More answers from another cold open, a scarier explanation on how the infected communicate, and a heartbreaking send-off. Episode 2 just kept getting better and better by the minute. It’s time for another breakdown of “The Last of Us,” HBO’s console-to-small screen adaptation featuring a pandemic. Because why the hell not? COVID-19 is depressing, but we need more shows about pandemics to keep us depressed.

Titled “Infected,” this episode is directed by Neil Druckman, the co-showrunner of the show and the creative director and writer of the game this was based on.

As always, heavy spoilers ahead. Watch the episode first before reading this breakdown.

2003: Thank goodness we had another cold open.

As I speculated in my previous post, we will have scenes from Jakarta, Indonesia in this episode. We’re introduced to Christine Hakim’s character, Ibu Ratna, a mycology professor in University of Indonesia. (“Ibu” is an honorific used in Indonesia for married women.)

We first see her in a restaurant eating barbecue with some greens. I’ll explain the importance of this detail in a while. On Sept. 24, 2003, uniformed men escorted her to a facility to examine a specimen and a dead body. The Indonesian government must have had an inkling about what they’re dealing with because they specifically looked for an expert on fungi.

When Ibu Ratna arrived at the medical facility, there were health warnings about severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a viral infection that had an outbreak in 2002 to 2004. It’s obvious that the Indonesian government was highly secretive about the fungi infections because no one in the facility seemed to be concerned about it and doors were heavily guarded.

When she first saw the specimen through a microscope, Ibu Ratna said that cordyceps cannot survive in human bodies just like what Dr. Schoenheiss said in the first episode. When the uniformed personnel heard this from her, his face showed concern. She was then allowed to a room to examine a cadaver. She inspects a mark from a human bite, sees a cordyceps inside the cadaver’s mouth, and runs for her life out of the room upon realizing it was alive.

The conversation that happens afterwards are revealing. Ibu Ratna learns from the uniformed dude that 30 hours prior, a woman in a flour and grain factory suddenly attacked and bit three co-workers. The woman was shot by the police and the co-workers were taken in to be observed, but they were executed as well, presumably because they got violent a few hours later. Fourteen other co-workers went missing, which means there are more who are probably spreading the infection in Jakarta while they speak.

Ibu Ratna says that the flour and grain are “a perfect substrate,” meaning those were the substances that most likely enabled the cordyceps to live and spread. In the first episode, we saw the Adlers bake cookies. When Sarah Miller (Nico Parker) heard from Connie Adler that there were raisins in the cookies, her face indicated that she never was interested in taking any, so her disgust of raisins probably saved her and her dad Joel (Pedro Pascal). Joel also mentioned in the previous episode that he’s on Atkins diet, a low carb weight loss program. He also forgot to buy pancake mix and cake, so it pays to be forgetful.

In other words, the warning from the cold open in the first episode and the second episode are connected. Dr. Neuman said fungi-related pandemics may happen when Earth becomes warmer, and then exactly that happens in 2003. What this cold open is saying is that it wasn’t just happening in the United States. While some flour and grain in Texas are making people sick, the same ingredients are also making people turn feral in Indonesia.

But back to Ibu Ratna. This is 2003, so they’re far from knowing any kind of cure or vaccine or both. She is so hopeless that she recommends bombing the entire city to get rid of the infection. Her recommendation isn’t villainous. It’s just that she has studied fungi all her life and she knows of no prevention for anything like this.

Now, I said earlier that I’ll come back to what Ibu Ratna was eating when we first see her in the episode. There was no carbs on her plate. So she’ll probably survive and be back in later episodes or in later seasons. Who knows.

2023: The Day After

Back in 2023, Joel and Tess (Anna Torv) haven’t slept in fear of Ellie (Bella Ramsey) turning. But while Joel’s hands were shaking all throughout, Tess started to believe that Ellie is somehow immune because “she made it through the night.”

