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Liane Hentscher/HBO
- Ellie and Dina only survive their trip across Seattle thanks to a surprise rescue from Jesse.
- When Dina’s shot with a Seraphite arrow, she and Jesse retreat to meet up with Tommy.
- Ellie enters the hospital alone and pursues Nora to the basement, where Cordyceps is now airborne.
- She tries to torture Abby’s location out of an infected Nora, then wakes up in her Jackson bedroom to see Joel.
"It’s in the air.”
That warning, delivered by shaken WLF soldier Elise Park (Hettienne Park), ushers us into the fifth episode of The Last of Us season 2.
Hanrahan’s (Alanna Ubach) disturbed by Park’s report of the ill-fated mission to the hospital’s basement, where Park's son radioed to complain of difficulty breathing and she was forced to seal off level B2 with Leon still inside. Hanrahan orders the information be kept quiet, and then it gets shifted to our back burner as we watch Ellie and Dina delve even deeper into Seattle’s horrors on day two.
Strategic Dina’s (Isabela Merced) making plans with the help of a map and wishing aloud that she had better tools to use for triangulation. Your protractor: don’t leave home in a zombie apocalypse without it!
Meanwhile, non-school-oriented Ellie (Bella Ramsey) wanders onto the Pinnacle’s long-abandoned stage and finds another playable guitar. (The city’s lousy with ‘em; I guess they didn’t call it the Seattle Sound for nothing.)
She picks it up and produces the first music this venue’s likely heard in decades. But she only makes it through the first line — “If I ever were to lose you” — before she sets the instrument aside.
Pearl Jam fans already know the next line, and game players already know the song’s significance. But for now, it's time to hear Dina's plan, which involves traveling through a building that’s likely full of infected so they can reach the hospital mentioned in the radio broadcast.
“Let’s go be reckless,” Ellie says. But when an encounter with a pile of dead Seraphites sprawled under a spray-painted “feel this, bitch” makes Dina retch, Ellie suggests that her pregnant girlfriend should sit this one out.
Dina’s response is to share the story of the first person she killed. It was the raider who beat her mother and sister to death inside their cabin north of Santa Fe while she was playing outside with a gun. She was eight. “If he had gotten away, I promise you, I would’ve hunted him down forever,” Dina says. “Forever.”
Does this make her Ellie’s perfect match, or her worst possible partner? Either way, she acknowledges that Joel must’ve done something to Abby and co., although nothing would’ve deserved what happened to him. Then she leaves the choice to Ellie. (She also declines to share the story of how she came to Jackson. Maybe another time?)
Ellie chooses to keep going, and it’s dark by the time they reach the building that’ll lead them to the hospital. Ellie describes it as haunted but empty, to which Dina cracks, “Just like us.” There’s no humor darker than teenagers raised amongst zombies.
Dina predicts they'll find a few stray Wolves and a couple of clickers and insists they handle things on a run-first/shoot-as-a-last-resort basis. Then she locks in Ellie’s agreement by telling her she loves her and Han Solo's Ellie when she tries to say it back.
But what they find inside the dark, cavernous space is stalkers. Lots of them, all making those eerie, human-sounding cries.
Ellie admits that she only killed the stalker in the season premiere after it bit her, and they’re too outnumbered to execute her plan to flank the smart monsters before the smart monsters can flank them.
Plan B it is. Dina runs for the maintenance storage cage to lock herself in while Ellie fights them off. Guns are no longer off limits.
A stalker with a crown of fungus leaps on Ellie. Then another. Then Dina’s gun jams as the infected start to rip through her wire cage.
It looks hopeless until the roar of a gun drops the stalkers attacking Ellie and scares the rest off, and in an echo of Joel saving Abby, a hand reaches out to pull her to safety. Here’s hoping this goes better for everyone than Joel’s rescue did. *nervous laugh*
Their unexpected savior is Jesse (Young Mazino), and he accepts their story that Ellie wasn't bitten — but only for now, if his expression is to be believed.
They flee the building and run straight into WLF gunfire. And troublingly, when they take shelter in a nearby park, the Wolves decline to follow them in. So the Jackson three have jumped from the frying pan into the fire and then back into a different frying pan.
