the last of us

The Last of Us episode 5 recap: There’s something in the air

culture, the last of us, The Last of Us Part II / Mike M. / May 12, 2025

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Andrew: We’re five episodes into this season of The Last of Us, and most of the infected we’ve seen have still been of the “mindless, screeching horde” variety. But in the first episode of the season, we saw Ellie encounter a single “smart” infected person, a creature that retained some sense of strategy and a self-preservation instinct. It implied that the show’s monsters were not done evolving and that the seemingly stable fragments of civilization that had managed to take root were founded on a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about what these monsters were and what they could do.

Amidst all the human-created drama, the changing nature of the Mushroom Zombie Apocalypse is the backdrop of this week’s entire episode, starting and ending with the revelation that a 2003-vintage cordyceps nest has become a hotbed of airborne spores, ready to infect humans with no biting required.

This is news to me, as a Non-Game Player! But Kyle, I’m assuming this is another shoe that you knew the series was going to drop.

Kyle: Actually, no. I suppose it’s possible I’m forgetting something, but I think the “some infected are actually pretty smart now” storyline is completely new to the show. It’s just one of myriad ways the show has diverged enough from the games at this point that I legitimately don’t know where it’s going to go or how it’s going to get there at any given moment, which is equal parts fun and frustrating.

I will say that the “smart zombies” made for my first real “How are Ellie and Dina going to get out of this one?” moment, as Dina’s improvised cage was being actively torn apart by a smart and strong infected. But then, lo and behold, here came Deus Ex Jesse to save things with a timely re-entrance into the storyline proper. You had to know we hadn’t seen the last of him, right?

Ellie is good at plenty of things, but not so good at lying low. Credit: HBO

Andrew: As with last week’s subway chase, I’m coming to expect that any time Ellie and Dina seem to be truly cornered, some other entity is going to swoop down and “save” them at the last minute. This week it was an actual ally instead of another enemy that just happened to take out the people chasing Ellie and Dina. But it’s the same basic narrative fake-out.

I assume their luck will run out at some point, but I also suspect that if it comes, that point will be a bit closer to the season finale.

Kyle: Without spoiling anything from the games, I will say you can expect both Ellie and Dina to experience their fair share of lucky and unlucky moments in the episodes to come.

Speaking of unlucky moments, while our favorite duo is hiding in the park we get to see how the local cultists treat captured WLF members, and it is extremely not pretty. I’m repeating myself a bit from last week, but the lingering on these moments of torture feels somehow more gratuitous in an HBO show, even when compared to similarly gory scenes in the games.

Andrew: Well we had just heard these cultists compared to “Amish people” not long before, and we already know they don’t have tanks or machine guns or any of the other Standard Issue The Last of Us Paramilitary Goon gear that most other people have, so I guess you’ve got to do something to make sure the audience can actually take the cultists seriously as a threat. But yeah, if you’re squeamish about blood-and-guts stuff, this one’s hard to watch.

I do find myself becoming more of a fan of Dina and Ellie’s relationship, or at least of Dina as a character. Sure, her tragic backstory’s a bit trite (she defuses this criticism by pointing out in advance that it is trite), but she’s smart, she can handle herself, she is a good counterweight to Ellie’s rush-in-shooting impulses. They are still, as Dina points out, doing something stupid and reckless. But I am at least rooting for them to make it out alive!

Kyle: Personality wise the Dina/Ellie pairing has just as many charms as the Joel/Ellie pairing from last season. But while I always felt like Joel and Ellie had a clear motivation and end goal driving them forward, the thirst for revenge pushing Dina and Ellie deeper into Seattle starts to feel less and less relevant the more time goes on.

The show seems to realize this, too, stopping multiple times since Joel’s death to kind of interrogate whether tracking down these killers is worth it when the alternative is just going back to Jackson and prepping for a coming baby. It’s like the writers are trying to convince themselves even as they’re trying (and somewhat failing, in my opinion) to convince the audience of their just and worthy cause.

Andrew: Yeah, I did notice the points where Our Heroes paused to ask “are we sure we want to be doing this?” And obviously, they are going to keep doing this, because we have spent all this time setting up all these different warring factions and we’re going to use them, dang it!! But this has never been a thing that was going to bring Joel back, and it only seems like it can end in misery, especially because I assume Jesse’s plot armor is not as thick as Ellie or Dina’s.

Kyle: Personally I think the “Ellie and Dina give up on revenge and prepare to start a post-apocalyptic family (while holding off zombies)” would have been a brave and interesting direction for a TV show. It would have been even braver for the game, although very difficult for a franchise where the main verbs are “shoot” and “stab.”

