The Last of Us (TV Program)

Joel and Ellie have been dealing more with humanity recently, but this week the undead reclaimed center stage.Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Endure and Survive’Oh yeah, that’s right … “The Last of Us” is a zombie show.For the past two episodes Joel and Ellie have been dealing with mere humanity, seeing the best and worst possible paths for their kind from Bill and Frank’s romantic optimism to Kathleen’s “kill ‘em all” bitterness.But in this week’s episode, which premiered Friday night on HBO Max — it will also air on HBO on Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl — the undead reclaimed center stage. After Kathleen’s army rolls up on Joel, Ellie and their new allies Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), the ground suddenly opens up and a rampaging horde of the infected swarms out, slaughtering scores of rifle-toting goons. It’s an abrupt reminder of a world-ending threat that has never stopped lurking for the past 20 years. Lately, the survivors of the cordyceps plague have been pointing their guns in the wrong direction.George Romero’s told this same kind of cautionary tale in 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” and then again in the sequels. Romero’s human characters set up barricades against the teeming masses of mindless monsters; but then over and over they would get distracted by their own bickering, let their guards down and then either get shot by outsiders or eaten by ghouls. The TV series “The Walking Dead” ran for 11 seasons with a similar idea. Though the fortresses on that show kept getting bigger — and the people inside them better organized — year after year, some catastrophic disaster would befall the living and the undead would capitalize.What distinguishes “The Last of Us” from its predecessors is that the series isn’t about the downfall of human society per se. That’s just an imposing, ominous backdrop to what so far has been a more intimate story. The action this week in Kansas City could have filled an entire Romero film or two or three “Walking Dead” seasons. But here these troubles are just something else our heroes have to move past, while hoping to suffer as few lingering injuries as possible.All of this though does not keep the episode’s director, Jeremy Webb, and the screenwriter Craig Mazin, one of the series’s creators, from leaning into the mayhem in Kansas City. The result was some of the most straight-up thrilling sequences in this show since Episode 2.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.The episode begins with a flashback to about 10 days ago, when Kathleen’s resistance movement finally overcame the FEDRA troops and dragged their corpses through the street in riotous celebration. On that night, she begins her tireless search for Henry, a former FEDRA informant who she blames for the death of her sainted brother, Michael. She starts by rounding up all the collaborators she can find and saying — or more accurately lying — that if they cooperate they will get the chance to be tried in her court. (“You’re all guilty, so that’s how that’ll go.”) That is how she learns that Henry and his 8-year-old brother Sam are under the protection of Dr. Edelstein — the man Kathleen will later interrogate and then shoot, as we saw in last week’s episode.But don’t feel too bad for FEDRA, or for their network of Quarantine Zone snitches. As Henry later explains to Joel, the authorities were so abusive to the city’s residents — “Raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years,” he says — that the town became known far and wide as “Killer City.”Henry and Sam are, as suspected, the people who sneaked up on Joel and Ellie in their high-rise office building hideaway at the end of last week’s episode. While leaving Edelstein’s secret bunker, Henry saw Joel and Ellie escape an ambush. Sensing these newcomers could aid their own escape, Henry and Sam followed them in order to propose a plan. The four of them are to travel together through the city’s maintenance tunnels — which Henry insists are free of the infected, thanks to a secret FEDRA project that even Kathleen does not know about — and then sneak out through a residential neighborhood near an embankment, next to the bridge out of town.Keivonn Woodard in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOOn the way though, Henry chooses to come clean to Joel, to let him know that Kathleen has reason to be furious. Henry did point FEDRA to Michael, because he needed medication for Sam, who in addition to being deaf, once had leukemia. (“I don’t work with rats,” Joel reflexively says at one point. “Today you do,” Henry replies.)So that’s what leads to our escapees facing dozens of militia rifles. They get through the tunnels OK, but then a sniper pins them down after they surface and by the time Joel disarms the gunman, Kathleen’s soldiers have bulldozed their way in. Henry offers to sacrifice himself to allow Sam and Ellie to escape, but Kathleen isn’t moved by any sob story about a sick brother. “Kids die, Henry,” she says. As she pulls out her gun, she adds, “It ends the way it ends.”Cue the