“The Last of Us” treads the boundary between different genres. On the surface, it fits within the esteemed tradition of post-apocalypse narratives featuring creatures that are not quite zombies. However, as you delve deeper into the series, it becomes evident that the focus is not on these monsters. The heart of the story revolves around relationships, love, and how these elements transform individuals over time.

At the core of “The Last of Us” are Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), two individuals who have endured significant loss and adversity. Through each other, they discover a renewed sense of tranquility in the world, although their bond also introduces a series of new challenges. Except for a few rare moments, the narrative predominantly unfolds from the viewpoint of these two characters. Despite this central focus, both the game and the show manage to cover an extensive period.

The HBO series technically begins in 1968, and by the time Season 2 is reached, it moves into the 2020s. The series manipulates time creatively; some episodes leap 20 years ahead with a brief montage, while others dedicate almost an hour to explore a decade-long romance in detail. With the various factions and cities, flashbacks, and glimpses into the future, the timeline can become somewhat intricate, so we are here to map out all the pivotal events you need to know.

In the first “The Last of Us” game, the sudden evolution of the cordyceps fungus comes as a complete surprise. One minute, Joel and his daughter, Sarah (played by Nico Parker in the show), are living normal lives, and the next, one of their fungus-infected neighbors bursts through the back door and turns their lives upside down. HBO’s “The Last of Us” adaptation, on the other hand, lays the groundwork for the cordyceps evolution in its very first scene.

The TV series opens with a clip from a 1968 talk show featuring a pair of biologists as the nightly guests. The biologists describe how cordyceps is able to infect the brains of insects and manipulate their bodies to serve its own needs. In fact, they lay out the basic premise of the entire series, explaining how a warmer climate might cause cordyceps to develop the capability to infect mammals, including humans. Somewhere between that talk show episode and 2003, when the show’s primary story begins, that evolution happens.

Episode 2 of “The Last of Us” also sheds some light on how the infection began and spread to the entire world. We see scientists make the first discovery of human-hosted cordyceps, and we learn that the fungus has spread through the world’s grain supply. Unfortunately, by the time this is realized, it’s already too late to stop the infection.

The evolution of cordyceps is the major development that makes the story of “The Last of Us” possible, but it isn’t the event that really kicks the plot into motion. The first truly important moment in the show’s story comes the very first time that Joel confronts infected humans. In one day, Joel’s hometown turns into an apocalyptic hellscape, and his only choice is to get his family as far away from other people as possible.

Joel, Sarah, and Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), all pile into a truck and try to find a safe way out of town. They repeatedly run into both literal and metaphorical roadblocks as the military tries to quarantine the area as more and more infected humans flood the streets. Eventually, Joel and Sarah get separated from Tommy and find themselves running from the infected on foot. The two of them cross paths with a soldier who’s been ordered to execute anyone trying to leave the area. That’s when tragedy strikes.

The soldier fires at Joel and Sarah just seconds before Tommy swoops back in to save the day. Sadly, Tommy is too late — Sarah takes a bullet in the chaos, and she starts bleeding out in Joel’s arms. Sarah’s death is the worst moment in Joel’s life, and it sets him on a path that will one day lead to his own death.

Aside from being a video game and TV show, one thing that sets “The Last of Us” apart from some of the best post-apocalyptic movies ever made is that the story takes place decades after the cordyceps infection causes society to collapse. The show’s very first episode includes a 20-year time jump that takes us from the night the outbreak hits Joel’s town all the way to a dystopian future where an authoritarian government controls Boston, one of the few cities where people can live in relative safety.

The franchise is surprisingly light on details about what happened during those two decades. We know that the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) tries to manage the outbreak in the early days of the infection. Containment fails, and as more and more people begin to die, the agency’s remnants become the de facto government in cities across the country.

FEDRA does its best to keep people safe, but not everyone agrees with the organization’s methods. The authoritarian regime that FEDRA becomes inspires a group of rebels who come to be known as Fireflies. Most of the conflicts that take place during the 20-year time jump are highly localized, but the struggle between FEDRA and the Fireflies happens all across the country.

