‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 5 Recap: Once Upon a Time

‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 5

Early in this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” Dina tells Ellie a story about what her life was like when she was 8 years old, surviving the apocalypse in a cabin in a sparsely populated forest north of Santa Fe, N.M. One day back then, Dina grabbed a gun and went for a walk, without permission. When she returned, she found a raider in their house and her mother and sister dead.

She killed the intruder — the first person she ever killed. Ever since, Dina has wondered what would have happened if she had been home when the raider arrived. Would she have been forced to watch him beat her family to death?

There are different conclusions we could draw from all this. On the one hand, Dina suggests her experience helps her empathize with Ellie’s decision to hunt down Abby. Dina knows that if she had not killed her family’s murderer right away, she would have tracked him down until the job was done.

But was her in-the-moment act of vengeance “justice,” exactly? Or just survival? Dina says that even if her family had hurt the raider’s family first, they would not have deserved to die the way they did; and she says that Joel did not deserve to be brutally slain, no matter what he did. Dina never proposes this directly — and would maybe disagree strongly with I am about to say — but the logical endpoint of her argument is that no one “deserves” to be killed. The act of taking a life should be a necessity, not a notion.

Dina concludes her monologue by giving Ellie a choice, to press on or head home. Interestingly, Dina insists that there is “no right answer,” which is subtly different from “no wrong answer.” (It’s as if she were saying that all of their choices are equally cursed.) Anyway, Ellie sees only one option, so the mission continues.

This week’s episode is ripe with bad vibes. For one thing, this is now the third week in a row that we have spent in Seattle, and after the variety of locations and stories that helped distinguish “The Last of Us” Season 1 from other end-times TV dramas, a certain exhausting repetitiveness is starting to set in here. The story feels a bit stuck.