The ending of "The Last of Us" season one came as a shock to the uninitiated,
but those in-the-know were bracing for it all along,
when they weren't too busy keeping their eyes peeled for Easter eggs. And there
were plenty for fans to find. Spoilers for both "The Last of Us" games and show ahead!
The finale of Season 1 opens with Ashley Johnson, the voice of Ellie in the games, running into
an abandoned farmhouse to get away from an infected runner. In both games, Johnson brought
the character of Ellie to life. In the show, she plays Anna, who is revealed to be Ellie's mother.
Throughout the cold open, in which Anna fights off an infected mere moments after her water breaks,
hearing her talk and grunt is surreal, as it's impossible for fans of the games not
to picture the digital version of Ellie. Anna is bitten by the
runner who follows her into the house, and Ellie is born during the struggle.
The source of Ellie's immunity is never revealed in the game, though it's implied that there is
something irregular about how cordyceps mutates in her brain, which is why the Fireflies must perform
a fatal surgery on her to develop a cure. In the finale, we learn that Ellie's immunity likely
stems from the fact that she was still attached to Anna's umbilical cord when Anna was bitten.
Ashley Johnson playing Ellie's mother is pretty perfect, but if that wasn't enough,
Laura Bailey, who plays Abby in "The Last of Us Part II," plays one of the three masked
nurses in the operating room. No spoilers, but fans of "Part II" know Abby's connection to
that operating room and what goes down in it, making Bailey's cameo a heartbreaking touch.
There are several recognizable motifs, themes, and objects in "The Last of Us," and many of them
are shown in the finale. We finally get to see the pivotal giraffe scene that has been teased
all season long, and there is the same harrowing final story beat when Ellie says "Okay" to Joel
near Jackson. One iconic weapon, however, finally gets a well-earned backstory early in the episode.
At the beginning of the episode, Ellie's pregnant mother Anna fights off an infected
runner with a knife. The knife is actually the switchblade that Ellie has been carrying
for years — a piece of information we never learn in the games. In fact,
Anna only appears in the game via a letter she left for Ellie.
Over the course of the two games, the one constant in Ellie's life is her switchblade. Now that we
know it originally belonged to her mother, it carries even more weight in the franchise's lore.
At the heart of "The Last of Us Part II" is Ellie's relationship with Dina, a girl her age who
came to Jackson before her and Joel. In the first game, Dina doesn't make any appearances and is
never mentioned, but it's quite possible that we got to see her briefly in Episode 6 of the show.
After arriving in Jackson, Ellie and Joel are given a proper meal from Tommy and Maria.
While she's chowing down, Ellie yells at a girl lurking behind a wooden post in the dining hall.
"What!?" "What's wrong with you?"
"What about her manners?" "She was just curious."
The girl looks like Dina, and the interaction parallels a conversation she has with Ellie
in the second game, when they reminisce about Ellie first getting to Jackson:
"Stuffing food in all my pockets for later like it was gonna run out."
"I saw that!"
It hasn't been confirmed yet whether or not the girl was Dina, but showrunner Craig Mazin
all-but-confirmed it on an episode of the official "The Last of Us" podcast.
"I wonder who that could be, theoretically, or not. We'll find
out maybe one day." "Oh!"
While touring Jackson in Episode 6, Maria takes Ellie and Joel to the stables,
where they get to meet a foal that goes by a familiar name.
"You want to pet her?" "Yeah! What's her name?"
"Shimmer." "Shimmer!"
Fans of the games surely perked their heads up at that detail, as Shimmer is the horse that Dina and
Ellie take when they go to Seattle in "The Last of Us Part II." When we meet Shimmer in the game,
she's a fully grown horse, so getting to see her as a youngling is a sweet touch.
Early on in Episode 7, as Ellie is about to go to bed during the FEDRA school flashback,
there is a quick shot of a stack of cassette tapes on her desk. On top,
we see A-ha's greatest hits compilation. Beneath it, there's an Etta James album.
