The Last of Us returns to HBO and Max Sunday for a seven-episode second season based on the videogame. With Season 1’s debut in January 2023, the two-year plus gap between installments might leave some details fuzzy.

Below find a full recap of The Last of Us Season 1 and the most salient points to remember ahead of Season 2’s arrival this weekend.

Outbreak Day

On September 26, 2013, the Cordyceps brain infection reached critical mass, manifesting in all people without discrimination. The fungus, which had previously been unable to survive in the human body because our internal temperature was too hot for it, evolved and mutated as the world got warmer due to climate change, making it able to take hold in humans and override their brains to turn them into mushroom-ridden zombies.

Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), a humble contractor living in Austin, Texas, at the time with his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker), worked a normal job that day, the day after his birthday, with his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna). Sarah went to school like normal, but the sense that things were off became apparent when she spent the afternoon at her neighbors’ home, and the old lady they were looking after got twitchy, a symptom of cordyceps.

According to news stations and radios, the disease first showed up in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the backstory of that discovery gets more detailed in the second episode of The Last of Us Season 1. Outbreak Day, as the apocalypse was referred to later, is the main subject of Episode 1. Joel and Tommy drove up to get Sarah after she had fallen asleep to movie night with her dad. Tommy split from the group, and Joel and Sarah were tracked down by a military soldier dressed for all sorts of protection. After radioing his higher command, the soldier began to shoot at Joel and Sarah despite Joel’s repeated assurances that they weren’t sick. Sarah died of a gunshot wound to her abdomen, and Joel Miller was never the same. He wears the watch that Sarah got fixed for him for his birthday although the glass face is shattered.

Joel Miller Decided to Accompany Ellie Williams West

Twenty years after Outbreak Day, Joel was just getting by, doing odd jobs and numbing himself at night. He had a flame kindling with Tess (Anna Sorv), who decided to accompany him when Marlene asked them to take Ellie out West. Unfortunately, Tess was bitten by an Infected person, so she told Joel to go on without her and “save the person worth saving,” by which she meant Ellie.

Though they were reluctant to travel together at first, Joel and Ellie forged a bond unbreakable by anything they went through on their journey — from the East coast and FEDRA’s strict monitoring of the Quarantine Zones to cities that completely rebelled against that way of living.

Society Has Split Into Factions Like FEDRA and The Fireflies

Since the outbreak hit at least all of the United States on the same day, various cities that are shown in the series have evolved in different ways in the aftermath of the apocalyptic events.

FEDRA, or the Federal Disaster Response Association, first corralled most of the population into QZs, or Quarantine Zones, once they killed off all the Infected and figured out how to keep the infection from spreading — by avoiding rogue Infected bites. FEDRA operated like the military with strict curfews and rations in the QZs, leading many to rebel against the lack of freedom they felt the faction was imposing on them.

The Fireflies are the main rebel group in response to FEDRA in most cities. Their slogan is “When You’re Lost in the Darkness, Look for the Light.” They also have a symbol that gets stamped on their territory. They operate as free radicals and counter FEDRA moves, fighting for liberation in the QZs.

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Collaborators worked with FEDRA to stop Firefly growth and actions. They are also known as “rats.” Lamar Johnson’s Henry Burrell was a collaborator on the run from a rebel group different from The Fireflies in Kansas City, where the QZ and all FEDRA presence had been dissolved. Henry killed the leader of the resistance movement there, brother to Kathleen Coghlan (Melanie Lynskey), in order to get medicine for his younger brother Sam’s (Keivonn Woodard) leukemia. This is just one example of how the global pandemic and 20 years following threw all morals into question and made survival the top priority for many, including the hardened Joel and 14-year-old Ellie.

Aside from the peaceful commune Tommy lives on in Wyoming, Joel and Ellie also experienced a religious cult led by David (Scott Shepherd), a religious leader who used the Bible to “shepherd his sheep,” but whom they looked to for leadership. David’s flock also didn’t know it, but they were eating human meat because game had run so low where they were living. Four men from Silver Lake had been at Colorado State University where Ellie and Joel were looking for Firefly doctors and labs, and one of them stabbed Joel. He also killed one of the men, so the cult were out for vengeance against Joel. Luckily, Ellie nursed him back to health just in time for his wound to heal while she was captured and held in captivity. David wanted her to lead the group with him before she discovered they were turning in to cannibals.