The most important character in “The Last of Us” wasn’t even around for the initial outbreak. Ellie grew up in the post-apocalypse, and she spent the majority of her childhood living in Boston under FEDRA rule. In both the show and the game, we meet Ellie at the same time Joel does, but her story begins much earlier.

For the most part, HBO’s series follows the game’s story beat for beat, but, occasionally, scenes or stories that expand the universe and our knowledge of the characters are added. The first season’s finale gave us one of those scenes when it showed us Ellie’s birth. We first see her mother, Anna (Ashley Johnson), when she’s about nine months pregnant and running from some infected. Just as Ellie’s mom starts going into labor, she gets bitten. She survives long enough to give birth to her daughter and to name her Ellie, but then she asks her friend Marlene (Merle Dandridge) to kill her before the infection changes her.

This scene establishes a relationship between Ellie and Marlene that doesn’t quite exist in the games. It also gives some context to Ellie’s immunity and goes a long way toward explaining why she seems to be the only immune person on the planet. Her body’s defense against the cordyceps infection exists because of an incredible coincidence, and the only people who could reveal the circumstances of Ellie’s birth are now dead.

During the 20 years that “The Last of Us” skips over, Joel builds a completely new life for himself. Like so much of that time period, we don’t have many specific details about what happened, but we do see where Joel’s journey led him. When we catch up with him in Boston, he’s an experienced smuggler, transporting illicit goods into and out of the city while evading FEDRA and making a decent living for himself.

We don’t know when Joel started smuggling, but we do know who his partner in crime is. Tess (Anna Torv) and Joel work together, and if we read between the lines a little, we can guess that the two of them are more than just business partners. We see that Tess is just as tough as Joel and is capable of handling herself, but the two of them are still highly protective of each other. We also know that they’ve traveled some of the country together because we see them meeting up with Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) in Episode 3, but, for better or for worse, they decided to set up shop in Boston. Without Tess, there’s almost no chance that Joel would have escorted Ellie across the country, so even though she isn’t in the story for very long, she has a pivotal role to play.

One of the biggest changes “The Last of Us” show made to the game’s story led to the series’ most celebrated episode. In the game, Joel and Ellie meet with Joel’s friend, Bill, to get supplies and a vehicle to help them travel. That version of Bill is mostly treated as comic relief, and players don’t really get to learn much about him. The show’s version of Bill, on the other hand, is presented quite differently.

Bill is a survivalist who was absolutely ready to live in an apocalyptic nightmare. In Episode 3, we get to see all the preparations that he made well before the cordyceps infection became a reality, and we watch how he smoothly transitions to a post-apocalyptic lifestyle. Bill’s actually happy living a life of isolation, but everything changes when a man named Frank falls into one of the traps on Bill’s property.

Bill and Frank fall in love with each other, and, at Frank’s urging, the two of them begin to reach out to other survivors. They get to become close friends with Joel and Tess while they spend a mostly blissful decade together. When a disease starts destroying Frank’s mobility, he decides to take a lethal amount of sleeping pills. Bill takes the pills with Frank, and the two of them die in bed, in each other’s arms. Their love story is arguably the most well-made episode in the entire show, and it emphasizes the theme that’s present throughout “The Last of Us” of love persevering through everything.

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Despite being a story centered on an apocalypse, “The Last of Us” shows us remarkably little about how society collapsed. Because the series is set more than two decades after the initial cordyceps outbreak, we only get small hints and glimmers of everything that played out in the wake of the infection. That said, the opening of the Season 2 episode “Day One” gives us a peek at what happened in Seattle after the area was overrun with infected.

Thanks to some bantering between FEDRA soldiers, we learn that FEDRA took control of Seattle when the city went into quarantine. From there, we learn that FEDRA took away the citizens’ right to vote and basically operated as an authoritarian regime controlling the city. We don’t know how cruel the agency rule was, but we do know that the group inspired some rebellions. In the episode, we see a FEDRA sergeant named Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) turn on his own organization, teaming up with Seattle citizens and murdering an armored truck full of FEDRA soldiers.