Andrew: Yeah if The Last of Us Part II had been a city-building simulator where you swap back and forth between managing the economy of a large town and building defenses to keep out the hordes, fans of the first game might have been put off. But as an Adventure of Link fan I say: bring on the sequels with few-if-any gameplay similarities to their predecessors!

The cordyceps threat keeps evolving. Credit: HBO

Kyle: “We killed Joel” team member Nora definitely would have preferred if Ellie and Dina were playing that more domestic kind of game. As it stands, Ellie ends up pursuing her toward a miserable-looking death in a cordyceps-infested basement.

The chase scene leading up to this mirrors a very similar one in the game in a lot of ways. But while I found it easy to suspend my disbelief for the (very scripted) chase on the PlayStation, watching it in a TV show made me throw up my hands and say “come on, these heavily armed soldiers can’t stop a little girl that’s making this much ruckus?”

Andrew: Yeah Jesse can pop half a dozen “smart” zombies in half a dozen shots, but when it’s a girl with a giant backpack running down an open hallway everyone suddenly has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim. The visuals of the cordyceps den, with the fungified guys breathing out giant clouds of toxic spores, is effective in its unsettling-ness, at least!

This episode’s other revelation is that what Joel did to the Fireflies in the hospital at the end of last season is apparently not news to Ellie, when she hears it from Nora in the episode’s final moments. It could be that Ellie, Noted Liar, is lying about knowing this. But Ellie is also totally incapable of controlling her emotions, and I’ve got to think that if she had been surprised by this, we would have been able to tell.

Kyle: Yeah, saying too much about what Ellie knows and when would be risking some major spoilers. For now I’ll just say the way the show decided to mix things up by putting this detailed information in Nora’s desperate, spore-infested mouth kind of landed with a wet thud for me.

I was equally perplexed by the sudden jump cut from “Ellie torturing a prisoner” to “peaceful young Ellie flashback” at the end of the episode. Is the audience supposed to assume that this is what is going on inside Ellie’s head or something? Or is the narrative just shifting without a clutch?

Andrew: I took it to mean that we were about to get a timeline-breaking departure episode next week, one where we spend some time in flashback mode filling in what Ellie knows and why before we continue on with Abby Quest. But I guess we’ll see, won’t we!

Kyle: Oh, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for a bevy of flashbacks I knew were coming in some form or another. But the particular way they shifted to the flashback here, with mere seconds left in this particular brutal episode, was baffling to me.

Andrew: I think you do it that way to get people hyped about the possibility of seeing Joel again next week. Unless it’s just a cruel tease! But it’s probably not, right? Unless it is!

Kyle: Now I kind of hope the next episode just goes back to Ellie and Dina and doesn’t address the five seconds of flashback at all. Screw you, audience!

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In HBO’s The Last of Us, revenge is a dish best served democratically

culture, the last of us, The Last of Us Part II, the last of us: part 2 / DJ Henderson / April 28, 2025

Andrew: And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.

Kyle: Yeah, I’ve said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.

But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who’s played the game knows how central “the porch scene” is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we’d still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.

Andrew: (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)

Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn’t, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence… I don’t know what they were thinking. Then again, if it’s just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.

Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he’s helped to build. Credit: HBO

Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O’Hara, world’s least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I’m sure we’ll get it at a time that’s engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn’t it?

We’re able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn’t want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one “normal” community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.

Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between “paramilitary psychopaths” and “normal community.” But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson’s uniqueness all the more important as a setting.

We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same “Ellie and Dina go out for revenge.” While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.

Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant. Credit: HBO

Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the “Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance” meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).

Part of it almost felt too much like “our” politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that’s the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific “they” who would be “laughing at us” if the community doesn’t track down and execute Abby. I’ll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie’s attempted vengeance tour doesn’t make me feel better about what she’s deciding to do here.

Kyle: I will say the line “Nobody votes for angry” rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn’t really work…

Andrew: SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It’s an extremely reliable indicator!

Kyle: Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!

Andrew: So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn’t about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council’s better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.

Kyle: One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just “GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING” and even the people that agreed with her were like “Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!”

Andrew: Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it’s not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie’s impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel’s taciturn competence there to leaven it.

Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that’s already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I’m not sure the town hall “deterrence” arguments would have swayed him.

Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the movie). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much “You’re gay, I’m not” bit…

Andrew: “You’re gay, I’m not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!”

I am not inclined to get too on Dina’s case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn’t go into it, but I’ve also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.

Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being “out” in this context than Dina would be.

Kyle: As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I’d have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more “grounded” TV show, the odds do not seem great.

Andrew: One thread I’m curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame “Abby and her crew,” people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it’s easier to kill her when the time comes. We’ll see how well it works!

But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the “Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps“-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.

