‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 5
Early in this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” Dina tells Ellie a story about what her life was like when she was 8 years old, surviving the apocalypse in a cabin in a sparsely populated forest north of Santa Fe, N.M. One day back then, Dina grabbed a gun and went for a walk, without permission. When she returned, she found a raider in their house and her mother and sister dead.
She killed the intruder — the first person she ever killed. Ever since, Dina has wondered what would have happened if she had been home when the raider arrived. Would she have been forced to watch him beat her family to death?
There are different conclusions we could draw from all this. On the one hand, Dina suggests her experience helps her empathize with Ellie’s decision to hunt down Abby. Dina knows that if she had not killed her family’s murderer right away, she would have tracked him down until the job was done.
But was her in-the-moment act of vengeance “justice,” exactly? Or just survival? Dina says that even if her family had hurt the raider’s family first, they would not have deserved to die the way they did; and she says that Joel did not deserve to be brutally slain, no matter what he did. Dina never proposes this directly — and would maybe disagree strongly with I am about to say — but the logical endpoint of her argument is that no one “deserves” to be killed. The act of taking a life should be a necessity, not a notion.
Dina concludes her monologue by giving Ellie a choice, to press on or head home. Interestingly, Dina insists that there is “no right answer,” which is subtly different from “no wrong answer.” (It’s as if she were saying that all of their choices are equally cursed.) Anyway, Ellie sees only one option, so the mission continues.
This week’s episode is ripe with bad vibes. For one thing, this is now the third week in a row that we have spent in Seattle, and after the variety of locations and stories that helped distinguish “The Last of Us” Season 1 from other end-times TV dramas, a certain exhausting repetitiveness is starting to set in here. The story feels a bit stuck.
The characters may also be sensing this. Dina and Ellie could be leading a relatively happy and productive life in Jackson, getting ready to raise a baby together. I think Ellie grasps this deep down, despite all her action hero bravado. Before these two leave their shelter at the Pinnacle Theater, Ellie kills time by playing one of the guitars still sitting on the stage; but after quietly singing the line “If I ever were to lose you,” she freezes. It’s as though she knows what she is putting at stake. When Dina comes in and says she has figured out a plan, Ellie quickly hardens back up.
The problem is that neither Ellie nor Dina fully understands what they are walking into — as is made clear by this episode’s prologue, set inside the Wolves’ Lakehill Hospital station.
In the prologue, a veteran Wolf, Hanrahan (whom we met in Isaac’s flashback last week), debriefs Elise Park (Hettienne Park), a squadron leader who has just lost some of her best soldiers. It seems Elise’s son Leon led a team tasked with clearing any remaining infected out of Lakehill’s basement levels, which have been hard for the Wolves to reach because of collapsed stairwells.
Level B1 was fine, but Leon’s group found the walls of B2 covered in cordyceps. This fungus cluster also generated airborne spores, infecting the soldiers. Elise sealed off the basement entirely, leaving her own child to die.
Dina and Ellie don’t really know much about the Wolves except that some of them used to be Fireflies. They know even less about the Wolves’ enemies, the Seraphites, except that the cult follows a female prophet and prefers bows and arrows to modern technology. (“Ever hear of Amish people?” Dina asks Ellie. “Maybe the Scars are like that.”) The two young women certainly do not know about a basement full of airborne cordyceps. All that is working in Dina and Ellie’s favor as they march to Lakehill is that the Wolves do not know they are coming. Working against them, according to Dina: “What we’re doing is reckless.”
Dina has mapped out a route to the hospital that leads them through a building that — for some reason — the Wolves do not patrol. She and Ellie expect the place to be full of infected but decide it is worth the risk, to maintain an element of surprise. When they arrive, they find the space haunted but empty. “Just like us,” Dina jokes.
As has been the case over the past few episodes, the ladies’ flirty banter brings some fun energy to otherwise tense scenes. They know that finding a seemingly abandoned building does not mean they are safe from monsters, only that they are unlikely to run into a horde. So they strategize, with Dina emphasizing to Ellie that they should use their guns as a last resort, so as not to alert the Wolves.
