BEWARE! This post contains significant spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 4!
The Last of Us, HBO’s award-winning adaptation of the hit video game series of the same name, continues its second season this week. Over the course of the next three weeks, until May 25th, we at The Beat will be delivering episode recaps for the new season, diving into what happens every week, how it reflects the game it’s based on, and how the show is crafted. The fourth episode of season 2, titled “Day One,” sees Ellie and Dina arrive in Seattle and begin to understand just how terrible a situation they’re in. Directed by Kate Herron (Loki) and written by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl), it adapts some of the game’s most iconic sequences, whilst simultaneously making major changes to benefit the structure of a TV show.
The episode begins with a flashback to 2018, around eleven years before the events of the show’s second season. In Seattle, a truck full of FEDRA officers, who are in riot gear, is discussing committing acts of violence against civilians (referred to as “voters”). When one of the officers questions why the “voters” nickname exists, we see our first glimpse of a major character, Isaac, played by the incredible Jeffrey Wright, reprising his role from the game.
Isaac states that they are called “voters” as a humiliating nickname, for their voting rights were taken away by FEDRA.
The truck stops before a crowd of civilians, and Isaac steps outside. He seems to know the woman leading the group of civilians, and asks the officer who questioned the ‘voters’ nickname to step outside with him. He then proceeds to throw a grenade into the truck and seal the rest of the men inside, killing them, and shooting the driver. Isaac is then welcomed to the Washington Liberation Front, or W.L.F., and asks the younger officer to do the same.
After the credits, we return to the present day. Dina (Isabela Merced) sneaks into a pharmacy to look for painkillers for Ellie. She picks up an unseen object, goes to the bathroom, and returns to meet Ellie (Bella Ramsey) outside.
The two of them then wander around Seattle, which is partially ruined after being bombed at the start of the apocalypse. They spot Pride flags, which neither of them recognises as two people born well into the apocalypse, as well as a dilapidated tank. Ellie tries to enter the tank, only to find it filled with corpses. She gives Dina a fun fact about space before spotting a radio station marked with W.L.F. imagery in the distance. She suggests heading straight there, but Dina talks some sense into her, telling her to wait until nighttime and hide their horse, Shimmer.
They leave Shimmer in a decrepit music shop while Ellie explores the vinyl collection. Dina awkwardly attempts to play the drums, while Ellie heads upstairs and finds a well-preserved guitar left inside a leatherbound case. She begins to sing a cover of A-Ha’s “Take on Me,” and Dina joins her and watches. Dina sheds a tear, and the bond between the two grows even deeper.
Ellie vocalises her appreciation to Joel for teaching her guitar. This moment is one of the most memorable in the game, particularly from the open-world sequence towards the start of Day One in Seattle, so it’s incredible to see it adapted so well here, even if the overall scope of the show feels smaller given how quickly they get to it. There’s only so much you can fit into seven episodes, and if there’s one complaint I have with Season 2 so far, many of the moments added to the show probably could’ve been exchanged with adapting the game in more depth.
Meanwhile, Isaac, now the leader of the W.L.F., is in a kitchen. He discusses his awkwardness when talking to women in the pre-Apocalypse and how he would cook to impress them. He always wanted a specific set of cooking tools made from bronze so that they would heat up quickly but maintain heat well.
The scene then cuts to show a naked, beaten Seraphite (the cult-like community introduced in last week’s episode) tied up in the kitchen, and Isaac burns him with a pan after he refuses to answer what the Seraphites are planning to do next. A young man outside points out how sadistic it all is, with the seraphite praying to his prophet for rescue.
Isaac derides the Seraphite for believing she was anything other than an unwell woman, and the two argue over the fallacies that create the conflict between the two. Who broke the treaty first? Who killed the children first? Does any of it even matter anymore? After volunteering to be burned again, Isaac shoots and kills him. It’s an incredibly visceral sequence, and it’s great to see more of Isaac, who remained a relatively unseen presence at this point in the game.
That night, Ellie and Dina sneak into the radio tower. They find a W.L.F. corpse riddled with arrows, as well as corpses strung up and gutted in the centre of the room. They quickly figure out it was the Seraphites, commonly called Scars due to the markings on their chest. The W.L.F. arrive, so the two hide, but are quickly caught when Ellie tries to run away. Dina shoots one of them, and they flee.
Unfortunately, the lighting and direction of this sequence aren’t great, because a lot of it is in total darkness and very hard to make out or see. An interesting change from the games is that Ellie and Dina come off as less superhumanly capable, which feels more realistic and sometimes a little frustrating. Similarly to Joel in the first season, it changes the characters somewhat, making them more palatable for a wider audience, for better or worse.
The two go to hide in a series of tunnels, but the WLF quickly arrive and light flares. This sequence adapts one of the most memorable setpieces of the game, but with an interesting change. Dina listens to try to identify how many infected are nearby, but quickly loses count as an entire horde arrives, causing total mayhem as the WLF try to fight off the infected. Ellie and Dina try to sneak into a train carriage to escape, but end up running and being chased by infected. The increase in action scenes involving the infected is great this season. The two eventually escape through the roof of a later carriage, and climb up a fence, running towards the subway exit. Ellie gets caught into the door, which is refusing to move all the way, and Dina quickly runs in, but not before an infected nearly bites her. Ellie lifts up her arm to block the bite, getting bitten by the infected herself. The remaining infected get trapped in the door, and the two women run outside to a cinema to hide out. This sequence makes a clever change to reveal Ellie’s immunity to Dina, given the lack of existence of spores in the television series.
We then see Dina point a gun at Ellie, who quickly explains the truth: She’s been bitten before, and she’s immune. Dina doesn’t believe her at first, holding the gun up to her the entire time while Ellie sleeps it off. Ellie awakens unchanged and shows Dina the bite, which is quickly healing.
This entire sequence features fantastic performances from both actors, but especially Bella Ramsey, who fully comes across like Ellie does in the games. Dina also reveals the truth to Ellie in exchange: She’s pregnant, with Jesse being the biological father. The two make love and fall asleep, embracing one another.
The next day, they wake up again, sharing a cute conversation about how long they’ve both liked one another. Dina admits that she’s planned out a future with Ellie, involving living on a farm together and having a child. Ellie claims to have been hiding her love for Dina well, to which Dina scoffs.
Dina then discusses her experience with compulsory heterosexuality, and how she felt the desire to hide being queer not to disappoint her parents, which is partially why she continued to date Jesse despite a lack of feelings for him.
Ellie remarks that “Holy shit, I’m going to be a dad!,” before the two are interrupted by the sounds of warfare outside. Gunshots, tank fire, and extreme weaponry, as the WLF wage war against the seraphites. Ellie asks Dina to consider staying in the cinema and avoiding danger, but Dina argues they should stick together. As the two watch the conflict unfold, they hold hands, entirely unprepared for what’s about to come.
‘Day One’ continues off the second season of The Last of Us with an action packed episode as Ellie and Dina finally explore Seattle and realise just how incredibly dark the situation is there, including how unprepared they are to handle it. It moves their relationship to the next level as the two bond over their shared traumatic experiences, as well as further exploring the conflict at the core of this world’s version of Seattle and why it’s become a war-stricken territory. Whilst the episode is weak in comparison to the epic scale of the game, show-only viewers will likely be wowed by the incredible action sequences and character nuances. Join back next week for a recap of Episode 5, and check out The Last of Us season 2, now available on Max.