monsters. Before Kathleen can shoot, one of her huge armored vehicles falls through a weak spot in the earth, loosing masses of the extra-ferocious underground creatures that Henry calls “clickers” — including one Big Boss mega-zombie who looks absolutely horrifying and also kind of awesome. (The video game includes a whole hierarchy of the infected.) Thanks to Joel covering his allies from the sniper’s nest as they scramble toward the embankment, all four of them are able to get away in the melee. But they are not unscathed: Sam gets infected. Though Ellie tries to save him by smearing some of her blood into his wound, he goes feral anyway, and Henry has to shoot him. With no one to stay alive for, he then shoots himself.That’s a truly heartbreaking ending, because these brothers would have made great traveling companions. Ellie and Sam had become fast friends, bonding over her collection of puns and a comic book series they both love. (Quoting the comic, Ellie says, “To the edge of the universe, endure and survive!”) Right before the end, they share what frightens them both, with Ellie admitting, “I’m scared of ending up alone.” Then Sam — poor, doomed Sam — asks the question that everyone should have probably been asking while they were trying to kill each other.“If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?”Side QuestsKathleen doesn’t stick around long enough to become the formidable tragic villain she seemed meant to be; but Mazin does give Melanie Lynskey two terrific scenes that add dimension to the character. The first is the collaborator roundup on the night FEDRA fell, where she berates the assembly for selling out their neighbors for “apples” and then demands they tell her what they know. (“You’re informers! Inform!”) In the second, she walks around an old bedroom and talks about growing up with her beloved brother, a good man who wanted her to forgive Henry. The point of these two scenes is to show that Kathleen had defensible reasons to destroy FEDRA and everyone who helped them — but she knows she took things further than Michael would have.Sam and Henry hide out for 10 days in Edelstein’s hidden loft, with a small supply of canned food and a big bag of crayons. Later, they take Joel and Ellie to the remnants of an underground settlement, which has books and games. As always, the great dream in nearly all post-apocalyptic stories — and heck, maybe in life itself — is to find a secure space with some food and something to do, and then to stay put for as long as possible. More

This week, Joel and Ellie’s bond deepened during an unplanned stay in Kansas City. They should have tried Des Moines instead.‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Please Hold My Hand’For a long stretch of this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” it looks as if not much is going to happen, and that maybe this week we’ll just have “The Chill Road-Trip Adventures of Joel and Ellie.” They listen to some Hank Williams. Joel teaches Ellie how to siphon gas from parked cars — though when he fumblingly tries to explain the physics behind it, she flashes a wicked smile and says, “You don’t know.”They eat some 20-year-old Chef Boyardee ravioli. (It’s good!) Ellie finds a book of puns at a gas station and torments Joel with jokes like: “What did the mermaid wear to her math class? An algae bra.”The fun can’t last, alas. About a third of the way through the episode, our heroes hit a blocked road in Kansas City, and while trying to find an alternative route through downtown, they are ambushed and then ultimately caught in the crossfire of a power struggle involving a local militia. In the initial melee, they crash Bill’s truck. All things considered, they probably should have driven through Des Moines.By the time the closing credits roll, there is a lot we still don’t know about the predicament in which Joel and Ellie find themselves. We know that the K.C. militia — which has “WE THE PEOPLE” emblazoned on its armored vehicles — is headquartered in a Quarantine Zone that FEDRA abandoned. We know its leader, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), is so ice-cold that she executes her old family doctor. We know Kathleen is on a rampage against FEDRA “collaborators,” and that as part of that mission she is looking for someone named Henry, who is with someone named Sam: a child, apparently, who draws pictures of himself and Henry as superheroes.We know that Henry and Sam were recently hiding out in a building where the concrete foundation is breaking up and rippling, perhaps because of some cordyceps/infected activity going on underground. And we know that next week, Joel and Ellie are going to have do deal with the two guns pointing at the episode’s cliffhanger ending.