Isaac goes on to form the Washington Liberation Front, a militarized resistance group that overcomes the odds and takes control of Seattle back from FEDRA. By the time Ellie arrives in Washington, the WLF has been running the city for nearly a decade — though it seems like they’re now fighting a war with a new rebellious faction known as the Scars.

Sarah’s death is one of the defining moments of Joel’s life; in a similar way, Ellie also finds herself defined by what she’s lost. In Episode 7 of the show’s first season, we see that Ellie spent most of her childhood growing up in a FEDRA school facility. Ellie’s not exactly a model student, and she doesn’t get along with many of the other children. She does have one incredibly close friend named Riley (Storm Reid), though — and even if you haven’t watched the show, you probably know where this is going.

One night, Riley and Ellie sneak out to an abandoned mall in Boston. Riley explains that this place has been her secret hangout spot for a while, and she shows an incredulous Ellie that the mall still has electricity. The two of them spend a glorious evening exploring the old shops and playing around in the arcade, and they share their first kiss together — but things take a turn when some infected make their way into the building.

Riley and Ellie fight off the infected, but in the process, they’re both bitten. They decide to live out their final moments together before turning, but when Riley changes, Ellie finds herself staying exactly the same. Ellie learns about her immunity in the same moment that she loses her best friend and first love, and that, more than anything, motivates her to help find a cure for cordyceps.

The main plot of “The Last of Us” sees Joel escorting Ellie across the United States — but that journey was never supposed to happen. In the first episode of the show, we meet Marlene, a leading member of the Fireflies who — though viewers didn’t know it at the time — was present for Ellie’s birth. Marlene is supposed to help Ellie get to a group of Fireflies waiting in the Boston Capitol. From there, the plan is to take Ellie to the Firefly base at the University of Eastern Colorado, where a group of scientists hopes to find a way to use Ellie’s immunity to create a cure for cordyceps.

The plan goes awry when Marlene takes a bullet during a skirmish in the Boston Quarantine Zone. She isn’t fatally wounded, but she needs serious medical attention at the exact moment that she’s supposed to be getting Ellie out of the city. In desperation, Marlene asks Joel and Tess to do the job for her — a responsibility Joel wants to refuse, but Tess pushes him to do it. The Fireflies at the Capitol, tragically, are all killed before Joel, Tess, and Ellie can reach them. Infected are swarming the place, and Tess sacrifices herself to save Joel and Ellie after insisting that he finish the job alone. Reluctantly, Joel agrees to honor Tess’ dying wish and begins devising a plan to get from Boston to Colorado.

Eventually, their cross-country journey carries Joel and Ellie through the outskirts of Kansas City. While driving through the ruined streets, the two of them are attacked by a gang of bandits led by a woman named Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey). Joel and Ellie take shelter in some nearby buildings where they happen to cross paths with a man named Henry (Lamar Johnson) and his younger brother, Sam (Keivonn Montreal Woodard). The siblings are on the run from Kathleen and her gang, so they decide to team up with Joel and Ellie to try and escape the city.

As Joel and Ellie make their way through the city with their new allies, Henry explains that Kathleen blames him for her brother’s death. Back when FEDRA controlled the city, Henry reported her brother for crimes in exchange for medicine to help with Sam’s leukemia. Kathleen gathered other outraged citizens and overthrew FEDRA while hunting Henry down for her revenge.

Eventually, the four survivors do manage to escape the city, but not before encountering a horde of infected along the way. Here, the TV show reveals a new kind of infected — the bloater — for the first time, and in the chaos of the battle, Kathleen is killed. Sadly, the next day Ellie discovers that Sam has turned after being bitten, and, after seeing that his brother is dead, Henry kills himself. Joel and Ellie are forced to get back on the road by themselves.

