House of R - 'The Last of Us' Season 2, Episode 5 Deep Dive

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Joanna and Mal are back to talk about the latest episode of 'The Last of Us'! They take their signature deep dive and discuss a new evolution of the Cordyceps fungus, the arrival of some familiar faces in Seattle, and a major turning point for Ellie. (00:00) Intro (23:01) Happy Mother’s Day (50:16) Seattle day two (01:02:21) "Future Days" (01:22:31) Come and see (01:44:55) I love you; I know (01:57:03) A walk in the park (02:15:14) Spores galore (02:28:59) Present tense (02:32:12) Spoilers: A fungus among us Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Producers: Steve Ahlman and Carlos Chiriboga Video Supervision: John Richter Social: Jomi Adeniran Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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New sweetgreen wraps hit different. Order now at order. Sweetgreen.com. Welcome back to House of our, you may have just finished listening to our Friday and our pod. And it is time for our Monday Last of Us Pod. I'm Joanna Robinson and joining me today, the most beautiful, radiant little spore that ever did podcast. It's Mallory Rubin. Joe, I'm going to leave you alone now.

I'm going to go explore the rest of this place because you're smart as fucking. You're figuring it out. Hell yeah. Okay, hello. We're going to talk to you about Last of Us, Season 2, episode 5. I feel her love before we get into that and we have a lot to say

and a lot to think about a lot of great emails from you all let's talk about some program reminders. Okay. Actually, first and foremost, I'm going to do a program reminder about our own show covering this show. We've had a lot of people ask us,

hey man, you keep saying you covered season one of the last of us, we can't find it. Yeah. And I feel your love and I feel your pain and I'm here to tell you, We covered it on the prestige TV podcast feed. Why?

Don't ask us why. But that's where it is. So if you want to hear us talk about season one of The Last of Us, it exists on the prestige TV podcast feed. So that's where you can find it. Else we're on the Ringiverse. The Midnight Boys are, of course, also covering the last of us. Their pod is already up. We already got an email about their coverage asking us what we thought about their coverage.

Can't wait to talk about it. Also, we're both covering and or. The Midnight Boys will be covering the last batch of Andor episode. episodes sort of right after they drop this week. I'm in mourning. And then we will be covering it later in the week. And we are devastated already. Can't wait to talk about it, though.

And then we have some plans to sort of extend our time in the Andorverse. That is what is happening with us. Also, we should mention, of course, Ben and Daniel are covering the last of us over a button mash. And then Rob and I are covering the last of us over a button mash. the last of us over on the Prestige TV podcast feed. Had a great chat with Kate Heron last week. We got some really interesting insights from the costume designer on the show from this week. Oh, it's fun.

Specifically, how you make mushrooms grow out of a costume, because that is like something that they have to think about, which is really fascinating. So that is what is going on here, there, and elsewhere, Mallory Rubin, how can folks keep track of all of that juicy mushroomy and dory? content. I'm going to keep it simple. Follow the pods. Why not? Yeah. Follow House of R. Follow the Ringervverse, follow the Prestige TV podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. You can watch full video episodes of House of Ar and Midnight Boys, Poo, Poo, on Spotify or the Ringerverse YouTube channel. So subscribe to that as well. And then while you're at, I follow the Ringervverse on the social media platform of your choosing and send us your emails. The inbox is open. Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com. Keep the last.

of us emails send us your Andor emails. We want to hear from you about everything. Okay. Can I just say, you know, sometimes we get tagged in people's Instagram posts or whatever it is. My favorite one I saw this weekend was one of our listeners on Mother's Day wrote, well, mothers really want for Mother's Day is like nearly four hours alone to watch Mallor and Joanna talk about Andor with a frosty beverage. So if you celebrate Mother's Day watching us talk about Star Wars, you rule and we love you and however you celebrate, whatever you celebrate,

we support you. Okay. Season 2, episode 5, Feel Her Love, written by Craig Mason, directed by Stephen Williams. And this is just like

the thrill of my lifetime. Big moment for the Lost heads here. Just really excited. Mallor and I love a TV show called Lost. I don't know if you've heard of it. But Stephen Williams is like, it's like Jack Bender and Stephen Williams are like the top Lost directors.

I've talked to to Stephen Williams about loss for a lost podcast I did. I've talked to Stephen Williams about Watchman when he directed one of the best episodes of television ever on Watchmen. So some of our very favorite lost episodes were directed by this guy. And also, I just love the way that Stephen talks about his work. If you watch the after episode, you got like a mere taste of the way that Stephen talks about. A mushroom remorse. Yeah, it's just like incredibly thoughtful. And I just I love his work and I just got so excited. Like, depressingly, though, this is a short episode.

It's a 45-minute episode of The Last of Us. How did you feel about that when you clocked the runtime, Mallory? You know, I'm always, I'm a glutton. I always won as much as we can get, but I did, I was trying to remember if this was the shortest. I know there were two episodes in season one, so I went back to, like, this is a minute shy of being the shortest. Okay. episode four in season one was 46 minutes and the finale was 44. So this comes right in the middle at 45.

So there's some elite company there, obviously, with the season one finale also being very compact. And as this episode reminded us, Last of Us is capable of achieving quite a bit in a compact runtime. Stockers, spores, seraphites. A lot's going on. Jesse's here. Okay. So it was a very action-packed episode. and also huge character moment for our main character, Ellie.

What are your sort of big picture thoughts about this episode television? Have we given our spoiler warning yet? Spoiler warning, listen. This is what we do. This is what we do on the podcast. Thanks for reminding me. Mallory's played the game. She finished it.

She's such a champ. I watched a playthrough of the game. So we know how this story ends. But we will not talk about it until the spoiler section. at the end of this podcast. So we will use gameplay to inform the way in which we talk about this episode, compare and contrasts,

some adaptive changes, etc., etc., but there will be big, loud, spoiler warning before we get into future days that are awaiting us on this podcast, on this game, on the show. Two real camps submerging among the bad babies for the spoiler warning sound effect we have chosen.

There's the guys, I appreciate it, but it does lead me to the brink of an actual heart attack. Yeah. And then there's the, I really want to say thanks because there's quite literally no way that I could miss that the spoiler section is about to begin. And that is our intention. But you still hear from people who are like, I was doing the dishes and I couldn't get to

the, and I'm just sort of like, okay, well. Get three camps. I don't. When we're nearing the two-hour mark, I would say dry your hands off and get ready. Okay, so big picture now that the spoiler warning has been safely issued. Huge big picture thoughts on this episode. Mallory Rubin, what do you think? You know, this was bleak.

It's a bleak episode of TV, and I admire that. I appreciate it. I think that is the appropriate place to be at this point of the story, and both where we concluded last week and then the place that we wind up in this episode, but also even just inside of this episode, going from the little smile that Deereuxie. and Ellie share into the absolute conviction of the good when Ellie, having picked up the guitar, then confirms with Dina that they have a path. And then, of course, everything that we head

into with Nora. So, you know, Ellie's face, when it's bathed in red at the end and the hallway is bathed in red, that color treatment that is so central in the game and has been very present already so far this season, I think for a lot of, people who listen to this podcast and spend a lot of time in the nerd verse, probably hard not to think of the Sith-like overtones. It's, you know, basically akin to the first time that we see the red filling Anakin Skywalker's eyes. And that feels appropriate. So it's an intense episode. It's an emotionally wrenching episode. I thought once again, like last week, the way that we have like an opening scene with a different set of characters. Obviously, we met Han or Hand last week,

but hadn't spent much time, is just structurally kind of like a really interesting choice. So there's a lot here to break down and some just, you know, incredibly grim stuff to work through together. I'm glad to have you, as always, to lean on. You're not here physically, but digitally, and work through my feelings together. And also I just like, you know,

obviously we're going to talk about it at the end, but the episode ends with a couple seconds in the past. And if anybody watched the next time, for next week. It's clear what awaits. So there's not only the emotion of what we witnessed inside of this episode, but then the emotion of the promise of what awaits. So it's just, it's an intense time to be a Last of Us fan. How about you? You have to get through the hospital basement hallway in order to have the reward that is getting to see Joel at the end of this episode. I really liked this episode a lot. I think it was interesting to me. I've been, you,

I've been dipping in and out of the last of a subreddit. And there's several different last of a subreddit. There's like game focused, this, that, and the other thing. What our listeners wrote in? Because I was sort of, you know, the discourse as it was with the show has been like quite charged around this season of television. And you and I like generally like to sort of not engage with like bad faith arguments. And I get kind of tired of repetitive sort of. of shallow dismissals. I don't mind a well-thought-out critique at all. And of course,

you know, we've got a critique of the show. We want to hear about it. We want to engage with it. But, like, you know, some just sort of people who went into the season sort of determined not to like it. And then I'm just sort of repeating those ideas over and over again. That sort of gets in the way of me trying to figure out what else people are thinking about. So one of our listeners, Daniel, who's actually a moderator of one of the subredits, wrote in to me to, like, give me a breakdown of, like, all the subredits and sort of, like, what kind of thing you can expect to find there. And he recommended his own, like, you know, which is the Last of Us HBO series is the name of the subright that he runs, which is not like a niche board.

It's a very populated board. But I checked it on that one on Sunday night and I had a great time with that board because there are still people, again, who have criticisms of the show. But what I saw overall was a lot of people who have had those criticisms in the past. And the main criticism seems to be this characterization of Ellie in the show so far seemed lighter and bubblier than the version of Ellie that they felt like they got in the game. And I feel like what I saw resoundingly on Sunday night on that board and a few of the others that I checked out was here she is at last the Ellie that we recognize, which is Bella Ramsey in a red lit hallway with complete blacked out eyes looking absolutely terrifying. And so the show made a decision about how to deploy that transformation or that moment. And, you know, I have thoughts about that when we get, I do want to talk about this, but I don't want to, for people who haven't engaged in the trailer for next week, I don't want to get too far into it. So I'll save that sort of for the very last.

But it's worked for me. I think I see the vision. but I can understand why people watching it until they saw this were worried we weren't going to go as dark as they wanted to go as the game is capable of. And then you see Bella Ramsey pick up a bent pipe and bash a dying woman in the leg

and you're like, oh, oh, okay, we're going there. Here we go. So I thought that was a really interesting, I really, I mean, harrowing, tough to wash. It's hard for me to say, like, I loved it, but I did love it because I thought the performances were really good. The visuals were really good. And I think it made a lot of the lighter moments that we got this season. I don't, it doesn't feel disjointed to me.

It feels important to me. So we'll get back to that maybe a little later on. Before I get into any other emails, I just need to state for the record that it has been eight days since we last saw shimmer. I'm counting the days and the hours. I need, you know how on the internet, the old interwebs, you'll get like a little cam for a bird hamsters, yeah, some sort of. A kitten cam. Yeah.

Some sort of animal in the wild who we are monitoring with great interest because we are so invested in the well-being of that creature. That is what I believe we deserve. For shimmer. Shimmer cam. So let's get a little shimmer cam going in the music shop so that we can keep tabs and be assured that the grass is lasting. It rains in. Hopefully some of that rainwater has made it in for shimmer's refreshment.

I really enjoyed the conversation that you and Rob had about what music shimmer might be rocking out to. Maybe we could get some confirmation on that front as well. I would have that going on a second screen, I think, pretty much 24-7. I love it. The free idea, HBO. When Kate Harron was talking on the podcast last week about, you know, a shimmer-centric spin-off episode, the reference that I couldn't reach in that moment, but I was thinking about was like, like, Appa's Last Days. Like, let's just follow Shimmer around.

That would be great. Way less traumatic version of Appa's Last Days, but it's just shimmer viving out. getting some Seattle coffee, going to Pike's Market, like, you know, just like what are, what else, you know, don't go to the aquarium. It's bad there. Like, whatever. So, okay. A little mailbag moment. Okay. Speaking of lost. And Marina wrote it and said, during, during the, if you have Moviel, you use Moviel section of your last pod, I really liked your discussion about, quote, the kind of person who leans in and rises up during an. Apocalypse. That instantly made me think of John Locke and Lost, ever heard of it, and maybe also Misty Quigley and Yellow Jackets. I'm only a few episodes in, so I've no idea what her full arc is. Don't spoil it. I started watching Yellow Jackets so I can listen to you guys thought about it. Someone said something to me about not having to seek justice because the universe always finds balance. I don't know if I believe that per se, but it's interesting to imagine that when these underdog characters find themselves on the fortunate, air quotes for the video people, side of disaster. They may feel a sense that the universe has brought all of this on specifically for them. They may be sure that the universe knew it was the only way for them to live the lives and have the saddest they were meant to live and have. I got so excited when I saw a John Locke, Misty Quigley, a comp email from our listener here.

Mallory, do you have any thoughts about this? I think this is a great observation, and we won't, per the request, spoil Yellow Jackets. I'm thrilled that you had another. bad baby is joining us out in the wilderness. But if this is the subject and the premise that is interesting to you, then Yellow Jackets is certainly a good story because Misty's certainly not the only character where that kind of idea is relevant, you know? Yep. Who can move quickly from, oh, no, or plane crashed, our lives as we know it are over into... This is the power I've always meant to have.

Oh, Queen, me? Okay. I've always looked great in antlers. Pass it over, you know? Yeah, John Locke, I think, again, you know, not to spoil loss for maybe people I've seen, but John Locke is one of the most fascinating characters that ever exists on television. One of my all-time favorites, yeah. Yeah, and that sense of like, impotent entitlement, to be clear, I, like, love John Locke.

Like, I actually, like, feel empathy for him, while also. just like watching all these moves he makes and and cringing and shuddering and being upset about what I'm watching happen. So I think for Isaac, we know so little relatively to a character like John Locke or Mysticly. We only have this little morsel on that what Mallory and I know from the game, but I think that's a really fascinating psychological profile to think about in the context of the mushroom apocalypse. And thinking about like maybe characters we already know, I don't think I would accuse anyone like Jesse or Tommy or Maria or anyone we see in leadership in Jackson of being this person.

But I would say someone like Maria, whose main character trait is she was a prosecutor once. That's basically the sum total of what we know about Maria. But like someone who like thinks she is the right person to lead. Maria would not say John Snow like, I don't want it. She's like, I should do this job. I'm good at it. And I should do it. But the distinctions then between like the Marias or the Johns and the Missies, the people who maybe were in positions of power and then can continue to wield that power in a new context. And then the people who are like,

at last, my purpose is clear to me and other people who, the circumstances have changed for them. Yes. And now they will recognize my worth. It's just so interesting when a character's in that place. I mean, thinking of someone like Isaac, we don't know again. Right. In the context of the show, we don't know

more than what we've seen here. But I do think it's interesting, given what we know from what we've seen here is like, we saw Alana Youbach's character, Hanahan, like, invite him to the resistance. Yes. In a position seemingly of leadership inside of that crowd. But now she is his subordinate and he is in charge, right?

