'The Last of Us' season 2, episode 5 recap: Stalker Alert
Seattle became even more brutal this week, and Ellie along with it
Well, dear readers, we are quickly running out of time with the second season of this prestige zombie show.
This week’s episode, clocking in at just 45 minutes1, was propulsive and truly scary, but left me feeling like this season is just getting started as it nears the finish line.
I know, it’s already been greenlit for a third season. But if another two-year wait is in store for just seven more episodes, a not-small amount of viewers, this one included, will be (or already are) frustrated.
The Last of Us is not the source of this infection, though. In a post-Game of Thrones TV ecosystem, it’s become routine for shows of this size and scale to shorten their seasons while increasing their production time.2
I’m hoping that the early greenlight for season three of The Last of Us, the fact that fake Seattle sets have already been constructed in Vancouver, BC, and the casting of pretty much all the principal characters, means there will be a shorter break between seasons.
Knowing what’s still to come in the game, though, I feel like the show will need at least four seasons to satisfyingly complete the story. I’ll look forward to that conclusion in 2033.
‘The Last of Us’ season 2, episode 5: Feel Her Love
You should know by now that this show loves a cold open. In fact, some of its best scenes are these standalone segments before the opening credits.
The beginning of ‘Feel Her Love’ mirrors what I think is the strongest of these sequences. In the second episode of the first season, officials in pre-apocalypse Indonesia inform a mycologist of the arrival of the Cordecyps fungus. Recognizing its severity in real time, she comes to a solemn conclusion: they’re already too late.
“Start bombing,” she tells the authorities.
In this episode’s first scene, set in modern times, WLF officials realize that the fungus is once again ahead of humans.
In a tense, well-acted two-hander, WLF higher-up Hanarahan (Allana Ubach, yay!) interrogates Elise, a fellow soldier played by Hannibal alum Hettienne Park (double yay!), at their hospital base.
She wants to know why Elise allowed the basement level to be sealed off while a regiment of troops was down there, dooming them to die?
It’s simple, really: They found more than traditional Infected roaming the abandoned underground corridors. They discovered that the plague has gone airborne, and it was the unit commander in the basement’s idea to seal them in. The revelation that the commander was Elise’s son is a bleak cherry on top of this brisk, exceptional scene.
Pockets of plague spores are common recurrences in the games, requiring characters (Ellie excluded) to wear gas masks to avoid infection. While its addition here may be simply caving to fan requests, I appreciate the showrunners’ decision to pepper new evolutions of the Cordecyps fungus and the Infected across seasons rather than dropping them back to back in the first season.
From this tense opener, the episode goes back to the main storyline.
In the last couple of episodes, The Last of Us has quickly become a story of young love, of chaotic emotions rendered at various levels of consistency.
Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabel Merced) spend the first part of ‘Feel Her Love’ planning, flirting, and backstory dumping. In their home base of the Pinnacle Theater3, Dina is triangulating a successful path to a WLF hospital while Ellie starts and mercifully stops another acoustic guitar performance on the theater’s main stage.
Once their route is planned, the two take to the road. Before long, they stumble on more carnage in the ongoing turf war between the WLF and the Seraphites. Here, a string of murdered Seraphite bodies lay beneath a mural of a woman, their presumed messiah, with the words "Feel Her Love.”
Beneath those words, in clumsy black spray paint, the WLF wrote “Feel this, bitch.”
The display makes Dina, who you may recall is pregnant, puke, and prompts Ellie to question bringing her along. Dina then tells Ellie about her tragic past, the first time she killed someone. She murdered a man who had killed her mother and sister.
Episode director Stephen Williams smartly keeps the camera fixed on a close-up of Merced here. In a world where everyone has a fucked up origin story, Dina knows that they matter less and less. This realization makes the scene more powerful; it’s not another moment to linger in grief, but in understanding a wronged person’s warped pursuit of justice.
The pair reaches the WLF hospital at nightfall. ‘Feel Her Love’ really kicks into gear here, with two exceptional, bloody sequences that are harrowing in their own unique ways. Williams uses different types of light to great effect here; one sequence is dominated by the narrow illumination of flashlights, the other by the sinister warmth of torches.
In an attempt to sneak around WLF guardposts, Ellie and Dina wander through an abandoned warehouse.
