Last of Us' Episode 2

This week brought a more in-depth look at post-apocalyptic Boston as well as more details about what exactly has happened to the planet.

A professor of mycology, Ibu Ratna (Christine Hakim), is brought in by the government to examine the corpse of a woman who had gone on a murderous rampage under the apparent influence of “cordyceps” — a mushroom with bad vibes that is generally unpleasant to be around. Even in the Jakarta prologue, the first real sign that something isn’t right is when the professor cuts into a subject’s leg and no blood spills out — only a fibrous white substance. But as Joel and Tess explain to Ellie — who only knows about the plague from what she has read in books and heard through the grapevine — there are still large numbers of mindless infected killing machines all across the city, writhing on their bellies in the streets in order to stay connected to an underground fungal network. There is a scene about halfway through this episode when Tess leaves the other two behind to scout for a pathway behind some rubble, and Joel and Ellie’s awkward conversation is almost painful to witness. In fact, throughout the episode, our heroes end up trashing a lot of the past. The fungal origin of this zombie-style apocalypse has also inspired some spectacularly creepy imagery, from the tiny tendrils that snake out of the infected’s mouths to the darkness-dwelling creatures whose heads look like split mushrooms. (Asked where she learned to juggle a sharp knife, she cracks, “The circus.” Told that their path to Beacon Hill can go “the long way” or “the ‘we’re dead’ way,” she replies, “I vote ‘long way,’ just based on that limited information.”) Because she talks incessantly, by the time the travelers hit their first big roadblock, she has explained a lot about what her life has been like up until now: spending her days in classes with the other QZ kids, learning about the culture they can’t see firsthand and spending her free time exploring the places she’s not supposed to go. Once again there is a pre-opening credits prologue, set in Jakarta in 2003, revealing the origins of the mayhem we heard about on Joel’s radio in Austin last week. This episode offers several good “get to know you” scenes for Ellie, who was initially introduced as a sassy detainee, aloof and angry. Only when the camera angle changes can we see that she is actually asleep indoors, in one of those rotting old buildings. This week features more of a grand tour — and honestly, it’s kind of awesome. A big reason so many people are drawn to movies and TV shows about the End Times is that there’s something both exciting and eerie about seeing the bones of our world, gnarled and repurposed.

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.

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.