This week’s episode of The Last of Us was a speedrun of familiar video game levels.
HBO’s The Last of Us live-action adaptation aired its latest episode, Season 2 Episode 5: Feel Her Love, this week. With just a short 44-minute runtime to work with, viewers might not have expected much from this episode. Instead, they got everything: a reference to The Last of Us Part II’s Stalker level, a climactic confrontation with Nora, spores, and more!
This episode adapts part of the events of Seattle: Day One from Ellie’s perspective, and it’s jam-packed with references to the game. Here are all the changes and Easter eggs we spotted in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5:
The Cordyceps infection is evolving to match the games
In the beginning of the episode, we hear from W.L.F. sergeant Elise Park that the basement levels of their Lakehill Hospital housed the very first few Cordyceps patients in 2003. Now, the W.L.F. soldiers they’ve been sending in to clear out the basement are getting infected without even being bitten. According to Park, “It’s in the air.”
Well, well, well. We’ve come full circle to an element from the games that this series has fully omitted up to this point: spores. In the games, the Cordyceps fungus has always expelled spores in areas where it’s heavily concentrated and bound to its surroundings. As such, survivors require gas masks to survive. In the series, spores are presented as more of an evolution of the Cordyceps infection, and yet another sign that the plague is continuing to grow and change with time.
We’ve seen this come up before. A serious debate was held over the existence of Stalkers earlier in the series, as few believed that the Cordyceps infection was capable of change at all. However, it’s now clear that the infection is not stagnant. Much like it was in the games, the Infected themselves can become a lot more dangerous and take drastically different forms with time. Speaking of which…
The Rat King cometh
We might be reaching here, but when we’re told that the basement levels of Lakehill Hospital are empty, the series feeds us this line off-handedly: “Nothing but rats.” Technically, that’s true. In The Last of Us Part II, Abby goes down to the basement levels and meets a rather fearsome foe called the Rat King, an unholy amalgamation of Infected left to rot in a sealed room for decades.
It remains to be seen whether the series will actually adapt this abomination during Abby’s part of the story, but the dominoes are lined up for it to happen. There are just two things standing in Abby’s way, and they’re both changes that have been made to the series.
First, there are now spores in the basement, and Abby might not be equipped to navigate them unharmed. Second, Abby only went down into the basement to get medical supplies, because the W.L.F. were packing up and leaving the hospital. In the series, we see Nora still in the middle of treating patients, and the W.L.F. seemingly staying put–an early sign that we’ll see Abby’s storyline play out a little differently.
It’s Stalker City over here
In The Last of Us Part II, Ellie breaks into the Seattle Conference Centre on the way to the W.L.F. hospital. Unfortunately, she discovers that the building has now become a conference of Stalkers; these twitchy, patient, and creepy Infected hide behind office desks and corridor corners to deliver an unpleasant surprise upon the player until they get out.
The series adapts this level with a few changes. We still get office desks and tons of Stalkers, but Ellie and Dina run into these Infected during a tense encounter in a warehouse. Outside of this warehouse are various shipping crates, which will also serve as familiar imagery for anyone who’s played through Abby’s storyline. She brings Yara and Lev to a safe haven nearby these crates, and temporarily abandons them to head to the Seattle Waterfront Aquarium.
The Stalkers are adapted perfectly in the series, to the point that it’s hard to believe video game Ellie managed to beat 10 of them at one go (to be fair, she had bombs). In the series, Ellia and Dina only survive thanks to the unexpected appearance of a friend.
Jesse, Dina, and Ellie meet the Seraphites
Here’s where the episode makes its biggest change yet. As Ellie and Dina inch towards certain doom at the hands of bloodthirsty Stalkers, they’re suddenly saved by an irritated Jesse. Jesse reveals that both he and Tommy headed out to look for Ellie and Dina the day after they left. That means Tommy is somewhere in Seattle as well, though it’s hard to believe that HBO’s more level-headed version of the character is leaving the same trail of his destruction as his video game counterpart.
In the game, Jesse meets up with Ellie earlier at Hillcrest, a W.L.F.-infested suburb in Seattle. He saves her from doom much like he does in the series, and the two go back to the theatre. Ellie slips out while he’s resting, and then has her first encounter with the Seraphites in the forest, where she is shot by an arrow.
In the series, these beats are covered differently. We saw what appeared to be Hillcrest in an Isaac-centred flashback last week, and thus the book seems to have been closed on those suburbs for good. The series skips Hillcrest and has Ellie go straight from fighting Stalkers to meeting the Seraphites, and this time, she has both Dina and Jesse in tow. The series then writes Dina out by having her shot in the leg with an arrow, instead of Ellie. The two are not seen again, and it is presumed that they fled back to the theatre afterwards.
Nora and Ellie get off on the wrong foot
Once Ellie gets into the W.L.F. hospital (after a video game-like encounter with a patrolling dog catching her scent), we get a straightforward adaptation of the game. Ellie meets Nora in a moment of vulnerability, just like in the game, and chases after her through the hospital corridors afterwards. Nora ends up in the basement where she breathes spores, which is new to the series but not to the games, and we hear the W.L.F. refuse to chase the two out of fear of becoming Infected.
Ellie then reveals to Nora that she’s immune. In turn, Nora reveals to Ellie that Abby killed Joel because he’d massacred a hospital full of Fireflies, including Abby’s father. This is a pretty big change for the series, as Abby’s motivations for killing Joel never fully crystallise for Ellie in the video game. The two hardly communicate without the use of their fists.
Ellie then slaughters Nora while looking for information on Abby’s whereabouts, but we don’t find out whether her violent interrogation methods actually bear fruit.
It was all a dream in the end
After that bit of violence, Ellie then wakes up in a bedroom in Joel’s house, where the two greet each other with grins. This feels like a nod to the old “It was all a dream” cliché, but fans of the game will know that, by now, the series has eschewed a whole lot of flashbacks in favour of a straightforward telling of Ellie’s revenge story, without bouncing back and forth in the timeline. It looks like we’re getting a flashback-heavy sixth episode next week, wherein we’ll get almost all of the game's flashbacks packed front-to-back within an hour-long runtime.
That’s it for now! Check out our coverage of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 4: Day One here, and stay tuned for more Easter eggs and references from upcoming episodes.