We have met the enemy, and he is Jeffrey Wright. And not for the first time, either. The acclaimed actor is reprising his role as Isaac Dixon, a FEDRA turncoat turned head of the Washington Liberation Front, from the video game The Last of Us 2. At least so I’ve read online, since I’m new to the material. From what I’ve seen so far, though, he’s a rough customer.
A flashback to the days of FEDRA’s reign over Seattle eleven years earlier initially portrays Isaac sympathetically, positioning him as a grizzled sergeant who’s sick to death of his men’s endless guffawing about committing various crimes against humanity and stripping the population of their rights. But he hasn’t grown tired of violence in general — he’s simply realized he’s been killing the wrong people. He tosses grenades into his squad’s APC and locks them inside, blowing them up. He spares only a newcomer to the team (Ben Ahlers), who must switch sides too if he wants to live.
Years later, we rejoin Isaac as he monologues supervillainously about trying to impress women with his cooking and coveting fine French cookware he only has access to now that the world has ended. He delivers this little speech to a man (played by Ryan Masson) who, we see with a sudden and shocking camera cut, is nude, bound, and badly beaten and tortured. The cookware is there to burn him with, you see.
Isaac is trying to get intel out of this guy on the planned location of the next attack by his cult, the Seraphites. (They’re the shaved-head, scar-faced bow-and-arrow enthusiasts we met last week.) During their horrifying conversation, if you can call it that, we learn that the conflict between Wolves and Seraphites goes back years, that some members of the group believe in the literal divinity of its founder while others don’t, and that neither the military goons nor the holy warriors will hesitate to kill women or children. But the slow trickle of Wolf defectors, the captive says, means that the Seraphites’ victory is inevitable. Isaac responds by killing the guy.
Running parallel to all this are the continuing adventures of Ellie and Dina. The streets, buildings, and tunnels of Seattle prove to be much more dangerous than they’d anticipated from afar. Mutilated members of the WLF hang strung up from ceilings or lie riddled with arrows. The Wolves themselves are heavily armed and out in force. The infected save the two women from the Wolves, then pursue them through abandoned subway cars and various other post-apocalyptic environments until they finally reach safety.
At least that’s how Ellie, flooded with adrenaline, sees it. But Dina saw her get bitten, right in full view, in an attempt to block a ravening infected from sinking its teeth into Dina instead. Ellie knows she’s immune, but Dina doesn’t. It takes a lot of convincing for Ellie not to get her head blown off right then and there, but Ellie admits her unique condition and convinces Dina to wait and see. The pair make it to the middle of the night, when Dina sees Ellie is right as rain.
Awed and overwhelmed by her friend’s unexpected lack of infection, Dina has a confession of her own: She’s pregnant. At this point they’ve shared their biggest secrets with one another: having sex seems almost like a lateral move, but that’s what they do. Now an official couple — Dina says she’d have acted on her feelings for Ellie sooner if it hadn’t been for a homophobic upbringing and her complicated relationship with her ex-boyfriend Jesse — they end the episode staring into the smoke and explosions of a full-fledged battle between the Wolves and forces still unknown.
We’ll see how things go when we watch the battle itself unfold, but for now there’s something quietly untoward about the picture being painted of this conflict. When Isaac and his captive go back and forth about why their respective sides keep fighting and committing atrocities, they describe a more or less perfect cycle of violence: It’s eye for eye, tooth for tooth, tit for tat, back on through the years so long neither man can reach or recall the starting point. What the Wolves have over the Seraphites in firepower and technology, the Seraphim have over the Wolves in unwavering commitment to an ideal. In the show’s world that makes them more or less even, and more or less equally at fault for what’s going on.
But this obscures the real-world nature of asymmetrical warfare, which generally occurs when a militarily and economically superior nation controls a disadvantaged one by force. There’s no “chicken and egg” situation there, as Isaac dismisses the Wolf/Seraphite war — we know which side did the laying and which side did the hatching, so to speak. The show’s both-sidesism has ugly implications for how we process real-world occupations, war crimes, even genocide.
On a less serious note, as action-packed as the episode is, the action it’s packed with feels taken straight from a video game. As a non-player I can’t say whether it actually was or not, but I’ve got enough big-budget action-game experience under my belt to recognize the abandoned buildings, the rusted-out vehicles, the narrow crevices, the overturned subway cars, the sudden and disorienting flips from moving horizontally to moving vertically and back again, the thin fences and glass windows holding for just long enough for our heroes to get away (not the first time this season has done the fence business), the conveniently placed crates to crouch behind (ditto). Put it all together and it feels less like watching an survival-horror show and more like watching somebody play a survival-horror game. That’s only debatably exciting when it’s your buddy or your spouse doing it, let alone the unseen hands of Craig Mazin.
Finally, boy can this show get schmaltzy. I’m all for the hot we nearly lost each other, we just shared life-changing information, we can’t contain the feelings anymore hookup on the floor that finally unites Ellie and Dina as an official Item. That’s a tried-and-true genre storytelling beat, and all I ask of TLoU is delivering those on a reliable basis. But having Ellie do a live performance of one of those breathy slowed-down covers of pop songs they use in movies and TV shows all the time — “Take On Me,” oh brother — that literally brings Dina to tears? It’s a little much, even if pregnancy hormones are involved. I’m going back and forth on the pair riding through a gay neighborhood and not understanding what the rainbow imagery represents: It’s eye-rollingly unsusbtle, but we live in unsubtle times.
Still, I think turbo-charging Ellie and Dina’s relationship, kicking it off the episode after they set out on their quest rather than saving it for some climactic moment down the line, is smart. It adds some verve to things, some spice, and that’s needed in the absence of Joel’s quiet charisma. And for all the hoary action-game tropes it employs, the long escape from the infected keeps the pace elevated. Even the sudden and brutal violence inflicted by Isaac, first on his squad and then years later on his prisoner, serves the additional purpose of simply keeping us in the audience alert, anxious, uncomfortable. These are exactly the kind of emotions a post-apocalyptic horror show should be aiming to generate. No offense to voting on motions brought before the town council, but that was no way to follow up the death of your main character. Thrills and chills are more like it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.