That is indicated by Elise in the cold open of this episode saying, like, yeah, if you're going to execute me, Isaac would be here. Like, the leader would be here, you know? So, like, what happened that Isaac hop skipped and jumped over Hanarhan to become the leader. And like, is it just his military background? Is it, you know, what is it that he is uniquely qualified to do that she can't do? And who knows how much space and time, because Han-R-Han is a show-invented character,

how much space and time they have for a story like that? I don't know. But there's just, like, little hints in the margin about, you know, Isaac's psychology here that I think is interesting to glum on to that. For sure. Yeah, all right. Our listener Cloud wrote a great email about the guitar scene in the music store last week. And I do want to say on the guitar front, we got a lot of emails from people who thought,

disagreed that the silica packet was a silica packet and they thought it was guitar strings. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Because Ellie's like, like, an immediate like sort of like, yes, this is here. And I don't think she would, like, guitar strings could be sentimental to her. She's like, oh, guitar strings, like, the conversation I had with Joel at the end of, like, blah, blah. But, like, but this isn't very much like, thank you, you're here right now. And then we also got a bunch of emails from people about whether or not it would be unsafe to be, like, huffing a silica packet or be that close with a silica packet. Thanks for the bad babies.

Yeah. From the time pod crowd? Yeah. Like, the Florida bath bomb It's like, yeah, that's fine. Okay. But Cloudbeth is really interesting an email about Ellie,

and I'll only read a part of it because some of it is, is spoilery. But she wrote, Ellie thanks and huffs the silica packets for preserving the guitar and the person who left the guitar in the case with the silica packets, but doesn't offer the same courtesy to anyone who might come after her. And Cloud Rice is in reference the fact that Ellie just leaves the guitar. out on a stand when she walks out.

She gets, Ellie gets a moment of real joy and connection to both Dina and to Joel because of someone's efforts to preserve the guitar, but it makes no effort to reciprocate that preservation. The guitar will just rot like the rest of them. Ellie is destructive. But at this point, she's still carelessly, thoughtlessly destructive. She probably didn't leave the guitar out purposely to ruin it.

She just didn't even think about how it would decay if she didn't make an active effort to preserve it. I think that, like in the game, the encounter with Nora Cloud Rush, this before this episode, but the encounter with Nora, likely the next episode, will be the turning point for Elie,

thoughtless destruction versus intentional destruction. Killing Nora is the moment she decides to proceed in excess of what is necessary to achieve her goals. Killing Nora is the first time she chooses destruction when she herself feels she does not have to. What do you think about that? You know, it's funny. I want to respond to this carefully,

because we talked about leaving the guitar in the spoiler section last week. not going to get into any of it. Yeah, it's completely different context. So I'm not going to get into any of that here. But I will just say that's where my head was. Yeah, yeah. We talked about elsewhere in the pod.

But the first message that I got from anyone in my life who I'm not podcasting with about the show, so not you, about this episode, was about that. Like, outrage. But she just left that girl. Her left the guitar to then rot, like all of the other things that she had walked in and initially discovered in that, like, befelled crumbling state. So it was interesting because that had not occurred to me because my head was in a different place with it. But I think clearly that's something that a lot of people were feeling after watching that,

which is fascinating. Well, here's what possible. Perhaps Shibber clopped her way upstairs. Put it away? Delicately mouthed, you know, lifted the guitar, put it away in the case, made sure to sort of nudge the silica packet back into the case. Yeah. Shet and buckled it.

I think that's possible. And I would like to say one more time. There's a way we could know for sure. HBO we're waiting. I used to watch Mr. Ed a lot when I was a kid, and Mr. Ed could do all kinds of things. So I believe in Shimmer. I believe that Shimmer preserved that guitar.

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Let's do it. Nonsense. Stannis Barathean burned his daughter alive on Father's Day. Have we spent a more troubling holiday on HBO Sunday night? Happy Mother's Day from HBO and The Last of Us. as we get to meet Elise Park and find out what happened to her son, Leon. It's grim. Spoilers for each for Game of Thrones, I guess.

Okay. Yeah. Once again, as we did before, we start inside of WLF territory. This is the more recent past. And Alana Yubak, as we mentioned is here, as Hanrahan and Hettian Park as Elise Park in the origin story of B-level containment. I just like overall like how did this cold open work for you? Did you have a not a good time with it? Did you have a compelling time with it?

Yeah. Yeah. Like you noted earlier, it's kind of a fucked up episode as last of us episodes often are to say like, boy, I enjoyed my time. You know, it seems sick and wrong. But I thought this was fascinating. And I will obviously go beat by beat through the scene and talk about more of the. the particulars here, but for a number of reasons, like rooting us in, as you already noted, with something like the org chart hierarchy for Isaac and Hanahan, that's interesting, but

like also even something like with the way that we saw Hanarhan and the flashback last episode in like plain clothes, you know, dressed with a city. And now it's like everyone's fully militiaed out. And even just the way that the WLF presence is spread throughout the hospital. You have some insights coming on like the factions within the factions, but just like this is a military unit that has set up post and claimed this hospital is a base and a base of consequence. So there's all of that, right? The way that we're getting to glimpse just very quickly as we roam through the hallways, the way that the operation functions, that's a very interesting place to start. I thought that the little things, like the design, the set design of the boarded up door, incredible. The way that that so quickly to us simultaneously conveyed the urgency of like this required everything we had.

We threw everything we had this right away. And then welded it. And then welded it shot. Everything we had and then let's get this on. But also like we had to do it with a quickness. this looks like it's a child's like art project, you know, art installations in a good way, in an effective way. And then, you know, obviously everything that we're going to talk about here with Leon and the absolute gut punch of the end of this conversation when we realize that

Leon is Lisa's son and the comparisons and points of contrast that that invites us to make between another parent and child duo in our story. I thought this was like a really rich opening for this episode and a great bookend for a lot of what maybe it's not a bookend. It's like a middle end. I don't know because it connects to so much that came in the past but also so much of where we find our characters at the end of the episode. So I liked it quite a bit. I do think it's interesting bookend to start with Elise and end with Joel. That's how that's the sort of pastry shell around.

who has made a choice. Around this episode. Yeah, so in terms of the factions within the factions, it was interesting to me that Craig Mason and the official pod was making sort of much of the fact that the soldiers here are not sort of cowed by Hanrahan's presence. That when she first walks in and before she sees Elise, she sees Elise's men, this idea that their loyalty is to Elise. And that's something Hanarhan says in this first scene, your soldiers are loyal to you. So I just thought it was interesting to think about the factions within factions inside of the WLF. You had raised this last week when you mentioned that the guard outside of

Isaac's cookware hour and torture extravaganza was uncertain about what was going on in there. And so this idea that like we are not, we are the WLF, we have treated our jeans for cargo pants. We are a militia, but we're not. all on the same page here. Yes. And who is the us? Who are the smaller uses inside of the larger uses? Right.

Where do our loyalties lie? Yeah. And we love tracking that in general in the show. And like we talked about a version of that with the seraphites where this first glimpse of the seraphites that we get is a group that is choosing to leave. And then obviously last week and now certainly this week we have other insights into how certain members of the seraphite community conduct themselves. So all of that is like a fascinating, continued peeling back of the layers of the

layers of these different groups. I guess the other thing just on like an opening note is so much of what unfolds at the end is about Ellie and Nora specifically and also the spores. But just for like how the episode starts and the scope of the presence that we see, we're also like Ellie is heading into an army base. And we talked about this on our... Terrifying. I don't know if you noticed nearly four-hour and our pod that we did last week.

The people were saying that it was either just the right length or not long enough. Not long enough is what I heard. What are we going to crack for is the question I keep. A bunch of sickos, we love you all. This idea that I like to hammer on about suspense versus surprise, right? And so in Andor, if you're not caught up with Andor, I won't spoil it. But, like, you know, we are privy to a sort of a horror that's awaiting some of our heroes that they are not privy to. And here, we know that there are spores on B2.

and we know that the hospital is just bristling with militia. And so as Ellie makes her way inside of the hospital, we know that there's all these soldiers waiting for. And also when she and Nora go down that elevator shaft, which gets a mention here, we know what they're headed towards. And that is like there could be the element of, if you don't have this opener, we could just be like, surprise there are spores down there.

Now, this is helpful. This serves like a narrative function in terms of like gets us prepared for what it means to be down there, gets us prepared to understand what has happened to Leon when we see Leon down there, all of this sort of stuff. Okay, so

we have this, like, at least looking at this really faded, it hurts chart with the 1 to 10 emoji, which is like... Broke me. It's like, so I don't know when they stopped doing this. Like, this is definitely for children, but I also remember filling out one of these in college.

So I don't know when they decide you're like, not you're you're too mature for the emoji chart anymore but this is just well that'll be a through line of this discussion today right are people who are college age still just children yeah great question um but you know surely she has to be like remembering something about Leon being quite small at some point and also the way in which her son is hurting and also just like for us as viewers it i don't know it ports you back into a pre-outbreak time where yeah horror could be measured in this way and pain could be measured in this way on a scale. On a two.

When it was like, yeah. When the last time we were at two. Exactly. And that's on our mind then later, you know, in the Dina Ellie conversation where it's like everyone's got their fucked up story and everyone has their horrors. And in the past, it's like the baseline is what? Seven? Yeah. It's just when your day tips into a 10 or a 12 or we're on the midnight meter.

Yeah, I was going to say. I think we're on midnight meter territory. We're like everything's a 10 and sometimes it's a 12, you know? I think that's right. Yeah. We learn a lot. We learn, you know, if you step, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, Step out of line, you might get executed.

You know, this is something that the WLF is ready to do to their own high-ranky people. And that Isaac is a bit of the man who passes the sentence. Swings the sword. Swings the sword. Swing the soft band. Okay. Interesting. And then it's war again.

Yes. And the borderline between us and the scars. And we later get a taste of that border in the park sequence when our, when Dina and Jesse and Ellie run into the park and the WLF is like, whoa, not in there. No, no, no, no. Dude, there's ferns in there. No, thank you. Terrifying, I love ferns.

Let me tell you, that forest was beautiful. I love a firm. Oh, my goodness. Absolutely beautiful. Lovel. I was like, I wrote in my notes, I was like, Pacific Northwest looking amazing. And then, of course, I found out it's Canada, but still, it's like the PNDU representing the PNW with the redwoods and the ferns.

You love to see it. Okay. Beautiful stuff. I thought that borderline, like, this was, again, the season is just overall so, so deft to me in really quick glimpses or exchanges telling us something crucial about the state of play. So, you know, the fact that there is a shot over the borderline and Isaac needs to be dealing with that, it tells us something current is changing. Like, there is an encroachment and a shifting of circumstances in real time that marks some sort of evolution of the state of affairs.

But last week, in the conversation between Isaac and Malcolm, you know, the... you kill our children, never by choice, you train them to shoot because your wolves kill them, because you train them to shoot, because you broke the truce, because you broke the truce, established that the truth was broken. And so there is like that existing fact, and then evolution and change inside of it, which tells us, as we clearly see, right, across these couple episodes, war has unfolded, and it is escalating. Yeah. And, you know, we can talk about this a little bit more now, I think, because outside of the spoiler section, because we have confirmation that Tommy is in Seattle, but like in the game...

Do we take a moment, Joanna? I mean, of course, at the beginning of the season, the biggest, oh my God, what if we fuck this up is like Joel's death? That's the scariest thing for anyone covering last of us. Fair to say that the thing we have agonized over most every week is when are we going to be able to talk about what Tommy does in the game? When will we know in the show if he's actually going? Because it is such a big change.

so relieved. I know. This was the week that the show said Tommy is here. Tommy is here. The fact that in the game he was there.

Yeah. In the game, it's a huge change from the game in that in the game he leaves first. Yes. And Ellie and Dina essentially follow him.

And they're following in the wake of like bodies that he's leaving behind and stuff like that. And so something, you mentioned this to me, but something that Ben and Daniel talked about on button mash

is how much the havoc that Tommy is wreaking on Seattle is turning up the heat on the seraphite WLF war. So, like, though we see these acts of aggression on either side, the hanging bodies in the TV

station, the pile of serified bodies next to the wall, like, all of that, what Dina and Ellie and Jesse and Tommy are up to in terms of, like, running back and forth across borders, shots being fired here, there, and everywhere, is you know, helping to

escalate something that was already on the brink of experience. So, yeah. Okay, so Elise mentions the B levels and the fact that the old timers know that this was, you know, where they took the first quarter of subspacations in 03. And this idea of old timers of the mushroom apocalypse is just like, because that's like at most, you know, it's like 20 years ago. Like, you know what I mean? Like old timers makes me, you know, life expectancy is. shorter in the mushroom apocalypse.

No question. The whole floor is empty, Mallory. Not even the rats. Not even the rats. Not even the rats. This was great. The stretch. Looking at the blueprints, which sterols are blocked off,

B1, B2, B3, this whole rundown, not even the rats. When Nora falls into the elevator shaft and looks up and sees the B2, you just know what it means. If you have gotten all of the information, you know what it means, you know where they are, you know what a way. It's very tidy. For me, so this is another big change from the game in that,

this idea of the spores, which we are introduced to here, is like a game-long concept. And as Neil and Craig talked about on the official pod this weekend, have talked about before, the reason that they didn't want to do, hey, you can just get cortices from the air, is that they didn't want to have, like, all of their characters in gas mess all the time.

Unlike the Mandalorian, they were not interested in obscuring Pedro Pescal's face. They're like, the people deserve to see Pender Pascal's face And we thank them. And thank you for that. And we thank them. But in the encounter between Nora and Ellie in the game that is replicated here, Nora needs to know instantaneously that Ellie is a meet.

And so they were like, well, we got to do the spores then. And then so how do we do the spores? Okay. We'll introduce this sort of evolution. The corticeps are evolving. Or this was like a particular strain of cordyceps in 03 that never broke out of containment inside of these levels of the hospital. So for me, actually, there's so much we learn inside of this juicy little scene.

But for me, Han-R-Han's face absorbing this idea of the cortisps evolving. Like, we're barely holding on and functioning. Haunting. Inside of this. We've still got fucking stalkers and clickers, you know, all across Seattle. We're fending off the seraphites. And now I have to worry about it's in the air. Right. You know, and I think that is a terrifying thing to think about inside of, like, similar to when Ellie's like, at the beginning of the season, this one's fast and smart. Exactly. Fuck.

Yeah. Oh, my God, you know. Yeah. I really, obviously, the discussion among the gamers for years now has been when will the spores come into the show. And I think that this was a really smart time, place and way to do it. You know, that idea of the old timers, like an area where the infection has been the longest, had been waiting and building and blooming and I mean, frankly, creating some, like, lovely wall art. The longest. Gorgeous.

Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. That love is beautiful. Horrifying, but beautiful. Life is full of these contradictions.

I was thinking back to the opening scene of the entire show. The news, the news program, right? What if that were to change, this idea that the fungus can't survive over 94 degrees? But what if that were to change? What if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer? Well, now there is reason to evolve. One gene mutates, dot, dot, doom, doom, doom. So, like, the show opens with the idea of evolution and mutation and the risk of complacency.

Like this is the note that takes us into this world of the story in TV land. I will never. Perfect. I will never forgive the last of us for giving me like a shuddering, chilling association with John Hanna, one of my like, all-time dreamboats. I know. Like, how dare you rope John Hanna into this? Okay. So I also love, so in this scene, I love that they're both smoking and the sort of visual connection between their exhalation of.

smoke and watching Leon then later puff the spore clouds into the hallway. Absolutely gorgeous and upsetting, as are all things. And then you have to wonder, what if somebody had Eugene's bong mask, you know? It could be helpful, I think, you know? Craig and you'll talk about, like, so no spores in the vents, right? That makes no sense to me, but listen, it's not my show, and it doesn't matter. It's much from Apocalypse, who can say? But they talk about these scenes as like, we need to have this.

This is one critique I have this episode, actually, an episode I really liked. Yeah. And it's the way in which they talk about certain scenes as having it is an almost like preemptive explanation for what they imagine the conversation will be of like, well, if you know there's spores in the hospital, why would you stay in the hospital? Or if Dina knows she's pregnant, why would she stay on this journey? And so they have these moments of explanation, right? Of like, well, it's not in the vents. We sealed everything off and we need the hospital. It's like a thing we can't, you know, abandon.

So we have to stay despite the fact that there are spores down there. All of that is fine. It makes sense to me. I like even better the connection to Kathleen and Kansas City and this idea of like a threat that's lurking down below. that you just didn't bother to deal with and you just sort of let denial is how Craig typifies it

but you just sort of let it burble and bubble down there below. And I like that, but I just think I, and maybe this is on me for like analyzing every single word they say on the official pod, but it just made me feel like they were just like a little overly concerned about like what the chatter would be. and I never want to hear a showrun, like,

be the Tony Gilroy you wish to see in the world. Tony Gilroy is like, I don't care. Do we have to use that fucking speech? I don't know. Oh, man. On the, a couple things. On the, does it make sense that it would not be in the vents? I am not a scientist.

I'm not sure if I've said it. Or an HVAC expert. I'm not sure if I've said it on the pod before. for it's a fair note from you, certainly. My thing with this in Last of Us or any genre story is not always. Often I will just ask a million questions about the logic behind a thing, but often, typically, I can hang with whatever the rules of the universe are as long as that universe is consistent inside of itself.

They're heavy sports. They go up out into the air, but then they just sort of settle down. They don't travel, keep traveling. That's fine. Kathleen was incredibly top of mind for me here as well. I'll only inform the people who absolutely need to know and no one else. I, like you, was really struck by Hannah-Hannerhan's face in the sequence, seeing the weight of this realization, like, dawning. What does this mean that this mutation has occurred, that this thing has shifted literally beneath our feet?

How will that change the way we live and operate and work and fight? Why worry about any of that at all? It reminded me not only of Kathleen, but of the Jackson Council. Of course. And they heard about the smart one, the stalker, and they were like, what if we went and partied? Now, we did hear from Jesse the next morning that everyone was actually quite anxious about this. But this, and I think what's interesting that is like we have in those three different examples, like different realities inside of them. It's not all the same.

It's not apples to apples, but it's all like very human beings not taking some aspect of. the infected threat, seriously, to borrow the phraseology from last week, like the third army, right? But really the first, it just doesn't feel like that all the time when these other human threats are so pressing in front of you. Allowing that to be backburnered because of another person or other people is so interesting. And like, I think Han-or-Han is a leader not wanting to incite panic. Okay.

But I think assuming that this is isolated. that this thing they discovered here is maybe only there or that just because it hasn't moved through the vents yet, it wouldn't, and that this is anything other than a matter of urgent peril, is unforgivable. And like in Kansas City... But don't worry, it's need to know. This need to know, Molly.

Check it with a couple people. Like, maybe I'll tell Burton. You know? Maybe. He's very focused. Very mission-oriented. Burton gets a duct tape and start taking up the vets. Economic in his phrases.

Why are we not taping up? up the vents. Like that's a great question. It is a great question. Station 11 heads would be taped up the vents for sure. You know, I think with Kathleen, that complacency and that hubris was born out of like a blinding rage. That's not what's happening with Hannah-in-hand here. So that kind of-as-we-in-as-far as we know. And as far as we know. So that kind of like distinction is really interesting that people can make the same mistakes for different reasons. I like the show illustrating that for us. As he mentioned,

sorry about your son is a really sick button on this scene. Dude. The show is demented. I love it. Demented is what I was going to use. But in terms of the times in which we like to track, like what is the last of us, the last of us for various characters.

It's the last of the parks, right? Elise and Leon. As far as she knows, he's dead. Actually, his fate is worse, but she doesn't know that. But like, you know, as far as she her son is gone and she sent him to his death. And that's something she's always going to have to think about. And this choice that, you know, and Craig hammered a lot on the official pod is this idea that, like, she chose her community.

She chose the wider world. And so did Leon. And I think this is a really interesting idea of, like, she made that choice. So Joel faced with a choice of Ellie or the world chose Ellie. And Elise forces the choice of Leon or the world chose the world. also chose to listen to Leon's wishes because Leon's the one who says Celis in. And so she did what she felt to be right and what he felt to be right, which is Celis in.

And Joel did not care about what Ellie wanted in that moment at the end of season one, which I think is really interesting to think about. I really love this. And it reminds me of the conversation that we were having to, I have cortices up in my brain and can barely think straight today. So I can't remember what week it was. But a couple weeks ago where, you know, we were responding to some emails from the bad babies and having like a discussion about how comparisons are still valid even when there are distinctions.

That's what makes them interesting, right? So this is like, I think a really great example of that because I think that Joel, I mean, the differences are very apparent, right? Joel, Ellie is healthy and well on the operating table, but healthy and well. And so Joel is doing what he does and justifying it to himself because he can save her, right? I saved her. Yeah. Leon's infected.

True. And so that is different, but I still think the overall, like, question of, if you were a parent. I still feel like. And you heard that in the walk. Would you believe it? Would you say, what if I could save you? I still feel like Joel would be like, prior open the elevator shaft, you know. Probably so.

Start up the vents. We'll get you. We'll pump the spores out of there and clear them out of there so you can breathe. That's what Joel would do. Have we tried a netty pot? Like, let's exhaust all options, you know? Oh, my God, netty potting out of the sport. I mean, has anyone thought to try it?

I don't know. Oh, my God. Nora, you're a medical professional. Why didn't you say fetch me some saline? I'll be fine. Have I mentioned I'm not a doctor? It has come up on Nettie podcast recently. Yeah.

But so like that, again, that distinction, all it does is make the actual parallels like Richard Aparst Me. I think what you were citing about Leon and Elise having a conversation together and Leon being a participant in that decision is the most interesting part of this, certainly. And also just more broadly, even outside of the Ellie Joel, Elise Leon, two parents, two children, two paths to peril, two choices to make. about your us and then them, there's just this larger reminder that we can never stop thinking about. I mean, we talked about this last week that, like, people in this universe are forced constantly to confront the fact that they might have to be the one to damn or doom a loved one. And I agree with you. Like, this is just, I mean, it, obviously if you're Ellie and you have to shoot Riley, that's horrifying. If you're Gina and you have to confront maybe needing to shoot Ellie, that is horrific, not to like diminish

having to stare a loved one in the face and kill them. Awful, of course. But the unknown quality of this, and the fact that even though the spores are new, it is kind of like, people do know what happens when you get infected. So locking your son in, knowing that he is infected and will spend now,

however long, roaming as an infected person, is just like to have to do that unimaginable, genuinely unimaginable. And then to have to sit there and like calmly explain it to your boss. Holy fuck. Over a hand-roll cigarette. The other thing that I was thinking about in terms of like this idea of the evolution,

be it the spores or the stalkers, is like, is there to remind us as if we need reminding of the consequences of Joel's actions. It's not just Joel, like we're in a bad place but somewhat stasis with where mushroom apocalypse is. We know where, to avoid or we've

gotten good at defending ourselves or whatever it is, it's gonna get worse. It's in the air. Like, you know, it's a question. And we don't know because, again, because this show mechanic is so different than the game mechanic,

we don't know if the sports are going to leave. In the game, the sports are all over the place. You're constantly confronted sports. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Ellie is still all alone in the opening credits. Despite her newfound us status with Ellie. Did you think maybe we would see a little

Isabella Merced mushrooms sprout up at the end of any of these opening credits? I did think it was possible. I wonder if they thought it was too cruel to then have Ellie in such a lonely place at the end of this episode and such a solitary place. It's like... Eliel alone.

Eliel alone, a very disturbing thing. And that is what we're going to talk about today. Okay. Seattle Day 2. Here we go. Let's do it. After the cold open, the first image we get is the marquee reflected in the water here. And I just want to talk about Stephen Williams a little bit more, as I kind of will constantly. But I just found the visuals of this very disturbing episode. We're extremely scared. Like, the stalker sequence is so scary. When I watched it the second time, I was like, how did you get through this the first time? Like, it was still so scary. And then the third time I basically watched it with my eyes closed. Like, it doesn't. get easier even when you know the outcome of what's happening in that sequence. So like, but there's just this like incredible beauty to the way in which Stephen Williams, uh, shoots his episodes. And this reflection in the water, there's a lot of golden light, close-ups, roving handheld camera work. There's just like a lot of like really beautiful

touches inside of frankly incredibly disturbing, uh, 45 minutes of television. Anything you want to say about the visuals here or do you or just roll forward i think it's a great observation great okay dina's here she's doing map stuff ago photography perhaps and the detail we get here thanks to a close up for the camera is that she's using her gun clip to sort of chart the path on the map and i just think especially in conjunction with like the school talk we get or she's talking to Ellie about not being very school-oriented and stuff like that. Tough one. Is it a reminder, like, these are school kids.

Be they 19 college age. College is still school. These are school kids. Who should be learning geometry and are instead charting a course through a war zone using a gun clip as a protractor. And that is just like incredible. And also a reminder of the episode one sequence where we see Joel, sort of bent over maps showing Benji sort of, this is a map,

who is on the outside, who is on the inside sort of thing. So how much did Dina learn triangulation and map reading in whatever passes for school in Jackson and how much did she learn it from Joel? We already saw Joel teach or something. So I don't, you know, I don't know if this is like a guitar moment for Dina

and she's thinking about Joel teaching her how to read a map. Yeah, you have to learn how to read a map before you can graduate to not looking the wires, you know. I don't know what the exact syllabus looks like at the Joel School in Jackson, but I assume that that's the progression. Where do you think care of beautiful waves comes in? Because both Dina and Joel have that on lockdown, you know? It's true. I feel like this is for Joel and Dina, like if Gail were here, she'd say they've just been walking side by side. You know, like I think they just both had this in Aitley, the skill from the jump. I really love this observation that you're making Joe about the gun clip and just the kind of

conversation about a protractor and how, really, this is like a very charming sequence before we get to the really dark stuff. But the fact that like a tool of war is how you talk about this and plot your course disturbing. The fact that when you're invoking a school supply, something you would put in a school box and buy at the school store, it's because you're trying to chart your path to go exact your vengeance. Like this is just all so disturbing. And even like, you know, we'll obviously get to the discussion of the hubris of the WLF in terms of like how Dina is able to gain all of this intel so easily because they are so cocky and reckless. But like, you know, then we can just think back to how we started to see some of the way that they talk and communicate about their positions and their patrols, which was when we saw Manny. And it was like a very quick conversation at the time at the end of episode three.

But it's like, oh, we're just taking like one of the most beautiful and notable tourist spots. that we would associate with like a lovely day out with the friends and the fam. And it's like, no, right, that's how we can tell where our militia's going. Like, everything that, and obviously that's part of, you know, we're going to get to this just in this, like, when Ellie walks into the theater and, like, what that, the preserved state she finds that and evokes and then where we shift to, like, it's just one of the real genius elements of the show. And, you know, this is like part and parcel for apocalypse storytelling and dystopian storytelling

in some ways. But I think it is one of the things inside of The Last of Us that is just consistent. consistently expert? Like, what does it mean if, when you talk about a protractor, you're doing it in this way? You know? I love that part of the show. And also this idea, we always love to come back to this idea of, like, what did you choose to carry? Like, no, I didn't pack a protractor.

But, like, I did pack as many guns as I could find. Don't worry about it. She's ammo. Three cans. Three cans of food. Let's always remember the shit three cans of food. Just three, though. Was it, like, beans, beans and beans?

You guess what it was? Okay. Probably. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I'd have to go back and look, but given the real bonding moment over the chef boy R.D. That'd like to think that if she could find any chef boy R.D. That was one of the...

How long does canned food last? What is this one of the things? I mean, you know, I would be toast. I'm upset. Okay. Ellie gets lights on in the theater. It's so proud. It's very like provider Joel energy, right?

Yeah. I also thought this was like reckless and kind of weird. Oh, it's terrible. No, no, they're hiding. And Ellie turns all the lights on the theaters. Yeah, there's glass windows everywhere. People can see the lights from the outside. Also, just take a beat and go outside, Ellie,

and make sure you didn't accidentally turn on the giant sick habit mark. Marky. Like, this was very, on the, they talked about being reckless, and this is, this is certainly reckless from Ellie. They make a lot of dumb moves. And I have to say that, like, you know, some of the gamers are like, hey, man, they're not this dumb in the cave. I don't wholly disagree with that.

