Ellie and Dina’s Seattle tour continues, and Cordyceps springs a surprise
When Ellie was forced to watch Joel die at the end of the shocking second episode of The Last of Us Season 2, she made a promise to his killers: “I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill you! You’re gonna die! You’re all gonna fucking die!”
More than three months have passed since Abby and her friends traveled to Jackson to kill Joel and avenge their fallen Fireflies, but Ellie still intends to keep her word. And in “Feel Her Love,” she crosses off the first name on her revenge list: Nora.
“Feel Her Love,” directed by Stephen Williams (Lost, Watchmen), is a thrilling continuation of Ellie and Dina’s payback tour through Seattle. Episode 5 features some significant developments for the show’s second season but also for the world of The Last of Us. Ellie and Dina receive reinforcements from Jackson, with Jesse finding them at a critical time and Tommy searching for them elsewhere in the city. And The Last of Us reveals a new, terrifying means for the Cordyceps infection to spread: spores.
“Feel Her Love” begins with the dramatic introduction of this novel evolution of the Cordyceps fungus. At the WLF’s hospital in Seattle, Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach)—who was introduced in last episode’s opening flashback as she welcomed Isaac into the WLF—meets with a WLF officer named Elise Park (Hettienne Park) about a strange incident that ended with Elise issuing an order for her own men to be killed. Elise and her team were tasked with clearing the hospital of all infected, and they ran into no issues from the ground floor to the sixth. But that changed when they reached the basement.
After the WLF failed to find anything on the first basement level (“not even rats”), Elise sent her best soldier, Leon, to lead a squad down to the second level, B2. Although Leon initially reported nothing out of the ordinary (save for the Cordyceps lining the walls and floor), he radioed in five minutes later with a harrowing update. “He was struggling to breathe,” Elise explains. “He could hardly talk. I thought maybe he had been bit. I said, ‘Leon, were you bit?’ He said … he said, ‘It’s in the air.’ He said, ‘It’s in the air. Seal us in.’”
It’s a brutal revelation, especially as we learn at the end of the scene that Leon was Elise’s son. Not only does the introduction of Cordyceps spores reshape our understanding of how this fatal infection can spread, but it’s also a significant reversal of a creative choice that the creators of The Last of Us series made in Season 1.
In the Last of Us video games, spores play a major role in how characters navigate the world, as carrying gas masks becomes a necessity in the years after the outbreak. But showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann decided that audiences might have a more difficult time buying into this concept in the live-action adaptation.
“In the game, it spreads through biting and saliva, but it also can spread through the air, through spores,” Mazin explained in an “Inside the Episode” segment in Season 1. “And while that works in a video game environment, in real life, spores move around everywhere. And it’s just harder to buy into the notion that spores localize and don’t spread.”
In Episode 5, spores are revealed to exist in the TV series after all, but only in this unique setting in the basement of the Seattle hospital—at least for now. As Elise explains to Hanrahan, “The old-timers said that down there was where they brought the first Cordyceps patients in ’03.”
This location comes back in an important way when Ellie branches off on her own to track Nora, but first, she has to reach the hospital. And that ends up being a perilous journey in itself.
Back at the theater where they’ve taken refuge in the present, Dina is busy triangulating the locations of the WLF bases and troop movements by listening to the Wolves carelessly communicate over the radio. She’s trying to determine the best route she and Ellie can take to reach the hospital and find Nora without being detected. The “non-school-oriented” Ellie opts out of assisting Dina in favor of exploring the rest of the theater, and she ends up finding the theater’s auditorium and stage, which has a wide selection of guitars for her to choose from. Ellie plays the beginning of a song, “Future Days,” singing, “If I ever were to lose you” before losing herself in her thoughts—and, more likely than not, her memories.
In Episode 4, Ellie didn’t show the sort of visceral rage that she displayed at the end of Episode 2, when she screamed at Abby and her crew following Joel’s death. Her hatred for them had been supplanted by her love for Dina, if only temporarily, as their friendship evolved into a romance. But that rage reawakens in a major way in “Feel Her Love” as her mind—and motivations—turn back to Joel.
With the sudden news of Dina’s pregnancy, Ellie’s priorities seemed to be shifting toward ensuring the safety of Dina and her expected child rather than putting them in danger from the trio of threats in Seattle (the WLF, the Seraphites, and the infected). However, Dina pushes her to stick to their original agenda in Seattle. As they walk to the hospital, she tells Ellie the tragic story of the first time she killed someone, which happened when she was only a child. Dina had sneaked out of her home and returned to find a man killing her mother and sister, so she shot him. Dina tells this anecdote not just to share her most traumatic memory with her new romantic partner but also to justify their current quest to avenge Joel and to inspire Ellie to finish what they’ve started.
“Whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn’t deserve that,” Dina says. “And I think, what if I hadn’t snuck out? What if my mom and sister were beaten to death in front of me? What if that motherfucker made me watch as he did it? Would it make a difference if my family had hurt his people first? No. No. And if I hadn’t killed him, if he had gotten away, I promise you, I would’ve hunted him forever. Forever.”