Kyle: They’re pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I’m not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous

Andrew: (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this…

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HBO’s The Last of Us is back for season 2, and so are we

culture, the last of us / Kelly Newman / April 14, 2025

Kyle: To start us off as we return to the world of The Last of Us, as a non-game player, maybe recap what you remember from the first season and what you’ve heard about the second.

Andrew: Going into the first season, I’d been aware of The Last of Us, the video game, as a story about an older guy and a kid trying to navigate a post-apocalyptic world. And the show was also mostly that: It’s Joel and Ellie against the world, and who knows, maybe this spunky young girl with an apparent immunity to the society-ravaging fungal infection could hold the key to a cure!

Things fell apart at the end of last season when the Fireflies (a group of survivalists/doctors/scientists/etc.) may or may not have been threatening to kill Ellie in order to research their cure, which made Joel go on a murder rampage, which he then lied to Ellie about. We fade to black as they make their way back toward the one semi-functioning human settlement they’d visited on their travels, where Joel’s brother and his family also happen to live.

Going into this season: I know nothing. I don’t really engage in TV show fandoms or keep up with casting announcements or plot speculation. And the only thing I know about the second game going into this is a vague sense that it wasn’t as well-received as the first. In short, I am as a newborn baby, ready to take in the second season of a show I kind of like with the freshest possible eyes.

Kyle: I may be to blame for that vague sense you have. I fell in love with the first game, especially the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and I thought the first season of the show captured that quite well. I thought the endings to both the game and season 1 of the show were just about perfect and that any continuation after that was gonna struggle to justify itself.

Without giving too much away, I think the second game misses a lot of what made the narrative of the first one special and gets sidetracked in a lot of frankly gratuitous directions. That said, this premiere episode of the second season drew me in more than I expected.

One jarring thing (in a good way) about both the second game and the second season is suddenly seeing Joel and Ellie just existing in a thriving community with electric lights, music, alcohol, decent food, laughter, etc., etc. After the near-constant precarity and danger they’ve faced in the recent past, it really throws you for a loop.

Andrew: Unfortunately but predictably, you see both of them struggling to adapt in different ways; these are two extremely individualistic, out-for-number-one people. Ellie (now a 19-year-old, after a five-year time jump) never met a rule she couldn’t break, even when it endangers her friends and other community members.

And while Joel will happily fix your circuit breaker or re-string your guitar, he emphatically rejected a needs-of-the-many-outweigh-the-needs-of-the-few approach at the end of last season. When stuff breaks bad (and I feel confident that it will, that’s the show that it is) these may not be the best people to have in your corner.

My only real Game Question for you at the outset is the big one: Is season 2 adapting The Last of Us Part II or is it doing its own thing or are we somewhere in between or is it too early to say?

Kyle: From what I have heard it will be adapting the first section of the second game (it’s a long game) and making some changes and digressions that expand on the game’s story (like the well-received Nick Offerman episode last season). Already, I can tell you that Joel’s therapy scene was created for the TV show, and I think it improves on a somewhat similar “Joel pours his heart out” scene from early in the game.

The debut episode is also already showing a willingness to move around scenes from the game to make them fit better in chronological order, which I’m already appreciating.

One thing I think the show is already doing well, too, is showing 19-year-old Ellie “acting like every 19-year-old ever” (as one character puts it) to father figure Joel. Even in a zombie apocalypse, it’s a relatable bit of character-building for anyone who’s been a teenager or raised a teenager.

Andrew: Joel’s therapist, played by the wonderful Catherine O’Hara. (See, that’s why you don’t follow casting announcements, so you can watch a show and be like, “Oh, dang, is that Catherine O’Hara?”)

I didn’t know if it was a direct adaptation, but I did notice that the show’s video gamey storytelling reflexes were still fully intact. We almost instantly end up in a ruined grocery store chock-full of environmental storytelling (Ellie notes a happy birthday banner and 2003’s Employee of the Year wall).

And like in any ~~new game~~ new season of a TV show, we quickly run into a whole new variant of mushroom monster that retains some of its strategic instincts and can take cover rather than blindly rushing at you. Some of the jump scares were so much like quick-time events that I almost grabbed my controller so I could press X and help Ellie out.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s pretty easy to see that the semi-stealthy assault on the abandoned market came directly from the game. I felt like there was some implication that the “strategic” zombie still had a little more humanity left in her that was struggling to fight against the fungus’ pull, which was pretty chilling in the way it was presented.

Andrew: Yes! Fungus is still a maximally creepy and visually interesting way for an infection to spread, and it’s a visual note that helps TLoU stand out from other zombie stories.