Okay. I think it's interesting when Craig and Neil were talking about, on the official blog, talking about later when we get to the pile of terrified bodies and this idea of like they're leaving messages for each other and this idea of communication being a theme

of this episode. How do we communicate with each other? So thinking about that, I love to apply that to this sequence and other sequences with Dina and Ellie and what is what is conveyed nonverbally between them like Ellie's like you'll find a safe way to get us to the hospital right and Dina just sort of like smile grimaces at her instead of responding and then when Dina when Ellie calls Dina smart as fucking figuring it out and they just

and then Dina's like Ellie and they just smile at each other in like a pre I love you I love you moment and it's like it's incredibly beautiful and just um when we think about it's about Ellie and Dina as an us, as Dina as sort of like Joel methadone to a certain degree, like what are the ways in which you just have complete understanding of a person? And there are times in this episode where that is true and times in which it's definitely not true. Yeah. Yeah. I really, I love that in general in terms of their, you know, obviously it was very specific and distinct with Henry and Sam in episode five in terms of what the sign language meant for them in terms of their purpose.

particular world of communication. But I think really since then, this has been on the minds of Last of Us viewers. I love you drawing attention to it here. And yeah, it's just like, it's such an effective way to show us the depth of understanding between two people. I think in particularly interesting contrast to what we are going to get to in a couple of scenes, which is like, there's actually a lot that these two don't know about each other. Absolutely. Which is a fascinating contradiction to carry it. Well, I would say, yeah, in one direction. A lot that Ellie hasn't asked Dino about herself. Ellie has a fucking bothered to ask Dina about. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, it's an interesting contradiction, I think, that you can build this level of, I can just look at you and you

know how I feel with somebody while maybe having not actually like expressed enough interest in their life kind of, kind of rings true to me actually about how people can be simultaneously like so self-interested and also so deeply connected to other people around them. And I thought in particular that Ellie, Ellie stops and looks back and they just smile at each other was such a, in general, but especially on the precipice of what we are about to watch, beautiful encapsulation of young love and joy and like what it feels like to be happy with somebody for a minute and what what you might want to fight for and stay inside of and hold on and hold on to. And then what does it mean if Jesse and Dina are going back to the theater and you make a plan to meet them

there and then you go somewhere else in the head, you know? And then you're like, oh, but vengeance. Yeah. Okay, listen, something I want to say here is I really enjoy this moment. I have this mark to talk about a little bit later and I think we can sort of deepen the conversation later. But I do want to address right here a trend that I've seen on on like the various message boards and stuff like that and a question we got asked a couple different times in emails which is like this accusation that the show has become sort of quote unquote Y.A. And so this idea that like this moment, a moment like this between Ellie and Dina where they're just like smiling at each

other, you know, I see the I see CW thrown around or whatever. And I just like in the in this post- Barbie movie era's tour world, I would just really like us to stop dismissing stories about young women as being, like, not as important.

I think to say that season one of The Last of Us wasn't a story about, wasn't a love story. Wasn't a story about a man who was a father finding someone who could

fill that role in his life in Ellie and there's dark tones to it just the way there are dark tones to this story. But that was a story about falling in love with each other. It's a paternalistic version of it, but it is a love story. No question. That story

isn't trivial because like an adult maleism. I don't want to accuse every accusation of this, but I do, there is that flavor in the water to me of the fact that these are two 19-year-old girls. So these strong feelings that they're feeling are somehow not as interesting or not as mature or not as deep as a similar story, I would say, that we found between Jolenelli and season one.

That bothers me. It bothers me. And I think there is a tremendous amount of profundity and what we find here, especially because it is inside of this episode so short-lived. It's something that is like fragile and fleeting. And this darker element of Ellie is sort of drowning out her ability to make this connection, to return to the theater instead of go to the hospital. So again, I don't like to spend too much time entertaining sort of bad faith arguments, but that's one that I'm just sort of like, I can't, I can't in good conscience let that sort of float around like spores in the air. Did.

Preach. Co-assign. Very well put. Let me say, this is not a YA show, but also like the, of course, I as a YA enthusiast feel compelled to just like also say that the implication that YA stories are like somehow not emotionally rich is also insulting. So for a number of different reasons that does not feel valid. We don't love it. Okay. So are you looking for?

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Future days. What do you want to say about walking into this theater and what we see here? Oh, my God. I just loved this little sequence so much. Gorgeous set. Obviously, this is a key set. It's beautiful. I thought that Ellie going into, Ellie alone, going into the actual theater space,

walking among all of those empty seats. toward the stage, one of those great moments in the show where you as the viewer and the character inside of the scene thinks about what civilization was like before. And like, there are movie nights in Jackson, right?

We've seen them. We had to rock out with like Britney and the Jug Boys on New Year's. There's music. Obviously, music plays a very central world in many ways. But this idea of like being in a place this grand and thinking about how many people would have been there together, this idea, like, the way I love that moment when Ellie looks up at the painting.

That made me think of Battlestar. The opera house and Battlestar. Yes, absolutely. This idea of like a cathedral to music, this thing that is so central in Ellie's life and Ellie's relationship with Joel. And the idea then of, you know, especially in a story where we are constantly talking about the us and the them and how small the us can be, what would it be like? even for a night to have an us that big.

Hundreds of people around you sharing a thing that you love and they love to, like how awe-inspiring would it be to confront that? And in a world, in a city like this, but just a world full of cities like this, where these places are crumbling and the decay has set in and there's a threat around every corner, like the little miracle of finding a cathedral to music of all things so well intact.

Yeah. Just really, really, really cool. And that's all before Ellie picks up the guitar and sings a line of future days. Which. So, beautifully put, thank you so much. I love that you bring that up because it does give me a thinly, thin excuse and I will take any. Talk about Station 11. Yeah, let's do it. Station 11, a story that starts with a production of a Shakespeare play and everyone's at the theater together.

And then there's this outbreak, this pandemic. And then later in this post-apocalyptic, you know, disease ravage United States, we get a theater troupe going around and performing Shakespeare to the various towns. And we get gathering, we get bonding over story, the power of story, all that sort of stuff. But it's on such a smaller, raggedy or scale than the grandness of this production of Lear that we see at the beginning of the book and of Station 11 the TV show. And so, yeah, to your point of thinking about this sick habit show. And also I was talking, I was actually talking to my best friend about this yesterday about, like, weird. I don't remember talking to you about this yesterday. You were talking about.

It's a tough way. Diana. Talking about confronting painful truths. Something that I talked to my sister a lot about because my sister works in, you know, in the opera. This idea that like live theater and me. opera and the ballet and the symphony and all these like cathedrals of culture have not recovered from the pandemic. Like we are not, you know, we talk about this, you know, Sean and Amanda talk about this all

the time in the big pick context of like people aren't going to the movie theater anymore. And that was already a problem pre-pandemic, but it gave even more of a problem post-pandemic. Because like people got used to being in their homes. There's a number of different reasons. I could talk about this forever. But like, there's also this idea of like being in a room with that many people after you've gone through a contagion that just feels scarier than I did before. You know how long it took me to go back to the movie theaters?

And even like, even now, like, you know, I've gone to the movies with you. Like, we'll go to the movies. But there's a difference between that and like when I, like the rare cases, like if it's a Dune or a sinners, where I will go to the IMAX in San Francisco that is sold out and it is so many people in one room. And I'm still just a little like, let I be wearing a baby. mask. So all of that's all of that's on my mind. I love that you pointed this out about the about the theater. Future days, just a few chords. It sounds like there was a version of this that was longer and I feel we were robbed, but thanks so much, Neil and Craig, your restraint

is admirable. If I ever were to lose you is what we hear from Ellie. And the next lyric is I'd surely lose myself. we get this sound design moment that Craig talks about on the official podcast as being like kismet moment in the edit where sound bleed from an edit of episode seven down the hall came into their editing bay when they were working on episode five. And so the sound you hear here is actually like a louder sound that we will hear again in episode seven. So it's almost this like preview, a pre-echo. of what's to come. Incredible. I think that's incredible.

We got this fascinating email from our listener, Lauren, about this Judith Butler text called Violence, Mourning, and Politics. That I think really feeds into this idea of like, you know, what is me without you sort of idea? Judith Butler wrote, when we lose certain people or when we are dispossessed from a place or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that morning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have

to others that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties are bonds that compose us. It's not as if an I exist independently over here and then simply loses a you over there, especially if the attachment to you is part of what composes who I am. If I lose you under the these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who am I without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost you, only discovered that I have gone missing as well, which is a profound and beautifully deep way of echoing this lyric. If I were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself.

Who am I without you? And this idea that like, again, this very important song, which gave the title to the first episode of the season, which plays an important role in the game, this concept of love that is, you know, perhaps unhealthily codependent. But like, what does this then reveal about you when that part of you, who is another person is ripped away. And this idea, the way the camera, handheld camera moves around Bella Ramsey in this space and that Ellie left alone for just a few minutes.

Nina has been by her side and just a few minutes alone with this sort of like winter soldier-esque musical trigger. And then the way that Craig described on the official podcast, Ellie has turned. turning into her dark Avenger self, not to be confused with the Avengers with the Z. What do you want to say about, what do you want to say about this? Boy, what a great email from Lauren.

I love that so much because, like, it makes me think about, I love this scene already. It makes me, that email from Lauren makes me love it even more. And it makes me think just, you know, honestly, like about the power of genre stories and why we love them and what they can do, right? Because you don't need to be telling a story about the zombie mushroom apocalypse in order to understand what a parent and a child mean to each other or what it feels like to lose,

like the defining person in your life. Obviously, like when you lose somebody who means that much to you, it is a deeply destabilizing. It can be a deeply destabilizing. thing to confront. What a story like The Last of Us does and what genre stories can do is heighten that circumstance to allow us to explore something that is fundamental to human nature and our lives already. So if that relationship happened to be one of the only ones you had had and thought you

would have because the single rarest currency in the world is a person who stays around, because the threats are everywhere? I thought it was what you share with someone else in your own cool. But sorry, that was an almost... Hold up the tat. Hold up the tat. That's just an almost famous reference. But anyway, go ahead.

Also that. And, like, that's just beautiful, right? To take this more extreme circumstance and allow us to then reflect on something that is just true about, like, the human experience. That's why we love genre stories. Hearing Ellie, seeing Ellie pick up the guitar and hearing Ellie just saying that, half of the line. Boy, was it magical and meaningful. Just a thrill to get even that.

And I thought the soundscape thing, it was incredible to hear them talk about that. Happy accident, as Craig put it. And I thought that that sound treatment, the way that that, like, rumble entered and paired with Ellie's face setting, setting into a state of just sheer determination, was in a show with like outright horror and death and injury and torment,

in some ways one of the most disturbing things that we have seen, right? And it is like the settling in of, okay, I'm happy. I have this good thing. I have enjoyed the prior night. I have enjoyed taking the next step with this person I love. And now I have reminded myself why I'm here. And it was so chilling to, to watch. And I thought also in terms of tracking, like, triggers and reminders, the different,

obviously, again, Ellie is in a very unique circumstance in an extreme situation. But, like, we talked a lot about in episode three what it meant for Ellie to confront in Siegel's jacket, right? And that that was really about, like, just despair, just despair washing over Ellie. And then in episode four, after take on me when Ellie is talking about. with Dina about what Joel taught her. It was, there was a moment for gratitude, for that memory to be a portal to gratitude and happiness and reflection.

And this was different. This was something immediately, like, calcified and concretized in this, like, unflinching state. And I just thought it's like, I just thought it was incredible and incredible performance and just an incredible, like, a structure in the scene to give us that

and to have Dina walk in and then for Ellie to just say like that flat, good. Good. Hold us everything we needed to know about where Ellie was in that moment. Really good. I love that. That's such a good. It's so good to think good.

It's so smart to think about comparing this to the take-on-me moment, which was a shared communal celebration of Joel. And then here's Ellie processing it by herself. And like, I had this mark to talk about a little bit later, but I think it's good to talk about it here. this idea of like the way that Craig and Neil talk about Ellie in violence and have always talked about Ellie and violence in this context of sort of addiction, this high, this rush, and this addictive nature to it. And sort of if violence is her addiction, then like, you know, what we see at the end of this episode is just like is an indulgence, is a, is, you know, is taking a hit after not

etc. Restraining yourself, all this sort of stuff like that and giving in and giving over. And part of something that can come with addiction and a number of other behaviors

is this idea of masking and this idea that like Ellie has psychologically been masking her darkness after Joel's desk, death. And we saw it most starkly when she's talking to Gail

and she's putting on this little show, a pretty shitty little show about how she's fine. And then we see her walk down the hallway and her face just drops. She's putting on less of a show for Dina and less of a show for Jesse. She puts on a show for the town council. You know what I mean? So this idea that she's been like

sort of smoothing over, rounding off the edges of her darkness, of her anger, of her vengeance of her violence as part of denial, which is a strong part of grief, obviously, is a strong part of addiction. And so, you know, this question that a lot of people have had of like, is Ellie too bubbly too happy? She's not single-mindedly focused on her vengeance, which is what I, a gamer, want to see from Ellie. I really like this other depiction of an Ellie who is being, who is trying to be quote unquote normal, especially trying to be quote unquote normal

around someone that she like loves and fancies. And it's just sort of like, I want to be a version of myself that Dina would find interesting and attractive and want to be around. And I don't feel like I can show her the darkness inside of me. Joel and Ellie had that as like a basic line understanding of each other. Like, she didn't need to hide that part of her from Joel because she saw it reflected back in Joel, which is not to say that Dina is not capable of defending herself, but it's a different, you know, it's like Dina can have a casual joint and Ellie and Joel are on like black tar heroin. And like they can talk about it and they know what it's like.

And it's not like they have to, you know, sneak off and do massive violence, you know, we see Ellie at the end of this episode with Joel in her bed several years ago just being happy and a child and safe, so safe to wake up in just like safety and security. It's the safety also of under, it's the safety of the walls of Jackson, it's the safety of being understood and being able to be yourself around someone. And she lost that and she doesn't feel like she can show who. she is. And so, like, in this side of this episode, when Dina's like, hey, you want to hear the fucked up thing that I did you when I was an eight-year-old? Like, that's Dina being like, hey, man,

I got some darkness in me. Like, show me some of the darkness in you, you know? And, like, Ellie told her a lie when she told her what happened with Brian. And she hasn't told her what happened with David. And not that she has to. She isn't like, oh, anyone that. But like, she's not, Joel already knows that about her. Right. And she's unwilling right now. to show that part of herself to Dina, because I think she's afraid that it's too dark. But, again, mere minutes after leaving Dina's side inside of this theater or being alone in the hospital, this other side of L.E.,

she does not have to mask at all. And it just comes, if Dina's there in the hospital, it does not go down that way with the- No, absolutely not. So. No chance. It's, and which is not to say that, like, again, I'm not advocating for, like, codependent relation.

You know what I mean? Like you shouldn't have to like have someone there all the time in order to be right with yourself. But if you can let someone else see you really, that gives you that stability to not eb so high and low inside of your own self. So I think that's something that the show is doing that I think is really smart. Yeah. And I can understand why some people play the game are like, hey man, this isn't the LEM used to. but I really love the way that it plays out inside of this episode. I think it's really brilliant to show that dimension of it. I love that.

I really agree. That was brilliant. I think that one of the core questions that the story overall in any form is interested in exploring is like, can you make room for more than one thing in your heart? You know? Like, can joy and rage coexist? How? What does it look like?