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Assuming our heroes don’t immediately die next week — a pretty safe assumption with five episodes remaining — what mattered most to the story this episode was that the trouble in Kansas City deepened Joel and Ellie’s bond, forcing them to be more honest with each other.After shooting his way out of immediate danger, Joel is surprised by an attacker who nearly chokes him to death. No longer able to keep her gun a secret, Ellie shoots and neutralizes the attacker but doesn’t kill him. That’s one cat out of the bag.When the attacker hands over his knife and pleads for his life — his name is Brian, he tells Ellie in a clear attempt to humanize himself, adding: “We can trade with you! We can be friends!” — Ellie hesitates to finish him off. But Joel has been at this survival game for a while. He snatches Elle’s gun and tells her to hide behind a wall so she won’t see how vicious he has to be with that knife.The moment forces more honesty to the surface. Joel, regretting the burden he assumes Ellie must feel for having shot someone for the first time, learns that she is not wide-eyed innocent he believed. She has, in fact, hurt somebody before. As for himself, he must be honest that he obviously needs her — and her willingness to pull a trigger — more than he wanted to.Unfortunately for both of them, that guy Brian? His dying offer to take them to his mom was probably a pretty good indication that his mother was Kathleen. (Her restrained reaction to the sight of his dead body more or less confirms it.) No way that doesn’t come back to haunt them.By the end of the episode, as they climb 33 flights of stairs in a skyscraper to find someplace safe to sleep, Joel and Ellie are exhibiting an increased level of trust that they can protect each other. So naturally, this is when they get awakened in the middle of the night by two new characters wielding guns, one who appears to be in his 20s, the other just a boy. They’re likely Henry and Sam, given that the younger one wears a painted-on superhero mask.This kind of existential threat was always there, even as Joel and Ellie were just rambling down mostly empty roads, cracking jokes. Even then they couldn’t stop to rest without wondering who or what might be lurking, ready to terminate their adventure.This is what makes Ellie — and Bella Ramsey’s multilayered performance — so pivotal to this story. She isn’t living in fear; she is embracing whatever life she has left. She is surprisingly aware of much of the pre-apocalyptic world — enough so that she can make knowing jokes about the gay porn magazine she finds in the back of Bill’s truck. But she over-romanticizes the past too. When Joel talks about how in the old days the gasoline supplies hadn’t broken down and people could drive for more than an hour on a full tank, Ellie eagerly asks, “Where did you go?” The answer: “Pretty much nowhere.”At one point, Joel says that even though he doesn’t believe this fallen world will ever rise again, he keeps surviving “for family” — while also pointedly telling Ellie that she is just “cargo.” But his attitude is clearly changing; it’s awfully hard not to find Ellie charming. Partnering with her is becoming more than just an obligation.Of course, the Kathleens of the world have family too. Things are likely to get more complicated.Side QuestsA great example of how delightfully puckish Ellie can be: While bedding down for the night in the woods, her tone turns all grave and urgent as she says to Joel, “Can I ask you a serious question?” When he says she can, she asks, “Why did the scarecrow get an award?” (Joel knows that one: “Because he was out standing in his field.”)Once again there is no pre-credits scene in this episode; and for the first time, there is no flashback. The closest we get to returning to the past is when Joel tells Ellie about Tommy, explaining that his brother — a “joiner” by nature — has spent the plague years connecting with anyone who claims to have a plan to fix the world, while sometimes dragging Joel along. Later in the episode, after Joel starts letting his guard down around Ellie, he admits that during his vagabond days with Tommy and Tess, he sometimes set up the kind of ambush traps that they met with in Kansas City.I love the contrast between Bill’s well-preserved old truck and all the rusting junk that Joel and Ellie drive past. Two weeks ago, I praised the work of the show’s digital effects artists for filling the backgrounds of shots with astonishing-looking ruins. (Example this week: a collapsed train trestle on the horizon, with railroad cars dangling.) But I must also tip a cap to the production designer John Paino, whose team built the crumbling physical spaces that Joel and Ellie move through — from the trashed gas stations to the wreckage-strewn Kansas City streets.When Ellie takes a whiff of Joel’s percolated campfire coffee, she recoils, then later asks, “That’s seriously what those Starbucks in the Q.Z. used to sell?” Good to know that even after society collapsed, Starbucks stuck around. More

