This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, now streaming on Max.
Our story this week begins in Seatle in 2018 — the before times for us, but well into the world ruined by cordyceps for the show’s characters — as we meet Isaac, a Fedra soldier who has just decided to quit being a Fedra soldier. He leads his snickering fascist colleagues into an ambush, kills all but one of them, and teams up with a resistance leader named Hanrahan(*) to form what will become known as the WLF, or Wolves — the group Abby and friends belong to.
(*) Isaac and Hanrahan are played by, respectively, Jeffrey Wright and Alanna Ubach. This is now Wright’s fourth HBO show in at least a recurring role, after Angels in America, Boardwalk Empire, and Westworld, putting him up there with other HBO mainstays like Alexander Skarsgård and the late Michael Kenneth Williams. Ubach, meanwhile, has previously recurred on Hung and Euphoria (as Lexi and Cassie’s mom), but hasn’t had a regular role before. If you count HBO movies, then Wright is among the channel’s most ubiquitous actors, having also appeared in the TV-movies Boycott, Lackawanna Blues, and Confirmation.
Because of the shift in time and focus, it’s easy to wonder for a moment if the episode will turn out to be this year’s version of “Long Long Time,” Season One’s Emmy-winning departure episode about Bill and Frank’s postapocalyptic love story. But Isaac only has one other big scene after the opening credits, an extremely trope-y case of a villain (or, at least, an antagonist) delivering an autobiographical monologue while preparing to torture someone. In this case, it’s a captured member of the Seraphites, the religious cult introduced last week, who is unswayed by torture, convinced his cause is the righteous one, and that his side is destined to win because Wolves frequently become Seraphites, but never the other way around.
Beyond that, our focus is entirely on Ellie and Dina, spending what a title card notes is their first day in Frasier Crane’s hometown. As with last week’s glimpse of the Seraphites, and earlier scenes involving Abby, Tommy, and others, it’s part of this season expanding its POV beyond whatever Ellie (and, before he died, Joel) is up to. So far, the success of that has been mixed. There are excellent actors involved in these shifts in focus, like Wright or Kaitlyn Dever, but these scenes are so brief and intermittent that all these new characters (or previously minor ones like Tommy) feel so much flimsier and less essential to this point than Ellie — and, now, Dina. Not coincidentally, this episode — the midpoint of Season Two, but not of the story that’s going to span this season and the next one — is at its strongest when its emphasis is on Ellie and the person who has succeeded Joel as her traveling companion and the most important relationship of her life.
After the duo were able to make it all the way from Jackson to Seattle without incident, the city itself quickly proves perilous. They stumble upon a group of Wolves who have been massacred and mutilated by the Seraphites(*), then are chased by other Wolves into a subway tunnel that turns out to be full of infected. Ellie’s resourcefulness, and her understanding that she can be bitten without turning, barely gets them out alive, and forces her to tell Dina the truth about her immunity. While the scale of this set piece isn’t as big as the siege of Jackson, it’s still bigger than the majority of Season One’s action, with dozens of infected swarming our heroes with speed and relentlessness. And because in this instance the potential victims are the show’s two leads (one old, one newer), it feels much more intense than when it was just a bunch of glorified extras in danger in Jackson — even if our rational brains can tell us that the show won’t kill another main character so soon after Joel.
(*) If the show had stuck with Ellie’s POV only for now, perhaps the sight of all those bodies would have been even more horrifying and scary, since we’d know as little about their origins as Ellie and Dina. On the other hand, it was plenty grim with context, and made it a bit easier to keep track of why our heroes get attacked by the Wolves.
Between the extended chase sequence, the opening flashback, and Isaac torturing the Seraphite, it feels as if Last of Us is trying to make up for the relative calm of its previous installment. Still, the show remains at its most potent when focusing on the relationships over the faux-gameplay, and there’s some outstanding Ellie-Dina material here.
When the duo find a quiet part of town to hide out in, they’re confused by the Pride flags and signs in the neighborhood. Ellie has always been queer, and Dina later reveals that she’s always known she was bi, but suppressed that part of herself because her mother convinced her to. But while they both know certain things about the world before cordyceps — Ellie, we’re reminded, is a space nerd, who here compares the burnt-out skeletons they find inside an abandoned tank to the doomed crew of Apollo 1 — there’s a lot of familiar ideas from our lives that are utterly foreign to them. If Dina had grown up in a place with Pride flags and parades, perhaps she might have pushed back against her mother, or wouldn’t have felt quite so determined to stick things out with Jesse, whom she likes but doesn’t love. But as she sits in the record store and listens to Ellie play a-ha’s Eighties synth-pop classic “Take On Me”(*), she looks as smitten with Ellie as Ellie was with Dina throughout the season premiere.
(*) “Take On Me” has long been a favorite of music supervisors and writers of a certain age. It was used memorably earlier this year in the final episode of Netflix’s Adolescence, and already has some HBO history from its appearance in the final season of The Leftovers.
And once Dina accepts that Ellie really is immune to cordyceps, all her feelings for her come pouring out, along with a piece of news that should in theory change everything: Dina is pregnant. She is pregnant, and she is in love with Ellie, and, after they’ve made love, they begin talking about the idea of raising this baby together. (Ellie: “Holy shit. I’m gonna be a dad!”)
It would be lovely if it weren’t so altogether stupid on their parts. Taking off for Seattle on their own, just to get revenge, was bad enough. Sticking around after it became clear that the Wolves were much greater in number and more dangerous than they assumed was even worse. But once the pregnancy becomes apparent — a pregnancy that Dina very much wants to see through — then the only choice is to climb back onto Shimmer and ride the 800 miles back to Jackson. Go directly there. Do not stop. Do not pass Go. Do not collect the dead bodies of Abby and her friends.
It’s not like The Last of Us would be the first story of tragic flaws leading to unintended consequences, though. If Joel were around somehow, he would order to get out of there. But this mess with Abby started because Joel did something terrible and impulsive that he knew Ellie wouldn’t approve of it she had been awake to tell him. Hurt people hurt people. Even ones who are excited about becoming a dad.
That they insist on staying isn’t a flaw of the show’s, necessarily. We know how deeply Ellie loved Joel. We know she’s young and impulsive and irrational. It’s totally plausible that she would be too blinded by vengeance to see the right course of action, even now. And in just four hours, the writers and Isabela Merced have drawn Dina clearly enough that we understand why her love for Ellie, as well as her own bond with Joel, would overwhelm her own good sense. But if it’s believable for how these characters have been established, it’s still frustrating, because it’s the only real story of the season. And if revenge in a postapocalyptic world already felt besides the point, now it feels exponentially more so.
From Rolling Stone US.
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