The Last of Us Recap: Don’t Go in the Basement

It’s a worrying sign when a group of heavily armed soldiers huddle outside a hospital basement door that’s been bolted shut behind a metal barricade and still look worried. Whatever’s down there needs to stay down there. So what’s the story? We learn it in this episode’s opening scene via a conversation between a pair of WLF officers: Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) and Elise (Hettienne Park). Hanrahan wants to know why Elise has “apparently killed” some of her own men. “Including Leon,” Elise adds, which gives Hanrahan pause. Charged with clearing the hospital’s lowest levels, Elise sent a squad, led by Leon, down to the first basement level, where they found only an empty floor. Pushing down further, Leon’s squad found some signs of the infected and then, with little warning, encountered airborne cordyceps. Knowing the deadliness of this situation, Elise and Leon made the decision to seal the basement floors with the soldiers inside. “I’m sorry about your son,” Hanrahan tells Elise as she leaves, filling in the chilling story’s last and saddest detail. This is a show that knows how to break your heart even before rolling the credits.

Once they have rolled, the season’s fifth episode shifts its focus to Seattle’s Pinnacle Theater. It’s “Day Two” in Seattle, a title informs us, and Dina and Ellie are making plans. By listening in on the Wolves’ transmissions, Dina is able to triangulate their position and plot a course toward the hospital. While she does that, Ellie explores their new, if temporary, home, a beautiful concert venue set up for a show that will never happen. Ellie can’t resist strumming a guitar, but painful memories force her to stop just as Dina finds her to share a plan of attack. This means cutting through an unidentified building that may be filled with infected, a plan that is certainly, in Dina’s words, “reckless.” They pursue it anyway, their path leading them past a scene of slaughtered Seraphites who’ve been left beneath a mural depicting their prophet. Ellie gives Dina the option to go back. Instead, Dina shares her origin story, a horrifying tale in which she, as an 8-year-old child, returned to her family home to find them slaughtered by a lone raider. Dina survived by killing him and, not coincidentally, she believes in revenge. “Would it have made a difference if my family had hurt his people first?” she asks, but the question is rhetorical. They press on.

This means cutting through the cavernous building they suspect contains infected but also suspect there won’t be more than they can handle without using their guns and thus alerting the Wolves. Their instincts seem on point at first, but then, with the exit door within view, they spot the strand of infected Ellie encountered before, the sort Dina dubs “smart.” Ellie suggests they retreat, but they’re surrounded, so they launch a desperate plan in which Ellie serves herself up as bait while Dina secures their exit. It doesn’t work. What does work is the unexpected arrival of Jesse, who takes out the infected and helps them escape the Wolves, who did, in fact, notice all the shooting.

They head to the park, where the Wolves won’t go. This presents them with a new set of problems, but first, Jesse tells them his story. He came to Seattle with Tommy on a mission to retrieve Ellie and Dina. They don’t want to leave before taking out Abby, but this discussion is put on ice when they hear some strange whistles. The park belongs to the Seraphites.

The trio doesn’t understand much about the group they know only as “Scars,” but they quickly receive a crash course when they witness a Serpahite band hanging and gutting a Wolf. At this point, we don’t really know that much about them, either. They were introduced as ill-matched foes for the Wolves, though subsequent developments have changed that perception. We know they’re a cult of some kind. We’ve learned little about their beliefs, but we have seen that not everyone interprets Seraphite orthodoxy in the same way. They might be underdogs compared to the heavily armed Wolves, but there’s a reason they’ve survived. Any sense they were obvious good guys went out the window a long time ago, but were Last of Us to introduce unmistakable good guys at this point it would be a huge swerve.

Making matters worse, Dina takes an arrow in her leg. They split up, and Ellie is able to escape and make her way into the Wolf hospital, where she finds Nora, holds her at gunpoint, and asks where she can find Abby. Nora’s able to break free of the standoff and alert the others, but she finds herself cornered by Ellie and has no escape except through the elevator shaft leading to the dreaded basement from the cold open. There it’s only Ellie’s immunity that allows her to survive in an atmosphere thick with infectious particulate matter and cordyceps-covered walls. She first encounters a WLF soldier who’s still alive (sort of) and entangled in cordyceps, then Elise’s son Leon, who’s similarly stuck in some sort of horrible state between life and death. When Ellie finds Nora wheezing, it’s clear that she’ll soon join them. Nora tells her they’re both now doomed to die, but then realizes that she’s talking to “the immune girl,” a person she wasn’t even sure was real. Nora tries to put things in perspective for Ellie by asking her if she understands exactly what Joel did, including killing Abby’s father, but Ellie can’t be talked down. Echoing Joel’s torture, she begins beating Nora, a grim scene interrupted only by a fade to black. On the other side, we’re greeted by a memory of happier times, as Joel walks into a sleeping Ellie’s room with a friendly “Hey, kiddo,” and the episode ends.

It would be a mistake to take that final image as being from more innocent times; Ellie was born into a fallen world and has known only danger. Her time in Jackson with Joel, what we’ve seen of it, seems to have been relatively peaceful, but that did not keep their relationship from fracturing. That said, it still throws into sharp relief where Ellie is now versus where she’s come from. She never got a chance to be a kid, but all of Joel’s efforts were meant to spare her a life of endless violence, and now she’s chosen that life because of Joel’s death. Subsequent episodes have given her every reason to turn back — Dina, Dina’s baby, her civic obligation to Jackson, the never-spoken truth that Joel would not want this for her no matter what — and still she’s pressed on. This is an action-packed episode and works on that level, but the action also pushes Ellie further down a dark path from which she might not be able to return, making it as dramatically effective as what’s come before.

Infectious Bites

• Oof, you could get the bends watching the last two scenes of this episode. Ellie’s talked about exacting revenge on Abby and her companions, but to see her perform it on the prone, helpless (if spiteful) Nora is chilling. It’s almost certainly not coincidental that the scene mirrors Abby’s assault on Joel. The episode cuts away after a few blows, but we don’t have to see more. Nora’s already doomed by breathing cordyceps. The torture is all Ellie’s doing, however. The look on Ellie’s face confirms she’s crossed a moral Rubicon, and there’s no going back. When we see her smiling and fresh-faced in flashback, it only confirms how far she’s gone down a dark path.

• The Pinnacle is inspired by Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, which opened as a movie palace in 1928. It occasionally still screens movies, but now mostly serves as a theatrical and live music venue.