Analysis ‘The Last of Us’ Chapter 2: ‘Infected’

SPOILERS WARNING!

*This article contains spoilers for episode 2 of “The Last of Us”.

Joel, Ellie and Tess venture beyond the Boston Quarantine Zone in the second episode of HBO Max’s “The Last of Us.” This episode, directed by Neil Druckmann himself, creator of the video game, takes us to a terrifying ground zero of the city.but first it stops with a new flashback to the day the epidemic started, most likely to the place where it all started: Jakarta, Indonesia.

It’s 2003 again. Two law enforcement officers enter a restaurant and approach a woman who is eating in silence. They take her away in a patrol car and she asks if she has committed any crime. The agent reassures her. The woman is Ibu Ratna (Christine Hakim), an expert in mycology. She has been summoned to investigate a strain of fungi, which she identifies as Ophiocordyceps. What she doesn’t understand is why the sample is in a solution thought to have been extracted from a human. She urges him to enter a decontaminated room, where she awaits him with a corpse. Cutting the wound, which looks like a human bite, and mouth proves that the fungus managed to survive in that human body. When the agent explains that this woman worked in a flour and grain factory, Ratna points out that it is the perfect breeding ground for this fungus. The victim isn’t the only one with erratic behavior. She has bitten multiple people who have been isolated and neutralized, but there are employees whose whereabouts are unknown. Her wrist shakes and she nearly drops her teacup. The agent asks what they can do to find a vaccine or a cure. “There is not” she says, giving the only solution she can think of: “Bomb the city and all of us in it”. He asks to be taken home to have the little time he has left with his family.

In this second chapter, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin want to explain a little better not only how the pandemic was born, but also how it works in today’s post-apocalyptic world. This flashback serves to give those of us who played the game a little more information that the game, focusing on Joel and Ellie, did not offer us. It offers us a more global perspective and begins to point out the rules, and especially the changes of the infection compared to the PlayStation title. It also highlights how tremendously different this is from the coronavirus pandemic. There was no other solution here than to try to stop the spread by any means. It is an absolutely hopeless scenario.

And immediately after that we jump to 2023 with a plane that if it affects anything it’s light. Ellie (Bella Ramsey) lying on the grass in the fetal position is bathed in the sun’s rays. We don’t know her yet, but she already prepares us for the tense conversation she’ll have later with Tess (Anna Torv) and Joel (Pedro Pascal), who don’t take their eyes off him. How is it possible that he didn’t turn over during the night? Ellie reluctantly tells them about Marlene’s (Merle Dandridge) plan: there is a Firefly medical camp, where they want to test Ellie to develop a cure. Joel is tired of being faced with yet another case of “the cure”, “the chosen one”. You’ve heard this story before and are 300% skeptical.. Tess, on the other hand, has a more practical point of view again: they can’t go back to the quarantine zone because they will scan and kill her. “Better them than us”, because Joel will pull the trigger without hesitation, but he already has a lot of baggage with him. In the end, Tess is the boss.

The city is in ruins. Boston was one of the cities bombed to try to slow down the infection, “It worked here, but not elsewhere” explains Tess. Ellie wonders why there aren’t hordes of infected, as if there should be outside the quarantine zone. “People like to tell stories” says Tess. It’s a way to scare the population and not try to go beyond the walls. The girl winks at the video games asking if, then, there are no giant infected who throw spores, a reference to the Bloated who, if they appeared in the series, should be different since there were no spores. In this conversation, Tess asks about parents or boyfriends who might come looking for her. Ellie says no and hits the boyfriend side of her. She also reveals that she got infected in a sealed mall within the Quarantine Zone, which she decided to explore on her own. It’s not the first connection we hear with ‘Left Behind’the additional content of the first video game that investigates Ellie’s contact with the mushroom.

The first major setting of the episode is a flooded hotel, just like in the game. Ellie asks if they’ve ever stayed in a hotel like this before the infection and admits she can’t swim, two more nods to the game. She starts ringing in reception and rings the bell. Those of us who have played get goosebumps at the noise, but Ellie still doesn’t know the danger of sound in this world. Ramsey is building that personality of a 14-year-old girl who left the quarantine zone for the first time and discovers the world that was outside.. About her She also leaves us with a new conversation alone between her and Joel in which Ellie tries to find out more about her pimp and he makes it clear that her past is off-limits. She also throws him a whole moral quandary: “Is it hard to kill the infected knowing they were people before?”. Joel has been very comfortable on the other end of the line for a long time.