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Joel and Ellie are making their way through Wyoming when they happen to pass near a settlement called Jackson. The two of them are approached by an armed band of men, but upon realizing that they aren’t threats, the men lead the pair back to the town. There, Joel has an unexpected family reunion with his brother, Tommy, and he and Ellie find the first bit of real peace they’ve experienced since starting their journey.

There aren’t many safe places in the United States, but as luck would have it, Joel’s brother lives in one of them. Jackson is the best example of a successful post-apocalyptic society that we see in “The Last of Us.” Thanks to an impressive wall, the town is well-defended, and they’ve even managed to recapture some of the amenities of the old world, like electricity and movie projectors. Families live peacefully, and everyone shares resources to make sure that the entire community is doing well.

Jackson is such a welcoming place that Joel and Ellie could call it home immediately, though Ellie’s drive to help find a cure for cordyceps pushes her to continue her mission. The two of them leave the town, but they know that Jackson will be waiting for them after their business with the Fireflies has been concluded.

Near the end of the Season 1 episode “Kin,” Joel and Ellie finally finish their cross-country journey. They arrive at the University of Eastern Colorado, expecting the place to be teeming with Fireflies, but instead, they find an abandoned campus. While exploring some of the buildings, they discover a map indicating that the Fireflies have fled further west, to Salt Lake City. But before Joel and Ellie can discuss this new information, bandits arrive, and, in the ensuing skirmish, Joel takes the broken handle of a baseball bat to the gut.

Joel’s injuries are very nearly fatal, but Ellie manages to find an abandoned house for them to shelter in while she tends to his wounds and searches for some medicine to help him fight off infection. Weeks pass, and when Ellie encounters some strangers from a nearby settlement, she offers to trade them a deer for a dose of penicillin. Ellie gets the medicine to Joel, but is captured shortly afterward by the men she traded with, and the group’s leader, David (Scott Shepherd), reveals that he’s secretly been feeding his people human flesh to keep them alive through the winter. While Ellie tries to escape, Joel finally comes to and heads out to look for her. Ellie and David get into a violent confrontation, and Ellie kills her captor just moments before Joel arrives. Reunited and back in fighting form, Joel and Ellie leave Colorado behind for Utah.

When Joel and Ellie arrive in Salt Lake City, they have the rug pulled out from under them again when they’re ambushed by Fireflies and Joel gets knocked out. When he wakes up, he learns that Marlene has also made her way to Salt Lake City from Boston. She tells Joel that Ellie has already been put under anesthesia and taken to an operating room, where a doctor will slice into her brain to get the tissue necessary to develop the cordyceps cure. The Fireflies didn’t explain the procedure to Ellie before taking her in, but Marlene tells Joel that the operation will be fatal.

At that moment, Joel snaps. He’s come to view Ellie as his own daughter, and he’s entirely unwilling to lose another child. Joel goes on a rampage through the Firefly headquarters and slaughters just about everyone in the building. When he reaches the operating room, the surgeon tries to talk him down, and Joel responds by shooting him in the head. When Marlene confronts Joel as he’s escaping the building with an unconscious Ellie, he kills her, too, hoping to prevent anyone from following them back to Jackson.

In sharp contrast to how “The Last of Us Part II” opens, the second season of HBO’s adaptation begins by introducing viewers to Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). She and a handful of surviving Fireflies are standing outside the hospital in Salt Lake City, right next to the massive plot of graves they had to dig after Joel’s attack. We immediately see the fallout of Joel’s violent actions and get a sense of just how horrific his assault on the Fireflies really was.

At this point, though, none of the surviving Fireflies have any clue where he might have gone. They also don’t know if there are any Fireflies left in the country, but they have heard rumors about a group of survivors living well in Seattle. Abby and her friends travel to Washington, where they end up joining the WLF, but all the while, she’s watching for any hint of where Joel might be.

