The Last of Us

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.

Tess, Joel and Ellie's journey takes a dark twist. Sean Keane headshot. Sean Keane.

Much to our relief, she manages light the fire and closes her eyes before the explosion kills her and a bunch of infected. They reach the Capitol Building and find the corpses of the Fireflies they were meant to bring Ellie to. She's quickly gunned down, but her sacrifice gives Joel and Ellie the chance to escape. They hope to replicate Ellie's resistance and restore the world. Several of these people were executed to stop the problem from growing, but it was too late. Fans of the [classic video game](/tech/gaming/sony-ps5-review-exclusive-games-power-playstation-5-sky-high-space-age-console/) will undoubtedly be pleased at how closely it mirrors the source material.

In Boston, two decades later, Joel, Ellie, and Tess pass by evidence of that calculus's aftermath, a crater left by a bomb targeting Boston, just as other bombs ...

(And an [episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1BA-IIoWmM&list=PLob1mZcVWOagLL-shJOp-d5_qJOG2MvCJ&index=8) featuring the ruins of an amusement park I grew up going to chilled me to the bone.) (The book’s great, too.) And it looks like all of Life After People is available on the History Channel’s [YouTube page for the show](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLob1mZcVWOagLL-shJOp-d5_qJOG2MvCJ). • “Infected” was written by Craig Mazin and directed by the HBO series’ co-creator (and The Last of Us game writer) Neil Druckmann. Much of the pre-Infected world is made up of places and things she’s never experienced firsthand. There’s a reason the opening credits end on an image of just Ellie and Joel in silhouette, after all. The party does its best to stealth-mode its way through the exhibits, but they end up fighting the Infected and then making a hasty exit after a string of close calls that are maybe more than close calls. • Speaking of, this episode features the first scene of Ellie and Joel alone together. It’s excellent and a fine companion piece to The Last of Us.) As flames engulf the Statehouse, Joel and Ellie begin the next phase of their journey. The tension at the heart of The Last of Us is between the grim measures needed to survive and the desire not to snuff out what makes us human in the process. Then the clicking begins, a sound that Joel and Tess know means they’re among the Infected. [the cordyceps threat](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-last-of-us-fungus-infection-cordyceps-explained.html) and understand the cruel calculus needed to (maybe) contain it.

Ellie (Bella Ramsey) awakens to find Tess (Anna Torv) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) scrutinizing her, clearly unsure about what to do next. They offer her a scrap of ...

The fungus in the capitol building has activated and sent a warning to the horde of zombies they saw earlier. I’m so impressed by the level of detail here and even though they are making some changes from the game, it’s close enough to the source material in my book. When the general asks what to do, she tells him to bomb the city. We learn through conversation between Joel, Tess and Ellie that bombing is exactly what happened across the globe to slow the spread. As she examines the body, we see the tendrils start to grow out of the corpse’s mouth. When they reach the rendezvous, they find a bleak scene of death and violence. The zombies of The Last Of Us are a hivemind. Recall, Joel, Tommy and Sarah all discussing Jakarta in the kitchen in the series premiere. Fungal tendrils grow out of his mouth and snake into hers—and finally the lighter catches flame. But she explains that this was the entire point of the mission that Marlene (played by Merle Dandridge who also played Marlene in the video game) and the Fireflies were on. When she sees the front desk, she sloshes over to it and pretends to be the clerk checking guests into their room. They offer her a scrap of their jerky but she has sandwiches.

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.

Joel, Ellie, and Tess explore the fringe of civilization with disastrous results. Here's how the HBO thriller's second episode plays out.

“There’s a Firefly base camp out west, with doctors working on the cure,” says Ellie. Against all advice from Firefly leader Marlene (Merle Dandrige), Ellie tells Joel and Tess all about her bite, and her resistance to the cause of mankind’s near-extinction. When pressed on what they can do to stop the thread, Ratna’s answer is a single, horrible word, spoken in English: “Bomb.” Effectively, the woman violently attacked a number of colleagues at her place of work, a flour and grain facility. (Not a joke: a widespread number of fans left the Last of Us series premiere pointing at bread as the source of the apocalypse, with Joel’s half-assed Atkins Diet, or maybe just his inability to make a grocery run, literally saving his life. “Cordyceps cannot survive in humans,” says Ratna, leaning on her years of expertise, denying the truth on the microscope slide right in front of her.

Episode 2 of "The Last of Us" gives us a closer look at the infected — and a grisly close-up of a major death.