With no choice but to keep moving forward, Jesse explains that he and Tommy left on their unsanctioned rescue mission a day after Ellie and Dina snuck out on Shimmer. Once they reached Seattle, they split up to cover more ground and are set to rendezvous in the morning.
Then their catch-up’s interrupted by a series of whistles they don’t recognize. But we do.
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Liane Hentscher/HBO
They’re in Seraphite territory and watch from a horrified distance as one of their priests (Maurice Dean Wint) brushes off a captured WLF soldier’s (Mathew Yanagiya) offer to share information on the Wolves.
Instead, the soldier’s strung up by a noose, and the priest invokes the Prophet as he picks up a scythe to “free” him. Then, well, we see how the soldiers at the TV station ended up with their intestines outside of their bodies. And geez, the amount of fervent, vaguely sacred-sounding call and response by the Seraphites is … uncomfy.
A whistle alerts the group to the intruders in their woods, and almost immediately, an arrow lands in Dina’s thigh. Ellie tells Jesse she’ll lead their pursuers away and will meet them back at the theater. Um, Ellie knows she’s not immune to arrows, right?
Thankfully, she manages to shake the Seraphites and slip inside the hospital, all while only alerting one very good guard dog. Impressive, honestly!
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Liane Hentscher/HBO
Inside, she holds a gun on an exhausted Nora (Tati Gabrielle), who's sterilizing bandages alone, and demands to know where Abby is.
Nora reminds Ellie that they left her alive at that Jackson lodge; Ellie suggests that maybe they shouldn’t have. Then Nora seals her fate by telling Ellie that she still hears Joel’s screams from that terrible thing they did to him — and that Joel deserved all of it. She then flings a pan of bleach into Ellie’s face and bolts, screaming about an intruder.
She gives it a good effort, but the hallway's blocked, so she pries open the elevator doors and jumps onto the stationary car, which drops under her weight and comes to a stop at Level B2.
Spores float through the air as Ellie creeps down the hallway after her, following the Cordyceps growth on the walls as it becomes denser, moister, more terrifying. Sort-of alive people, including Leon Park (Cheonguk Park), are cocooned in tendrils and exhale spores with every breath.
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Liane Hentscher/HBO
Ellie finally finds Nora struggling to breathe at the end of a hallway. “You killed us both,” she gasps, and Ellie smugly replies, “Did I?”
Even as she’s dying, Nora realizes the stories about an immune girl are all real. Ellie again asks for Abby’s location, and Nora’s response is to spell out what Joel did in the hospital, including shooting Abby’s father in the head.
“I know,” Ellie says simply, answering a question we’ve all had this season. With Nora no longer able to hold herself up, Ellie crouches to repeat her question about Abby.
When the dying woman refuses to talk, Ellie spots a length of pipe with a bent end — you know, a little like a golf club — and slams it into Nora again and again, screaming, “Where is she?”
And then Ellie wakes up in her sunny bedroom in Jackson to Joel’s warm, “Hey, kiddo.”
Spores for Thought
- If you got a little choked up at seeing Pedro Pascal again, well, welcome to the club.
- So we’ve got airborne transmission of the Cordyceps infection. This certainly nudges the show closer to game territory, where inhalation’s the primary means of infection. It’s also so much more terrifying; you might be able to outrun a bloater, but can you outrun breathing? Also of note: the hospital basement is where they brought the first of the original Cordyceps patients back in 2003, according to Elise Park. So that nasty stew’s been brewing for a good, long while.
- Director Stephen Williams' pedigree includes Watchmen, Westworld, and Lost, but he’s also got zombie cred, having helmed episodes of The Walking Dead and The Returned. And sure enough, he delivers another terrifying encounter with the infected this week.
- Speaking of, it sounded like Dina was open to heading back to Jackson even before that arrow landed in her leg. Tangling with a building full of stalkers’ll do that to a girl, apparently.
- Shimmer’s chilling at the music store, right? Lots of yummy grass. No infected. Good vibes for the best horse... right???