Instead of explaining what happened in Salt Lake City to Ellie, Joel lies. When she wakes up, he tells her that there are other immune people and that the creation of a cure has not worked. He also says bandits attacked the Firefly base, forcing him to take her and run. Ellie has doubts about Joel’s story, but she keeps them to herself as the pair make their way back to Jackson.

Once they’re a short walk away from the safety of their new home, Ellie finally opens up a bit to Joel. She explains some of her doubts about his story and asks him to swear to her that he’s telling the truth. Instead, he doubles down on his lie, and in both the original game and in the first season of “The Last of Us,” his betrayal of Ellie’s trust is the end of the story. Ellie tells Joel, “Okay,” but the audience is left wondering if she’s really willing to believe him. As Season 2 reveals, the fallout of Joel’s lie completely alters the course of his relationship with Ellie in the coming years, and his actions in Salt Lake City will eventually result in his death.

When Ellie and Joel return to Jackson from Salt Lake City, their relationship is on some shaky ground. Ellie has doubts about Joel’s story, and she’s beginning to wonder if she can really trust him. For a while, though, she’s able to push those concerns out of her mind, and they both find some peace and happiness in Jackson.

As they settle into the community, Joel and Ellie take up residence in one of the available houses and start living very much like a father and daughter. Ellie is eager to start patrolling Jackson’s outskirts to defend the town from the infected, and Joel plays the role of protective father by telling her she isn’t old enough. Despite yearning for a bit more excitement, Ellie finds herself at home in Jackson and makes new friendships with Dina (Isabela Merced) and Jessie (Young Mazino). She also starts pursuing relationships and living almost like an ordinary teenager from our world.

As time passes, Joel and Ellie become integral members of the community. Joel heads out on patrols and uses his pre-apocalypse experience in construction to help build up parts of Jackson for new residents, while Ellie takes shooting lessons from Tommy and finds her own place in the world. Over the course of several years, however, the tension slowly rises between Ellie and Joel; instead of confronting Joel directly, Ellie starts giving him the cold shoulder — but the truth can’t stay hidden forever.

By the time “The Last of Us” Season 2 takes the audience to Seattle, the city is engulfed in war. This isn’t the fight between the WLF and FEDRA, because that particular battle took place entirely off camera. Instead, the WLF are fighting a group of people who seem like religious fanatics. They wear robes, shun technology, cut scars into their own cheeks, and worship a woman referred to as the Prophet.

Isaac somewhat derisively refers to this enemy faction as the Scars, but fans of “The Last of Us Part II” know that they call themselves Seraphites. The game has surprisingly little to say about them, their religion, or the origin of their conflict with the WLF. Players need to look for notes and really dig into hidden clues to piece together their story. HBO’s version of “The Last of Us” will almost certainly explain more about the conflict between the Seraphites and the WLF than the games, but fans are going to have to wait a while for that information. Season 2 reveals very little about the conflict between the two groups, but it’s safe to assume that the Scar/WLF war will be a big part of the narrative in Season 3.

Ellie is a smart girl, and she’s not really fooled by Joel’s story about what happened in Salt Lake City. Her doubt shows in the ending of “The Last of Us” Season 1, and it continues to gnaw at her as Ellie settles into her new life in Jackson. The beginning of Season 2 reveals that after 5 years, these doubts have all but destroyed her relationship with Joel, but it’s not until Episode 6 that we really get to see what happened between the two of them.

When she first arrived in Jackson, Ellie wanted to believe Joel’s story and to live a relatively peaceful life with him. It’s only very slowly over time that she starts running out of patience with him. But because she’s too afraid to directly confront him about what happened in Salt Lake City, Ellie begins acting out in other ways, eventually moving out of the house and into the garage.

In the games, Ellie goes to Salt Lake City and sees the aftermath of what happened for herself. In the show, she works up the courage to talk to Joel about what happened just one night before Jackson is attacked by infected. Joel confesses everything but says he has no regrets because he truly loves Ellie and wants her to live. She admits that she’s not sure how to forgive him, but now that the air has finally been cleared, she says she wants to try.