And what does it look like when you show that to other people? And I think that like, you know, even Ellie and Joel, I mean, think of like the moments where they were, you know, the diarrhea runs in your genes. Like, you know, there was joy in life. Like, it's, that's what it means to know another person is to make room for all of it. And so, like, I love what you're, I really love what you're citing about the fear that Ellie would have about, like, showing that to somebody else. Um, especially because one of the things that makes me think of is, like, you know, not to jump ahead. We will, we'll save our conversation about the implications of this for the end of the episode and the Nora Ellie scene.

but like, I know, right? We get confirmation of a season-long question. We don't know the particulars of what it means and how Ellie came to know, but we know now that Ellie knows. That's confirmed in this episode. That's massive. Huge. What does that remind us of?

That even Ellie and Joel, who are those mirrors to each other and share that unvarnished truth with each other and can be themselves with each other, that even then Joel did a thing that he was afraid to tell her. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so Ellie has actually directly confronted, you did this thing and you kept it for me. Yeah. Yeah.

So then if Ellie does that to other people, like this is just like, this is whether it looks like this for any of us, probably not. But like this is what people do. Yeah. Right. Other people hurt them. And then they do that to other people. They make the same mistakes that they hold against other people. That is just like 101 being alive.

Yeah. So I really love what you're identifying here. And I love the way that the show explores those ripples across relationships and across time. Let's, I love you. I love podcast. I do the best. All right. Come and see.

We get a little Amish lesson. Ellie's never heard of the Amish. Okay. Ellie, I would love to recommend a film to you. It's one of our shared favorites. it's called witness and nobody has ever looked hotter than Harrison Ford, singing Sam Cuck, banging on the roof of a car in a barn. Just recommend it.

Movie night. Next movie night, Jackson. Okay, sounds good. We get an explanation for why Dina knows where Nora will be, the WLF are super chatty on the radio because they think no one's listening. Yep. Okay. The two of them discuss the no good, very bad idea of what they're about to do.

to go into this building. They do it anyway. And this is what Stephen Williams calls the beginnings of Ellie's Revenge Quest. You thought 45 days on horseback from Jackson to Seattle was it? No. That was the prequel. That was the preamble. Here we are.

Now it's time for the long-ass building. All right. So Ellie and Dean are talking baby names. They're talking about their shared future together when we get this startling death table. the piled bodies in front of this wall. Feel her love, the title of the episode, this writing that we've seen on the mural that we'll hear later from the seraphites,

and then the alternative title of the episode, Feel this bitch written underneath by the LF. So let's take you behind the curtain of making this podcast. This is unusual turnaround for House of R in that this is a sudden. Sunday night show and we talk about it on Monday mornings. And usually we take a little bit more time to do this because we like to listen to the official podcast and do this, that and the other thing. Last night, Craig was like, hey, man, guess what? An inspiration for this scene was this 1985 war, Russian war film called Come and See. And it's the best warming of all time. And I thought about it a lot when I made Chernobyl, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, well, guess what I have to watch? Unbelievable. Last night, it's just on YouTube. Last night. I was. I was like, I was like, I'll try to find the scene.

The scene happens to be at the end of the movie. So I watched the whole movie. But, yeah, I watched Come and See, which is a very disturbing, very beautifully disturbing Russian anti-war movie about a young boy who sort of finds himself drawn into the Russian front during World War II. And it was a young boy often accompanied by a young woman. And the absolute horrors that were, like, by the end of the movie, he is like prematurely aged. She's got like wrinkles on his face and stuff like that.

One of the visual elements that I thought was interesting, the tableau is very clear what he's talking about. Like, when you see it, you're like, I understand you pose the bodies to look almost identical to this pile of bodies that we get at the end of the movie. But we then get this close up on Ellie's face, on Bella's face. and there's a couple of those inside of this episode of Ellie registering the horror, seeing the seraphites in the forest. There's just like a couple sort of like close-up registering horror moments for Ellie. And that is just like, seems to me to be taken directly out of this movie, which is like... Interesting.

I don't know. A huge percentage of it is just this kid's face as he absorbs the horror of war. I don't want to get into all of the details of this movie. You can watch on YouTube or not if you want to, but it comes down at the end to this very esoterically presented idea of like, would you kill baby Hitler to stop World War II, aka a Nazi themed trolley problem essentially. And again, that feeds right back into the way in which Craig and Neil are thinking about this story, which is like. Like, who would you, what would you risk or what would you, who would you save? Could you kill something innocent like a baby Hitler in order to stop all of these atrocities, et cetera, et cetera. Can I recommend this movie? Yeah, I just, it's a very specific mood is what I would say for this movie.

Okay. And I will say Mozart's Lacromosa, which is like a very iconic Mozart piece that has gone viral on TikTok a couple times the last couple of years. plays over the end of this movie in a way that makes me never want to listen to it again. And I mean that is like a compliment to like how powerful it is. Anyway. Oh, interesting. The horrors of war, the horrors of violence and what it does to, you know, a young person is, of course, exactly what we are dealing with here. What did you make of the way in which Ellie absorbs this and then the conversation that Ellie and Dina have after it?

Yeah, I thought this was like, this was a really interesting stretch. You know, we go from the, first of all, thank you for that. I like Troy Baker have not seen this film. Put it on the list, Troy. That was this great, great part of the pod. This is the best war movie ever made. I haven't seen it. That's just basically the, you know, same conversation we just had.

You really have a Troy Baker energy sometimes to you. That's like the nicest thing you ever said to me. It's a real actual of it. Yeah. I don't think I'm worthy of that compliment, but I'll take it. Cool, calm, extremely thoughtful. That's me, cool and calm. Definitely when the bad babies send us cartoons of us as cats.

I'm the one who's presented as cool and calm and not the one chewing my own foot in the hair. Okay. Let me try this again. Effortlessly thoughtful is what I will say. Remember that cartoon? That was fucking great. Oh, the one where I looked deeply stoned slash asleep. Yeah, and I was like, yeah, wonderful stuff.

But we build, you know, from this conversation about the hubris of the wolves and the arrogance, right? This idea of complacency, arrogance, very present across many of the scenes. You know, this made me think a little bit of the discussion we had last week about the hubris we were hearing from Isaac and to describing his enemy. And then we build into the, like you said, like baby names. Even that, though, on the one hand, there's like a, you know, Dina's kind of like, yeah, it'll be fine. Let's like just distract ourselves. So we don't have to think about how anxious we are and how like crazy it is that we're doing this thing.

Very stupid thing. Yeah. Yeah, which was I thought actually like kind of an interesting way to imbue the scene with a little bit of the, I mean, because we should just say like this stretch of the game, you know, or really any stretch of like these of the Seattle. days. Like, there's just, it's unrelenting, like, it's, it's challenge after challenge after challenge. So the show is, you know, for, for various reasons, and out of necessity, condensing that and compressing it into a couple moments and a couple confrontations that are going to convey

something that maybe you are absorbing, like, at volume and scale in the game. And so, like, what they confront here is one of those ways. I thought that the conversation about the baby name is, like, even just, I don't know, something about Ellie saying. Like, what are you going to name? It just felt really different to me than I'm going to be a dad, you know, at the end of last episode. And, like, I thought even though it was a conversation about the future and a shared future and a future that they had just very recently, like, spent a very jubilant evening into morning,

fantasizing about together, that there was a different energy to this, for sure. You know, your point from earlier in the episode about the, the nature of communication inside of groups and across groups. Like the idea of taking the message of the prophet, this mural, we see these murals all across Seattle. Obviously, we saw Feel Her Love, that tag in blood at the TV station last week. And then to see it here in this like artistic fashion and then the wolves replying with feel this bitch.

And then a collection of the bullet riddled dead was. And those flies are swarming around the bodies. And like, you know, when Ellie and Dina came across the massacre to seraphites in the, on the forest path a couple episodes ago, like, we have to understand, first of all, it's two things. One, that you never become immune to seeing something like this. Like, this should not be normal to come across a pile of. freshly dead people who have clearly just been brutally murdered. And then to see... And people versus infected, not to be like, you know, too crass about it, but like,

this distinction that they've been drawing for the last couple episodes of like, yes, people did this to each other. Yes, we've killed a lot of infected in and around Jackson. We love doing it, but it's not the same as killing a person, right? Yes, yeah. And, like, people did this to each other. And the TV station last episode, the Sarah fights. hung and displayed and, as you noted, bathed in light their victims. And here the wolves presented

under a mural, like an art installation, the people who they had massacred. Like, this is just horrific. And for that to be the thing that pushes Ellie into, you know, what we would I think describe as like Joel Protector mode, right? I have to get you out of here. Like last episode, they were in the TV station. They each had to kill somebody in order to get out of there. Then they went into the light rail station and had to escape like legions of infected. It's not like it's been a chill visit to Seattle so far. So the thing that incites Ellie saying to Dina, like, what is wrong with me?

I should not have brought you here has to be undeniable. Yeah. Well, it's this and and with the added layer of and you're pregnant, right? There's a dead child here and you're and you're pregnant. Like, that's, I love that. Thank you. I love that. I love the point that Craig and Neil made about this idea that Ellie's like, I'll take you home, not we'll go home. We'll go home and start our family with our baby together. It's, I'll take you home. Then I'm going to hop back on Shimmer, spend another 45 days on Shimmer all alone and come back here. And dear God, poor. shimmer. Just let shimmer spin some records, please. Okay. Then we get this Dina backstory. Yeah. Which is different than it is in the game. Yes. What do you make of the differences here, Mallory, and how did this story play for you? I thought this was a chilling and incredibly performed scene yet again. Now you already know how this story ends because I don't live in a cabin north of Santa Fe anymore and I don't have a mom or sister anymore. But since everyone's

past is fucked and we've all heard everyone's fucked stories. How do you think this one goes? I thought that in particular, that pairing of this like very specific and personal reveal with the like recognition that everybody has their version of this almost too, honestly like too depressing and upsetting to like properly articulate. Like it was just so dark. And the fact that the like path to understanding with another person and the thing that you share with them is that you've both surely suffered through some life-altering loss is just like brutal. So really good and effective scene for reminding us of that. Just what world do these people live in?

And then in terms of Dina, in particular, Jesus, like an eight-year-old kid who just wants to go outside and play in the yard. And then here's the screams of a raider killing her mother and sister. I thought the part of this about how startled he looked and then like looked startled when I shot him too was like holy shit stuff.

Yeah. Coming to terms with like being feared as an eight year olds. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's a lot. There's so many layers to this disturbing cake. But that's one that I like really, really

gloved on to. He was startled to see me with the gun and then I killed him. And then also the self-recrimination of I was too slow. Yes. That part was, yes. Like, great call on the startle front. Like, what can people take away from you, but also what can you take away from them?

And like the two, I was eight years old and I was too slow thing. Like, it really made me think of, I know you had this elsewhere in the outline today. I hope you'll forgive me for mentioning it here. But this was where I thought of it, like Joel sang to Tommy in episode six last season because I was too slow and too fucking deaf to hear him coming and what it means for the world to be a place where. everybody feels like they're not good enough for one reason or another. Either you're too young and you weren't ready or you feel like you're too old or something that has changed about your body or your circumstances makes it harder. And like you talked beautifully in the last couple episodes about how one of the really heartening things that we saw about Jackson was like it was a community that embraced everybody and like actually tried to remind you that you didn't need to feel that way.

But that this would be human nature like to wonder for any number of reasons if you were going to be enough in the moment of your trial. And, like, you know, I also just thought in terms of a canon update or tweak from on the adaptation front that this was really interesting. Like there's little things like Dina being eight in the show versus 10 in the game. But the big one is that in the game, when we're learning about Dina's past, like, it's clear that her sister lives past them losing their mother. And that her sister basically, like, raises her. So this is, now her sister, Talia, is like not around in the events of her. of The Last of Us part two, but like... She's all these stories about her sister.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they had this whole experience after. So that's a big change that Dina as an eight-year-old was like completely alone. Yeah. And this idea, we alluded to this earlier, but Ellie having no fucking clue about this. And then just saying, like, I always thought, like, how did you get to Jackson? Like, the assumption that Ellie made that Dina was sort of like born and raised in Jackson or at least nearby, you know, like, and never just bothered to ask, like, where does Dina

live in Jackson. Like, you know, who is she, who is she bunking with? Like, you know, if she doesn't have any family, like, and Dina never asked, this is her, I mean, Ellie never asked. This is her best friend. This is the person she's in love with and she never asked about this. Just, I think, really reveals how much Ellie was caught, however much she was asserting her independence in those, in that time that we saw her at the beginning of this episode, wrapped up in the Joel and Ellie show. And, you know, and just a reminder that Dina is someone who is who, like Ellie, has gone through tremendously traumatic things and processed it differently. You know, and that's fun. That's not, I'm not putting a judgment on, like, how you process trauma, but it's like, it's just to reveal that there isn't just one way, simply one way in order to process this, you know.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I thought on that front, too, in terms of, like, us having a better understanding of Dina's relationship to trauma. You know, we had talked about earlier in the season the adaptive change to have Dina in the room when Joel dies and to give us just more of a Joel Dina relationship, period. And that, like, what that gives us is like Dina is not just here for Ellie to support Ellie. Not that that wouldn't be a meaningful thing, you know, on its own. But that Dina is also here because she loved Joel and she lost Joel and she was there when this happened. And so then this is like a deeper understanding behind that still. I have lost.

I have suffered through a horror before. And what just happened here brought all of this up for me. I thought like the, 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. No. And if I hadn't killed him, if he had gotten away, I promise you, I would have hunted him down forever. Forever.

Giving us, you know, we've invoked in recent episodes like a couple key core panties. Anthion Thrones lines for like Abby or Ellie, like giving us a Dina version of, you know, there's no justice in the world, not unless we make it, or nothing's more hateful than failing to protect the one you love. Feels really crucial. Even though inside of this episode, right, Dina is confronting shifting circumstances in a way that Ellie is not. Like, not to jump ahead, but the moment when after Jesse arrives and they're going through

the woods and, like, Jesse's like, let's fucking go. and Ellie's like, no. Dina's response to that is, Ellie, not like, yeah, Jesse, no, which is interesting, you know? And so, like, obviously there's a lot to track here, but to help us understand why Dina is there in the first place

and her relationship to what has happened and, like, to loss and to pursuing some sort of revenge exacted in the face of it is like a really important thing for us to understand about Dina individually, not just through the ends of Ellie's loss. I love that. Very effective. I love that.

And I think, you know, Ellie says to Dina, oh, no, Ellie cups to Dina's cheek and Dina says, I'll go back if you want and I'll keep going if you want. If I die, it's on me, it won't be your fault, right? And Ellie says, sadly, like, keep going. Like, I want to keep going, right? And in the game, and we already mentioned this because it happens back in Jackson, but in the game, Dina says to Ellie, you go, I go, end of story.

