The Last Of Us Season Two, Episode Five Recap: Seeing Red

As Ellie finally reaches her first target on her revenge tour, her mask finally starts to slip

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Ellie finally got a little bit of revenge this week. How are we feeling? Not as cathartic as you thought it was gonna be, huh? HBO’s take on The Last of Us is finally back in the trenches after a few weeks of levity, or at the very least with its grisly revenge plot out of sight and mostly out of mind. It’s been interesting watching newcomers react to the show, roaring and ready for Ellie to exact her pound of flesh. But, unlike the game, the first taste the show gives us of her revenge tour starts with something just as disturbing as Joel’s death three episodes ago. It’s a complicated scene to unpack for several reasons, but we have a fair bit of television to get through before we get there.

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Something in the air

This episode starts in a Washington Liberation Front base. We see Hanrahan, whom we briefly saw Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) meeting in the opening flashback last week, walking through one of the group’s bases with dozens of troops looking at her with concern. Whatever she’s there to do must be important because the tension is palpable. She enters a room where a lone woman named Sergeant Park sits at a table with a cigarette in her hand. Hanrahan tells her that her soldiers are clearly very loyal to her, but Park thinks their worry might be misplaced, since if she were getting executed, she imagines Isaac would have come to pull the trigger himself. Hanrahan says Isaac is off dealing with more important matters, like fighting the Seraphite forces elsewhere in Seattle. This woman apparently killed several W.L.F. soldiers; however. So, despite her confidence based on Isaac’s absence, the jury’s still out on whether she’ll be executed.

Park, we learn, was in charge of securing a hospital, and when her squad cleared the ground floor of infected, they headed to the basement where the original cordyceps patients were supposedly brought back when the outbreak began over 20 years prior. However, aside from the fungus that had grown onto the walls as it does anywhere the infected proliferate, they found no sign of infected. But as the squads investigated the basement floors, they started to exhibit respiratory symptoms along with the early signs of infection. There’s only one possibility: The infection is in the air. The squads above the basement floors hadn’t gotten sick, so they sealed the basements shut with their less fortunate comrades inside and fell back to the base. After Park recounts her tragic tale, Hanrahan says that as far as the W.L.F. is concerned, her actions were heroic and ensured the longevity of the group’s operations. She’s exonerated and left to mourn her squad, her son included.

When season one aired, The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin made a big hoopla of changing how the cordyceps infection spreads. In the games, it’s an airborne illness, spread via spores that hang visibly in the air in environments where the fungus grows, but the show did away with this. Mazin admits that was done in part so that Pedro Pascal’s face wouldn’t be obscured by a gas mask every other episode. But now that we’re coming up on a scene that relies on the use of the original airborne virus, this seems like the show’s way of weaving it back into the world. Right now, only the W.L.F. seems to know about this, and it seems to only really be a danger in long-incubated spaces like the hospital basement Park’s squad was inspecting, so I doubt we’ll see Ellie and Dina putting gas masks on anytime soon.

The boys are back in town

Back at the theater, Dina is still on radio duty, listening to the W.L.F. chatter and marking up a map of the city. Ellie has managed to get the power running in the old building, but still wants to help Dina with whatever she can. Dina gives Ellie light shit for not being “school oriented” as she triangulates the probable location of their targets based on what she hears on the radio. When it becomes clear that Ellie’s out of her depth, she leaves Dina to figure it out. As she leaves, Dina calls out to her and just silently smiles at her when she turns around. “I just wanted to take another look at you.”

Ellie explores the theater a bit more and finds the remains of a musical outfit that was performing on the stage some time before the outbreak. The show does a good job of pulling from the games’ soundtracks at exactly the right moments, like here, when it uses the gorgeous “Vanishing Grace” from the first game, which was most notably used when Joel and Ellie got a brief break from all the horrors to pet some giraffes in Salt Lake City. It gives this moment where Ellie looks at the empty theater a sense of cozy, nostalgic safety after the terrors of running away from infected and a crazed militia.

