The Last of Us on HBO is still a very accurate adaptation of The Last of Us Part I, and it’s a great show for both old and new fans. Last week, in Episode 1, we talked about some of our favourite Easter eggs. We’ll look at the Easter eggs in Episode 2 and point out some fun details you might have missed. Let’s jump in and talk about “Infected,” the second episode of The Last of Us.
Word For Word, Bar For Bar
This episode of The Last of Us was directed by co-creator Neil Druckmann, so there will be a lot of references to the first game. We love Easter eggs that pay tribute to the games, and Druckmann gave us a lot of those. When Ellie, Joel, and Tess are walking through the city is the first big one.
On the roofs, Joel asks Ellie if the outside world is everything she hoped for, to which she responds, “The verdict is still out, but you can’t dispute that view.” This is one of the first times that Joel and Ellie are honest with each other, and the show does a great job of capturing it. Even though it’s a small scene, it shows how much the HBO team cares about the original game. We have a lot of these kinds of moments in this episode, especially when we meet our first Clicker at the end.
Ellie Can’t Swim
As Tess, Ellie, and Joel move through the quarantine zone, they come across a building that is flooded. They need to get to the other side, but Ellie doesn’t want to because she can’t swim. The water is up to Joel’s knees, which makes him laugh.
This small interaction is a nod to a big part of how The Last of Us Part I is played. In the first game, Ellie can’t swim, so it’s up to Joel (and the player) to figure out how she can get from one part of the map to another. It took a long time and sometimes made me angry. This idea is made fun of on the show by having Ellie walk through the water without help from Joel.
Ellie’s Switchblade
In the last episode, we saw Ellie briefly holding her switchblade, but here, Joel finally talks to her about it. It belongs to Hannah, Ellie’s mother, according to The Last of Us: Left Behind and The Last of Us: American Dreams. In both Last of Us games, Ellie’s main melee weapon is this knife. In The Last of Us Part I, Joel’s melee weapons break often, so he has to make new ones all the time. Ellie’s blade never breaks. Since she can’t have a gun, it’s her only defence against the infected.
The Amazing Clicker Cameos
Misty Lee and Phillip Kovats are back as the voices of the female and male Clickers in The Last of Us. Olivier-Ross Parent and Samuel Hoeksema play these characters on screen. In The Last of Us Parts I and II, Lee and Kovats performed the motion capture and vocal acting for the long-since extinct infected. As Joel, Ellie, and Tess try to get away from the Clickers without being seen, we hear their scary sounds for the first time. Kovats wrote on Twitter about his time on set:
Thanks @IGN !!!@Misty_Lee and I had an absolute blast working with @Neil_Druckmann and @clmazin reprising these characters and helping them come alive, playing against the amazing actors on screen
💙✌️ https://t.co/QCKUaiEWCf— phil (@philsound) January 17, 2023
Set Design That Fits The Game
We’ll try to keep this section short. We go through the city and into the museum, which is a familiar place for players. When our main characters get to the museum, fans will see right away that it looks just like the one in the game. This episode is mostly based on “The Outskirts,” the third chapter of The Last of Us Part I. The three of them go to the museum, where Tess gets infected and gives her life to buy more time for Joel and Ellie.
The Last of Us airs on HBO and HBO Max every Sunday with brand new episodes.