We meet Abby and her friends in the immediate aftermath of Joel’s assault on the Firefly base, and we see the moment that she decides she’s going to kill Joel. In that moment, her friends seem more committed to survival than revenge, so they agree with her plan while also encouraging her to lead the group to Seattle until they can find a way to track Joel down. After that, we don’t see them again for five years.

“The Last of Us” Season 2 has little to say about what Abby and her friends experienced during their time in Seattle, but it does show us where their journey ends. Somehow, she found out that Joel went to Jackson, and we see her group arrive outside the community in the dead of winter. They don’t know what to expect from Jackson, and most of them start to panic the moment they see the town. It’s significantly larger than any of them had anticipated, and Abby’s crew suddenly has doubts about being able to even find Joel in the community, much less how to kill him without being captured in the process. Abby has no patience for doubts or second thoughts, though, and she’s determined to charge the town’s streets herself if that’s what it takes to avenge her father’s death.

Anyone who played the games spent their time watching HBO’s “The Last of Us” anxiously awaiting one moment in particular. “The Last of Us Part II” shocked gamers in 2020 when it killed off Joel in the first few hours of the game, twisting and changing the story into a grief-fueled revenge tale for Ellie. Season 2 of the show basically follows the same path as its video game counterpart, with just a handful of notable differences.

In the show, Joel and Dina are out on patrol together while Abby is busy watching Jackson from afar and planning her assault. Infected swarm the town in a violent attack that didn’t happen at all in the games. Joel and Dina notice fires burning in Jackson right about the time they cross paths with Abby. But a terrible winter storm is rolling in, and though he desperately wants to get back to town, he agrees to follow Abby to the chalet where her friends are to avoid the weather.

Joel’s terrible luck helps Abby achieve her goal without ever going near the town. As soon as Joel and Dina are inside, Abby’s friends drug Dina, and Abby shoots Joel in the knee. She explains that her dad was the doctor who was supposed to perform the operation on Ellie and begins torturing Joel and beating him with a golf club. Ellie was also out on patrol, and when she arrives at the chalet she gets jumped by Abby’s friends, who seem pretty uncomfortable with just how violent Abby’s revenge has become. Ellie, badly beaten, witnesses Abby kill Joel, and she holds onto his body while Abby’s friends make their escape.

Ellie would have chased after Abby’s group if it had been possible, but her injuries were so severe that she needed intense medical attention in Jackson. It takes several months for Ellie to heal, and through all that time, the people of Jackson are also trying to recover from the devastating infected attack. Once Ellie is back in fighting form, she’s ready to chase down Joel’s killers immediately, but everything major that happens in the town is decided by council vote.

Ellie takes her pitch to a community meeting and explains why she thinks they should send a group of people after Joel’s killers. Ellie argues that she’s not purely motivated by revenge but also by a sense of justice and a need to prevent further violence in the community. The council shoots down Ellie’s proposal, largely because they can’t afford to lose any able-bodied community members when the town is in dire need of repairs.

Unfazed by this decision, Ellie decides to hunt Abby on her own. Dina, however, has a different idea. She comes to Ellie’s garage and explains that she’s already thought through a plan for the two of them to make it to Seattle and kill Abby together. With the help of some sympathetic townspeople, Ellie and Dina gather supplies and sneak out of town the next morning.

The journey from Jackson to Seattle isn’t short, but no amount of time could adequately prepare Ellie and Dina for the situation they stumble into when they reach the big city. As we’ve already discussed, by the time the pair arrive, Seattle is a war zone where the WLF and the Scars take potshots at each other whenever possible. On their first day in the city, Dina and Ellie realize that this mission is even more dangerous than they’d expected.

Shortly after reaching the city, the women see signs of the WLF at a nearby television station. They check out the building, and inside, they find a horror show. WLF soldiers who have been massacred by Scars are hanging from ropes, cut open from throat to pelvis. Before Ellie and Dina can really register what they’re seeing, more WLF soldiers arrive and begin scouring the building for Scars.