Sarah, Joel and Tommy pointedly avoid any food with flour in it in episode 1, and in this episode, the outbreak is sourced to a flour and grain factory in Indonesia. Episode 2 is about her personality refracting off of Ellie and Joel, and what’s revealed about the main characters in that light. (These appear to be clickers, a type of zombie from the game.) An exhale from Ellie sets one off, and Joel fights it off while the second one chases Tess and Ellie. In what has perhaps been my least favorite sequence in this show so far, the zombie plants a tendril-full smackeroo on Tess; it’s a cursed mirror image of the recognition and intimacy Tess wanted from Joel. Suddenly, one of the corpses shudders to life, and this is a world in which Joel is comfortable again. The fight ends with Joel shooting one zombie and Tess lodging a hatchet in another. The museum’s facade is covered in fungal growth, but Joel tests it with the butt of his rifle and declares it bone dry. At a certain point, Ellie and Tess split up, and the attention focuses back to Joel, who regroups with Ellie. There’s an obstacle on the way to the State House: a mass of infected, seen from the roof of the hotel. As a patch of light passes over the zombies, we see them writhe in a wave-like motion, in unison. We learn a bit more about the rules of the world here. A woman, Ibu Ratna, professor of mycology at the University of Indonesia, is detained by a serious-looking military authority and brought to what looks to be a hospital.

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.

In episode 2, Joel, Tess and Ellie continue their journey and face off against the deadly Clickers. Spoiler alert: These reviews will include spoilers for each ...

The Last of Us is becoming a very visceral experience and we’re fully digging it so far. They squirm and move and the idea of those burrowing into you is horrifying. Episode 2 of The Last of Us begins in Indonesia and chronicles the very beginning of the pandemic that would bring humanity to their knees. The entire sequence in which the gang hides from the infected is tense and riveting. While she initially held some hope that bringing Ellie to the Fireflies in time might help her, Tess has no choice but to admit that this is the end of the road for her. The Last of Us is purposely a little light on the zombie action; the focus has been shifted to humans, mostly to show how we, as a species, are coping with the shitshow that has become Earth.

In Sunday night's episode, Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Tess (Anna Torv) have trouble defeating just two of the monsters, and, as fans of the ...

In our conversations, I brought it up to Craig and he was immediately excited by it, or as he would say “activated.” We brought it to life in the most beautiful, poetic way, which is Ashley Johnson playing Ellie’s mom and she was the original actor for Ellie. I wish we had that in the game.” Druckmann: The other thing that came from our conversations is the network of infected that you see in this episode. We look for movement actors that can replicate that movement, and we are very lucky that we found some actors that adore the game. We wanted to go further and say, “OK, what are the different forms and functions?” I found this image that an artist had created of somebody that had become subsumed by fungus and in their mouth there were mushrooms. We had a long conversation about what’s more thematically appropriate for this episode, which is called “Infected” and is about the threat of the outside. Druckmann: Part of it was the deviation from the game, where Tess is killed by soldiers. We don’t quite know yet: That’s part of the fun of adaptation, and leaving these blurry edges of the map for our characters to discover as the adventure continues. One of them was “What’s going on in the rest of the world?” One of the things that Neil always talks about is how in the game your perspective is really connected completely to either Joel or Ellie, depending on who you’re moving with your controller. In another surprising expansion from the “Last of Us” game, the episode starts with a flashback to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2003, where a mycologist discovers one of the first people to die from cordyceps. But we had talked about how we’re in a genre that’s popular, and there are a lot of different versions of stories of an outbreak. For our clickers, we lifted them from the game, and kept them as is.

In 'The Last of Us,' an infected character sacrifices herself to save Joel and Ellie in an explosive episode 2. Read EW's recap.

Outside, Joel and Ellie listen to the shrieks of the burning undead. He grabs Ellie and runs, leaving Tess to stare down the horde of Infected bursting through the front doors. Unfortunately, one of the fungal fibers in the ground reacts, just as Tess explained to Ellie earlier, alerting the Infected down the road from them. One of the dead around them roars to life and Joel shoots it dead. She begins tipping the drums of gasoline and dumping boxes of grenades. With no one to take Ellie, Joel doesn't know what to do with her except go back to the QZ. The Firefly supply truck out front is abandoned and fresh blood paints the steps to the building. He's more comfortable talking about the amount of Infected he's killed, which is "lots." When the other Clicker rushes forward, Tess brains it with an ancient ax (nicked from one of the displays) and Joel finishes it off with a shot to the face. As they try to sneak past, he steps on the smallest shard of glass, alerting the Clicker and triggering a frantic struggle. They opt for the "long way," which involves climbing through the ruins of a luxury hotel, the first floor of which is submerged in scummy, skeleton-infested water. Most of the big cities were bombed to help prevent the spread, Tess (

We last saw Ellie and Joel, along with Anna Torv's Tess, fleeing FEDRA soldiers patrolling the QZ. As they ran off into the darkness, the unmistakable noise of ...

