The Last of Us Season 2 has been great so far, with the kind of strong storytelling that we’d expect from the creative team. Now, it looks like it’s about to fully lean into one of the most terrifying mechanics from the video game.
HBO just dropped the teaser for next week’s episode, “Feel Her Love,” and it looks like the spores are finally making their debut.
Up to this point, the series has largely sidestepped this element of the infection opting for tendrils over airborne transmission, but fans of the game know how big of a deal spores are. They’re lethal, invisible, and a reminder that the world of The Last of Us is always hostile, even when it’s quiet.
The teaser picks up right after this week’s emotional rollercoaster of an episode, “Day One.” Ellie and Dina escape a horde of infected, but not without consequence. Ellie takes a bite to protect Dina, who, up until this moment, had no idea about Ellie’s immunity.
Dina’s almost shoots Ellie in the head as her first reaction, not knowing the bite isn’t a death sentence.
Thankfully, Ellie manages to convince her, and the moment of terror quickly turns into a tender and revealing moment. Dina tells Ellie she’s pregnant with Jesse’s child. That tension then leads to intimacy.
But the moment that really hit home for fans of the game came when Ellie discovered a rundown music shop and found a guitar. What followed was a soft, fragile performance of A-ha’s “Take On Me,” a direct nod to a touching moment from the second game.
“[In the show], it’s like, I’m fully embracing not only the love I have for her, but also I’m feeling the love that she has for Joel,” Isabela Merced (Dina) told GQ.
“And that’s why it’s so emotional. It’s a moment of beautiful grief, happy grief, that is so delicate and fragile, and expressed so beautifully through music, and music is such a big component of the game. That song will never be the same. I will never hear it and not think of [Dina and Ellie].”
Now, with spores entering the picture, the stakes are about to rise again. The teaser shows Ellie and Dina coming across a grotesquely decomposed infected body, and if the show follows the game’s logic, that corpse may still be contagious.
Infected bodies continue to emit spores long after death, creating invisible death zones for anyone who dares breathe them in.
Will the show finally force its characters to don gas masks like in the game? Or will it continue reinterpreting how the Cordyceps fungus behaves in this world? Either way, next week’s episode promises to dive headfirst into another piece of what made the original game so memorably terrifying.