Ellie is insulted that her girlfriend thinks she just shoots indiscriminately, but Dina says: “You’re a little crazy and that’s exciting. It’s one of the reasons I love you.” (Ellie, wide-eyed and grinning: “You love me?”)
But while they don’t encounter a horde, Dina and Ellie do come across one of the strange creatures they first met outside Jackson: the ones with the protruding antlers, who are smart enough to hide and stalk rather than attack in a blind rage. There are several of these super-creeps — too many for Dina and Ellie to outflank. Ellie tells Dina to run into a nearby metal cage while she takes advantage of her immunity to bait the beasts. Despite their previously stated intentions, the couple ends up doing a lot of shooting. But who can blame them, given the way these monsters are ripping, clawing and biting?
Just when it looks as if Dina and Ellie may be zombie chow (or at least Dina … Ellie is still the star of this show), they are saved by someone wholly unexpected. It turns out Jesse has been tracking them across the Northwest, alongside Tommy, who is elsewhere in Seattle. Jesse shoots the attackers and escorts his friends out of the murder-building and into a nearby park, where the Wolves refuse to go.
If these three were not in such a panic, they might be thinking exactly what those of us watching at home are shouting at the screen: that The Wolves probably stay out of this park because the Seraphites’ camp is there. Sure enough, within minutes of ducking into the foliage, our heroes hear an eerie whistling and see torches in the darkness. From their cover, Dina, Ellie and Jesse watch a Seraphite priest (Maurice Dean Wint) hang and disembowel a Wolf prisoner, showing no interest in any bargain the man has to offer. (“Now he is free,” the priest insists.) Then Dina is shot by an arrow, and everyone scatters.
The episode ends with Ellie — almost by accident — fleeing to the hospital. Once inside, she has the good/bad fortune to run into one of Abby’s Jackson posse, Nora (Tati Gabrielle), whom Ellie knew was stationed at Lakehill. The two of them tussle, and in the melee they end up in an elevator shaft, which drops them to Level B2.
What they find there is deeply unsettling, with the cordyceps cluster’s usual psychedelic colors and shapes joined by little bursts of spores, emitting from the human figures pinned to the wall (one of whom, played by Cheonguk Park, is Leon). Nora chokes on these particulates and accuses Ellie of killing them both, to which the immune Ellie says, with a slight smirk, “Did I?”
Ellie and Nora don’t have much time to talk before Nora dies — a process Ellie speeds along by clubbing the Wolf repeatedly with a metal pipe. Once Nora realizes Ellie is the fabled “immune girl,” she tells Ellie what Joel did in Salt Lake City: how he killed Abby’s father, who could have saved the world. Ellie says she knows all this and does not care.
People keep trying to tell Ellie stories — cautionary tales, mostly. But she is disinclined to heed them. The only story she wants to hear is the one that ends with a dead Abby. Although Dina has warned her that this ending will probably not be happy, right now it is all that Ellie can imagine.
Side Quests
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I said that this episode ends with Ellie beating a dying Nora, but that is not strictly true. There is a short coda that flashes back to Joel and Ellie in Jackson, smiling and ready to face another day together. I suspect this is setting up a full flashback episode next week. Will we find out how Ellie learned about Joel’s lies? Will we see how Joel killed Eugene? Stay tuned!
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Dina gets to show off some impressive smarts as she triangulates the position of the Wolves using maps and radio chatter. Jesse is later able to use Dina’s work to find the two young women in the scary building, and as they escape into the park, he praises her skills. He knows Ellie was not responsible for the mapping because she is, in Dina’s words, “nonschool-oriented.”
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The smart zombies make the most upsetting noises, sounding like human moans. It makes me wonder if these creatures are getting closer to developing the power of speech.
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The closing credits song is “Present Tense,” by the Seattle favorites Pearl Jam. It could be read as an answer to the Pearl Jam song Ellie starts to sing at the Pinnacle Theater: the more forward-looking “Future Days.” Or it could be heard as a companion to Dina’s big speech, given its final lines: “You can spend your time alone re-digesting past regrets, / Or you can come to terms and realize / You’re the only one who cannot forgive yourself. / Makes much more sense to live in the present tense.”
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