Please note there are spoilers for episode 4 of The Last of Us below. Proceed with caution.
Well we’re back at it again. After a week off from the violence and misery to lick its wounds, HBO’s The Last of Us is back on track with its trauma tour, reminding us once again that the worst part of life after the apocalypse isn’t the fungus zombies, but the other survivors.
Episode 4, titled “Day One,” opens on a flashback to 2018 with a group of Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) soldiers traveling in an armored truck. One soldier, played by Josh Peck, recounts the story of how one of their fellow officers brutally smashes the face of a citizen, who he refers to as a “voter,” into a wall. Hearty laughter breaks out from the group. One of the rookie soldiers asks why the citizens are called “voters,” and the leader Sergeant Isaac Dixon (Jeffrey Wright, reprising his role from the games) says that it’s because FEDRA “took away their right to vote and somebody started calling them ‘voters’ to mock them.” Isaac doesn’t find the story amusing, and the soldiers start to apologize when the truck comes to a halt.
A school bus has been placed in the middle of the road as a blockade and a group of people come out of hiding, clearly an ambush. The soldiers prepare for a violent conflict, but Isaac tells them to stand down and says he will try to diffuse the situation without fighting and takes the rookie soldier with him. After Isaac exchanges words with the leader of the ambushing group Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), he returns to the truck, tosses some grenades inside and locks the door, killing the soldiers. He then dispatches the driver and tells the rookie that he needs to make the choice to join with the rebel group or die.
Flash forward 11 years, we find Ellie and Dina in continuing their revenge quest in Seattle. It is their first day in the city, hence the episode title, and they are scavenging for supplies. Dina crawls around an abandoned store looking for pain medication, but doesn’t find any. She’s about to leave the store when she sees something off screen that catches her eye. We don’t see what it is, but Dina doesn’t tell Ellie about it either, instead saying that she’ll catch up shortly and just needs to pee.
Ellie and Dina then navigate their way through the Seattle streets, encountering Pride flags, dead FEDRA soldiers and a tank. Ellie comments that she thinks the soldiers turned against each other and checks for any spare ammunition they can scavenge. In the distance, Dina spots a towering skyscraper with “WLF” spray painted onto a large satellite, and while Ellie wants to impulsively head in that direction in broad daylight, Dina is able to persuade her otherwise by pointing out that the WLF forces would likely be more than prepared to deal with such a brazen attack and that since the building is on a hill, the WLF forces would see them coming from far away.
Instead, the two hunker down in a music store to wait for nightfall. Dina tinkers with a drum set and Ellie finds a pristine guitar safely tucked away in a case. She plays A-ha’s “Take On Me” which moves Dina to tears.
Elsewhere, we’re now catching up with Isaac. He’s in a kitchen recounting to an unknown party how he used to try to impress his dates by cooking for them and dreamed of owning an expensive copper Mauviel saucepan, much like the ones hanging in the kitchen in front of him. He then heats up one of the saucepans and explains that copper requires a lot of care and heats up faster than cast iron, but also loses heat very quickly making it a poor choice for interrogations. “But,” he explains to the naked Seraphite cultist he has chained to the wall, “if you own Mauviel, you use Mauviel.”
Isaac, now a key figure of WLF, grills (pun intended) the cultist about where his people will attack next. Unable to get an answer, Isaac tells the Seraphite to hold out his hand, which he then burns with his fancy French cookware. Just outside the kitchen/interrogation room, a WLF soldier expresses his discomfort with the torture, but another unseen guard rebukes him. Isaac continues his interrogation with both sides accusing the other of killing children and breaking truces. The Seraphite says that in spite of advantages like stronger guns and hospitals, the WLF will lose in the long run because while soldiers are abandoning the WLF every day to join the Seraphite cause, no Seraphite has switches sides. Isaac then threatens to burn the Seraphite’s entire body until he gets his information, but the cultist just offers up his arm. Unable to break his the prisoner, Isaac shoots him in the head, an action that is met with approval by the other guard that turns out to be the FEDRA agent that Isaac spared in the beginning of the episode.