It didn't happen in the show, but that's a game. Right. And one of our listeners, Nicole, picked up on the biblical illusion of Ugo I go, which is from the book of Ruth. And I'm going to read some scripture to you. Please. In a I'm not a religious person kind of way. Okay. But Ruth said, do not press me to leave you to turn back from following you.

you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people should be my people and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do thus to me and more as well. Even death parts me from you. And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. Then Nicole writes, this story is frequently referenced by queer biblical scholars and theologians as a queer relationship. There's no evidence in the story that Ruth and Naomi had a sexual relationship, but it is queer in a broad sense. Ruth clings to Naomi, who she apparently loves. Instead of just going back to the comfort of her own family and finding a new husband to care for her, the duo have an adventure of their own, engaging in some trickery to get

Ruth married off again, but they don't leave each other under pretty dangerous circumstances, women in ancient Israel, unprotected by men. It's honestly a miracle. It's in the canon, given that it centers women, which most of the rest of the biblical canon does not. Though the time in which these stories take place are very different, some basics are the same. These pairs of women are chosen family for one another, and their lives. Love pushes them to defy social convention and enter into a pretty dangerous situation,

even if it means dying. At least they will die together and not alone. And this line happens in the game and it is an intentional biblical reference. I think it really highlights something even more remarkable and special about the DNA and LA relationship. I can't wait to learn more. So thank you to Nicole, who has been a longstanding listener who often will email in references that I miss.

So I appreciate Nicole for that. But I want to let Nicole know that I do know this quote from Book of Ruth. I know it from the film, Frye Green Tomatoes, and the book, Fried Tomatoes, which is, of course, queer canon. But where that lodges, I will lodge thy people, shall be my people, is a message from the character Ruth to Idgy to be like, come get me from my abusive husband. I'm going to live with you instead.

Fried Tomatoes, classic, great movie. Okay. Incredible. So we go from here. Dina Bolt cuts the gate open, which felt like a fun little game moment. Did you feel seen as a gamer in this moment? No, I actually was like, why are they risking detection by cutting a bolt? They should just climb the fence and then paused and saw that there was barbed wire on the top of the fence and then forgave them.

So, like, can't leave a trail. Come on. To your point earlier, we walked into a theater that was incredibly preserved, but here we walk into an office building where, like, you know, the phones are off the hook and just like absolutely abandoned dusty debacle disaster, haunted but empty, just like. Just like us. It's just like us. Great stuff. Really good. We've clocked before the way in which people try to talk to Ellie when they know she's not going to do what they ask inside of a situation.

Dina did it before when they were in the market at the beginning. And Ellie fell down and he just like, stay there, okay? And Ellie's like, yep. And she's like, but for real, stay there. And then Jesse with Ellie when they go out to look for Dina and Joel. And of course, Ellie does whatever Ellie wants to do. And I love this because, like, Ellie will not listen. Ellie will do whatever what Ellie wants to do.

But I like that Dina says, you're a little crazy and that's exciting. It's one of the reasons I love you, but I do want to make it out of here. So, like, this is the I love you. You love me? Oh, I know. Okay, crazy. Here we go. It's a great Hans Solololea

I love you I know sort of moment. Okay, we love that. That communication, right? Dina's like, you don't have to say it. I know you love me. Like, it's fine. But also that idea of like, hey, I know this frustrating thing about you.

Yeah. And I see it and I love it. It's part of why I love you. It's this thing that a lot of other people would see is a flaw. It is a flaw, but I love it. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, but there's a time and a place. Yeah, I thought that was great. I really liked that as well. And I liked you earlier, you know, when they're talking about the walkie-talkie insights and stuff and like the long-ass building and Ellie is the one who's like, why aren't they patrolling that building? And we do get to see Ellie puzzle things out alongside Dina earlier on the episode. So then it's like we've seen some progress and some of the effect of Dina's tutelage, like pause, take a minute, think rationally. And so then to just still, like, give us the reminder, dude, you're going to be guns ablaze in for sure.

Obviously, when they actually are forced to use the guns and, you know, stalkers are terrifying. We'll talk about that in a second. It was necessary and required. But even then, I'm like, dude, Ellie, you fired a shot at the stalker who's like right in front of Dina. What? It was an absolute shit show. Panic at the disco. Oh, man.

I simply would have let them. the stalkers take me because, listen. Oh, okay. You're just like, I'm not thinking it out of there. So, like, why even worry about it? Why fight? You want to go out just, like, quietly letting them consume you? Test style.

Let's just go. Anyway. Some yearning tendrils? Yeah. Nice. Do you think that Dina trying to listen for infected in the warehouse and not hearing anything is a nod to not being able to see soccer stillowets in the game? You can't see a stalker coming.

This is like the worst part of confronting the stalkers. Like the radar that you can use and enhance. You know, it's one of the like the things that you can upgrade as you go is basically useless when it's when it's stalker time. So even as you like master the technique of, you know, crouching before entering a room and who's waiting for me around the other end and okay, I can tell from the shape that this is going to be like a bloater or a shambler or whatever, that fucking useless. You walk into a space and you don't know if you're about to get ambush. That's why they're so terrifying. And then, like, all of the tactics that go into making your way, like, is this, am I going to be guns of blazing? Am I going to try to use stealth mode here?

You don't have the, stalkers do not give you the opportunity to plan. And so, weirdly, in a way, they're actually, like, an ideal foe for Ellie because it's like, that's how she likes to operate. But they're so fucking scary. Yeah. Terrifying. They're scary here. We get, like, a horror movie score. My God.

The walking down the hallway, for me, as you know, I'm going to. For me, as you know, I can't handle horror. So that was actually the scariest thing in the episode more so than the actual confrontation with the stalkers. I'm just like a dark hallway with dripping water and a scary score. It's not something I can personally handle. When the fucking light lights up a corner and it's just like not one but four stalkers. Also not ideal. Okay.

Not ideal. Yeah. Craig says there's like 11 of them. I love that Craig Mason. I feel like Craig. he uses like a Californian one in conversation and I love it

it's like it's not one it's not four it's like 11 of them anyway okay I just want to say okay so horrifying Craig and Neil talked about the way the lights reflect off of their eyeballs and how long it took for them to calibrate the exact reflection

off of eyeballs to make them look scary but not like silly I was under Jamie Rohnen to ask This is a note. This is an absolute note for me. It's the hardest of possible passes on Jamie's email. Outrageous.

Did you guys know that there's a fungus called Dead Man's Fingers, Zylaria Polymorpha, and then Jamie sent over a photo that I put into our doc. But why? The reason I put it in is it reminds me at the little crown fungus on the stalkers. But it does look like dead zombie fingers coming up from the, it's horrifying. We don't have an I-eat-Mushroom story this week, and I blame Jamie for that. Yeah, could it be that you had a debilitating flu that you managed to podcast through anyway last week, or could it be this photo from Jamie, you could say?

Really tough. Okay, so too many stalkers. We're not going to make it out. Ellie makes a plan. You run to that cage. I can get bit. I'll be fine. As Craig and you made clear the podcast, Ellie is lying her face off.

to Dina in this moment. She's like, we're not making out of it. Perhaps one of us will make it out of it. And that better be Dina. And so Ellie flips into full Joel mode is like, go, I will take on all of this. And as tests, let us know in season one, Ellie is immune to biting by not being immune, not immune to being ripped apart. Yeah. And last episode, we got to hear when Ellie was trying to convince Dina of her immunity.

You know, she said, like, please listen to me. I would die for you. I would. Yeah. But that's not what just happened. That's what's happening here. That's what's happening here. Again, I was maybe sometimes closing my eyes on the sequence, so who's to say?

But I believe the stalker's Jurassic Park clever girl, Ellie, by like flanking her as she said they would and distracting her and she's looking one direction and then she gets dive bombed from the other direction. It's all very tough. Peeling the... Peeling the lid of the mesh cage. that Dina is in, like it's the lid of like a tuna fish. It's just... You mentioned before this idea of, like, failure and Joel, this idea, so two things, two things to note here.

One, Neil Druckman wants to point out this idea of, like, when you're a teenager, you're like, I'm invincible, and this is, like, a real reckoning moment for Ellie of, like, she doesn't get to get out of everything. I mean, she does, because Jesse shows up, but she doesn't get to, like, get out of every, like, little scrape sheet. wanders her way into. Though I would say, I feel like Ellie has had a few of those moments

in season one. I don't think she's like been cocksure in everything she's done in her life. And then number two, here she is on the ground again, held down, pinned down like she was in episode two, forced to watch as

as she expects the person who's the most important to her in her life is about to die. I failed to protect Dina and now I have to watch it while being held down again. And here is this. So this idea of like failure as it marks Joel and now marks Ellie of I couldn't protect her.

I failed her. This is what he says to Tommy in season one after that too slow and too fucking death thing that you mentioned. All I've ever done is fail her again and again. He's talking about Sarah and dreaming about failing Sarah again again. Yeah, I'm failing in my sleep. So here's Ellie, being the Joel and failing. Deeply painful.

Deeply painful. There's like if you, to have to confront what it would mean if you oriented your entire existence around a rage quest, maybe, but also protecting one other person. The villain Frank edict, right? Yeah, yeah. And really what a rare thing. their end was then in that respect, like how for most people who lived their life this way, the end would be either watching that person be taken from you and feeling like you had failed or feeling like you had failed because you were the one who was taken and then you left them alone. Oh my God. Here comes Jesse.

Craig calls him Hans Solo. Great stuff. Yeah. How does that compare to the other nicknames? Reddit has called him Apocalypse Himbo. I have zero notes. And of course, Tina called him Captain Miami. That's still my favorite.

Yeah, that's still my favorite. America's ass. Captain Miami. Jesse's here. Great stuff. Because of the trauma, the lens blur happens, and I went back and watched, great stuff to watch, the scene where Ellie kills David

to sort of see if there was a similar sort of trauma blur there and there is. It's not exactly the same, but there's like a somewhat similar one. And Ellie is so disorienting. When Ellie kills David and emerges and then Joel

reaches out and she's just like she's like doesn't know where she is like what's going on but it's Joel there with a coat you're okay baby girl like it's okay like all this or stuff like that I've got you so here comes Jesse and because of the lens blur and Ellie's traumatized state

she thinks it's Joel which is a moment that happens in the game with different set of characters but like this idea of like wishful thinking that it's Joel come to rescue but it's through the haze, like the... But it's apocalyptic form and rifle out and boots. The boots, yeah.

Heavy boots, backpack, jacket. Man, yeah. I like to this show appearance for Jesse and the changes. Like, we'll talk about the kind of mood distinction in a second. But even just like, you know, in the game, when Jesse arrives in a sequence that I had a really hard time getting. through just because of my skill level. Like, it took me so long to get through this dilapidated residential, this area of houses and because I didn't want to hurt the dogs and there are so many dogs. It was just so hard to, because they smell you and they're pursuing you. You know, the fact that, like,

in that stretch of the game, we were going to talk about the elsewhere, but, like, Dina is, the arrow that hits Dina in this episode, hits Ellie, Dina. And so, like, Jesse taking Dina, because she's injured. It's a tweak and a distinction because the thing that has Dina back at the theater and the stretch of the game is that she's, like, incredibly sick for her pregnancy. And so when Jesse arrives, Dina's not there in the game. It's just Jesse and Ellie. And so this extra dimension of Ellie having to confront, like, I couldn't save Dina, but you could?

Yeah. Complex. Complex. I love how Bally described it as they thread D. other's masculinity, right? But, um, and each other's protector instinct. Um, I like, I also really like this moment where Ellie and Dina have to convince

Jesse that Ellie didn't get bit. Yeah. He was like, I saw. I was watching. She didn't get bit. It's fine. Like another version of telling the council. Yeah, everything that Ellie said about the smart one is true.

And then Marie is just like, hmm. Tina didn't see any of that. Um, they run from the WLF who cannot hit them despite the fact that there is shining bright light on them. And this is, I think, my last and favorite Reddit comment. Everyone has Stormtrooper ass aim in this episode except Jesse. Jesse should be said, comes through with a much more significant gun than anything that L.A. and Dina are rocking.

And I hate guns in general, and I'm anti-gun, but that looked very handy in this particular moment. Maybe if we talked about gun control and the mushroom apocalypse, my stance would change. But here we are. A Walk in the Park. this is a game sequence this is another location that they found like the theater that is like

stunningly evocative of the game setting Stanley Park and it's like completely beautiful in the way in which they staged it where like the nature is swallowing like street lights, street lamps and stuff

like that is incredible I love how Young Mazzino described as like this fairy tale environment with something like really, really deeply dark and scary. As stuff in the case in a fairy tale woods, there's usually something very scary lurking inside of it for you. The WLF will not follow them in there.

And I just got to say, always a bad sign when the bad guys won't follow you. Never good. There's a worst guy coming. That's what's happening. So, yeah. What do you want to say about Jesse's attitude here? Like, how he's like,

don't want to fucking, do I look like I want to fucking talk to you? And his idea, what we learn about the reason why he and Tommy came. Yeah. So I thought that Jesse's, like, withering judgment here was really keen and notable. And obviously, it's something that Ellie feels. I liked the way that Druckman described it as, like, you know, Ellie's starting to feel ashamed, basically, of, like, the situation that she has brought

all of these people now that she cares about. too, obviously, Dina and now having to confront like Jesse and Tommy came because Ellie initially is like, I can't believe they sent you after us to like fetch us and bring us back and Jesse's like, no, they didn't want us to come. We had to sneak out

to make sure you guys didn't die. Yeah. And now look where we are. And Ellie being like, we were handling it fine. He's like, O'Dill. That was a great moment. Right? Like a great moment because it's like it isn't fine. And of course part of it is like how could it be fine? It was never going to be fine.

Yeah. But to have to really stare that truth in the face for a second, like, it's only, you know, literally like, well, 45 days, you know, pre-shimmer. And then also a couple days when they first looked out from the overpass. It's like, this will be fine. How many could there possibly be? So the circumstances of their clarity has evolved rapidly. Yeah.

But like in the game, you know, when Jesse first appears and then they have this like to pick up truck escape and Ellie's like, what are you doing here? And remember, as you explained earlier, like, Tom, went first because he didn't want Ellie to go do this. He wants to spare Ellie from this danger and this pursuit. And then in the game, Ellie and Dina, who had decided already before their conversation with Maria, but that Maria is like, please bring him back, go. And they're kind of like haunting Tommy's footsteps and following this like trail.

And then Jesse comes. And when Ellie's like, what are you doing here, he says, do you think I'd let you do this on your own? Hey, Bal. Much more chipper. Hey, bud. Very different energy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, Jesse doesn't know yet about the pregnancy.

Like, this is just look at, look at the imminent peril around you right now. Like, how could you think that this was the thing to do? And, you know, we love, like, we've talked about this season, like, Jesse being, you know, established as a rule follower. And so, like, we know what it means for him to be here. Like, it tells us something about the extremity of this circumstance. What Tommy had to leave behind, which is different from Tommy leaving Maria behind in the game versus Tommy leaving his kid behind. Yes.

