<i> The Last of Us</i> Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: On the Road Again

Spoilers below.

Like the rest of us, Jackson is in mourning. In the wake of Joel’s shocking murder and the infected rampage last episode, the Wyoming fortress is in shambles. Tommy cleans his brother’s body with a wet rag as Ellie, badly injured, awakens in the hospital screaming. Everyone is traumatized, including viewers, and The Last of Us knows it.

It’s only after weeks of recovery, both for Jackson and its residents, that Ellie is cleared to re-enter the realm of the living. She breezes through Gail’s mental health assessment, making a game of it, giving all the right answers without a drop of sincerity. But her self-satisfied smirk disappears as she emerges into a world outside her recovery room, a world without Joel in it. She walks to his house and drags herself through his bedroom, a near-perfect replica of the one we see in The Last of Us: Part II. Her eyes comb over his unfinished woodwork designs, his flannel shirt hung on a chair, his bed made as if awaiting him. She cries clutching one of his jackets, breathing in his scent.

Dina calls to her from the downstairs, and Ellie breaks out of her trance of grief, wiping away her tears with something like panic. Of all people with whom she could be honest about her feelings, Dina might be the best, but Ellie won’t give herself that luxury. She meets Dina at Joel’s dining table, where the former delivers a peace offering—homemade cookies—and reveals a secret she’s been keeping: She knows the names of “most” of Abby’s crew.

They’re known as the Washington Liberation Front, or WLF, a.k.a. the Wolves. And she knows they were headed back to Seattle after they’d accomplished their mission. Ellie is furious at Dina for hiding this information, costing them valuable time, but Dina insists her patience was practical. She couldn’t let Ellie go “crawling on [her] hands and knees” after the Wolves whilst she was still in recovery, and, besides, it made practical sense to wait: “If you want to find someone and the only thing you know about them is where they’re gonna end up, maybe you let them get there,” she says. Ellie can’t deny the logic.

They go straight to Tommy, who’s less than enthusiastic about the idea of abandoning a damaged Jackson to send a “posse” on an unplanned revenge quest. He wants justice for Joel, to be sure—in fact, he displays a rare flash of anger when Ellie suggests he didn’t know his own brother as well as she did—but he wants to get the job done the right way. They’ll hold a council meeting and vote on it, he insists. Ellie reluctantly concedes. (This, you’ll find, is a pattern throughout the episode.)

But the council meeting does not go as she’d hoped. In spite of her own impassioned plea; her (false) insistence that she wants justice, not revenge; and the surprising support of Seth, the man who called her and Dina homophobic slurs at the New Year’s party, the council ultimately votes against sending a crew to find and execute the Wolves. As one Jackson resident reasons, “We are too hurt, and it is too soon.” Another calls for mercy, arguing that mercy is what separates Jackson’s survivors from the “raiders and murderers.” Ellie wants to hear none of it. If the council won’t provide her support, she’ll find a way to Seattle on her own.

Worry not—Dina won’t let her get far without an ally. Before Ellie can even finish packing her small arsenal of guns, Dina barges into Ellie’s bedroom with a travel route mapped out, a full list of supplies, and a plan to get them out of Jackson without detection. They meet up at an unused gate at 3 A.M., where, of all people, Seth shows up with their necessities (and with Shimmer, Ellie’s beloved horse, in tow). Ellie begrudgingly thanks him for his help, and she and Dina begin their multi-day trip to Seattle.

This sequence depicts a relatively major change from the PlayStation game, in which Ellie and Dina depart for Seattle only after Tommy has tricked them and left first, traveling alone and hellbent on revenge. Maria gives the pair permission to take supplies (and Shimmer) only if they promise to return with her husband intact. By erasing this part of the narrative, the HBO series leaves Tommy’s role in Ellie and Dina’s quest as-yet unclear. But I suspect we’ll see him again sooner than we might expect.

As episode 3 progresses, Ellie and Dina stop first not far outside Jackson, where Tommy says their dead are buried. Ellie kneels beside Joel’s grave and offers a handful of coffee beans, a touching nod to his enduring (and, to Ellie, inexplicable) love of java. She says nothing during this scene, but she doesn’t need to. We can infer what she’s thinking just from the tension in her jaw, the stoop of her back, and the bereft look in her eyes.

Eventually, they make their way through a montage of beautiful northwestern landscapes from the plains of Wyoming to the forests of Washington. They stop overnight to set up camp in a rainstorm, and Dina—trying to pretend as if she’s not at least a little bicurious—asks Ellie to rate their kiss from New Year’s. When Ellie suggests a mere six out of ten, she balks, but she nevertheless lets slip that her and Jesse’s on-again, off-again relationship is (or was) back on again. At least temporarily. She then wonders, aloud, if the problems between her and Jesse don’t stem from his inherent sadness. What if the issue is Dina herself? Ellie doesn’t have an answer to this, especially as her own feelings for Dina would certainly complicate her response. And she clearly can’t help holding out hope that Dina might not be as straight as she says she is.

The next morning, any thoughts of romance are forgotten when they stumble upon an massacre in the middle of their trail. The corpses belong to a group introduced earlier in the episode, whom fans of the video game will recognize as the Seraphites. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t dig too deep into their lore, but episode 3 shows us that these characters wear monochrome outfits and display prominent scars on each of their cheeks, shaped almost in Joker-like smiles. They believe in some kind of “Prophet,” one who’s been dead for a decade, and they are fleeing Seattle in order to avoid a “war” with the Wolves. The smell of their rotting flesh prompts Dinah to throw up in the bushes, and she and Ellie assume the Wolves had a hand in their bloody fate.

At last, they come upon Seattle proper, the city’s skyscrapers draped in overgrown foliage and crumbling concrete. As they joke around about Curtis & Viper—a movie series Joel loved, as well as another Easter egg from the video games—we finally get another glance of Abby’s faction, the WLF. Ellie and Dina are expecting a small, perhaps unorganized group. Episode 3 reveals the extent of their misjudgment. The Wolves are a tightly run machine, and there are dozens of them, highly armed and well-disciplined as they march along the streets. As the Seraphites suggested earlier, Seattle is not a small survivor camp. It’s a war zone. And Ellie and Dina are walking right into the crossfire.