She finally stops when she finds a line of guitars just waiting to be played. She picks up an acoustic one and sits on a stool on the stage to start playing. The guitar is miraculously somewhat in tune, so she only has to turn a few knobs to get it where she needs it to be. Then, she finally starts picking away at the strings and plays a few measures of “Future Days” by Pearl Jam before putting the guitar down in a huff.

Any Last of Us game fan knows this song immediately, but this is the first time we’ve heard it performed on the show, even if it’s only for a few moments. The funny thing about the use of this Pearl Jam deep cut in the show is that there is no plausible reason for it to exist in the show’s timeline. For some reason, HBO’s series begins in 2003, rather than in 2013 as the games do. “Future Days” is from the grunge band’s 2013 album Lightning Bolt, which wasn’t even out by the time the outbreak began in the game’s timeline on September 26. Naughty Dog explained this by pointing out the song had been performed live and posted to YouTube months before the album was released, but that explanation doesn’t work for the show, since neither the song nor the video platform existed in 2003. Will the show have its own explanation for why a song that shouldn’t exist does? Or is it just too important to the story of The Last of Us to leave out, even if it makes no sense?

Dina has mapped out a way for Ellie to reach the hospital where Nora is stationed, but her plan does require them to go through a building that the W.L.F. seemingly avoids. The only reason they can think of is that it’s likely overrun with infected. How does she know this? The W.L.F. never shut up on the radio. Ellie points out this is stupid, considering they’re just giving away their positions to their enemies, but based on the fact that the “scars” they’re facing use archaic weaponry and seem to be some kind of religious cult, Dina hypothesizes that they may not use technology, and she wonders if they’re like the Amish. (Sidenote: Dina, you know who the Amish were, but not what a Pride Flag is? What are they teaching about the old world in these post-apocalypse schools?)

Image: HBO

The two head out and kill some time talking about baby names for the bun in the oven. Dina jokes that if it’s a girl, she’ll name the baby “Ellie,” and if it’s a boy, “Elijah.” Before she can offer a more serious option, the two stumble upon the bodies of a group of massacred Seraphites, which makes Dina sick to her stomach. Ellie tries to get her to turn back for her and the baby’s safety, but Dina presses on, offering her own reason for why she intends to see this through with Ellie. She brings up how Ellie never asked about the first person she killed after she’d asked Ellie about hers on the way into the city, and she proceeds to tell the story now. Dina recounts how, when she was eight years old, she lived in a cabin north of Santa Fe and would get bored because she wasn’t allowed to go outside to play. Despite her homophobic mother’s protests, Dina went out one day to explore, but brought a gun with her for protection. But, as it turned out, she wasn’t the one who needed it; her mother and sister did back home.

A raider entered the cabin while Dina was gone and killed her family, and was still there when she ran back upon hearing the screams. Ellie didn’t kill her first human until she was a teenager, but Dina was half that age when she shot the raider for what he’d done to her family. Ellie apologizes for not asking before, but as she inquires about how she made it to Jackson, Dina says it doesn’t matter because it’s the past. What matters is right now. Joel didn’t deserve what happened to him any more than her mother and sister did, she says, and if the person who killed her family had gotten away, she would have hunted him down, too.

The Last of Us has probably embellished Dina’s story more than any other this season, and with each passing episode, I’m more curious where her journey ends because it’s so starkly different from the source material. In The Last of Us Part II, Dina is devoted to Ellie’s cause because she’s being supportive of her girlfriend, whereas the show has gone out of its way to give her more personal stakes than before, and at times, she seems almost as consumed by the need for vengeance as Ellie. Maybe she still ends up in the same place as she does in Part II, but the more the show changes her, the more I wonder. The show’s given me zero reason to have any confidence in its vision of this story, but I guess I’ll take cautious intrigue over being bored and annoyed the whole time.