When night falls, Ellie and Dina sneak into the WLF tower through an open window and find a WLF soldier killed with a bunch of arrows. Further into the building they find even more dead Wolves, strung up with their organs hanging out of their opened bellies. The message “Feel her love” is written in blood on the wall along with the Seraphite symbol. Before she died, one of the Wolves called for backup, which arrives before Ellie and Dina have the chance to escape. The Wolves are obviously horrified by has been done to their comrades and they sweep the area for any Seraphites, causing Ellie and Dina to get separated. Ellie is eventually spotted, leading to a fight during which both girls kill a soldier and escape through a window, then get chased into the subway train tunnels beneath the city.
The Wolves also enter the subway tunnels to try to find our fugitive heroes. The problem is they expected the tunnels to be empty, (which they are not) and all the noise attracts a swarm of infected. Ellie and Dina try to hide in one of the trains, but that turns out to be a mistake as it only traps them. Ellie and Dina experience a tense and harrowing escape from the train and the station, and just as they’re about to escape they are caught by some old turnstiles. Ellie is able to make it through, but as Dina is forcing the gate forward, a clicker attacks Dina. Ellie saves her by allowing the clicker to bite her arm instead and the duo escapes to an abandoned theater.
Obviously shaken by the experience, Dina prepares to kill Ellie before the cordyceps from the bite turns her into a zombie. Ellie is then forced to explain her immunity to Dina. Once satisfied that Ellie isn’t going to turn, Dina shares an information bomb of her own: she’s pregnant. Somehow, this is romantic for the two girls who kiss and then have sex. In the morning, Dina tells Ellie that she is bisexual but was repressed by her mother and that she has known that Ellie has had a crush on her for a long time. Dina says she knows she was pregnant with Jesse’s child due to her recent frequent vomiting, missing her period and from the pregnancy tests she found in the store at the beginning of the episode, hence her telling Ellie that she needed to pee. “Holy shit,” Ellie says, “I’m gonna be a dad.”
The tender moment of respite is broken by the sound of distant explosions and a message from the radio they stole off the body of the dead WLF soldier. The Seraphites are attacking a WLF base leading to heavy casualties and a retreat to Lakehill where Nora will know what to do. Assuming that this is the same Nora that was part of the party that murdered Joel, she would know where Abby is. The two go up onto the roof to try to get their bearings and locate Lakehill with their map, and due to the new development of Dina’s pregnancy, Ellie asks her to consider staying behind. Dina responds by grabbing Ellie’s hand. “Together,” she says. Cut to black.
For those who complained that episode 3 was boring, this episode was hopefully more of your speed. The brutal opening scene brings a powerful new player into the game with Isaac, and Jeffrey Wright plays him with a chillingly calculated and detached brutality.
While the subway scene was the highlight of the episode for me (if you can’t tell by now, I really like watching the characters fighting against the infected), this episodes exploration of the conflict between the Wolves and Seraphites is full of depth and horror. This conflict has obviously been going on for a long time, and both sides have committed atrocities towards the other. Ellie and Dina have walked into something much bigger than they can imagine and we really get the sense that they are way out of their depth.
The few moments of quiet levity and tenderness between Ellie and Dina both break up the action and help pace out the episode and try to flesh out the relationship between Ellie and Dina to make their relationship feel more deserved. Obviously, the two have always been close friends with the potential for something more. I mean besides the flirting and making out, Dina literally took it upon herself to risk her life to go on a murder quest with Ellie. However, somehow to me, the scene in the music store, while nice enough, didn’t help warm me up to their relationship, and neither did the rather cringeworthy writing leading to and immediately following their hookup. Maybe it’s just because my expectation of their relationship is colored by how well I think it was established in the game, but it’s just not as convincing in the show. Still, I love that the girls are ride or die for each other.
We’ll see how the road ahead tests that devotion.