Joel is ready to give up Ellie to the Federal Disaster Response Agency (Fedra), which now governs all quarantine zones. When Tess says that if they go back to the QZ, Fedra will kill Ellie once she’s scanned and the thermal scanner turns red, Joel says, “Well, better them than us. You need to stop talking about this kid like she’s got some kind of life in front of her.” Effing dude doesn’t care about anyone else anymore other than Tommy. The nihilist in me can relate.

But what I can’t relate to is Joel’s anti-vaxx stance when Ellie explained that the Firelies are thinking of her as the cure for the infection due to her resilience to a bite from an infected. He says he’s heard it all before and nothing will ever be found to or discovered to prevent more infection.

Some Interesting Details

Before they left, Marlene packed a chicken sandwich for Ellie, which she can eat because she’s immune. What’s more interesting is that in this post-apocalyptic world, we now know that there are other people who do what Joel and Tess do since Ellie said Marlene bought the chicken from smugglers.

As Ellie and Tess are having a conversation about how she got bit, Ellie is clearly uncomfortable lying about some details. (We’ll talk about that when that episode comes, but if you truly want to know this early, the trailer for the show may offer some clues.)

Ellie also said she doesn’t know how to swim, which is an information that’s probably given to us in preparation for something important at some point in the series. Remind yourself that next time they reach some body of water.

Did you notice that scene when they were in the water and Ellie sees a skeleton that made her jump? Joel rushes to see what it is and he’s ready to save her. That instinct even surprises him. When Ellie realizes that it’s nothing to be afraid of, he just stands there thinking of what he just did. Dude is like, “Just a few moments ago, I was ready to give this kid up to his potential killers and yet I rushed to save her. What was that?”

The Infected

We get to see our first infected chase in this episode. I hope you were wearing your earphones when that happened, because that was an experience.

Anyway, earphones or no earphones, here are some things we learned about the infected from this episode:

1. You’ll know when they’re near when they’re near. Ellie didn’t when she was bit.
2. Some of them last about a month or two.
3. Some have been walking around since infection day, though. We’ll see 20-year-old infected bodies soon in the show as the trailers suggest.
4. They communicate through miles of underground network. Fungi are effing scary. This is a scarier alteration from the game. In the game, you worry about spores. In this show, you worry about the characters stepping on a fungus that’ll inform other fungi elsewhere about your whereabouts.
5. A clicker, an infected whose fungi parasite have grown out of the heard like a chicharon bulaklak, cannot see you, but they can definitely hear you.
6. Even if Ellie gets bitten twice, it’s still Tess who dies.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about that send-off.

‘I mean, if it’s gonna happen to one of us.’

We didn’t see it on screen, but Tess gets bitten while they were at the museum. Because the bite is on her neck, she has 15 minutes before she turns.

When they reach the meeting place where they are supposed to drop off Ellie, no one is there to greet them. Tess rushes to the building to look for the Fireflies because she knows her time will soon be up. She has to see that the “last hope” Ellie is in safe hands. She has to know that all of it is worth it—that they could win.

We also have to address what she says when trying to convince Joel to bring Ellie west.

I never ask for anything. Not to feel the way I felt—

Tess, The Last of Us Episode 2

This is a interesting line because now we know that their relationship was like. Joel never loved Tess as much as she loved him. Sure, they were partners in smuggling stuff, and they shared the same bed, but Joel is too broken to care for somebody else other than his brother Tommy.

Later, she also says,

You get here there. You keep her alive and you set everything right. All the shit we did.

Tess, The Last of Us Episode 2

which means we might see more of Tess in future episodes’ flashbacks to explain that line.

Here’s a timeline of the events in the show so far.

A preview of the next episode shows the duo of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), who also got a mention in this episode. Tess specifically told Joel to bring Ellie to them. It’s a popular episode amongst critics, I have high expectations. The next episode is titled “Long Long Time” and it’s directed by Peter Hoar.