The-last-of-us-episode-2

Joel, Ellie, and the gang go on a video game-style quest—and things get messy.

That’s certainly one of the ways they can spread the infection, but it’s nasty as all hell. So, I’m in the same boat as some of you newcomers to the story. The group comes across a hotel building that has become something of a swamp. Looks like we’ll have to find another way to get to the other side,” or, “Press X to climb, Joel!” I know the HBO series can’t have Ellie say lines like, “Joel, did you know that you can hold L2 to lock on to enemies?” but I still want her to say it. The city we saw with the slanted skyscraper at the end of the premiere episode wasn’t a good sign that anything is inhabitable outside of the QZ, either. He shines a flashlight in one of their mushroom faces and the beast doesn’t notice, so they seem to work purely on sounds alone. And The Last of Us just works. They still smuggled Ellie out of the QZ, though, and whatever’s happening to her may be the cure to this whole epidemic. So now, Joel was forced to make a deal with the Fireflies to smuggle Ellie out of the QZ in exchange for the car battery. Sadly, that car battery was sold off to the Fireflies by a guy named Robert. Say what you will about the Halo television series or the groan-inducing Sonic the Hedgehog movies, but HBO and The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann are truly working on a whole other level. Whether it’s because of Druckman's involvement, or commitment to the source material, The Last of Us’s premiere simply had the right sauce.

Infected,” the second episode of HBO's dystopian drama, showed us how Joel and Ellie process a traumatic loss.

The bulk of the zombies are saved for the final sequence, but even with only a few of the monsters, the museum fight is intense and very well-constructed. Nasty all around, and if the fight sequence in a few spots perhaps drifted too close to feeling like a game level (the shots from Joel’s POV, for instance), for the most part, Mazin and Druckmann have a clear sense of how each action beat has to work as drama, rather than something interactive. The show does a good job of establishing the rules of play — the zombies track you by sound, not sight, for instance — as well as continuing to make the creatures feel distinctly gross in appearance and everything else. She is humanity’s potential salvation, but she’s also a girl who just lost someone she had grown to like a lot in a short amount of time. But perhaps the most important thing the episode does is to make sure we see Ellie as a person first, rather than a walking vaccine incubator. If The Walking Dead wanted to build a set like that, it would have necessitated situating most or all of a season there to amortize the cost. She is not only immune to the infection, but the Firefly doctors believe she may be the key to creating a vaccine to protect future generations from this plague. And it’s the strength of Torv’s work that in turn makes Tess’ death hit much harder than the loss of any character should after only two episodes. One step, then the next step, and maybe the one after that are all he can allow himself to think about. But in this case, the scientist’s certainty that there is no way to treat this infection serves as a contrast to the whole reason Joel is meant to take Ellie to parts west. She has studied spores and fungi all her life, and she understands instantly that there is no cure for this — that the only way to save humanity is, “Bomb. The zombie apocalypse is days away, and the government of Jakarta is finding this out before anyone else.

Bella Ramsey continues to be excellent as Ellie, granting humorous relief in a world that offers very little. She's dependent but resourceful and, crucially, ...

But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is finally ready to see if there’s a life away from The Prince of Darkness. There’s no irony lost that our first real meeting with one of them takes place in a museum - leading them to not only take over humanity’s present-day but also a place designed to preserve our past. It’s deeply effective and an ominous foreshadowing of the show’s hopeless present day as we're transported back to a bombed-out Boston. She's dependent but resourceful and, crucially, willing to learn as the true horrors of the wider world steadily become revealed to her. A scene filled with quiet dread, it ends with the loudest of suggestions - the bombing of an entire city. Although not essential to Joel and Ellie's journey, it offers compelling information that acts as an explainer of how the fungus works for newcomers, as well as fascinating new context for those familiar.

The second episode of The Last of Us takes us to the streets of Boston, as Joel and Tess attempt to get Ellie to the Fireflies.

But Tess remains determined to find answers as to where the Fireflies were taking Ellie, and Joel says that it’s over, that they should just go home. Tess stays back and Joel and Ellie look out at the city. When the other clicker comes to attack them, Tess sticks an ax in its head, and then Joel shoots the creature dead as well. After a gunfight, Joel finds Ellie and tries to lead them to safety, but after stepping on a piece of glass, a clicker comes barreling toward them. Ellie asks if it’s hard to kill the infected, knowing that they were once people, Joel says “sometimes,” followed by Ellie asking if it was hard to kill the FEDRA guard when they were escaping, but this questioning stops once Tess finds her way back to the group. While Joel wants to return her to the Boston quarantine zone, Tess sees Ellie as the best way to get the supplies Marlene promised. When Ellie asks if Joel and Tess are a thing and how he ended up in Boston, Joel bluntly says “pass.” Ellie then asks how long infected stay alive. While they continue down the long way, Ellie tells Tess that she was bit after she snuck into an old mall in the quarantine zone. Yet Tess wants to finish the job, and regardless of if it's true or not, Joel and Tess get what they want if they deliver Ellie—and that’s good enough for her. She shows that the bite isn’t getting worse, and states that she isn’t infected. Directed by Neill Druckmann, the creative director and writer of the original game, this second episode is much quieter as we leave the Boston quarantine zone and begin to see the world that Joel and Ellie will have to face going forward. After the credits, we find Ellie sleeping in an abandoned building, being watched over by Joel and Tess, who are both understandably unnerved by this girl who is seemingly immune to the outbreak.

One of the needs we had was to show how the infected take over a city,” Craig Mazin, the show's producer, said.

Then there are those who watch the show and see it as the product of hundreds of people’s work, and view the proceedings as borne of creators’ choices. Which is what makes settling on an interpretation so difficult — and reading the scene as grossness for its own sake so easy. Because The Last of Us franchise has existed for nearly 10 years, a lot of people are instinctively in the latter camp, having seen Druckmann in particular elevated from random game director to minor celebrity within video game culture. But scratching the surface a bit, both the kiss and its tendrils give the sense that Tess is being welcomed into a new “community” of infected. There are those who buy into the fiction of the show and interpret the stuff that happens on screen very plainly, as a story. (You can read this as thoughtful critique or thoughtless reproduction.) And perhaps the showrunners, who are men, did not think about whether it might be cruel or send a weird message to subject one of the show’s most prominent female characters (so far) to an even worse fate than she suffered in the game, and in a more lurid way at that. The kiss is clearly nonconsensual, a grim fictionalization of rape culture and the kind of brutish behavior so many people suffer even in our current non-apocalypse. It’s possible the showrunners of this horror drama TV show wanted a dramatic and horrifying body horror gross-out scene. “And I remember one of the annoying questions I asked was, why are FEDRA soldiers all the way out here? But this closeness comes at a cost: a loss of both her identity and humanity. As Joel and Ellie, the series’s protagonists, make a break for it, Tess stays behind to slow the zombies down by upturning a few barrels of gasoline and setting off a stash of grenades left behind by a group of smugglers and freedom fighters. If the open city is really, really dangerous, it seems like they’re really going way, way out of their way to find Tess and Joel.