In case you’ve forgotten, what remained of the U.S. government and its military did not vanish with the onset of the Cordyceps outbreak. In fact, it’s still the dominant force in much of the East Coast, as far as we know. But Ellie and Joel left FEDRA, the blanket term for government forces, in their rearview mirror long ago. So it’s kind of a shock that this episode opens with a group of FEDRA soldiers yucking it up inside an armored vehicle. Where are we? When are we? The answer is Seattle in the recent past, where a seasoned soldier (Josh Peck) is holding court as he recounts a story of confronting “voters” with the help of a brutish, slow-witted comrade-in-arms named Greenberg who does not understand the word disseminating.
Why do they call them “voters,” Burton (Ben Ahlers), a fresh-faced recruit, asks. It’s here that a previously unheard voice of authority pipes up to clarify. “It’s because we took away their rights,” Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), their leader, says. We’ve heard of Isaac. He leads the WLF. But all that’s in the future as this scene unfolds. When the vehicle reaches a blockade, the FEDRA forces find themselves surrounded by voters. Isaac tells them he’s heading out alone to talk to them. This is true, but there’s more going on here. Pulling out Burton, Isaac first walks up to the leader of the citizens, then casually tosses a grenade in the back of the vehicle. He’s selling them out to join the WLF, to all appearances, because he believes in the WLF cause. Does Burton share this belief (or, at the very last, want to survive)? “Now make your choice,” Isaac tells him shortly before the opening credits kick in.
The Last of Us’s fourth second-season episode leaves Burton’s choice unresolved until later. Instead, it flashes forward 11 years to the season’s main timeline, where Dina and Ellie scavenge an already ravaged pharmacy for anything that might be useful. They don’t have a lot of luck, unless a long-expired jug of milk counts, but Dina spies something that might be useful (though what remains unclear at the moment).
Seattle looks strangely beautiful. Wilderness has already reclaimed much of the city (the parts spared from bombing, at least), and there’s little that appears ominous as they enter Capitol Hill, a neighborhood filled with rainbow flags and Pride symbols that Ellie and Dina don’t understand. But around the corner, they find skeletons, an overgrown tank, and other signs that the area once served as a battlefield. Ellie likens the burned corpses inside the tank to the doomed astronauts of Apollo 1, a reminder of her fascination with the space program (evident by the posters in her room back in Jackson), and that she has interests beyond revenge and survival.
Still, revenge remains pretty high on Ellie’s to-do list, and when Dina spots the letters WLF painted on the satellite dish of a local TV station, she’s eager to rush in. Dina suggests they exercise caution rather than rushing in, so they stash Shimmer and wait until dark inside a music store. This, too, speaks to Ellie’s other interests. Finding a well-preserved guitar, Ellie tunes it and plays a lovely acoustic rendition of A-ha’s “Take on Me” while Dina looks on tearfully. It’s a tender moment during a break in the action; it seemingly never occurs to either that they could walk away and leave this quest behind.
And what about Isaac? He’s still around, we soon find out, and he’s still a believer in the WLF cause. But any idealism he’s held onto is now coupled with sadism. We watch him waxing poetic about cookware he could never afford in the time before the infection, but it’s revealed that he’s now using these “strange benefits of the apocalypse” for destructive purposes. Copper might be ideal for cooking, but it’s also well suited for torturing “Scars,” the derogatory term for Seraphites, the scar-faced followers of a still-unnamed prophet we heard about in the previous episode. Though naked and defenseless, the Seraphite refuses to divulge any information about his people’s whereabouts, prompting Isaac to kill him. “Good,” Burton, now 11 years older and a hardened WLF soldier, says as he stands guard outside the door. “Scar got what he deserved, fucking animal.”
Though they don’t yet know it as they scope out the TV station, this is what Ellie and Dina are up against. Or at least part of what they’re up against. Inside, they find a horror show of slain Wolves, all hung from the ceiling and disemboweled. On the wall, Ellie finds a strange rune and the words “Feel Her Love” etched in blood. Ellie can’t know it yet, but she stumbled upon the aftermath of a confrontation between the Wolves and Seraphites, in which the Seraphites won. We’ve seen what cruelty the WLF can exact. Now here’s an example of what their enemies can do. “What the fuck is wrong with Seattle?” Dina asks, and it’s easy to see why.
But Ellie and Dina barely have time to consider this before trouble starts to arrive in the form of Wolves responding to a call for backup. It doesn’t take long for this to go south, forcing Ellie and Dina to fight Wolves and then flee in the rain. They find shelter, but not safety, in a dilapidated subway line, where they again have to evade the Wolves searching for them. When the soldiers find themselves fighting infected, they turn this chaos to their advantage and escape, but just barely. There’s one other issue: Ellie is bitten in full view of Dina as she attempts to save Dina’s life.
This, understandably, freaks out Dina. After they take shelter in a nearby theater, Dina pulls a gun on her best friend with every intention of putting her down. It’s confession time. “I’m immune,” Ellie tells her, then promises she will wake up unchanged and that Dina can hold a gun on her for as long as she feels is necessary. Dina goes along with this, and when it becomes clear that Ellie is telling the truth, two dramatic events happen back to back: Dina reveals she’s pregnant, and the two begin making out. When they wake up, each eats some jerky to counteract morning breath before kissing again. Postapocalyptic life clearly has its downsides.
As the sun comes up, Ellie tells Dina the whole story, about how she’d been bitten before and why she covered the bite with tattoos. Then Dina makes her own confession: She has wanted to be with Ellie for a long time. In fact, she’s imagined a future in which the two make a life together, with kids and everything. Dina has wanted this for a while, despite the complicated relationship with Jesse that led to her pregnancy. “We’re all having a baby,” Ellie concludes. Then a message on the WLF walkie-talkie they’ve stolen prompts both Dina and Ellie to leave these thoughts aside. They know where to find WLF headquarters and Abby. Ellie suggests Dina stay behind, things being different now. But Dina won’t be left behind. The episode ends with her saying a single word to define their situation: “Together.”
• The conflict between the heavily armed WLF and the less resourced but still dangerous Serpahites, a deeply religious group not averse to violence, doesn’t map directly onto any real-world situation, but it’s hard to ignore parallels between current global hot spots. Specifically, Neil Druckmann has spoken about how he drew inspiration from growing up in Israel and witnessing the cycle of violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s a heavy topic for a zombie show to take on, of course, but the series so far seems to be following the example of the game, which attempts to immerse players in the middle of morally knotty situations. We see that both the Wolves and the Seraphites are capable of atrocities. We also see that each side has its own reasons for what it does. In some ways, it’s an expansion of themes that the series has already introduced. We love Joel, but it’s just as easy to see why Abby would think him a monster. And why Ellie would think Abby a monster. And on and on. That Ellie and Dina repeatedly put their feelings for each other to the side in the interest of vengeance is one of this episode’s saddest details. Sometimes hate takes precedence over everything else, no matter the cost.
• Ellie is too young to remember “Take on Me” being a hit the first time around. Then again, she’s too young to remember anything being a hit the first time around. Globally, it’s the biggest song ever recorded by the Norwegian pop group A-ha, but A-ha enjoyed a long career after that breakthrough, finding consistent success in Europe. They’re still around, though, apparently, they’ve become one of those bands whose members don’t really interact with one another when not onstage.
• If you put money on Josh Peck (a) showing up in an episode of The Last of Us and (b) playing a huge jerk, well, you just had a big payday.
• You know what’s always a good thing? When Jeffrey Wright shows up. He’s reprising the role he played in The Last of Us Part II (the game, in case there’s any confusion).
