Andrew: We're five episodes into this season of The Last of Us, and most of the infected we've seen have still been of the "mindless, screeching horde" variety. But in the first episode of the season, we saw Ellie encounter a single "smart" infected person, a creature that retained some sense of strategy and a self-preservation instinct. It implied that the show's monsters were not done evolving and that the seemingly stable fragments of civilization that had managed to take root were founded on a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about what these monsters were and what they could do.

Amidst all the human-created drama, the changing nature of the Mushroom Zombie Apocalypse is the backdrop of this week's entire episode, starting and ending with the revelation that a 2003-vintage cordyceps nest has become a hotbed of airborne spores, ready to infect humans with no biting required.

This is news to me, as a Non-Game Player! But Kyle, I'm assuming this is another shoe that you knew the series was going to drop.

Kyle: Actually, no. I suppose it's possible I'm forgetting something, but I think the "some infected are actually pretty smart now" storyline is completely new to the show. It's just one of myriad ways the show has diverged enough from the games at this point that I legitimately don't know where it's going to go or how it's going to get there at any given moment, which is equal parts fun and frustrating.

I will say that the "smart zombies" made for my first real "How are Ellie and Dina going to get out of this one?" moment, as Dina's improvised cage was being actively torn apart by a smart and strong infected. But then, lo and behold, here came Deus Ex Jesse to save things with a timely re-entrance into the storyline proper. You had to know we hadn't seen the last of him, right?

Andrew: As with last week's subway chase, I'm coming to expect that any time Ellie and Dina seem to be truly cornered, some other entity is going to swoop down and "save" them at the last minute. This week it was an actual ally instead of another enemy that just happened to take out the people chasing Ellie and Dina. But it's the same basic narrative fake-out.

I assume their luck will run out at some point, but I also suspect that if it comes, that point will be a bit closer to the season finale.

Kyle: Without spoiling anything from the games, I will say you can expect both Ellie and Dina to experience their fair share of lucky and unlucky moments in the episodes to come.

Speaking of unlucky moments, while our favorite duo is hiding in the park we get to see how the local cultists treat captured WLF members, and it is extremely not pretty. I'm repeating myself a bit from last week, but the lingering on these moments of torture feels somehow more gratuitous in an HBO show, even when compared to similarly gory scenes in the games.

Andrew: Well we had just heard these cultists compared to "Amish people" not long before, and we already know they don't have tanks or machine guns or any of the other Standard Issue The Last of Us Paramilitary Goon gear that most other people have, so I guess you've got to do something to make sure the audience can actually take the cultists seriously as a threat. But yeah, if you're squeamish about blood-and-guts stuff, this one's hard to watch.

I do find myself becoming more of a fan of Dina and Ellie's relationship, or at least of Dina as a character. Sure, her tragic backstory's a bit trite (she defuses this criticism by pointing out in advance that it is trite), but she's smart, she can handle herself, she is a good counterweight to Ellie's rush-in-shooting impulses. They are still, as Dina points out, doing something stupid and reckless. But I am at least rooting for them to make it out alive!

Kyle: Personality wise the Dina/Ellie pairing has just as many charms as the Joel/Ellie pairing from last season. But while I always felt like Joel and Ellie had a clear motivation and end goal driving them forward, the thirst for revenge pushing Dina and Ellie deeper into Seattle starts to feel less and less relevant the more time goes on.

The show seems to realize this, too, stopping multiple times since Joel's death to kind of interrogate whether tracking down these killers is worth it when the alternative is just going back to Jackson and prepping for a coming baby. It's like the writers are trying to convince themselves even as they're trying (and somewhat failing, in my opinion) to convince the audience of their just and worthy cause.

Andrew: Yeah, I did notice the points where Our Heroes paused to ask "are we sure we want to be doing this?" And obviously, they are going to keep doing this, because we have spent all this time setting up all these different warring factions and we're going to use them, dang it!! But this has never been a thing that was going to bring Joel back, and it only seems like it can end in misery, especially because I assume Jesse's plot armor is not as thick as Ellie or Dina's.

Kyle: Personally I think the "Ellie and Dina give up on revenge and prepare to start a post-apocalyptic family (while holding off zombies)" would have been a brave and interesting direction for a TV show. It would have been even braver for the game, although very difficult for a franchise where the main verbs are "shoot" and "stab."