So different stakes here. Very much so. And like we have heard in this episode like Ellie and Dina say like it's reckless. The thing we're doing is reckless. So it kind of like evens it out. Like they know it's not like they can argue the point. But still, there's something different between trying to not arguing the point and really staring at the truth of it in the face that this I thought very succinctly conveyed. does.

We get whistling in the dark. PTSD. Very scary sound for game players. Torches also in the dark. Very scary. We hear drums. Drums in the deep is what I thought, of course.

And I was just really glad that we got the cold up, not the cold up. The sequence we got in a previous episode where we saw this different aspect of the seraphites before we see this version of the seraphites. But we're in the ferns. There's torches and trees and these scary people dressed in rags hoisting someone up by the neck. And this is just a very, this is just like clear lost territory for our guy, Stephen Williams.

Minor season one spoiler. I was thinking about our guy Charlie who gets hoisted up by the neck in the woods. in The Lost. In what episode? All the Best Cowboys of Daddy Issues? One of the best episodes of television. I love that episode. By who? Stephen Williams. So here we are. Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent episode of television. And so then we watch this horrifying ritual, right? So disturbing. Where we get this religious dialogue, the corruptest soul only lies, may she guide us, he's nested in sin, free him so he may know her love.

And then quite casually, now he is free. So this is, Maurice Din Wint is playing this character who doesn't get, I think it's like seraphite priest or something like that in the closing credits, doesn't get like a name. Isn't like a game character necessarily. But, Maurice,

I know from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, who plays Sergeant Luther Robinson, no relation to me, a very sexy soldier in Hedwig. And I was like, hey, hey, very different vibe here, very scary. But Morris is just, you know, a hardworking Canadian actor, which of the type that you should show up in The Last of Us again and again again. But I thought he did a really good job here with, like, scaring the shit out of me with what. Yeah. I think his like Like His calm Mallory Rubinette's demeanor

Yeah exactly just so And he pops the buttons off the shirt With a sigh of the four he eviscerated this person It was just Yeah Really really really disturbing stuff And a really cool Way

To get this This is classic gameplay where it's like You have to observe a thing Versus like Isaac torturing the serifite was like an unobserved act, but this is like a, we have caught them in progress of this ritual in the forest here. Yes.

Yeah. And the distinction between in the game, Ellie being alone in this sequence coming upon this ritual. And the terror because Ellie is alone, but then there's like a different kind of terror here when this is a shared experience of like, what have, what have we all wandered into together? Like what might happen now to the people I love, a threat that is, of course, literalized mere moments later when an arrow pierces Dina's leg. But there's also just, like, as we now, like, move forward in the story, like, Ellie's not the only one who has seen this thing.

Elie's not the only one who has the depth of this understanding about, and there is something that feels different about stumbling upon the aftermath, as horrific as that is, and watching the thing itself, that the casual celebration of this type of destruction. Watching this guy beg, watching this WLF. Exactly. And there's no pity and there's no empathy and in a story about those things. And there is like nothing but the certainty and the arrogance of that certainty that you know better than another person about the thing that they should do. Deeply disturbing. Jesse sweeps up Dina very dashingly is like, I'm going to go back to the theater, right? And Ellie is supposed to just like split up and meet back at the theater. there.

Yeah. Instead, first she hides in a little tree, later she will smuggle herself in a little crevice into the hospital. I'm just saying? It's a no for you. No crevices. One thing I know about you is you have poor crevice. Not even once.

No, not even to escape certain doom? Maybe into that tree. I do like a hollowed out redwood tree. It's true. Very, very arms on redwoods. But like, okay. This is where Neil said Ellie is an addict. This is like a relap.

Like an addict, she's neglecting the people who love her. Right? So like Jesse and Dina, not only is like, Dina's injured. Ellie's love is injured. And Ellie is not rushing off to make sure that Dina's okay. And not only that, but as far as Jesse and Dina know, Ellie got got by the Sarah. Like if she goes off on this like side quest to the hospital,

they're going to assume she's dead and be terribly worried about her. So that, but all of that fades in the background as soon as she sees, um, the hospital in the distance and is like, here we go. Time. Time to go.

Go time. Dog alert. Sweet Bonnie, just trying to do her job, gets gas lit by her owner. I hope this guy is properly punished for ignoring Bonnie. This is real like, real.

Is this real ghost and storm of swords? Like, always listen to your pets, people stuff to me? Bonnie knew. Yeah, Bonnie knew. And then we see Nora. Nora is there. Pretty much right where Dina said she would be. And Nora is, like, bathed in this golden light, and she's caretaking.

And she says, you're all set. Very Malibinous, calmly, quietly. It's a good new bit of yours. In last exactly one episode, you know my memory. Soothingly, calmly, quietly, as Mallory Rubin would. But this is a very different Nora than the one we saw hold Ellie down and a glimpse of like maybe what might have been for Nora if she never had to exist inside a mushroom apocalypse. Could she have just been a soothing, calm, quiet caretaker? perhaps perhaps

Tati Gabriel we see her bleaching a bunch of bloody rag She looks very worn down and tired Tati Gabriel who plays Nora Who I know best from the chilling adventures of Sabrina Which season is always in session He's incredible in that show A show that is a whole mixed bag

But she is very very good in that show And she's going to be the lead of one of Nottie Dogs upcoming games which looks fucking sick. I watched the trailer. It looks really cool. I will not be playing it, but... Maybe I will.

Unlike Last of Us, this new Noddy Dog game, it's Tudie Gabriel hunting Kumelanjani, essentially, in space, and both her character and Camel's character look exactly like them. Oh. Like they have done just, like,

completely faithful renditions of the actor, which I think is interesting. Last Jedi Pilled, yes. But am I Last Jedi Pilled? Or did you think about Kylo Ren when Ellie says, you remember me? Yeah, you remember me. I'm always thinking about Kylo Ren and The Last Jedi. Oh, you do.

Oh, man. And we get the very first, where's Abby? Yes. Where's Gomorro? Where is Wallace? Okay. We also just get like the faintest. Walls.

The way that Ellie emerges from the darkness into the light to confront a former firefly, you know, when you're lost in the darkness. Oh, nice. That was great. And also, like, how could we not think of the parallels of what Ellie is about to do and what is unfolding here happening in a hospital given St. Mary's as the setting, just the parallelism there is. What did you make of Nora's reaction here, right? She starts seemingly with empathy. I'm so sorry you saw it happened as if she wasn't the one holding Ellie down. No one should ever have to see something like that.

Sometimes at night I still hear his screams as a terrible thing the way he died. Yeah. Yeah. The little bitch got what he deserved. I don't know that play for you. So this is like very similar to the game, both this initial conversation and then the chase part is a little bit. So the two parts that are Ellie and Nora are very similar.

The chase is very different because... The chase is if you lose Nora, like... You have to start over again. I'm not going to tell you how many times it took me to do it. Just watching the gameplay, because you're just like, you round the corner and you see like her little foot disappear behind him and you're like jumping. It was... I was just like, where did she go?

She moves so fast. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Okay, go ahead. But also, like, the pursuit from the wolves is different because the spores, as we noted, or just like an existing thing in the game canon. So they just like put their gas masks on and follow. Right. So then there's like a sequence where you're confronting the infected and the wolves.

That part's all different. But most of the conversation between them with a couple distinctions are very similar, including that little bitch got what he deserved is like right from the game. I think in the show there was a amplification of the like false empathy, which felt to me. like mostly a tactic to try to like disarm Ellie before tossing bleach in her? Yeah. He starts on that she can escape.

But what I really liked about this is that for a minute it puts us back on that headspace where, okay, so like now in the context of watching the scene, you go back and you remember that Nora is the one pinning Ellie down. And like, you know, you have the reminders in our document which we'll talk about just like we heard from Nora in the first episode about the idea of the immunity. So, like, we have these insights from the past. But, like, when we talked about what happened in episode two, something that we did a lot was talk about how Abby stands out in such stark contrast to the other members of the Salt Lake

crew. And I think putting us back in a headspace for a second where we're like, right, only Abby thought it was okay to do this. And then it's like, actually, no. Like, man, he seemed pretty into the. Yeah, there's like, there's like Mel on the front of the spectrum, and then there's Owen, and then there's like probably Nora and then man. Yeah.

And so there's like variants, right? And I thought it was really interesting how Mazen talked on inside the episode and then on the official podcast about the moral certainty that Nora possesses here, that like what they did to Joel was right and that he deserved it. And like what it ever means for a character in any story to think that they get to make that decision about another person. So what I love most about this is that we are about to watch Ellie do something horrible. Appalling.

Yeah. The story makes us complicit because, I mean, I won't speak for other people. When Nora says that, I'm like, how dare you talk about Joel that way? That's our Joel. What's interesting. For a minute, like you're with Ellie before she loses you. To skip ahead to that moment. again, I'm watching a play-through.

It's not the same as playing the game. But I was watching, I was just like, oh, let me refresh myself on the, you know. So I looked up a video of just like Ellie and Nora in the hospital, just to sort of refresh myself on that moment in the game. And this person, like, Ellie loops for a really long time before picking up, you know, the tool to bash onto Nora. And like, but you have to do it. Right.

The person in the caption's like, it's not a glitch. I was just trying to figure out if there's anything I could do to not do that. Which is similar to how they talked about Joel's action at the end of the first game of the first season of just sort of like, try as you might. You can't get out of that hospital without killing everyone. You have to. So you're complicit in what Ellie does here. Ellie cheeses Nora through the hospital, Apex Predator style. I love when Nora's like, shoot her, what are we doing? Come on.

Did you have the sense that Nora was in the need-to-know circle about the spores, or did she go down there not knowing that they were down there? I can't say with certainty because of what we heard from Han or Han, but like I got the sense that Nora knew because, first of all, the way that she's talking about spores, there just seemed to be an awareness of what was in the air. but also the moment where after the elevator crashes down and she looks up and sees the B2 and it's like, I guess that could just be there for us, but it felt also like she was like, oh, oh, boy. There we go.

Oh, boy. I mean, I simply would not go into the hallway. I know. I'm like, I guess at this point just stay there and like, Ellie, come shoot me. Yeah. Seems better. Come fight with me. Okay.

Ellie enters the hallway and it is one of the sickest shit. This is incredible. You've ever seen in genre storytelling. We got a lot of emails about this, but please trust me by babies. I hardly had had aliens written out of my notes because in aliens there are people sort of like up on the wall being like, kill me! Okay. Can we hear that again? Okay.

Oh, man. Annihilation was the big one. Annihilation also in my notes. Yeah. This beautiful horror. This absolutely. Dementedly gorgeous spectacle. Malarabin walking through the spores, is this what ology season feels like for you?

Exactly. And if anyone, if it had had a Claritin liquid gel down there on B2, who knows, who knows what could have been different. Yeah, I really thought the visual rendering of just obviously like the sprawl of the wall art was astonishing and the omittance of the spores from that poor fucking doctor. then sweet Leon incredible. But just the spores in the air, stunning. Just absolutely. Very tail.

Very till. Like, very dust. Okay. Here's a summation of what Neil and Craig said about, like, the way in which this particular cordyceps situation, which again is a Craig Mason sort of, this idea that like they're puffing out spores into the air is this Craig Mason invention. But Neil Druckman describes it as symbiosis. The mushroom is fighting to stay alive.

is not that scary, but this has them capture you, put you here, put you to work. So this is an animal thing. We exploit each other. We exploit other animals to survive. And then Neil said, in the privilege of civilization, we're protected from how cruel

animals can be. And so that made me think of, again, of what we talked about in terms of the social contract. This is what the walls of Jackson protect you of. This idea that nature is red in tooth and claw, brutal, nasty short. Mushrooms will hold you captive against the wall and make you puff out spores

to what end? If they can't get up the vents, I don't know. But it's just so disturbing. It reminds me of there's this thing that happens in Independence Day, Spilers for Independence Day, where the alien takes Brett Spiner's scientist's character hostage and is like playing his vocal cords in order to make him speak certain things.

That's what I was thinking about when I was watching. Leanna and the doctor sort of puff. stuff out of here. It's great call back, deeply disturbing. This is so upsetting, but also so cool. Very good. It did make me think again of that just opening to the entire series because, like, you know, this is a different version of this thing, but we, like, we're trained to understand

what the infection really is from the beginning. The fungus needs food to live, so it begins to devour its host from within, replacing the ins flesh with its own. But it doesn't let its victim die. die. No. It keeps its puppet alive. Puppet alive? I mean, that's what we see here. Oh, my God. That just made me so ill. Okay. So Craig is like these people have been alive for years, decades. Very tough fate. Okay. I'm so upset by all of this. It's so beautiful. Shout out to Barry Gower and the prosthetics team who have just been doing an incredible job on the show from the start, but this is like a

masterpiece. And Barry Gower, a name I know well from Game of Thrones, so just like absolutely crushing it on Sunday night genre television for a long time. Anyway, there's an electrical room, Ellie turns on the red light,

just like Roxanne, just like the subway car sequence, just like Darth Vader and Rogue One. And as Craig points out, and we already mentioned this, Bella's eyes turn black in the red light and look in human. Yes. Yeah. Nor is like, you killed us both.

Ellie's like, you sure about that? You sure about that? Did I? That was, I think, the single most disturbing thing to me of all. The quiet, composed. Miley Rubinette. Yeah, exactly. Just the relish of did I? Did I? Like, knowing you have. And Ellie knows what is happening. is that is more chilling to you than the I know that we get later all of it just everything in the sequence i mean the like the state of compose that we see Ellie in is i think much more upsetting than Ellie running down the hallway shrieking Nora I'm going to kill you yeah like this is actually a deeper disconnect from Ellie's humanity I really and kudos to everybody involved with the decision to have the pipe curve like a golf club. Oh, my God. Because what is Ellie doing? She is doing, she is on this quest because of what Abby did to Joel, which is not just killing him, but torturing him.

And that is what Ellie is doing here. The curb pipe. The curb pipe. And as they pointed out, in the game, you don't have to watch this happen. But here we watch her go right for the leg, which is right where. Abby hit Joel. So yeah, like, they're like, did you notice the parallels? We could think you're her, the immune girl, you're real. And as you tease, like, Nora in the first episode, when the fireflies are gathered around the graves in the very beginning of the season,

Nora says, I heard some rumors. It was some kid he took that was supposedly, Mel's like, that's not true. Something not true because it is impossible. And Nora's like, no, probably not. And even if it were, wouldn't fucking matter anyway. And Mel says, not without, essentially, not without Abby's. dad who's dead. And then Owen cuts in and he says, if you're going to worry, worry about us. And this is the formation of the SLC crew as an us. And this is the us that is top of mind for Nora as Ellie comes at her curve

piper no and says, where's Abby? Swear to me like Batman like very scared. Vanessa. And Nora says, no. Nora's dying. And she's just like, no. Because that's her us, right?

