When we last saw Joel and Ellie in the Season 1 finale of The Last of Us, they were both coming to terms with everything that had gone down at the Fireflies’ Salt Lake City hospital base.
While Ellie (Bella Ramsey) was unconscious for the entirety of the killing spree that Joel (Pedro Pascal) went on to save her from being sacrificed in the name of finding a cure for the zombie fungus pandemic that had devastated humanity, by the end of the episode, it seemed like she intuitively had a pretty good sense of what Joel had done. Despite responding with a hesitant “OK” when Joel swore he wasn’t lying about the Firefly doctors not needing her because they had already found other immune people and none of them could provide a cure, it was pretty clear from Ellie’s face that she had figured out the truth.
Now, more than two years after the Season 1 finale first aired, The Last of Us is returning for a highly-anticipated second season and preparing for its own time jump. Based on the acclaimed video game franchise and created by the game’s mastermind, Neil Druckmann, and Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin, Season 1 of HBO’s post-apocalyptic epic centered on the father-daughter relationship blossoming between hardened survivor Joel and 14-year-old orphan Ellie as they traveled west across America 20 years after modern civilization was destroyed by the Cordyceps brain infection.
Here’s what to remember from the first season of The Last of Us before Season 2 premieres on April 13.
What happened between Joel and Ellie?
Joel was originally hired by Marlene (Merle Dandridge), leader of the Firefly rebel group, to smuggle Ellie out of the Boston quarantine zone governed by military authority FEDRA and take her to the old Massachusetts State House. However, he soon learned Ellie had been bitten three weeks earlier by a stage 3 infected “clicker” and was immune to the Cordyceps fungus, a revelation that led Marlene to believe Ellie’s DNA might be the key to creating a vaccine that could fight the infection.
Although he was still wary of Ellie, after discovering that the Fireflies who were supposed to be waiting for her at the state house were dead, Joel eventually agreed to escort her across the country to try to find the facility where they were working on a cure. Naturally, as the two traveled and faced a variety of life-threatening post-apocalyptic perils together, they formed a tight-knit bond that gave them both something new to live for.
Why is Ellie immune?
In the Season 1 finale, we learned that Ellie’s mom and Marlene’s close friend Anna (Ashley Johnson, who voiced Ellie in the video games), was bitten by an infected while giving birth to Ellie. That resulted in traces of Cordyceps entering Ellie’s system through her umbilical cord and, according to Marlene, producing “a kind of chemical messenger” that “makes normal Cordyceps think that [Ellie is] Cordyceps.”
However, after Marlene revealed this information, she made the mistake of telling Joel that the Firefly surgeon was planning to harvest Ellie’s brain without her consent in order to gain access to the immune cells and try to reverse-engineer a vaccine from them.
“Our doctor, he thinks that the Cordyceps in Ellie has grown with her since birth,” she explained. “He’s going to remove it from her, multiply the cells in a lab, produce those chemical messengers, and then we can give it to everyone. He thinks it could be a cure.”
Joel then proceeded to massacre almost everyone inside the hospital, including the surgeon, to rescue Ellie, sacrificing humanity’s chance at a cure in order to save her. “They were runnin’ some tests on you and some others,” Joel lied to her when she started to come to from the anesthesia. “Turns out there’s a whole lot more like you, people who are immune. Dozens of ’em. And the doctors, they couldn’t make any of it work. They’ve actually stopped lookin’ for a cure.”
What to expect at the start of Season 2
Season 2 of the show is set to jump five years ahead to a point in time where Joel and Ellie have grown deeply estranged while living at the settlement that Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) established in Jackson, Wyo. However, it won’t be long before a brutal act of violence changes everything.
While we won’t spoil what that act of violence is or any other specific plot points from The Last of Us Part II video game, we will say that you can likely expect a significantly darker narrative than Season 1 that pushes the story to new extremes. But even diehard fans of the game apparently won’t know everything that’s coming.
“I love the changes that we’ve made,” Druckmann told Variety. “It’s a different version of that story, but its DNA is in there. Maybe more than excited, I’m really curious what their reaction will be.”
The post Everything You Need to Remember About The Last of Us Before Season 2 appeared first on TIME.