Ellie decides to let Dina stay with her, and they finally reach this mystery building the W.L.F. refuses to enter. Inside is an office that seems empty at first glance, but the militia is still keeping an eye on it with a searchlight. At least, they’re looking at the perimeter around it. Dina notes that they haven’t positioned searchlights to see inside the building itself, which means the girls should be able to move freely throughout without worrying about the wolves. She offers to scout out the next room before Ellie says she should be the one taking point, since she can’t get infected. Now that the facade is over, the team can be a little more tactical. Ellie doesn’t see any infected, and Dina surmises that there are probably, at most, a few strays somewhere in the building rather than a full-blown horde. The two get into a little lovers’ spat when Dina accuses Ellie of being a loose cannon with her firearms, but says that her “crazy” side is exciting and one of the reasons she loves her. When she says the L-word (Lesbians), Ellie is a little starstruck and nearly says it back before Dina interrupts and says, “Oh, I know.”

I am glad to see some of this confidence Dina exudes redirected at Ellie now that the relationship is official. But damn, these girls are slamming their feet on the gas like the most stereotypical U-haul lesbians. I keep getting pulled back and forth between how much I enjoy Merced’s performance and how the pacing of this relationship has been thrown all out of whack by Mazin’s timeline. Yeah, Dina has pretty much always loved Ellie, so dropping this less than 24 hours after they confessed their feelings and decided to raise a child together isn’t entirely out of the question. But damn, it sure feels like this relationship is being fast-tracked without taking a breath to accommodate the TV show format.

The two move through the building and it’s unnervingly quiet, until they reach a boiler room and find the mangled remains of a wolf caught by an infected. Not just any infected, though; it’s another stalker.

But it’s just one of them, right? If they coordinate, they can probably take it out, no problem. But unfortunately it’s not going to be that simple, because an entire pack of stalkers starts to circle the two. Dina starts to panic, and Ellie tells her to take shelter in a gated area while she lures them away. Dina’s not about this plan, but Ellie reminds her that she can get bitten as many times as she has to without getting infected. There’s no other choice right now. She sends Dina off with a kiss, and the girls get to work. Dina reaches the gated area and is able to seal herself inside, but the stalkers immediately start to tear through the rusted metal. Meanwhile, Ellie is quickly overpowered by them, and for just a moment it seems like this might be the end for our girls. Just then, however, gunfire starts ringing through the room. The infected collapse one by one as the mystery gunman takes them out with a trained and precise hand. As he reaches out to Ellie to help her off the ground, we see it’s Jesse, who has finally reached the city after leaving Jackson shortly after the girls.

He asks if Ellie got bitten in the scrap, and seems a little unconvinced when she insists she wasn’t. But they don’t have time for a full body check, they gotta get moving before more infected show up. The trio books it out of the building and narrowly escapes a wolf squad by running into a park that the soldiers won’t enter. They assume that means the infected are lurking, so they’re still on guard. Ellie immediately starts bombarding Jesse with questions about how he found them, and he says he tracked them to the theater and found the map Dina had been marking up. Finally, after Ellie asks one too many questions, Jesse snaps and asks, “Do I look like I want to fucking talk to you right now?”

Okay, mean ass. It feels like Jesse is taking on the role of “unlikeable hero” in the show now that HBO has siphoned all of Ellie’s irritability out of her to make her a loving mother-to-be. The Last Of Us (Craig Mazin’s Version) and all its creative liberties have felt fundamentally at odds with the story of self-destructive revenge that it’s based on in a seeming effort to make it more palatable, and one of the many casualties of this approach is that the golden retriever of the group has now become an angsty rottweiler so Ellie doesn’t have to be one. I sometimes worry too much of my criticism of this show reads like a jilted game fan mad that the show isn’t following the original script to the letter, but nearly every change the show makes is either undermining the actual point of the story, or is replacing the dynamics the characters once had with new ones that are not as interesting. The Bill and Frank episode in season one, a notable exception, is still one of the most drastic shifts away from the source material that the show has done, but it lifted up the larger themes of the story. This season, it seems like every effort is being made to ensure Ellie is still the hero of her own story, even if that means making the people who were originally there to ground her read more like scolding family members.