Big mistake! This building is home to “the smart ones,” more of those Stalker zombies that Ellie encountered in the season premiere.4 The way Williams slowly reveals these Infected— with Ellie and Dina shining their tactical flashlights in different areas and discovering more and more of them— was truly terrifying.
The couple’s plan to keep quiet and avoid gunfire is quickly abandoned as this encounter becomes a life-or-death fight. Dina flees to a nearby wire enclosure and locks herself in while the immune Ellie tries to distract and fend off the horde. There are enough Stalkers for both of them, though. A few of them overwhelm Ellie while the others start peeling away the wire fencing protecting Dina.
Just as all hope and ammo appear to be gone, in steps a surprise character to rescue them. Jesse (Young Mazino)! It turns out that he and Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) set off after Ellie and Dina not long after they left the Jackson settlement.
The two split up to search once they reached Seattle, and Jesse found their base at the Pinnacle Theater. Dina’s expert triangulation (a word that episode writer and co-showrunner Craig Mazin likes using as much as I like typing) then led him to the hospital.
Jesse, Ellie, and Dina run out of the warehouse and into WLF gunfire. They stumble into a conveniently close patch of unlit forest, with one WLF soldier hilariously yelling, “We don’t go in there!”
We soon find out why!
As the trio crawls through the bushes, they discover a gruesome ritual: A group of torch-carrying Seraphites has surrounded a pleading WLF prisoner; a noose is around his neck, his feet desperately balancing on a metal bucket. After some vague, cultish chanting, the Seraphite leader takes a scythe and disembowels him.
The Jackson intruders’ presence is soon discovered, and Ellie again plays the role of distraction so Dina and Jesse can get away.
Ellie has an ulterior motive, though.
She’s not done with the hospital, which so far is her only lead on tracking down Abby and avenging Joel’s death.
The part where Ellie spots the WLF hospital in the distance while escaping the Seraphites was so poorly lit that my friends and I paused the episode, rewound, and rewatched it, squinting to try and make out what exactly she was doing.
Mazin’s script skips over all the sneaking and detective work required to track down Nora (Tati Gabrielle), who was part of Abby’s revenge squad.
After taunting Ellie about Joel and throwing a water-filled tray, Nora leads her on a chase through the hospital, down an elevator shaft, and into the Infected-haunted lower levels.
The Cordecyps growths that overwhelm these areas are wonderfully menacing, as are the particle-breathing WLF troops embedded in them.
The most startling part of the episode, though, is seeing the full breadth of Ellie’s rage manifest. After cornering a wheezing, sickly Nora in a red-light-tinted corner of the basement, she relishes the opportunity to flaunt her continued immunity in the face of this airborne evolution.
Williams shoots much of this shot-reverse shot in close-up; Nora is collapsed on the ground, the camera positioned on the side of her face, but Ellie is filmed head-on from her point of view.
Ramsey’s unblinking stare, bathed in a crimson glow, shows the full extent of her post-Joel capacity for depravity. Even though Nora is already dying from fungal inhalation, she’s going to make it even more painful. She grabs a nearby lead pipe5 and starts bashing Nora in the legs, demanding to know Abby’s whereabouts.
Then Williams abruptly cuts away, and we end on a brief flashback. A sun-drenched room, a smiling Ramsey, the return of Pedro Pascal!
Based on this and the post-credits preview, next week’s episode seems to focus on one of the more touching interludes in the game: Joel’s creative birthday surprise for Ellie during more tranquil times in Wyoming.
While this episode should serve as a bit of a reprieve after the carnage of ‘Feel Her Love,’ I remain frustrated that it is one of only two remaining episodes in the season.
What did you think of the episode? Do you think we’ll see Kaitlyn Dever again before the season wraps?
What used to be a normal length for non-Columbo dramas before the Golden Age of TV bloat.
How the hell is Stranger Things still on? Aren’t these teens in their 40s by now?
Seattle’s Paramount Theater by another, presumably cheaper name.
'The Last of Us' season 2, episode 1 recap: Gail!
As I begin weekly recaps of the second season of The Last of Us, a warning: I have played the video games that this series is based on numerous times, and will be approaching these write-ups as such.
An exact replica of a popular in-game weapon.
Guessing next week is the space trip plus the Ellie learning the truth about the hospital. Ellie meeting Owen and his girlfriend plus Abby showing up at the theater feels like too much for the finale but I feel like it has to include both.