<i>The Last of Us</i> Season 2, Episode 5 Recap: In the Air Tonight

Spoilers below.

In case you weren’t already traumatized enough from the brutal beatings in episode 2 or episode 4, episode 5 reminds viewers that you are, in fact, watching The Last of Us, and the brutality isn’t going to stop simply because Abby gave up golfing. (Sorry.)

The latest chapter begins not with Ellie and Dina, safely squared away in their theater safehouse, but with Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), the WLF leader we briefly met in episode 4. She surveys the entrance to the hospital basement in Seattle, which her soldiers have sealed off with beams and welded metal, ensuring no one can get in or out. She also learns those soldiers have trapped some of their comrades downstairs—including Leon, the son of a sergeant named Elise Park. Why? Because the crew of patrolmen who went downstairs encountered something...strange.

According to Elise, Leon radioed back to his mother to convey that his soldiers had discovered Cordyceps on the walls and floor of the B2 basement level. But when he radioed back a second time, he could no longer breathe properly. “I asked, ‘Leon, were you bit?’” Elise tells Hanrahan. “He said, ‘It’s in the air. Seal us in.’”

Fans of the games will know what that means, but even if you aren’t familiar with The Last of Us: Parts I or II, you can infer the implications: Fungi produce spores. Spores are at least partially airborne. And if Cordyceps can spread through the air, that makes the cannibalistic mushroom disease even more terrifyingly dangerous—and difficult to avoid. Spores make frequent appearances throughout both video games, and so it caused something of a commotion within the scores of TLOU loyalists when season 1 opted to introduce “tendrils” instead of spores. Alas, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann never ruled out the use of spores entirely. Finally, here they are.

In a line you might miss if you aren’t paying close attention, Elise mentions that the first Cordyceps patients were brought to the Seattle hospital in 2003. That means the basement levels are a sort of Ground Zero for the infection, which further means the infected on those levels have had the longest amount of time to fester. That could be one explanation for the spores. But Hanrahan doesn’t yet know enough to be sure. “I’ll inform the people who absolutely need to know and no one else,” she says. She considers Elise a hero for what she’s done—and the sacrifice she’s made. “We owe you a debt.”

Back in the theater, Dina works to triangulate the WLF soldiers’ locations based on their patrol movements, while Ellie—who is less mathematically inclined—explores their surroundings. She finds another guitar in the auditorium and picks it up to play the first few notes of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.” (It’s a gut-punch of a song, even for those who don’t know its connection to the game.) But she can’t bring herself to sing more than a single phrase: “If I ever were to lose you…”

The song, the words, the memories they evoke of Joel—they all seem to trigger a pit of grief and anger in Ellie, a pit that had seemed (temporarily) filled by last episode’s declarations of love between her and Dina. When Dina walks into the auditorium with news, Ellie listens with a reinvigorated urgency. Her thirst for revenge, for now, remains undiminished.

Dina has learned from the WLF’s frequent radio transmissions that Nora is in the Seattle hospital. She further infers that the Seraphites must not use the local radios, or else the Wolves would be much more wary about broadcasting their movements. Dina guesses the Scars are similar to Amish people, at least in their derision for modern technology. Either way, it means she has no trouble figuring out the blind spots in the WLF patrols.

As such, she finds a gap that the Wolves themselves steer clear of: a warehouse, where Dina suspects the infected have made themselves a cozy home. If she and Ellie can make it through the warehouse unscathed, they’ll reach the hospital without alerting the WLF. Ellie agrees. It’s time to “go be reckless.”

But on their hike over, they’re once again reminded of the magnitude of the danger they’re facing. They encounter a row of recently murdered Seraphites, rotting underneath a mural of their Prophet, which prompts Dina to start gagging again. Ellie briefly loses her resolve, questioning the rationality of ushering a pregnant woman into a war zone. “I’m so fucking stupid,” she tells herself.

Dina isn’t hearing any of it. She has her own reasons for joining Ellie on this mission. As they walk, she shares a terrible origin story: She was only 8 years old when she first killed a non-infected human, a raider who’d snuck into her family’s Santa Fe cabin and murdered her mother and sister. “What if I hadn’t snuck out?” she asks aloud. “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, she decides. No matter what, she would have found that raider and made him pay. And so she gets why Ellie “has” to do this. And she’s here to help her see it through.

“If I die, it’s on me,” she says. “It won’t be your fault. So what do you want to do?”

Ellie, of course, wants to keep pushing forward. She’s not thinking logically. But neither, really, is Dina. Grief isn’t logical. Neither is trauma. It warps your entire sense of what is “normal.” It makes you question your own senses and sensibility. It prompts dramatic, sometimes erratic action. And in the apocalypse, “normal” has already gone out the window.