Bad news arrives from the roof of the hotel: they cannot continue there because there is a nest of infected people arriving. New lesson for viewers: the infected are connected and move in an orderly manner, like insects. To deliver the spores, Druckmann and Mazin planted roots that cause the fungus to create an underground network that connects several nests. If an infected is attacked, the infected connected to it (even if they are miles away) will be warned to come and attack the threat, which is just another body to conquer. Tess points out to Ellie that she may be immune to Cordyceps, but not to being torn apart by a group of zombies.

This insurmountable obstacle forces them to take a detour through the museum, a mythical scene from the video game. It is our first contact with the evolution of the infected. This gloomy building, filled with statues, nooks and Cordyceps roots, looks like a death trap. Joel makes sure those roots are dry, so they shouldn’t be connected to any infected. However, Ellie discovers a fresh corpse with very deep wounds. No other infected had made such a mess. And that’s because the first clickers of the series are waiting for them in the museum, people who have been infected for much longer and whose heads are deformed by the fungus. Joel explains, in complete silence and using gestures, that clickers can’t see due to the fungus covering their faces, but they have developed very keen hearing and can track their victims using the nasty scream they emit.. As expected, the clickers overhear the protagonists and an intense fight ensues through the corridors of the museum. Once they’re neutralized, they calculate the damage and Ellie realizes she’s been bitten again on her arm, but she’s not worried, just frustrated. Joel, however, is terrified that he will convert this time. Tess is very, very angry. Ellie traverses a board and recreates a mythical plane from the video game and sets her sights on the City Hall building, where her fireflies are presumably waiting for them.

“Our luck had to run out at some point”

But there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. Tess loses her temper and enters the building, where she sees a pile of corpses. Investigating they discover that one of her fireflies was infected and the others attacked him to prevent him from biting them. Tess searches like crazy for a map to see where the medical camp is. Joel can’t take it anymore and yells at him that they have to go home. “There is no home!” Tess responds, filled with rage, as she laments that her luck has run out. “God, it’s infected” says Ellie. Tess shows how a clicker bit her neck and shows Joel how his wound, only minutes old, is in far worse shape than Ellie’s, who was bitten twice.. It’s Joel’s way of teaching, and the audience, that Ellie really is immune to the fungus in some way. Tess pleads with Joel to take the girl to Bill and Frank to help transfer her to the fireflies. Now that she sees her end very close, she begs him not to turn her death into something in vain, to protect the girl and, thus, balance the scales after a life full of undoubtedly reprehensible acts.. She needs to believe that she can be one of the last to face this cruel fate.

One of the infected, presumed dead, wakes up and proceeds to attack, but Joel quickly kills him. However, we are about to see how this infected network works. Some filaments wrap around the corpse and a large group of creatures start running towards the town hall. Tess makes the decision to immolate herself so she doesn’t end up converting and gives Joel and Ellie a chance to escape. As the cinematic cliché dictates, the lighter does not light the second, third or fifth. Zombies pour in and run after Ellie and Joel. But one stops and turns to Tess. As they work in unison, they all begin to stop and turn their attention to one person who is no longer quite human but still maintains control over themselves. The infected approaches her and, in the most grotesque scene of the series so far, opens her mouth to let the wires coming out of her mouth enter Tess’s.. This doesn’t happen in video games (thank god), and it almost feels more like a welcome to the family from the infected than a way to take over Tess’s body, because she was already infected. She is losing hope and flicking the lighter more and more slowly. But it finally turns on. The explosion is so big that it also blows up the runners who had been following Joel and Ellie. She will have awakened all the hordes of the city, but the two are already far enough away to continue their journey.

But I’m worse than ever. Joel clearly blames Ellie for Tess’s death, and Ellie is very likely to blame herself for it as well. Tess is the first corpse he carries on his shoulders on this journey to the supposed cure. Now it must work, she must be “the key”. Because how to carry it if in the end all is in vain? The next chapter, which airs on HBO Max on Monday, January 30, will see if Ellie and Joel can keep from killing each other in the street now that they’re alone, and if Bill and Frank can help them in their own way. But, as we know from Depeche Mode, but they don’t, danger could again await them wherever they go.