This week’s episode, starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, stepped away from the main action, offering a melancholy vignette about companionship.‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Long Long Time’In last week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” Ellie waded through a flooded hotel lobby, delighting in the decaying grandeur of a social institution she had only read about. This week, she spends a few hours in an elegant old house, filled with vintage furniture and a piano. She has no context — not even from books — for what a home like this really means.Joel, on the other hand, has dined with and traded with the house’s former residents, Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), many times over the previous 15 years. Joel keeps his feelings to himself, but it is easy to imagine that for him this home was a portal to a safer, cozier past, like the one he lived back in Austin.How must Joel feel then, when he finds Bill and Frank dead?This is the first episode in this season to skip the pre-credits scene, which in the previous two weeks had been devoted to a brief flashback. Instead, most of the 70-minute running time is spent on one long journey into the past, stretching from the frantic early days of the cordyceps plague, in 2003, to one quietly bittersweet day in 2023, not long before Joel and Ellie knock on Bill and Frank’s door. Over that 20-year stretch, we see the story of a love affair — doubling as a short, sweet lesson about what survival really means.As someone whose favorite post-apocalyptic movie is George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” — with all of its long scenes of survivors constructing a combination fortress-oasis in a shopping mall — I could have lingered forever in this episode’s 2003 segment. After the government has evacuated his neighbors, Bill, a doomsday prepper in a quaint Massachusetts town, raids the Home Depot, the gas plant and the wine store, and he eventually builds a fence around his neighborhood and its nearby shops, fortifying it with security cameras, electric fencing and booby traps.With his gardening and hunting skills, Bill has all he needs to survive. But he lacks a larger sense of purpose. Four years later, when a stranger, Frank, falls into one of his pits, Bill softens. Frank, a refugee from Baltimore’s failed Quarantine Zone, persuades his captor to give him some food and let him take a shower. With someone — at last — to show off his skills to, Bill delivers an elegant gourmet rabbit lunch, paired with a fine Beaujolais.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Later, the two men take turns playing the piano and singing the Gary White love song “Long, Long Time,” made famous by Linda Ronstadt. The lyrics prove prescient. After Frank coaxes Bill to admit that he has never acted on his attraction to men, they slip into bed together, with Frank promising, “I’m going to start with the simple things.”What follows are two more poignant vignettes, from 2010 and 2013, showing the comfortable life these two lovers settle into. Bill can’t entirely shake his fear of losing everything to the authorities or to the infected — a paranoia more intense now that he has someone to protect. But Frank nevertheless urges him to make their immediate surroundings more attractive and permanent. Then he invites over some friends he met on the radio: Joel and Tess. All this domesticity leads Bill to worry that taking pleasure in basic human interactions will be a distraction from his mission to survive, leading to near-fatal mistakes — like the night when raiders try to infiltrate the compound, and Bill gets shot.But Bill survives that attack, and instead it’s Frank who falls apart, succumbing to some unspecified illness in 2023. In their house, now filled with Frank’s paintings instead of Bill’s mother’s cross-stitch samplers, the men agree to have “one more good day” together before drinking wine laced with a lethal dose of painkillers.Some time later — perhaps weeks — Joel and Ellie find the couple’s dirty dishes, along with a note urging them not to open the bedroom door and see the corpses. (We never see them either. The episode closes with a shot drifting backward into their room’s open window; but it never shows the bed.)It’s frankly remarkable that what is ostensibly an action-horror series could make time — in its third episode, no less — for an alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking short film about companionship. It’s as though the opening montage from the movie “Up” were extended to about 45 minutes and then dropped into the middle of “World War Z.”It’s even more remarkable that the writer Craig Mazin and the director Neil Druckmann have made this little interlude not only relevant to the plot but also potentially essential to what this series is going to be about. On a surface level, what happens here is that Joel and Ellie get access to Bill and Frank’s stash, including a truck, a lot of guns and other essential supplies. But on a deeper level, this episode is about how even amid a world-ending crisis, the taste of a fresh strawberry can make a person want to stick around for another day.