The camera cuts back to Joel and Ellie as they witness the explosion. Joel shoots the infected in the head, and we now see how the tendrils Tess described earlier in the episode work. The first time we see a (live) clicker in the show's museum, it is in the background as Joel and co. They then leave the museum and Ellie crosses the roof tops on a plank just like she does in the game. This is clearly the show's way of further proving Ellie's immunity, as thanks to the lack of spores in this adaptation, she can't be shown not wearing a gas mask in places that other characters have to. This is similar to something she does during a flashback scene in The Last of Us Part 2, when Joel takes her to the Wyoming Museum of Science and History for her birthday. In the game, this happens on a semi-regular basis with Joel and Ellie. As they make their way to the hotel, Ellie explains that she was bitten when she broke into a sealed off and abandoned mall. Joel still pushes for the three to turn back and return to the QZ. However tranquil this moment may seem at first, it is soon interrupted by the realisation that both Joel and Tess have been watching Ellie sleep, Joel with a gun in his hands. As with last week's cold open, these scenes add to the story of The Last of Us, and I mean that more than just in its most basic and obvious form. It takes us to Jakarta in 2003 (you may recall that Jakarta was mentioned on the radio when Joel was having breakfast with Sarah and Tommy in last week's episode).

Humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction by a fungus that infects billions of people in the HBO series The Last Of Us. While there is no threat of such ...

While there is no threat of such an apocalypse in real life, experts say the potential threat posed by the world's fungi should not be ignored. "There's no evidence they're causing disease in humans. It kills more than 100,000 people a year in sub-Saharan Africa. "What really is the most removed from the current status quo is the scale and the rate of the infections occurring in The Last Of Us," says Prof Bignell. "They are predominantly insect pathogens. Humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction by a fungus that infects billions of people in the HBO series The Last Of Us.

The pre-credits scene in that first episode, featuring a decades-old interview with a scientist (John Hannah), explained the conditions in which the virus might ...

And later that night, Joel forgot to pick up a birthday cake (full of flour) for his at-home celebrations. The pre-credits scene in that first episode, featuring a decades-old interview with a scientist (John Hannah), explained the conditions in which the virus might be able to be created... When Joel and his daughter Sarah see the elderly neighbour (who will eventually become infected before the day is through), we see she is being fed biscuits by her caring husband, as he implies it is the only thing she'll eat anymore. Now this information will shine a new light on the details from events within the first episode. Which basically means, flour is the ideal carrier system for the virus to piggyback on to. But what we weren't told is how the infection began in the first place.

The second episode of the HBO series, "The Last of Us," takes us back to the year 2003, when the first few cases of the Cordyceps Brain Infection (CBI)

With Tess getting infected and dying at the end of the second episode, Joel is vested with a huge responsibility, and the lives of each and every individual depends on him. In an extremely harrowing and nerve-wracking moment, Ibu Ratna told the officer to bomb the entire area, as it was the only way to contain the outbreak. Ibu Ratna was told that there were fourteen workers who were missing and were believed to be infected. It could be possible that the people who were on a high-carbohydrate diet and were eating all sorts of baked products like biscuits were more prone to the Cordyceps brain infection because, by consuming that stuff, they were giving the fungus an opportunity to thrive. She saw the infected leg and was petrified to see strands of fungi coming out of the mouth of the deceased. The officer told Ibu Ratna that the infected individuals turned violent and attacked others around them. She started processing every detail once she calmed down and tried searching for rational explanations and contributing factors that had led to the spread of the deadly fungi. Ibu Ratna observed the specimen and told the officer that it was Ophiocordyceps, but she couldn’t understand why they had used chlorazol to prepare the slide. In such cases, death becomes a means to end all misery, but the fungus doesn’t let that happen, and it keeps the host alive by preventing the decomposition of the body. The officer informed her that it was the preparation used for the samples that were taken from human beings. He explained that fungus, after entering the body, could act as a hallucinogen and start feeding upon the body of the host itself. Ibu Ratna finds it quite absurd and tells the officer that Cordyceps couldn’t affect human beings.

In both making changes to how Tess' fight with the infected played out in the video game, and drawing on viewers' knowledge of zombie storytelling tropes, ...

