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Generally speaking, The Last of Us has taken a lot of care to be a self-sufficient adaptation—a TV series that even someone unfamiliar with the video game can follow along just fine. But that sturdy feeling has started to slip a bit in the last few episodes of season two, as the show introduced the Seraphites and the soldiers of the WLF without a whole lot of context. As discussed in previous weeks, it might be a very long while before that context comes—making recent episodes feel a little lacking.
But Sunday’s episode, “Feel Her Love,” is the first time this season that it’s really felt like knowing the source material would be genuinely helpful. So much happens so quickly—in the shortest episode of the season thus far—that it’s genuinely a little disorienting, even if you’ve played the games.
As writer/co-showrunner Craig Mazin is fond of doing, the episode begins with an original vignette in which a WLF officer (played by Hetienne Park of Hannibal fame) is being interrogated for killing the men under her command. She explains it wasn’t that simple. After hunting down some infected in Seattle’s hospital, she sent a team down to its basement levels, where they disappeared. She then sent another team after them, led by her best soldier, Leon, who radioed back with terrible news: The cordyceps growth beneath is out of control, filling the basement with spores. She listens to Leon’s last moments: The spores are choking him, and he knows he’s doomed, so he tells his commander—his mother—to seal everyone in. As the interrogation concludes, the WLF officer is commended for her sense of duty, and given condolences for her loss.
Here’s the first little annotation worth making: This scene isn’t just setting up the episode’s ending, which takes place in the hospital’s basement levels. It’s also revisiting the show’s most substantial change from the video game. In the PlayStation version of The Last of Us and its sequel, the cordyceps infection spreads via spores, much like other real-world fungi. As you know by now, things are a bit different on the show; the infection spreads via tendrils that penetrate hosts, usually through bites. When the TV version of The Last of Us launched, Mazin and co-showrunner Neil Druckmann talked about this change at length without entirely leaving spores off the table. Now here they are—but it’s not really clear why, other than as further evidence that the cordyceps infection is changing. Those changes, and the hospital basement, are also setting up one of The Last of Us Part II‘s most memorable monsters—but we likely won’t get to see the HBO version of it until the show’s third season.
After the cold open, we then rejoin Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) in the theater where they’re holing up. As Dina works out a safe route to sneak into the hospital, Ellie roots around the theater stage, finding a rack of guitars. She picks one up, plays the first few bars of a song, and then seems to get too emotional to do more. It’s a little strange, considering she just finished playing all of “Take On Me” last episode—but this episode in particular feels like it’s trying to cram in a lot of relevant bits of plot from the game in a very limited span of time.
Ellie had been playing “Future Days” by Pearl Jam. The song also appears in The Last of Us Part II; it’s used in a scene where Joel tells Ellie that he’ll teach her how to play guitar. (It is also the title of the TV show’s season two premiere.) In the game, Joel sits down and plays the first verse of the song, singing lyrics that map very closely to how Joel feels about Ellie. Showing Ellie strum out the beginning of the song here likely means we’ll see this version of Joel (Pedro Pascal) crooning Eddie Vedder’s lyrics himself in a future flashback.
But the rest of the episode is quite grim. The only gap in the WLF patrols lies through a warehouse full of infected—the smart, stalking kind from the premiere. Ellie and Dina are nearly overrun before they’re saved by Jesse (Young Mazino), who reveals he’s been following them with Tommy (Gabriel Luna, mentioned but not yet present) this whole time. Unfortunately, Jesse’s rescue involves very loud gunfire, which draws the attention of the WLF.
Under fire, the trio escapes to a nearby park that the WLF will not follow them into, because it’s controlled by the Seraphites. Almost immediately, Ellie and company run into the cult members, who are performing a ritual disembowelment of a captured WLF soldier. The whole thing is abrupt and cartoonish, as we still don’t really know any of the Seraphites the way we do WLF members—even the cruel ones like Issac Dixon. We won’t be getting to know them here either, as they spot Dina and fire an arrow into her leg, prompting the group to split up. Ellie draws their attention running one direction as she fires her gun, while Jesse carries Dina off to safety.
The logistics of this scene are strange. This is the last we see of Jesse and Dina, and between the Seraphites we saw in the park and the WLF waiting outside the park, it’s hard to feel good about their chances of making it out. Meanwhile, Ellie finds a way to sneak into the hospital—a strange choice, since Dina has just told Ellie that she loves her. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Ellie to barrel onward without making sure Dina is safe.
As far as adaptation quirks go, what’s happening here is largely a ruthless excision. The show is truncating large swathes of The Last of Us Part II that aren’t very plot heavy, but do a lot for pacing, underlining how determined Ellie is. In a video game where solo characters are regularly expected to take on entire armies, excessive gunfights are par for the course. But in live-action television, they would strain credulity. What we get in “Feel Her Love,” then, is some pretty severe tonal whiplash, as the episode’s home stretch suddenly pivots to Ellie’s cold-blooded hunt for Nora (Tati Gabrielle), the first member of Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) team she’s been able to track down.
It’s all in service of an ending that is controversial by design, as was the comparable moment in the video game. After chasing Nora through the hospital, she and Ellie end up in the basement, overrun by spores. As Ellie looks for Nora, you can see two men—one of whom is presumably Leon from the prologue—still alive and wheezing spores into the air. Eventually, Ellie corners Nora, who is choking on the spores. Nora, who remembered Ellie from Joel’s murder (and doesn’t regret the incident one bit), now puts together that Ellie is the rumored immune girl. In a fit of fury, she asks if Ellie knows what Joel did—how he doomed the world to save Ellie. Ellie says she knows, then beats Nora to death with a pipe.
It’s one thing for The Last of Us to depict Ellie saying that she’s going to kill Abby and her team. But watching her follow through on that threat is another. It’s a dark, uncomfortable turn—one that Mazin and director Stephen Williams seem to concede might be hard for viewers to accept, as the episode doesn’t end there. Instead, there’s a quick cutaway to a flashback. Ellie is younger, and happier, and Joel is telling her it’s time to go. It seems like next week, we’ll be going to a happier place, the flashback episode that’s been teased all season—but with only two episodes left to go, this seems like a very precarious place for The Last of Us to pause.
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The post ‘The Last of Us’ Recap: Ellie Gets Reckless, and Commits to a Grim Path. So Does the Show appeared first on Vanity Fair.