That's her found family. And this idea of seeing Ellie after only hearing rumors of Ellie, the way that Craig Mason described it is it's sort of like if you were raised a Christian, you see an angel or you see God. This thing you had faith in is real. Not that it matters at all. And then, yeah, we get the, don't you know what he did? Description. A few of our listeners said, hey, well, actually, Nora, he didn't kill everyone in the hospital. he let the nurses live.

Nurse Dana in the pit would be very pleased with that. I can't wait for you to get all my nurse Dana references. I can't wait either. I can't wait either. This was great. I thought the you're her part, like, already it is clear in the sequence that Nora

believes that what they did to Joel was justified, but there's like extra validation and vindication here because it is like a reminder of what Joel took away, right? And so even when confronted with the fact that her last moments are going to be full of torment and pain and anguish, she still refuses to give Abby up because of the us that you're citing and because she believes genuinely that what they did was right. And what Joel did was wrong. And that rigidity in that stance is such a dangerous thing, as is, of course, the rigidity of Ellie's quest here. the place that we see Ellie descend to, fitting that this takes place in a basement, right?

Because that's what this is. It is a descent to hell and into a different version of and detachment from humanity and morality. Like, we love Ellie, just as we love Joel. Yeah. This is such a horrible thing to see a character we are invested in and care so deeply about prove capable of doing this to another person.

And it's not hard. it's not a hard thing for Ellie to do, right? Again, you mentioned the word relish. There just seems to be like a, she's dead-eyed to a certain degree in a way that Joel was when he sort of goes into his fugue state and shoots his way through the hospital. But there's also like a gleam there as well. And I don't know if you can be dead-eyed and I'm a gleam in your eye at the same time. But if you can, that's what Bella Ramsey achieved inside of this sequence, bathed in red light.

It's incredible. It's really good. It was so upsetting, but incredibly good. I thought, too, before the I know, the I don't care was so important because, like, we know that that's not true, actually. That is a lie Ellie is telling herself. And when you lie to yourself, it's worse than lying to other people because that's when you really lose your way. Like, we've talked a lot about this over many pods, so I won't rehash it all here. but like something we talked about a lot at the end of season one

in the beginning of season two, when we found Joel and Ellie in this place of like this, this rupture between them was like the fact that Ellie needed to believe that she had a purpose and the sense, and now we have the I know. So again, we know there is actually clarity of what Joel did, like,

that Ellie would not have wanted him to do that. And then the question becomes, could there ever be a way to understand it? And like, I think that reminding everybody where we found Ellie the morning after New Year's in that conversation with Jesse when she basically was like, I know my shit with Joel is complicated, right? I know that. From the outside, it probably looks really bad. It has been really bad. But I'm still me.

He's still Joel. And we, nothing's ever going to change that. That that at the end of the day. Life is full of complexities and competing truths, but that's the truth for Ellie, that, right? Nothing's ever going to change that. You took Joel away from me. Nothing is ever going to change that.

I love that you used a throne's quote earlier, and I will drop one here and say, an Ellie alone in the world is a dangerous thing, right? Targaryen alone in the world. And Ellie's, Ellie all alone, which is her number one fear. And like, learning in season one that being alone is Ellie's number one fear

has one cast to it because you're like, of course, she's a young woman, has experienced so much loss, lost her mother, lost Riley, lost all this stuff. Being alone is so terrifying to her.

But it takes on a different cast here where it's just sort of like, when I'm alone, I do this. Yeah. I crouched down and get on Nora's level coldly calmly wears Abby and it's just upsetting. Okay.

Then we cut to. Ellie wakes up. Cool breeze. Birdsong golden, gentle golden light. And as Craig Mason says on the podcast, just a few years earlier, Ellie was just a little girl. And then here is our reward for making it through the hospital. Here's Pedro Pascal. here's Joel. Hey, kiddo. Smile from him. Serene, happy smile from her. Hi. And she's in her bedroom, not living out the garage. She's in, she's in that room that we saw her look at in early episode. Oh, Mallory. I'm so worried for you for next week. Okay. I don't know how I'm going to survive it. And then Pearl Jam plays.

Oh, my God. Dude, this like shook me to my core. Just, I like seeing, I mean, first of all, just, I mean, first of all, just. as soon as she wakes up and you hear the door, you know, but then, like, you get the back shoulder and the little sliver of head. It's like when we finally see Joel. I was just like a wreck. And, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about was, like, in that conversation earlier in the episode out on the street between Dina and Ellie, one of the things that Dina says when she's making this comparison is like, he didn't deserve that. And then Ellie does a version of that to another person. And like she has just had the person who is now closest to her in the world basically say nothing forgives that. Kind of to invoke Abby, like there are just some things she don't do,

even though Abby did it. And for that to be the thing that sparks this trip back into the past, for Ellie to have taken a step completely beyond herself. Yeah, this is what I think what I said when Rob and I were talking about this in the spoiler second. as like crossing the Rubicon for Ellie. I'm just sort of like, this is just a brand new territory for her. And, uh, um, an upsetting place to be. Okay. So the Pearl Jam song that plays present tense, 1996.

So not violating any, uh, bending anything about the time space continuity. Um, the lyrics we get, do you see the way the tree bends doesn't inspire leading out to catch the suns ray, a lesson to be applied? Are you getting something out of all this encompassing trip? We got this really powerful email from Kevin. I won't read the whole thing, but Kevin was talking about why that song is so important to him. And he says, listening to it, he says, imagine my surprise when right as it builds to the chorus, the song cuts out and the credits continue. One verse questioning the state of your journey through this world and taking lessons from your experience, then silence and the literal things left unsaid about your way forward and where these lessons have taken you.

It was the perfect encapsulation of Ellie's trip so far and also where Shima's head to come out on the other side. Also, of course, present tense, future days, Pearl Jam songs, you know, bookends and duos and pairs and anything like that. Good stuff. Anything else you want to say before we get, before we get to our real spoiler section, I want to just do a spoiler warning based on the trailer. So this is like an interstitial spoiler section just for people who watch the trailer for next time on. Are you ready? Are you still here? Did you dry off your hair? Did you drive off your and press pause? Did you stop the treadmill and press pause?

What are you doing? Are you still here? Okay. So I think the trailer for next week makes it pretty clear that this is like, this is a Joel episode of The Last of Us. And those of us who know

that there are flashbacks in the game have been wondering, when are we doing the flashbacks, how are we parceling out our Petro Fiscal in this season, blah, blah. And so to this question of like this idea of the YAA accusations or the Ellie who is too bubbly and chipper and bright on this road trip, I guess I would say I think what the game does is the mechanic of the game uses is to use the flashback to give us a contrast between sort of like Terminator Ellie and Seattle with, you know, earlier with Joel, a happier Ellie in the past. And so this reminder of what is lost, in a sense lost, is present in mind because we get flashbacks sort of sprinkled throughout. In the show, since they decide to hold the flashbacks until this episode, I think that contrast is then brought forward by this masking Ellie with Dina versus what we get in the hospital.

And so I think that, I think it is important for us to remember lighter, happier Ellie. so that when we see her flip, we're like, ah, you know, like what is lost in inside of that. So that's sort of my theory for why, another theory for why I think her demeanor has been a bit different throughout this. I like it. Anything you want to say about the trailer at all that you can say in the spoiler for a second? Just completely overwhelmed. Let's go to our for-reels-y-reels. We freaking mean it.

spoiler section. Are they gone? Did you go? Did you go? You've been warned. Okay. Mallory, not only do we know that it's like a flashback episode, but we get like ripped from the sequence that you texted me like made you a wreck, which is astronaut

Ellie. How did it feel to see Pedro Pescal in that like space capsule? I just, I mean, you know. haven't seen the next episode, so, you know, I don't know, like, what level of faithful adaptation this will be, like, will it be each of the memories from the game, just sequentially? Will we expand beyond them? Will we change? We have other things from the past that we still have not learned, like, what the fuck happened with Eugene? So my assumption now, again, I have not seen this episode, I don't know, my assumption is, like, that will also probably be answered in this next episode. You don't think the finale is just a Eugene episode. I really hope not. Eugene, you're not welcome in my finale aquarium. Sorry.

I sort of like, I won't waste time talking about something that I haven't seen yet. So we'll see how I feel about this when we get there. I'm kind of like predicting a competing reaction where I have like kind of no doubt this episode will be extraordinary and that I will love it. And I do still wonder structurally if this is the. right choice to compress it, compact it all into one episode. So I'll reserve judgment until I see it. But for me in the game, I would just say, like, having these sprinkled throughout was necessary. So I'll be really interested, like, to see how that feels as an adaptive contrast. And I will remain open-minded about it, certainly. And then I look forward to talking about,

to talk about that next week. I think I'm worried about this is just like, as I'm worried, people are going to be like, see the show needs Petra Pascaletadet or whatever. So that's kind of my theory for honestly why they decided not to sprinkle them. Because then you're almost like, would it feel in the show like, we're like, we can't do an episode without Pedro.

And to me it's not about we can't do an episode without Pedro, but I will say that like in the game, what having the flashbacks sprinkled and distributed more evenly, like does is it's this, simultaneous, like the, all of the stuff we already talked about, the gut punch of losing Joel is completely intact, but like, you get these life rafts, you know, of like a return. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know.

I'm so curious to see. I think in general, like, obviously, you know, varies. But, like, I think in general, the adaptive changes that they make tend to be very smart for this version of a story. So, again, I'm confident it will be really great. But curious to see how it feels, yeah. one thing I love about both Craig

reason and Neil Druffman but chiefly Craig is like how sometimes how little chill he has about certain things and so on the official pod all the like Rat King teasers

that he put in the podcast I loved it if you're listening to this and you have not played the game what game players know is that we're on B2 in this level on B3 one level below

is this horrible humunculus of a like conjoined a horrible final boss sort of creature called the Rat King that is like a cordyceps of like a stalker on a clicker with a bunch of rats that you have that is very hard to kill and very scary and I should say I want to say really quickly on the playthru that I watched it was a play through where like I never had to watch myself die but I was rewatching someone else play the Rat King sequence with Abby and I just watched her die That broken neck torn and a half.

I died so many times before I beat the Racking so many times. Yeah, this was a great. The teasers for the Racking were really great and really fun. I'm excited. Do you like the idea in three years when we get season three, do you like the idea of like if this is happening simultaneously if Abby is just like downstairs while Nora and like? I don't know about simultaneously,

especially I think because I have some questions now about how Ellie is getting out of here without, without like bringing spores into the wider world. That would be a responsibility. I'm not sure I want Ellie to carry. But, you know, Abby,

one of the things that we learn in the Abby stretch is that before Nora has this encounter with Ellie, she's with Abby. And Abby has also snuck in and had this like final, they don't know it's final, but like final conversation with Nora.

So the idea that this is all happening in a very tight time. Do you think Bonnie was also like, hey man, Abby's here? I mean, Abby sneaks in differently in terms of like, I'm supposed to be here. I'm just getting supplies for Isaac. Don't worry about it.

Then a few people are like, are you? Are you? Okay. Did Bonnie make you think of Alice? Yeah, of course. I mean, I guess my new theory, actually, for why it seems like, Shimmer is going to live is to make what happens with Alice, like, really stand on its own as a horrible thing.

Jesse using the map to find Dina and Ellie previewing how Abby will find the theater at the end of the season next season. Just don't leave that map around is what I would say. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, these are the people who are just leaving the lights on with the windows. It's just like there are people in there. How much guiltier will Ellie feel that both Tommy and Jesse came because of her? Yeah. I mean, obviously, like, I think that.

Ellie is going to carry what happens to Jesse in a pretty heavy way. You know, and Jesse, just like, I think, honestly, I think that's part of why we got Dina saying to Ellie, like, if I die, it's because, like, I chose to be here, you know? Jesse didn't say that. No, but, like, he is an adult who made his own decision and decided to come here and, like, you can't control what other people do, but also they followed you there. So that's tough. It's tough. You know, the Tommy thing is so much more tangled because obviously we have the differences that we've already outlined of, like, Tommy having to be. a kid now, but then there's just also like, you know, when Tommy goes later to the farm and, like,

makes the pitch and is so entwined with Ellie's inability to, like, move on. I'm curious to see, like, what that journey is like in the show, given that Tommy's journey to this point has been really distinct. I think I'll be curious about, like, how much the injury lays into all of that. Okay. Last on at least, I guess I'll ask. We got an email about this, but I'll just summarize and say, like, given that next week is a flashback, a lot of flashbacks, who's to say? Then we get finale, presumably the aquarium, O&ML. Where do you think this season is ending?

My assumption is the season ends with Abby showing up to confront. Does Jesse make it out of the season, or does Jesse die in the finale? Jesse dies in the finale. Right? I feel like that. Does Tommy get shot in the finale? Yeah. Yes.

I think that sequence plays out. Door opens. Jesse walks out. I mean, I guess the huge difference, of course, would be like Leves' presence because Leves not a character in the show, but we don't have the full clarity

that Leve is there until later until we come back to that scene from the Abbey perspective. So, yeah, my assumption is that that will be where the season concludes. I'm really fascinated to revisit our earlier conversations. We won't do this now. but like at the end of the season, if that is in fact where we end,

to then look back in the earlier choices about, like, if we are broadly following the same structure of the game and it's like season two is Ellie and season three is Abby, does that change anything about how we feel about some of the adaptive changes to like move on? Yeah, Abby's clarity or not. But that'll be an interesting thing to kind of circle back to if that is where the season ends. So yeah, that's my assumption is that'll be the final thing.

Something to look forward to. Chapter of Miami. getting killed. I'm not excited about that. Young Wazzino has been great. He's very fantastic in this episode. Okay. We did it. I love this show. I'm really sad

that we only have two left. Me too. Like despondent. I know. I don't want to attend. Also sad that Andor's ending. It's just a tough time to be watching incredible television with you, Mallory Rubin, calm, cool, quiet, collected Mallory Rubin. We'll be back on the last thing. Sorry.

Just very quickly. In the spoiler section, we have to circle back to the forever. I mean... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like... Dina says forever. Yeah. Like she's seen the San Lott at movie night. Like, you know...

And this is obviously not going to be how she feels about it. So having her actually say it. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, just like having her say it. And then, you know, it's not just that she doesn't feel the same about the right... Like, is this the right way for us to live?

Shouldn't we choose to be happy? It's like actually confronting something. Yeah, caused a change. Painful. Very painful. All right. We will be back later this week with Andor. Thank you, too.

Stephen Allman. John Richter. Carlis Chiraboga. Arjuna Rangopal and Jomea Dineran. Our little shroomy network of the best people. Our favorite triangulators. Oh. Love you.

Myrubin. I love you, my darling. I remember the fungus loves two. We'll see you soon. Bye! All. Pay off your home, travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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