“Paying attention to things — it’s how we show love,” Frank says; and Mazin and Druckmann back that up with their own small details, like how when Frank first arrives, Bill’s dining room furniture is covered in dust. But by their last day, Bill is voluntarily watering the flowers. Again: It’s the simple things.The episode is also about Joel’s growing dependency on Ellie — he is starting to need her as much as she needs him. Bill’s goodbye note says to Joel that “men like you and me” are meant to take care of people, and that so long as there is “one person worth saving,” they can live a fulfilling life. In the note, Bill tells Joel to look after Tess — a line that hits our man so hard that he has to step outside for a few minutes. (Joel won’t talk about Tess with Ellie, though at one point we do see him building a tower of rocks by a creek, presumably in her honor.)So he needs to refocus; and he needs to start caring more about Ellie, the foul-mouthed chatterbox who until now he has mostly just ordered around. (Not that she ever obeys.) This kid who is fascinated by tales of video games, restaurants and airplanes may help him see the world differently. When they hop into Bill’s truck to head off to Joel’s brother’s Firefly compound in Wyoming, Ellie is excited about everything in the vehicle, which she’s seeing for the first time. (“It’s like a spaceship!”) As they pull out of the compound, she pops in a cassette tape, and Joel is moved to hear “Long, Long Time,” a song that clearly means a lot to him, too, for his own unspoken reasons.Ellie, of course, has no emotional associations with this song. (“You know I don’t know who Linda Ronstadt is.”) But right there, at that moment, they are making a new connection, together.Side QuestsOn their way to Bill and Frank’s, Ellie pesters Joel with questions about the pandemic, and he explains to her — and to us — more about what happened. Although the origins of the cordyceps mutation remain unknown, many believe the fungus contaminated some common worldwide grocery staple, like flour. Infections began taking hold on a Thursday. By the following Monday, society collapsed, as people were either herded into Quarantine Zones or slaughtered by the military. Everything happened so fast that no one had time to prepare. Rash choices made during a frenzied weekend still linger.Those radio broadcasts that let Joel know about trouble outside the Q.Z.? It turns out they originated from Bill and Frank’s place. (The decade-specific pop music code was Frank’s idea.)In a parallel to the sequence in which Bill fortifies his neighborhood, we see Joel and Ellie stock up for their road trip, grabbing clean clothes, toilet paper, deodorant and other basics. Joel won’t let Ellie take a gun; but when he isn’t looking, she finds the pistol Frank kept stashed in a writing desk, and she shoves into her backpack. This will undoubtedly appear again later.Mazin’s dialogue captures the easy affection Bill and Frank have toward each other. It’s all about their gentle pokes and running jokes — the stuff that becomes the foundation of a long relationship. It’s clear these guys are going to hit it off from the moment they meet, when Bill says he is hesitant to feed Frank because he doesn’t want other bums to come by looking for a free lunch — “This is not an Arby’s,” he grumbles. And even though Frank is facing a gun-wielding paranoiac, he can’t help but reply, “Arby’s didn’t have free lunch; it was a restaurant.” More

This week brought a more in-depth look at post-apocalyptic Boston as well as more details about what exactly has happened to the planet.‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Cordyceps Ordo Seclorum’For a few tantalizing seconds in the middle of last week’s “The Last of Us,” we got a brief glimpse at how the post-apocalyptic Boston looks outside the Quarantine Zone. This week features more of a grand tour — and honestly, it’s kind of awesome. A big reason so many people are drawn to movies and TV shows about the End Times is that there’s something both exciting and eerie about seeing the bones of our world, gnarled and repurposed.As Joel and Tess escort Ellie on what they hope will be an uneventful hike up to a Firefly compound on Beacon Hill, they trek through a crumbling city, where some skyscrapers have collapsed and others have been overtaken by unchecked nature. In Ellie’s first appearance in this episode, she is curled up in a patch of grass, bathed in sunlight, with a butterfly fluttering by. Only when the camera angle changes can we see that she is actually asleep indoors, in one of those rotting old buildings.Ellie, of course, has never known anything but this. She grew up with it, was shaped by it and — perhaps more than anyone, given her immunity to the dreaded fungal infection — has figured out how to thrive within it.This episode offers several good “get to know you” scenes for Ellie, who was initially introduced as a sassy detainee, aloof and angry. She’s still sassy this week, teasing Joel and Tess about their plague-paranoia at one point by pretending to twitch like an infected person. But she also makes amusingly dry little jokes. (Asked where she learned to juggle a sharp knife, she cracks, “The circus.” Told that their path to Beacon Hill can go “the long way” or “the ‘we’re dead’ way,” she replies, “I vote ‘long way,’ just based on that limited information.”) Because she talks incessantly, by the time the travelers hit their first big roadblock, she has explained a lot about what her life has been like up until now: spending her days in classes with the other QZ kids, learning about the culture they can’t see firsthand and spending her free time exploring the places she’s not supposed to go.This is also in some ways a “moving pieces into place” episode, establishing more details about what the heck has happened to the planet Earth, while getting the characters to the next big pivot-point in the story — which will see Joel and Ellie leaving Boston on their own, with no Fireflies and no Tess.