Bill & Frank

Still others combatted the drastic shift in life, like Nick Offerman’s Bill, whose survivalist instincts led to much preparation for the end of the world as it had been known. Hiding from FEDRA agents in a basement in his home like a bunker, Bill avoided being shipped off to a QZ where people could go “if there was room.” Bill rigged his house and the surrounding area with enough booby traps to protect him for a while, but the one thing he was guarding that someone got through to was his heart.

One day, Frank (Murray Bartlett), on his way west from the Baltimore QZ, fell into a hole outside Bill’s compound. He begged Bill to host him for lunch and a shower, and Bill dazzled Frank with a meal of Michelin star level prep and a fancy wine paired with it. Frank saw Bill’s piano and started playing it before asking Bill to play. Bill’s rendition of Linda Rondstadt’s “Long, Long Time” tipped Frank off that there was way more beneath the tough shell of Bill’s conservative conspiracy theorist exterior. Frank got past Bill’s armor and the pair fell in love, living out a romance for the ages in Episode 3 of The Last of Us.

The pair also struck up a trade with Joel and Tess. Frank unfortunately became ill, and he initiated his death after a nice last day with Bill, who also followed suit with drugs in their last bottle of wine.

Ellie Williams Is Immune To Cordyceps

Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) is the second half of the dynamic duo that drives The Last of Us. Viewers met Ellie when she was in captivity with the Fireflies under Marlene (Merle Dandridge). In the finale, Ellie’s backstory comes into view with the story of her birth by Anna (Ashley Johnson, who originated the voice of Ellie in the video game), who was in labor while fleeing an Infected person who bit her right as she gave birth to Ellie. She cut the umbilical cord after she was bitten, so Ellie grew up with cordyceps inside of her that matured with her. Thus, when Ellie was bit by an Infected person, she had a bite wound for a while, but it didn’t get past that stage. A doctor thinks the cordyceps within Ellie tells those cordyceps that she is already a cordycep. This makes her immune, and the whole point of her expedition west with Joel is to get her to doctors who can use her blood to find a cure.

Ellie proved her immunity after she got bit by an Infected person in a boarded up mall in Boston. Episode 7 of The Last of Us Season 1 took viewers back to that experience, which she had first said happened to her alone, but it really occurred when her best friend Riley (Storm Reid), who she had attended FEDRA school with, took her on an adventure down there. The Infected bit Riley too, and she didn’t make it. Before they were attacked by the rogue Infected person, Ellie kissed Riley, and Riley confirmed that she had feelings for Ellie too.

Joel’s Brother Tommy Went to Wyoming

Joel’s other motive for heading west from Boston is to find his brother Tommy, who had last settled in Wyoming from what Joel knew. Tommy, who was in the army for Operation Desert Storm, first joined the Fireflies after the outbreak, but he wanted out of the anarchist group too. Last Joel had heard from him came from a radio tower in Cody, Wyoming.

Episode 6 saw Joel and Ellie happen upon Tommy’s new people, a group living in a commune in Jackson, Wyoming. Tommy met Maria (Rutina Wesley) there, and they are now married and expecting a child. Joel’s initial reaction to the news was less than Tommy hoped for, but then Joel asked Tommy to take Ellie for the rest of the quest since he had a bad feeling about what would happen.

Ellie was furious with Joel, and he relented, offering her a choice between the two men. She chose him. He did get stabbed on the next leg of their journey, and Ellie miraculously traded a full deer for penicillin to heal him from his infected wound.

The Operation and The Cure

Once they made it to Salt Lake City, Utah, as signaled by Firefly clues left behind, Marlene was there waiting for Joel and Ellie. The next step was for Ellie to undergo brain surgery so that the doctors could isolate her cordyceps cells, multiply them, and turn them into a vaccine for the whole population as a cure. As soon as Joel put together that Ellie would likely not survive the brain surgery, or at least come out of it very changed, he rebelled against all of Marlene’s Fireflies and went on a killing spree to get to Ellie before they operated on her.

He then took her, unconscious, back to Wyoming. When she woke up groggy in the back of the truck they had taken from Bill and Frank’s, he lied to her and told her that they had done tests on her and that there were a bunch of other people like her who were immune to the cordyceps. He further complicated the lie by saying that the doctors couldn’t make the cure work. Ellie’s last words to Joel at the end of the Season 1 finale were “Swear to me” that everything he had said about the Fireflies was true. He said “swear.”

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