‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 5 Recap: Spores, Stalkers and Backup

“The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 5 begins, once again, with the Washington Liberation Front (W.L.F.). Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) arrives in one of the militia’s W.L.F.-controlled hospitals only to find its basement stairwell completely sealed off. When she asks Sergeant Elise Park (Hettienne Park) why she decided to kill some of her men by doing so, she is told a terrifying story. Sergeant Park tried to fulfill her mission of making the hospital fully operational again for the W.L.F. by clearing every one of its floors. She found little resistance doing so, too, until her soldiers began to scour the building’s three basement levels. B1 was fine. “The whole floor was empty, not even rats,” she says (a line that is sure to make “The Last of Us Part II” players’ ears perk up).

When she sent her son Leon down to help clear out B2, however, he radioed not long afterward and sounded like he could barely breathe. “I said, ‘Leon, were you bit? He said, ‘It’s in the air. Seal us in,'” the haunted Park recalls. Hanrahan does not hide her shock over this story, but does her best to shake it off, telling Sergeant Park, “As far as I’m concerned, you resolved the situation permanently and heroically.” Her words offer little comfort in a scene that creates chilling dread out of a simple conversation, which is something “Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin is uniquely gifted at pulling off. This scene also accomplishes two things: It sets up the eerie conclusion of this week’s episode and also the scariest set piece in “The Last of Us Part II,” which HBO viewers likely will not see realized until the TV show’s third season.

Before we can get to either of those moments, “The Last of Us” cuts back to the theater where Dina (Isabela Merced) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) found shelter at the end of “Day One.” Dina is busy listening to the W.L.F. radio she and Ellie stole, using the military transmissions she hears to find a safe path to the hospital where they know Nora (Tati Gabrielle) is stationed. While she does this, Ellie explores the theater, stumbling upon another, relatively pristine guitar in the building’s gorgeous, dusty auditorium. Sitting on the theater’s stage, she sings just one line from “Future Days” by Pearl Jam, a song that “Last of Us” viewers probably will not recognize but video game players absolutely will. “If I ever were to lose you…,” she sings, recalling a moment from her past that has yet to be depicted onscreen, but which pointedly opens “The Last of Us Part II.”

Backup arrives

Dina realizes the only way for her and Ellie to make it to the hospital and avoid the W.L.F. patrols along the way is to cut through a building they assume is filled with infected. Dina notes that this strategy is “reckless,” but that does not stop her or Ellie from committing to it anyway. On their journey across the city, they stumble upon another “Feel Her Love” mural, under which lies a pile of murdered Seraphite bodies and another spray-painted message that reads, “Feel this, b—h.” The sight horrifies both Ellie and Dina, and it causes Ellie to offer Dina an out. In response, Dina decides to tell her partner the story of the first person she killed.

When she was eight, Dina snuck out of her family’s house to play outside. While she was outside, she heard screaming and ran back with her gun. By the time she got home, her mother and sister were already dead, but the raider who had killed them was still there. Dina shot him without hesitation. “Whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn’t deserve that,” Dina argues. “What if my mom and sister were beaten to death in front of me? What if that motherf—ker made me watch as he did it? Would it make a difference if my family had hurt his people first? … No.” Dina, in other words, understands why Ellie wants to find and kill Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). “I’ll go back if you want, and I’ll keep going if you want,” she says. “If I die, it’s on me.”

Ellie, unsurprisingly, decides to keep going. Once they reach the building Dina had marked earlier, she tells Ellie not to start shooting any infected they see and making a lot of noise like she normally would. “You’re a little crazy, and that’s exciting. It’s one of the reasons I love you,” Dina simply states. “But I do want to make it out of here.” Their plan goes out the window when they find themselves trapped in a dark room with countless infected stalkers just like the one Ellie killed in the “Last of Us” Season 2 premiere. The two girls get pinned down by the stalkers, only to be saved by Jesse (Young Mazino), who kills the attacking infected before leading Ellie and Dina away from the building and out of the range of the W.L.F. soldiers who were drawn to them by their gunfire.