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Although Dina makes it pretty clear what her stance is, she leaves the decision about whether to turn back to Jackson or proceed with their mission in Ellie’s hands—and Ellie decides to push forward. But soon enough, it becomes apparent that they’re both in over their heads. As they follow Dina’s route through an abandoned building that the WLF chooses not to patrol, they quickly find out why the area has been left unguarded: It’s full of infected stalkers, the same intelligent breed of mushroom monsters whom Ellie first encountered at the grocery store outside of Jackson in the season premiere.
If it weren’t for Ellie’s immunity and the sudden arrival of Jesse to save the day, Ellie would have been infected by the small army of stalkers piling on top of her, and Dina soon would have met the same fate. Jesse helps lead them safely away from the infected and the alert WLF soldiers, only for them to run into Seraphites, who are in the midst of executing another stray Wolf. When the Seraphites discover them hiding in the bushes, Dina gets shot in the leg by an arrow. The three of them get separated, with Jesse carrying Dina back to the theater as Ellie draws the Seraphites away into the woods.
As Jesse had explained moments earlier, he and Tommy sneaked out of Jackson the night after Ellie and Dina left in order to find them and bring them back home. Jesse and Tommy split up to cover more ground in Seattle, and their intention was to meet in the morning. In theory, Ellie could have stuck to Jesse’s plan and circled back to the theater so they could find Tommy together the next day and return to Jackson to live happily ever after. But she takes the opportunity to branch off and find Nora on her own.
Ellie sneaks into the hospital, locates Nora with ease, and holds her at gunpoint as she demands that Nora give up Abby’s whereabouts. Ellie tells Nora that she may let her go if she provides Abby’s location, and Ellie might even mean it. But then Nora triggers Ellie’s wrath. “I’m sorry you saw it happen,” Nora says. “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. Yeah. Yeah, the little bitch got what he deserved.”
After Nora manages to break free, Ellie chases her through the hospital until she has Nora cornered. In a moment of desperation, Nora tries to escape by jumping into the elevator shaft to reach the other side of the floor, but her weight forces the elevator car to shift and fall all the way down to the ominous second level of the basement. When Ellie follows her down, she finds everything that Leon had warned his mother of over the radio at the start of the episode: Cordyceps lining the hospital walls and spores floating through the air. She even discovers Leon himself, infected and exhaling spores as he remains embedded in a wall of fungus.
Ellie follows the sounds of Nora’s coughs and finds her sitting on the floor, clinging to life as the spores enter her system. As Ellie moves from room to room, unaffected by the viral infection in the air, it doesn’t take Nora long to realize who Ellie really is: the immune girl. But more surprising than that is how Ellie reacts to Nora’s explanation of what Joel did to the Fireflies in Salt Lake City.
“Don’t you know what he did?” Nora asks.
“I don’t care,” Ellie replies plainly.
“You don’t care?” Nora continues. “He killed everyone in that hospital. Including the only fucking person alive that could make a cure from you. That was Abby’s father. And Joel … Joel shot him in the head. That’s what he did.”
Unmoved, Ellie simply responds: “I know. Where’s Abby?”
Given the nature of Ellie and Joel’s fractured relationship by the start of the second season, we could have assumed that Ellie had finally discovered the truth about what happened in Salt Lake City at some point during the five-year gap between the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2. However, Ellie’s response to Nora confirms it. Ellie discovering the truth of Joel’s lie may have dissolved their relationship, but—just as Dina assured her earlier in the episode—none of that matters to her now. Because the only thing that matters is that Joel’s killers, Abby most of all, pay for what they did to him.
As Ellie, soaked in red light reflecting from the walls, starts to beat Nora with a metal pipe, her eyes widen, creating a maniacal look. It’s as if this act of violence has activated something inside Ellie, just as watching Joel beat a FEDRA guard to death did in the series premiere. The screen cuts to black as Ellie, consumed by her rage once more, continues to strike Nora—but a final scene appears before the credits roll.
In the episode’s closing flashback, Joel is back and looking more like a dad to Ellie than ever before. He enters Ellie’s old bedroom in his house in Jackson with a smile on his face and says, “Hey, kiddo” while planting his hands firmly on his hips. And as Ellie stirs in her bed to sit up, she replies, “Hi,” returning his smile with an equal, sweet enthusiasm. The moment is brief yet impactful, as The Last of Us juxtaposes Ellie’s horrifying brutality in the present with a tender moment between the original starring duo of the series. It’s been functionally three episodes since Pedro Pascal’s Joel last appeared on-screen, and his fleeting return is a devastating reminder of why Ellie and Dina came to Seattle.
During their second day in Seattle, Ellie and Dina encounter a swarm of infected stalkers, WLF soldiers, and Seraphites, leading to Dina getting shot in the leg. They’ve put themselves in tremendous danger, and now they’ve dragged Jesse and Tommy—a soon-to-be father and a father, respectively—into it as well. With Dina injured and pregnant, they should all just turn back to Jackson and accept Nora’s death as enough of a penance for Abby’s sins. But Ellie’s rage has been reactivated, and Abby is still out there. And if Ellie was able to get Nora to give up Abby’s location, then Ellie will know exactly where to find her.
Daniel writes about TV, film, and scattered topics in sports that usually involve the New York Knicks. He often covers the never-ending cycle of superhero content and other areas of nerd culture and fandom. He is based in Brooklyn.