So Ellie and Dina do exactly as they’d planned: They sneak into the warehouse only to—surprise, surprise!—encounter a whole bunch of infected, including some of the stalkers they first stumbled upon outside Jackson. It does not go well.

Ellie and Dina simply aren’t equipped to handle all these fungus zombies on their own. As Ellie creates a diversion to save Dina’s life (they love each other, after all!), it’s Ellie who ends up getting saved—not by Joel this time, but by a surprise visitor: Jesse.

Jesse isn’t exactly thrilled with his runaway ex-girlfriend and former patrol-mate. Convinced D&E would die on their own (which, let’s be honest, they would), Jesse and Tommy have followed the duo from Jackson, splitting up once they reached Seattle in order to cover more ground. But as Jesse leads the women to what he thinks is relative safety in a nearby park, they soon learn the park itself is a home base for the Seraphites, who are in the midst of a ritual disembowelment when they discover the intruders.

The Scars succeed in shooting Dina in the leg with an arrow before the Jackson crew can make their escape. Ellie attempts another diversion, this time leading the Scars away from Jesse and an injured Dina as she tears through the forest like a bat out of hell. Her desperate flight leads her first to a hideaway burrow beneath a tree, and then toward the hospital itself.

In spite of the unscheduled interruptions to her pursuit, Ellie’s goal remains unchanged: She wants to reach Nora. Plus, she has Jesse to depend upon now; Dina’s injury can wait. Ellie discovers Nora exactly where the radio transmissions said she’d be, and she holds the WLF medic at gunpoint as she attempts an interrogation.

But Nora isn’t nearly as frightened of Ellie as she should be. Of Joel’s hideous murder, she says, “That little bitch got what he deserved.” Look, that’s not something I’d say to the revenge-bent teenager pointing a pistol at your head, but I also wouldn’t have survived the zombie apocalypse to start with.

Nora uses the vicious verbal jab to blind Ellie with her own rage—and to toss medical supplies at Ellie’s head, buying her enough time to make a run for it. They race through the hospital hallways as the WLF soldiers start shooting at Ellie, who gives chase long enough to back Nora into a corner. Desperate, Nora jumps into an elevator shaft, which leads her down to the basement.

What the audience already knows about that B2 level, Nora has yet to discover. By the time she collapses beside a locked door, she’s inhaled enough spores to guarantee her swift conversion into an infected. Ellie, meanwhile, takes deep breaths like she’s relishing a clear mountain breeze. She comes upon the gasping near-corpses of the WLF soldiers whom Elise “sealed in,” including Leon, whose exhalations distribute more spores into the air.

Ellie is perplexed, even shocked, by this discovery—but she’s not deterred. She keeps her gun steady, locked on Nora’s head. “You stupid bitch,” Nora seethes. “We’re infected. You killed us both.”

“Did I?” Ellie asks, almost mocking.

It dawns on Nora that this is the girl. The one whose brain was meant to provide the Fireflies with a vaccine. Horrified that this girl—the girl—is seeking revenge for Joel, Nora tries to reason with her: Joel killed the Fireflies. Joel killed Abby’s father, the one doctor who could develop a cure.

To which Ellie replies, simply, “I know.”

Realizing that Nora won’t willingly give up any information on Abby’s location, Ellie resorts to the method Joel, it’s been implied, utilized as a younger man: torture. In a harrowing callback to Abby’s golf club, Ellie scoops up a pipe and uses it to beat Nora over and over again. She seems surprised at herself, almost as if she’s having an out-of-body experience, but her voice is tight and controlled as she asks again, “Where is she?” The camera cuts out before Nora dies, but we see enough to know she meets an unspeakably gruesome end.

This scene marks a major turning point in the story, both in the show and in the game. In the latter, there’s plenty of lead-up to this moment. A lot of violence—or, I should say, a lot more violence than we see in the TV series—precipitates Ellie’s use of torture. By this point in Part II, she’s killed literally dozens of people; in season 2, she’s taken out only a handful that we’ve witnessed. So her escalation in episode 5 is extreme. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unprompted. Ellie is mimicking what she watched in that lodge outside of Jackson. She is re-creating the trauma that is seared in her memory. But the lack of precedent does make this scene feel startlingly new, a side of Ellie we might not have previously thought existed. That shock is further underscored when the next scene is a flashback, in which a younger Ellie wakes in her room in Jackson. Joel stands in her doorway with his hands on his hips, and says, warmly, “Hey, kiddo.”

We can expect the next episode to bring us more of that flashback: to reunite Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, together the beating heart of this series. But the flashback itself won’t change what Ellie, in the modern timeline, has done. Like Nora and like Abby, she “can’t escape this.” She can’t take back the violence she’s inflicted. And we can be certain it will follow her wherever she goes from here.