Ellie kills a WLF soldier as she and Dina escape the building. They make their way to an abandoned theater and decide that it’s as safe a place as any for a temporary base. Once they’ve settled into their shelter, Dina and Ellie admit their feelings for each other, and Dina reveals that she’s pregnant with Jessie’s baby. Ellie is thrilled at the prospect of starting a new relationship and helping to raise Dina’s child — but she’s not willing to give up her revenge mission just yet.

The way cordyceps functions is one of the dumb things fans ignore about “The Last of Us”  — it doesn’t really work when viewed through a real-world scientific lens, but the game version of the fungus infects people via spores in the air. The first season of the show changes that, clarifying that the cordyceps infection does not have an airborne component — at least until Season 2.

In the second season of the show, the WLF are hard at work making Seattle as safe and livable as possible. Part of that project involves restoring an abandoned hospital to make it usable again. While clearing out the hospital, WLF soldiers make a horrifying discovery in the basement. The building’s dark, dank underbelly is a perfect breeding ground for cordyceps, and the fungus has grown to cover the area’s walls, floors, and ceilings. As soldiers explore it, they start coughing, and then they start turning. The WLF realizes that the cordyceps in the hospital has become airborne, so they do everything possible to seal off the basement before the new infection can escape.

It’s hard to say how this new development is going to change the story of “The Last of Us Part II” as HBO continues its adaptation. Season 2 made sure to emphasize the threat of airborne infection, so it seems like this new evolution of cordyceps will have wide-ranging effects. Only one thing is certain: the world of “The Last of Us” just got a lot more dangerous.

Ellie’s second day in Seattle is extremely eventful. In the morning, she and Dina have another conversation about the pregnancy. Dina insists that her baby doesn’t change anything about their mission, promising that she’s as committed to finding Joel’s killers as ever. With that in mind, the two head into the city to search and, before long, find themselves caught in the midst of the war between the WLF and the Scars.

Neither faction is friendly toward Ellie and Dina, and soon, the women find themselves running from both groups. Their mission would be over right here if it weren’t for the intervention of a familiar face when Jessie swoops in and picks off some of the infected who are attacking them. He explains that, after they left, he and Tommy decided to go after them. Now, Jessie wants the three of them to reunite with Tommy — and get out of Seattle as quickly as possible.

Dina was injured while running from the Scars, so Jessie takes her back to the theater. Ellie decides to go on alone, hoping to find one of Abby’s companions at the hospital. She runs into Nora (Tati Gabrielle) and chases her down to the basement. The now-airborne cordyceps begins to turn Nora, but Ellie is saved by her immunity. She takes the opportunity to torture Nora for information about Abby’s whereabouts.

Ellie’s third day in Seattle finally brings her face-to-face with Abby, but not in the way she intended. Jessie continues to pressure Ellie and Dina to return to Jackson, but before they can head home, the group needs to find Tommy. Leaving the injured Dina at the theater, Ellie and Jessie go to find their friend, and they eventually hear him fighting WLF soldiers off in the distance. Jessie wants Ellie’s help getting to Tommy, but right at that moment, she pieces together the information she got from torturing Nora and believes she knows where Abby is.

Ellie abandons Jessie to go off on her quest for revenge. She heads to a nearby aquarium, but instead of Abby, she finds Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). Ellie holds the pair at gunpoint and tries to get information about Abby, but Owen makes a move to attack. Ellie fires her gun, killing Owen, Mel, and Mel’s unborn baby all in one shot. Shaken, she returns to the theater and finds that the others are all waiting for her.

Unfortunately, Abby’s figured out that Ellie is in the city, and she shows up at the theater for a confrontation. Abby shoots and kills Jessie, and Season 2 ends on a cliffhanger with Abby holding Tommy and Ellie at gunpoint. In Looper’s review of “The Last of Us” Season 2, we do point out that the final events of the season rush by a little too quickly, but as fans of the game already know, there’s plenty more story yet to come.