Image: HBO

Jesse reveals that he and Tommy both left Jackson the day after Ellie and Dina snuck out, but they’re not here to help with the girls’ crusade; they’re just here to collect them and get them back to Wyoming. Ellie protests, but their argument is interrupted by the shrill whistles of the Seraphites. A group of cultists gathers in the middle of the park with a W.L.F. prisoner, who begs for his life as they tie a noose around his neck. The Scar leader says they have no interest in any secrets he can offer about Isaac’s plan, and then disembowels him with a scythe. The Jackson trio watches in horror before one of the cultists sees them and fires an arrow into Dina’s leg. Ellie tells Jesse to carry her out of there and back to the theater while she diverts their attention. The darkness of the night works to her advantage, and she’s able to disappear into the woods as Jesse and Dina escape. But even as the Scars give up on the chase, Ellie’s not retreating to the theater where her injured girlfriend waits for her just yet.

“...I’d surely lose myself”

Instead, Ellie heads for her original target: Nora. After evading the guards positioned outside the hospital, Ellie sneaks into the building through a hole in the wall too small for the average person to crawl through. Even as the W.L.F. guard dogs bark at the opening, their human owners hold them back, assuming some kind of animal must have set them off. They’re not entirely wrong, I suppose.

We then see Nora working in the hospital’s sick bay and caring for the injured. As she leaves to put away some supplies, she’s greeted by none other than the girl she thought she’d left behind in Jackson. Ellie tells her to put her hands up and turn around to face her. She asks if Nora remembers her. She doesn’t answer, but her expression reveals she certainly does. Nora asks what Ellie wants, and she asks where Abby is. Nora claims she doesn’t know, but Ellie doesn’t believe her. If Ellie shoots Nora, her quarry points out, the gunfire will have every wolf in the building scrambling to her location. “You’ll still be dead,” Ellie replies.

Nora tries to appeal to Ellie’s sense of mercy, pointing out that they could have killed her in Jackson, but they only came to Wyoming with one target in mind. Ellie says that was a mistake, and once again asks where Abby is. For a moment, it seems like Nora is about to confide in Ellie that she regrets what happened to Joel. She says she still hears the screams he let out as Abby tortured him at night, and she’s sorry that Ellie had to see it happen. But then, just as Ellie slightly lets her guard down, Nora’s tune changes: “Yeah, that little bitch got what he deserved.” Ellie is stunned just long enough for Nora to throw a bucket of water and supplies at her and give herself a window to run. Then Ellie gives chase. As Nora runs through the hospital she screams for her fellow soldiers to fire at the intruder, but then she reaches a dead end with her only way out a sealed elevator leading to the basement floors. You know, the ones where the infection is in the air. This scene is probably why the show had to bring spores into the fold. Short of a complete rewrite, the clash between Ellie and Nora requires the cordyceps infection to be an airborne illness to work. The difference this time around is that there’s a dramatic irony as Nora heads into the basement floors to escape Ellie’s wrath, only for us as viewers to know that a different danger entirely awaits.

Image: HBO

Ellie gives chase and finds the overgrown fungus covering the walls. A few still-breathing infected are trapped within the structure, breathing out bits of infection with each wheezing gasp. Hearing the labored breathing of someone else in the next hallway over, she turns on the oppressive red emergency lighting in the electrical room, only to find Nora leaning against a wall, choking on the spores in her lungs. She hacks up a curse in Ellie’s direction and says that she’s “killed [them] both” by driving them to this sealed basement. But when she realizes Ellie isn’t struggling to breathe, she realizes the reports of an immune girl in Salt Lake City were real. Ellie confirms that she is, in fact, that girl, and asks, once again, where Abby is.

Nora tries to appeal to Ellie’s humanity, telling her about all the people Joel killed, including Abby’s father and with him, any hope the world had of being rid of this infection. Then, to her surprise, Ellie says that she already knows and again asks where Abby is. Nora collapses on the ground and stays silent. Then Ellie looks around and, finding a pipe, holds it over Nora and asks her question one more time. Nora flatly says “no,” and Ellie starts to let loose, bringing the pipe down on Nora’s legs, repeatedly asking where Abby is until the screen cuts to black.

Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. This is arguably one of the most controversial scenes in The Last of Us Part II, and for good reason. But before we get into the uncomfortable optics, I do have to point out that part of what made this section effective in the game was that this originally served as the big reveal that Abby and company were once Fireflies, but the show instead told us that right off the bat. The game used this scene as a one-two punch to reveal both that truth bomb and the fact that Ellie was already well aware of what Joel had done by the time Abby had made her way to Jackson. So much of The Last of Us Part II’s excellent narrative tension comes from its calculated silence. The game tells you almost nothing about what Ellie is feeling, outside of her journal entries which conveniently write around the specifics of what she already knows. This exchange between Ellie and Nora is a moment of realization for both of them, as Nora realizes that Ellie is the immune girl Joel killed dozens of people to save, and Ellie discovers that this entire crusade against her surrogate father was carried out by people who suffered for her survival. All of these things could have been inferred by the player, but the game hadn’t said them outright by this point, and the sparse script and unnerving performances by game actors Ashley Johnson and Chelsea Tavares really sell the weight of that moment before any blood has been shed.

Looking back at the original scene and how its dialogue elegantly reveals so much without having to beat you over the head with the most literal expository writing makes the show look like an amateurish rewrite by someone who thought that scene was a little too subtle. Plus, Ellie already told Jesse, and by extension, the audience, that she and Joel were getting past whatever conflict they had in his final days, so the reveal that she already knew about the Salt Lake City massacre isn’t really a surprise this time around. But that’s not really new for the show, as I’ve pointed out several times over the course of the season. Every time we get to what was a huge “oh shit” moment in the game, it feels like the show just goes through the motions of recounting it while cushioning uncomfortable moments like Joel’s death with quippy dialogue, or Nora’s interrogation with overexposition.

In the end, neither of those reveals change anything. Ellie is still dead set on killing Abby, even if she has to torture her friend to do it. Which means it’s time to get into one of the more questionable moments in the entire Last of Us franchise. In Part II, Nora’s death was notable for a few reasons. On top of it being the first kill that really solidified Ellie’s revenge tour demanded more of her than she bargained for, it is framed much differently from any other in the game. Prior to this, Ellie had killed Abby’s hotheaded friend Jordan who wasn’t included in the show (Manny seems to have been made into a composite of himself and Jordan for the series), and that fight is a bit more cathartic because that dude was a shithead who taunted Ellie and didn’t spend his final moments begging for his life. Nora, meanwhile, is tortured for information, and the interrogation leaves Ellie absolutely shattered at what she had done. This is all in-line with the story The Last of Us Part II tells, in which Ellie goes down this violent path but is unable to stomach the reality. However, the difference is that when the player kills Nora, the woman herself isn’t even given the dignity of an on-screen death. The camera lingers on Ellie as the player is forced to press a button to strike her off-screen. It’s supposed to be a transformative moment in which the player is forced to look upon Ellie in her darkest hour and understand what this crusade is doing to her. But when you have a white woman beating the lone named Black woman in the game for information and you can’t so much as show her as it’s happening, it is the most damning example of a trend of The Last of Us subjecting Black characters to the worst fates it can imagine in its post-apocalyptic world.

HBO’s take on the series has only slightly mitigated this by casting more actors of color, including Rutina Wesley as Jackson’s leader, Maria. But even so, Nora’s death still has an optics problem that the show can’t shake. If there had ever been a time for the show to reconsider the source material and make thoughtful, intentional changes, this was probably it. But here we are, watching Ellie torture Nora for information on Abby’s whereabouts. If nothing else, it’s still just as effective at communicating Ellie’s fall from grace.

We end this episode with something a little more pleasant: a flashback. The sun shines through the window in Ellie’s old room in Joel’s Jackson house. She stirs awake as Joel enters the room with his signature “Hey, kiddo.” Ellie says “hi” as the credits roll. Rejoice, Pedro fans. Daddy’s back next week.

New episodes of The Last of Us air on Sundays at 9 p.m. Eastern on Max.

 

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