Andrew: Yeah if The Last of Us Part II had been a city-building simulator where you swap back and forth between managing the economy of a large town and building defenses to keep out the hordes, fans of the first game might have been put off. But as an Adventure of Link fan I say: bring on the sequels with few-if-any gameplay similarities to their predecessors!

Kyle: "We killed Joel" team member Nora definitely would have preferred if Ellie and Dina were playing that more domestic kind of game. As it stands, Ellie ends up pursuing her toward a miserable-looking death in a cordyceps-infested basement.

The chase scene leading up to this mirrors a very similar one in the game in a lot of ways. But while I found it easy to suspend my disbelief for the (very scripted) chase on the PlayStation, watching it in a TV show made me throw up my hands and say "come on, these heavily armed soldiers can't stop a little girl that's making this much ruckus?"

Andrew: Yeah Jesse can pop half a dozen "smart" zombies in half a dozen shots, but when it's a girl with a giant backpack running down an open hallway everyone suddenly has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim. The visuals of the cordyceps den, with the fungified guys breathing out giant clouds of toxic spores, is effective in its unsettling-ness, at least!

This episode's other revelation is that what Joel did to the Fireflies in the hospital at the end of last season is apparently not news to Ellie, when she hears it from Nora in the episode's final moments. It could be that Ellie, Noted Liar, is lying about knowing this. But Ellie is also totally incapable of controlling her emotions, and I've got to think that if she had been surprised by this, we would have been able to tell.

Kyle: Yeah, saying too much about what Ellie knows and when would be risking some major spoilers. For now I'll just say the way the show decided to mix things up by putting this detailed information in Nora's desperate, spore-infested mouth kind of landed with a wet thud for me.

I was equally perplexed by the sudden jump cut from "Ellie torturing a prisoner" to "peaceful young Ellie flashback" at the end of the episode. Is the audience supposed to assume that this is what is going on inside Ellie's head or something? Or is the narrative just shifting without a clutch?

Andrew: I took it to mean that we were about to get a timeline-breaking departure episode next week, one where we spend some time in flashback mode filling in what Ellie knows and why before we continue on with Abby Quest. But I guess we'll see, won't we!

Kyle: Oh, I've been waiting with bated breath for a bevy of flashbacks I knew were coming in some form or another. But the particular way they shifted to the flashback here, with mere seconds left in this particular brutal episode, was baffling to me.

Andrew: I think you do it that way to get people hyped about the possibility of seeing Joel again next week. Unless it's just a cruel tease! But it's probably not, right? Unless it is!

Kyle: Now I kind of hope the next episode just goes back to Ellie and Dina and doesn't address the five seconds of flashback at all. Screw you, audience!

Andrew: And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.

Kyle: Yeah, I've said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.

But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who's played the game knows how central "the porch scene" is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we'd still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.

Andrew: (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)

Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn't, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence... I don't know what they were thinking. Then again, if it's just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.

Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O'Hara, world's least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I'm sure we'll get it at a time that's engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn't it?

We're able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn't want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one "normal" community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.

Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between "paramilitary psychopaths" and "normal community." But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson's uniqueness all the more important as a setting.

We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same "Ellie and Dina go out for revenge." While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.

Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the "Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance" meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).

Part of it almost felt too much like "our" politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that's the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific "they" who would be "laughing at us" if the community doesn't track down and execute Abby. I'll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie's attempted vengeance tour doesn't make me feel better about what she's deciding to do here.

Kyle: I will say the line "Nobody votes for angry" rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn't really work...

Andrew: SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It's an extremely reliable indicator!

Kyle: Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!

Andrew: So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn't about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council's better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.

Kyle: One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just "GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING" and even the people that agreed with her were like "Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!"

Andrew: Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it's not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie's impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel's taciturn competence there to leaven it.

Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that's already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I'm not sure the town hall "deterrence" arguments would have swayed him.

Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the game). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much "You're gay, I'm not" bit...

Andrew: "You're gay, I'm not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!"

I am not inclined to get too on Dina's case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn't go into it, but I've also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.

Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being "out" in this context than Dina would be.

Kyle: As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I'd have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more "grounded" TV show, the odds do not seem great.

Andrew: One thread I'm curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame "Abby and her crew," people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it's easier to kill her when the time comes. We'll see how well it works!

But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the "Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps"-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.

Kyle: They're pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I'm not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous

Andrew: (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this...