They hunker down in a park the W.L.F. chooses not to follow them into. While there, Jesse explains that he and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) snuck out of Jackson the night after Ellie and Dina left to go after them. The two men split up when they got to Seattle, but have planned to rendezvous together tomorrow morning. When they do, Jesse says the four of them will go back to Jackson together. Ellie starts to protest, only to first be interrupted by Dina and then by a flurry of ominous whistles. The trio witnesses a group of nearby Scars mercilessly hang and disembowel a captured W.L.F. soldier. Dina is then shot in the leg with an arrow, and Ellie tells Jesse to take her back to the theater while she draws the Scars’ attention away. When she sees the roof of the W.L.F. hospital in the near distance, though, Ellie decides to go there rather than follow after Jesse and Dina.

The immune girl

Ellie sneaks past the patrolling W.L.F. soldiers and their dogs and eventually comes face to face with Nora, who is surprised and confused to see her again. “We could have killed you,” she says. “Maybe you should have,” Ellie replies. “Or maybe you should have stayed the f—k out of Jackson.” Nora ignores Ellie’s repeated questions about Abby’s whereabouts, telling her, “I’m sorry you saw it happen. No one should ever have to see something like that. Sometimes, at night, I still hear his screams. It was a terrible thing, the way he died.” Her facade of sympathy for Joel is torn down when she coldly adds, “Yeah, the little b—h got what he deserved.” She tries to flee, but Ellie just chases after her, evading the gunfire of Nora’s fellow W.L.F. soldiers.

Desperate, Nora jumps on top of an elevator, which plummets several floors down. She lands right next to the door to level B2 and runs inside. Ellie follows her in, discovering the entire floor covered in Cordyceps and the air dense with spores* that spread the same zombie infection that destroyed the world decades ago. Ellie even stumbles upon the dying soldiers that Sergeant Park sent down there the day before. By the time she catches up with Nora at the end of a dead-end hallway, the W.L.F. nurse is already coughing and struggling to breathe. “We’re breathing spores. We’re infected,” she tells Ellie. “You killed us both.” Ellie just blankly responds, “Did I?”

It does not take long for Nora to catch on. “You’re her. The immune girl… you’re real,” she says in awe. “Don’t you know what he [Joel] did?” Ellie says she does not care, and she remains unwavering even as Nora lays it all out for her. “He killed everyone in that hospital, including the only f—king person alive that could make a cure from you,” Nora explains. Ellie replies with two words that may surprise some HBO viewers: “I know.” When Nora continues to refuse to give up Abby’s location, Ellie picks up a nearby pipe and beats her with it, torturing Nora until she tells her what she wants to know. But viewers do not see the full extent of Ellie’s violence. Instead, the episode abruptly cuts to the distant past. A younger Ellie wakes up in her bed in Jackson just in time to greet Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he walks in the door.

* In “The Last of Us Part II,” Ellie’s confrontation with Nora is even darker. Ellie already knows what spores are when she arrives in Seattle, and she knowingly throws both herself and Nora into a spore-covered level of the hospital after getting pinned down by W.L.F. soldiers. Ellie, in other words, knowingly dooms Nora in “The Last of Us Part II,” whereas it is Nora in the show who chooses to go into the hospital’s basement.

Our future days

The ending of “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 5 suggests that viewers may finally start to get some of the flashback scenes between Ellie and Joel that they have been denied thus far, and which are the strongest moments of “The Last of Us Part II.” These scenes are scattered intermittently throughout that video game, but its HBO adaptation has thus far withheld them, likely out of fear of further disrupting this season’s already disjointed pace. The series has suffered a bit without Pascal’s star presence, though, so if we really can expect to see more of him moving forward, that is a welcome development.

It is also worth noting that, in addition to finally introducing the infected spores from the “Last of Us” video games, this week and last week’s episodes have adopted the same day-by-day (i.e., “Seattle: Day One,” “Seattle: Day Two”) structure as “The Last of Us Part II.” That suggests the HBO series is going to actually follow the exact same, divisive structural path as its video game source material. Right now, it seems highly unlikely that TV viewers will be willing to exercise the same, extreme levels of patience that “The Last of Us Part II” and its structure demand from players, but only time will tell for sure.

“The Last of Us” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.

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