Her choice to die as she wants, instead of becoming yet another component of the identity-less infected, is an expression of free will against an entity that defies humanity’s understanding of natural law, a last investment in the kind of optimism that she and Joel have spent years refusing, and an act of resistance that will have lingering effects on the story to come. This is your chance to get her there, to keep her alive.”) Her assured physicality as she knocks over gallons of gasoline, empties a box of hand grenades, and flicks a lighter over and over to get it to spark as the Cordyceps-infected stream into the statehouse conveys her resilience and commitment. And while Mazin and Druckmann may discourage zombie comparisons, the noble and tragic send-off they give to Tess in “Infected,” via a Torv’s sweet spot as an actress, evidenced by her work on Fringe and the canceled-too-soon [Mindhunter](https://www.vulture.com/tv/mindhunter/), is as an incisive and intuitive pragmatist who can size up a situation and get a read on a person more quickly than anyone else, and she brings those qualities — her even gaze, her assured body language — to Tess. And The Last of Us co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have [pushed back](https://collider.com/the-last-of-us-craig-mazin-neil-druckmann-interview/) against the Z-word by emphasizing how the Cordyceps plague is based in [trackable science](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-last-of-us-fungus-infection-cordyceps-explained.html). Torv gives Tess’s expanded dialogue a mixture of steeliness, solemnity, and melancholy as she speaks to her and Joel’s shared past, and to the opportunity Ellie presents for a better future. And an agonizing climb up a body-filled stairway into an exit-blocked room, where Tess tries to protect Ellie from the pair of Clickers using echolocation and the camera tiptoes around blind corners, finds reflections in chunks of jagged glass, and swings upward to greet infected sprinting straight at us. And onscreen, her sacrifice is all the more meaningful for how it honors both the genre’s historical interest in the cost of individual choice, and The Last of Us’s specific interest in the galvanizing effect of hope. This moment exists in the video game, too, with Tess uttering the same resigned “Our luck had to run out sooner or later” line and pushing Joel and Ellie away from her so they can escape the FEDRA soldiers advancing upon them. [The Walking Dead](https://www.vulture.com/tv/the-walking-dead/), or infected with the Rage Virus, as in [28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later](https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/best-pandemic-movies-on-netflix-hulu-prime-and-more.html). A crash course in how these particular infected work, during which Tess explains to Ellie (and us) that Cordyceps also grows underground, with All horror subgenres, and the monsters who populate them, have a certain set of tropes that communicate to viewers what they can expect from that type of story.

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal as Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us episode 2 Photo: Liane Hentscher | HBO. This article contains spoilers through The ...

For starters, Joel is following the low-carb Atkins diet (which was popular in the early 2000s and was the “keto” of its day) and therefore rejects their neighbors’ offer of a biscuit. Robert Atkins would be the ultimate hero of a mushroom apocalypse? We know that thanks to the events of episode 1 (and the very premise of the show). That very same episode also features a news report in the background that warns of concerning developments in Jakarta just to set up this second episode reveal. Of course, not every single person in the world was infected because not every single person consumed flour product in late September 2003. The Last of Us episode 2 acknowledges this fact when the military reveals to Ibu Ratna that the first infected individuals were discovered at a “flour and grain factory on the west side of the city.” Unfortunately, the government has no idea who first bit their specimen and 14 total workers have gone missing from that same factory. That leads us into one of The Last of Us‘s most clever bit of background storytelling yet. The only “treatment” possible to is to bomb the city of Jakarta into oblivion. But still some major mysteries about the infection lingered in the context of [The Last of Us](https://www.denofgeek.com/the-last-of-us/). Regardless of where the infection was first observed, the end result was always going to be the same: near total annihilation of the human race. [episode 2 of the series](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-last-of-us-episode-2-review) answers at least one of those questions right from the get go. [the unfortunately real fungus](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-last-of-us-the-cordyceps-brain-infection-explained/) (and subsequent Google image search revealing it commandeering tiny ant bodies) was enough to answer that.

I've been listening to the post-Last of Us podcast hosted by Troy Baker, featuring co-showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. It's a pretty fascinating ...

But in terms of making quality TV that lands, I think that model really does hold Netflix series back, not just because of the “water cooler conversation” aspect, but in terms of how the episodes are shot, written and received without real beginnings or endings like Mazin describes here. There’s something to be said about HBO’s “looking forward to Sunday night” philosophy, whether that’s for The Last of Us, before that The White Lotus, before that House of the Dragon, and the conversations that happen around one specific episode the next day. Do you think anyone would be talking about things like the Jakarta intro or the Tess kiss if we’d gotten every episode of The Last of Us dumped on us last Sunday? So what happens is that either the showrunners, writers and directors know this, so they don’t really bother filming coherent starts and stops in episodes, making them feel like overly long movies, or if they do try, those moments don’t really land because they can all be binged together. One interesting thing they talked about this week was the difference between a game and a show in terms of the ability to have episodes. But that’s not the case for the show here, and they talk about how that allows them specific start and stop points.

This has been as a result of the release of the HBO adaption of the show (available on Sky Atlantic for those in the U.K). In addition, the PS4 version of the ...

This has been attributed to the game being sold on sale in UK retailers such as Argos and Amazon. In addition, the PS4 version of the game, The Last of Us: Remastered has also seen a 322% spike in sales and has re-entered the charts at No.32. However, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe remains in the list’s top 5 with a 3% sales increase each week and in 5th place is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II which has dropped after a 29% decrease in sales.