It does seem like we’re moving into Phase 2 of most zombie apocalypse fiction. Phase 1 is: There’s an infection! Society collapses. Phase 2 is: Humanity attempts to rebuild. But maybe the scariest monster of all… is humankind??

I’ve always found Phase 2 to be inherently less interesting because I can watch all kinds of shows where people are the antagonists, but Joel and Ellie remain unique and compelling enough as characters that maybe they’ll carry me through.

A teenager should have some hobbies. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery

Kyle: The first game already established a lot in the way of “humans are the real monsters” vignettes. And while I still don’t want to give too much away, I will say that human-versus-human drama is definitely going to be an increasingly central part of the narrative going forward.

Speaking of which, I wondered what you made of the brief scenes we get with Abby leading a reluctant but willing band of revenge-seekers that see doctor-murdering Joel as an unalloyed evil (somewhat justifiably, especially from their point of view).

Andrew: My first thought was “look at all these clean, hot, well-coiffed apocalypse survivors.” At least Joel and Ellie both look a little weathered.

But in seriousness, yes, it’s obvious that What Joel Did is a bomb that’s going to go off sooner rather than later. Trying to address it without addressing it has pushed taciturn, closed-off Joel into therapy, where he insists to a woman whose (presumably infected) husband he killed that he’s a “good guy.” And it seems clear to me that Ellie’s shunning of Joel is coming from her sense that something is amiss, just as much as it is about a 19-year-old rebelling against her would-be father figure.

In Joel’s case, it’s telling that it seems like lying to Ellie is weighing on him more than the murder-rampage itself. But having these improbably fresh-faced Firefly remnants chasing him down will mean that he might end up paying for both.

Kyle: I think Joel can live with sacrificing the entire world to save Ellie. I don’t think he can live with Ellie knowing he did that pretty much against her explicit wishes.

Andrew: Oops!! Pobody’s nerfect!

Kyle: I’m sure Abby will understand if Joel just says he made an oopsie.

Andrew: Seriously. Can’t believe they’re still mad even after a five-year time jump. Can’t we all just move on?

As we close, and while at least trying to avoid spoilers, are there any game moments you’re looking forward to seeing? Or are you just hoping that this season can “fix” a story that didn’t work as well for you in video game form?

How can you stay mad at this man? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery

Kyle: Actually, I don’t have to spoil anything to say that the scene at the dance was one I was looking forward to seeing in both the game and the show. That’s because a large chunk of it was the first bit of the game Sony ever showed during a memorable E3 2018 press conference, which would end up being the company’s last ever official E3 press presentation.

Besides making me an instant fan of the song “.44 Pistol,” that scene had me very excited to see how the social adventures of “All Growed Up” Ellie might develop. And while I don’t feel like the game really delivered a very satisfying or believable version of Ellie’s evolution, I’m hopeful the show might be able to smooth out some of the rough storytelling edges and give a more compelling version of the character.

Andrew: Yeah. Video games get remastered, but they mostly seek to preserve the original game rather than overhauling it. A well-funded multiseason TV adaptation is a rare opportunity for a redo.

Kyle: The way HBO handled the first season gives me hope that they can once again embrace the excellent world-building of the games while adding some prestige TV polish to the plot.

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HBO drops The Last of Us S2 trailer

culture, Entertainment, streaming television, the last of us, Trailers / 9u50fv / March 11, 2025

Pedro Pascal returns as Joel in The Last of Us S2.

HBO released a one-minute teaser of the hotly anticipated second season of The Last of Us—based on Naughty Dog’s hugely popular video game franchise—during CES in January. We now have a full trailer, unveiled at SXSW after the footage leaked over the weekend, chock-full of Easter eggs for gaming fans of The Last of Us Part II.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series takes place in the 20-year aftermath of a deadly outbreak of mutant fungus (Cordyceps) that turns humans into monstrous zombie-like creatures (the Infected, or Clickers). The world has become a series of separate totalitarian quarantine zones and independent settlements, with a thriving black market and a rebel militia known as the Fireflies making life complicated for the survivors. Joel (Pedro Pascal) is a hardened smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsay) across the devastated US, battling hostile forces and hordes of zombies, to a Fireflies unit outside the quarantine zone. Ellie is special: She is immune to the deadly fungus, and the hope is that her immunity holds the key to beating the disease.

S2 is set five years after the events of the first season and finds the bond beginning to fray between plucky survivors Joel and Ellie. That’s the inevitable outcome of S1’s shocking finale, when they finally arrived at their destination, only to discover the secret to her immunity to the Cordyceps fungus meant Ellie would have to die to find a cure. Ellie was willing to sacrifice herself, but once she was under anesthesia, Joel went berserk and killed all the hospital staff to save her life—and lied to Ellie about it, claiming the staff were killed by raiders.

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