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Once again there is a pre-opening credits prologue, set in Jakarta in 2003, revealing the origins of the mayhem we heard about on Joel’s radio in Austin last week. A professor of mycology, Ibu Ratna (Christine Hakim), is brought in by the government to examine the corpse of a woman who had gone on a murderous rampage under the apparent influence of “cordyceps” — a mushroom with bad vibes that is generally unpleasant to be around. The doctor warns there is no medicine for this, and that the best remedy is to bomb any city where the fungus takes hold.This is what happened in Boston, where the bombing “worked,” inasmuch as the government was able to stop the spread long enough to establish a safe area. But as Joel and Tess explain to Ellie — who only knows about the plague from what she has read in books and heard through the grapevine — there are still large numbers of mindless infected killing machines all across the city, writhing on their bellies in the streets in order to stay connected to an underground fungal network. And as they also explain, while Ellie may be the one person who can’t be “turned” by one of these humanoid beasts, “You’re not immune from being ripped apart.”So, with the risks well-established, this taut, tense episode follows what is meant to be a simple mission: Ellie is to be delivered to the Fireflies, who will then take her to a base out west to be a resource for a potential humanity-saving vaccine, while Joel and Tess will receive a gassed-up, battery-charged truck that they can use for their own personal business.An important point to keep in mind: Joel in particular has no altruistic impulse here. He would hand over Ellie to authorities in an instant if they offered a similar reward, or if he had to do it to save his own life. He has no bond with her — at least not yet. There is a scene about halfway through this episode when Tess leaves the other two behind to scout for a pathway behind some rubble, and Joel and Ellie’s awkward conversation is almost painful to witness.Not long after this moment, the plan goes haywire. When “the long way” proves impassable, the trio tries to sneak through an old museum, and in the process they awaken the mushroom hordes. Much of the second half of this episode features a nail-biting scramble through the Boston ruins, as everything previously mentioned about the monsters — including their ability to communicate via the ground — comes into play.When the gang does reach the Fireflies’ base at the gold-domed Massachusetts State House, they discover that everyone they were supposed to meet there has either been infected or slaughtered. Even worse: Tess herself was bit during one of their narrow escapes. She sacrifices herself by blowing up the capitol building, keeping the creatures at bay long enough for Joel and Ellie to get clear of the danger.There is some symbolism in this explosion, which destroys a classic piece of American architecture. In fact, throughout the episode, our heroes end up trashing a lot of the past. They knock over antiquities when they scramble through a museum, and it seems like with each step forward the road behind them closes off. In other words, there is no returning to the way things were. All that matters is what Tess says before she dies: “Save who you can save.” That’s “who” — not “what.”Side QuestsGiven how amazing this show’s devastated cityscapes look, let us throw some praise to the director Neil Druckmann, the cinematographer Ksenia Sereda and the camera crew for framing up some nice low-angle shots, giving Alex Wang’s visual effects team a proper backdrop to fill.The fungal origin of this zombie-style apocalypse has also inspired some spectacularly creepy imagery, from the tiny tendrils that snake out of the infected’s mouths to the darkness-dwelling creatures whose heads look like split mushrooms. Even in the Jakarta prologue, the first real sign that something isn’t right is when the professor cuts into a subject’s leg and no blood spills out — only a fibrous white substance. Ick!As someone who is perhaps unduly fascinated by what TV and movie characters eat, I hope we get more scenes like the one in this episode where Joel and Tess gnaw on bone-dry jerky while Ellie gets to enjoy a huge, moist chicken sandwich, smuggled into the QZ for her because she’s so special.And so we say farewell to Tess — and to Anna Torv. I shall miss them both. As a “Fringe” fan who wrote reviews for nearly every episode of that series way back when, I had missed seeing Torv on my TV; and Tess was a character worthy of her talents, capturing her gift for playing tough ladies with bruised souls. More