When The Last of Us Part II came out on the PlayStation 3 in 2020, there was a big backlash against the game. Fans put forward many justifications for why they were so angry. One of them went something like this: "The story is a straightforward revenge tale with nothing interesting to say."
It's true that The Last of Us Part II is a revenge story. After spending the first game bonding with Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey) witnesses his brutal murder at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a new character who is getting revenge on Joel for killing her father in the season 1 finale. Ellie then sets out to get revenge on Abby, crossing more and more lines until she's behaving just as cruelly and wantonly as Abby did.
At what point does someone cross the line separating justice from vengeance? Is it worth taking revenge on someone if it costs you your soul? These questions are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago, and it's exciting to watch Ellie try and puzzle out the answers.
On this week's episode, Ellie tracks down Nora (Tati Gabrielle), a military medic who came to Jackson with Abby. Ellie chases Gabi through the hospital where she works, eventually forcing Gabi to stumble down an elevator shaft into the basement, where the cordyceps fungus has crawled over every wall and pillar in the room, painting them sickly shades of orange and blue and green. The room is eerily beautiful; I would go to this haunted house experience.
We're introduced to a new bit of lore: there are people trapped in the basement who've long since been enveloped by the cordyceps fungus. They now breath infectious spores into the air. Fans of the video games have been wondering if the fungus would ever go airborne; it has. Gabi was dead the moment she fled into the basement, but Ellie is immune to infection, so she's okay.
Ellie follows Gabi into a dead-end hallway and asks her to reveal where Abby is, but Gabi doesn't budge. Ellie isn't here to argue; she picks up a nearby pipe and smashes Gabi's leg with it, mirroring what Abby did to Joel's leg a couple episodes back. She's not angry; her eyes are dead. The camera lingers on Bella Ramsey's blank expression, eerily lit by red lights. There's a surreal quality to everything that happens once Ellie enters this colorful underworld. Ellie is not herself down here, or maybe this is the only place she can be herself. Maybe she's becoming someone else, someone "empty and haunted," as Dina puts it earlier.
This is why I don't buy the line about The Last of Us Part II being "just a revenge story." A story isn't about what is about but how it is about it, and this revenge story has the power to chill the blood. If you don't believe me, look into Ellie's eyes.
Review: The Last of Us season 2, Episode 5, "Feel Her Love"
The episode is all about that ending for me, but there are other moments worth noting. We get more great chemistry between Ellie and Dina; they're sweet and playful with each other in the theater, where Dina is figuring out where to look for Abby and Ellie is trying to help despite her complete lack of ability. Later, after they set out, Dina helps us understand why she's taking this revenge quest so seriously. Like Ellie, she lost people close to her: her mother and sister. Dina killed the man who did it on the spot, but if she hadn't got him, she would have spent the rest of her life hunting him down.
I can't say enough nice things about Isabela Merced in this role. Whether playful, soulful, lustful, sad, happy or pained, I buy everything she's played as Dina. We may no longer have the Joel-Ellie dynamic, but Ellie and Dina also make a wonderful team. Is it possible they're too good and that I won't miss the old Joel-Ellie pairing enough?
Anyway, Ellie and Dina are trying locate Abby and her posse without attracting the attention of the paramilitary Wolves, which means being as quiet as possible. That gets difficult when they're pinned down by a mob of super-smart infected, of the same kind that Ellie encountered in the season 2 premiere. These zombies don't just run at you and try to eat your brains; they flank you and use tactics, which makes them especially dangerous.
We get a swerve when Jesse (Young Mazino) shows up to rescue Ellie and Dina from their predicament. He and Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) have followed Dina and Ellie to Seattle to keep them from getting themselves killed, and the trip already looks like it's paying off. (Tommy doesn't appear in the episode, he's elsewhere in the city.)
Ellie, Dina and Jesse have to use guns to fight the stalkers, which attracts the attention of the Wolves. That takes us into our other surreal detour of the night, and my second favorite scene. The trio runs into a public park where the Wolves are scared to follow. This is territory ruled by the Serephites, aka the Scars, the weird religious folk who have been at war with the Wolves for we know not how long. As Dina points out, the Scars are kind of like Amish people in that they don't use modern technology. We don't know why, but I imagine it has something to do with the world being overrun by infected and the Scars repenting of modernity in penance. And who am I to judge how you react to a zombie apocalypse?
Anyway, Ellie, Dina and Jesse find themselves running from gun-toting militia members only to find themselves in a deep dark forest populated by bow-wielding monks disemboweling a man by torchlight in some bizarre ritual. It's an abrupt shift in tone, a hard turn from military drama into dark fantasy. As the trio looked on at the Scars gathered in the clearing, I thought of the scene from The Wizard of Oz when the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion look at the Wicked Witch's soldiers. That's how far Ellie, Dina and Jesse travel in a few steps.
Jesse and Dina get separated from Ellie, which is how Ellie ends up in the hospital and finds Nora; we'll find out what happened to the other pair next week. Anyway, I love that The Last of Us can evoke this kind of mythic feeling. In The Last of Us, the civilized world that we know is gone. The people who moved into the primeval forest are waking up to find themselves neighbors with gods and monsters. Which will Ellie be?
The Last of Bullet Points
- The Last of Us loves cold opens. In this one we see a couple of WLF officers talk about the spores in the hospital basement. The hospital itself is too valuable to give up, so they decide to seal off the basement and keep using the upper floors. Not only does this nicely set up Ellie's journey to the basement later on, but fans of the games know that Abby will make her own fateful journey down there later.
- One of the WLF officers mentions that her son Nathan went down into the hospital basement to hunt infected and ended up getting sealed down there. Later, Ellie comes across a man who can only be Nathan breathing spores into the air. More nice linkages. Now that I think about it, I suppose it would have been nice for Ellie to put the spore people out of their misery, but it was a weird situation and she had other things on her mind.
- At the theater, Ellie starts to play Pearl Jam's "Future Days" on the guitar. The song has a key role in the games. Technically, it shouldn't exist in this world, since the zombie apocalypse happened before Pearl Jam released it, but I guess we can paper over that.
- Call me thick, but I actually didn't pick up on why Ellie and Dina decided that they should make their way to the hospital. I just went with it. I'm sure they know what they're doing.
- This was the shortest episode of the season so far but didn't feel like it.
- The title of the episode is "Feel Her Love," a slogan of the Seraphites. It's also darkly ironic since the episode ends with Ellie beating someone to death. That's some seriously tough love.
Episode Grade: B+
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