about how the game’s themes and specific moments were informed by the conflict he witnessed in the West Bank as a child, and his own complicated feelings about Israel and Palestine. As such, the fight between the Wolves and the Scars (which is what the Wolves call the Seraphites) could be likened to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

At least sort of. In the years since the game was released, Druckmann has tried to clarify his intent: “Those feelings, and not my wrestling with those feelings, were the inspiration for the inciting incident. But I have to make this clear because, again, it’s not based on, and it’s not an allegory of, and you can’t point to any group and say, ‘Oh, that’s this group and that’s this group,’” Druckmann said in a 2023 interview with Haaretz.

Druckmann and The Last of Us Part II cowriter Halley Gross have said that they were more expressly concerned with using the game to more generally explore “the cycle of violence.” The association between the WLF-Seraphite conflict and the Israel-Palestine conflict, however, still lingers—and not without reason, as the game’s depiction of its warring factions seemed to map quite well onto the state of affairs in the West Bank at the time it was released.

Because HBO’s The Last of Us is adapting The Last of Us Part II across more than one season, it’s impossible to know how or if it will adjust this aspect of the game’s story as it continues. The game is built around a big, daring pivot, where players abruptly switch to Abby’s perspective for its second half, getting to know the WLF. Abby also gets a different perspective on the Seraphites than Ellie, all in the interest of humanizing every side of the game’s conflict. Whether or not the game successfully pulls this off is an extremely subjective question, and it will be fascinating to watch it play out in a new medium. Mazin, Druckmann, and Gross all have their work cut out for them.

In the brief glimpse we get of them to start, the Seraphites on the show appear extremely faithful to the way they’re presented in the game, with their handmade ponchos and facial scarring. The important thing to take away is that they have been in a long war of attrition with the Washington Liberation Front—the WLF—for control of what was Seattle. Which means that Ellie is on a collision course with both factions, now that she’s left on a mission to find and kill Abby.

Ellie’s storyline this episode is largely original to the show, as she takes time to absorb and process the horror of “Through the Valley.” We pick up three months after the events of that devastating hour. In one of last week’s more interesting departures from the game, Jackson suffered a devastating attack at the same time that Joel was murdered—which means that this week, The Last of Us can make it clear that Ellie isn’t the only person in this universe to suffer major loss. That point may seem unsubtle, but it’s an important thing to stress if The Last of Us wants to continue to stand apart from The Walking Dead—its closest pop-cultural comparison, and an example of the sort of nihilism postapocalyptic stories can devolve into.

With all that in mind, it becomes easier to appreciate all the time this week’s episode takes to show Jackson’s efforts to rebuild and recover—and how the community is responding to its angriest member. When Ellie appears before the Jackson town council and proposes that they form a posse to find justice for Joel, they turn her down. No one, of course, believes Ellie will settle for that answer—not Tommy (Gabriel Luna) or Gail (Catherine O’Hara), who have a conversation about whether Ellie has been influenced by Joel’s rage at the world or is simply a kindred spirit to him. And definitely not Dina (Isabela Merced), who, rather than watching Ellie ride off half-cocked, has spent the last three months doing all the research she knows her friend won’t—learning about the WLF, planning a route to find them, pluckily insisting on accompanying her.

It’s really worth pausing for a moment and celebrating just how great Merced is in the role of Dina. Not just because she brings a healthy amount of spunk to an otherwise pretty dour show, but for the way she lingers even between chipper moments. Dina is making a difficult decision for the sake of love, and hoping that her support will get through to Ellie at a time when nothing else will.

And if that doesn’t work soon, they both might be in dire trouble. After a solemn stop at Joel’s grave, where Ellie leaves a few coffee beans in tribute—the 2013 video game took a moment to stress that coffee is basically gone post-pandemic, and Joel really missed it—the two make it to Seattle in no time at all. And unbeknownst to them, they are gravely mistaken about the WLF. It’s not limited to Abby’s small group. It’s a whole damn army.