Both are Easter eggs and continue to get fleshed out across the entire episode.
After Riley takes Ellie into the abandoned mall, Ellie marvels at the wonders of a
working escalator. What's playing in the background? A-Ha's hit song, "Take On Me."
Fans of "The Last of Us Part II" will recognize the significance of the famous song right away,
as, in the game, Ellie plays an acoustic rendition of the song to Dina in the music
store in Seattle. The song is an important piece of Dina and Ellie's relationship,
and the showrunners opted to bridge that into Riley and Ellie's relationship, too.
Just like in the "Left Behind" DLC, Ellie and Riley dance and kiss to Etta James'
"I Got You Babe." That song choice was likely always going to find its way into the episode,
but seeing it hinted at early in the episode is a nice touch.
As Riley and Ellie are making their way into the abandoned mall in Episode 7,
Ellie's flashlight starts flickering uncontrollably. Ellie shakes her
flashlight to get it working again, much like the player would in the game.
Whenever a flashlight starts to go bad in the game, players have to gently "shake"
their controller to get it working again. Showing Ellie fix her faulty flashlight
like this is a clever way to insert a common gameplay moment into the narrative of the show.
In the abandoned mall, there is a shot of a movie poster for "Dawn of the Wolf Part II." In the
game, Joel reveals that "Dawn of the Wolf" was one of the last movies he and Sarah watched together.
"Dawn of the Wolf" is "The Last of Us" universe's version of "Twilight," as Joel says that it's just
another "dumb teen movie" when Ellie asks if the main character gets "gutted" at the end.
When "The Last of Us" was being developed by Naughty Dog, "Twilight" was one of the
biggest movie franchises in the world. But, unlike "Twilight" and its five installments,
"Dawn of the Wolf" was limited to just two entries before the world fell apart.
On the walls of Ellie's FEDRA room, there are numerous space-themed posters, including one of
the moon, and a "Mortal Kombat II" poster, an interest hinted at by Ellie in Episode 3 that
will fully come to fruition later in Episode 7. There's a picture of a giraffe in there,
as well as a plethora of "Savage Starlight" comic books, one of which Ellie reads before bed.
On her bedside table, too, is Will Livingston's "No Pun Intended Vol.
1." We got to see Ellie reading from "Volume Too" earlier in the season,
and it is Episode 7 where we learn that it was Riley who gifted her the beloved second edition.
There are also dinosaur drawings, a hint to a quick moment later in the episode,
and a memorable scene in "The Last of Us Part II."
When Riley reveals that she has a gift for Ellie, Ellie quickly begins a rapid-fire interrogation
of Riley, begging to know what the gift is. At the end of her rambling, she offers a final question:
"Is it a dinosaur?"
Fans of "The Last of Us Part II" will remember that, during the first major
flashback in the game, Joel takes Ellie to a surprise location for her birthday.
Joel won't budge on it, even though Ellie berates him with never-ending questions.
"Is it a dinosaur?"
And then, to her excitement, it is. Joel takes Ellie to the Wyoming Museum of Science and
History, which has a large, full-scale statue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex outside.
One of the biggest changes in HBO's adaptation of "The Last of Us" is the location where Joel and
Ellie meet Henry and Sam. In the game, the meeting takes place in Pittsburgh, but in the show,
it's changed to Kansas City. Moving the location doesn't have a huge impact on the narrative,
save for how Pittsburgh's yellow bridges were used as a beacon of direction for Ellie and
Joel in the game. However, Pittsburgh does not get thrown to the curb entirely in the show.
In Episode 8, Ellie and David take shelter in a rundown barn. David tells Ellie that he was
part of the Pittsburgh quarantine zone until it fell out of FEDRA's control. Viewers who haven't
played the game won't pick up on the significance of this, but die-hard fans of the franchise will
be pleased to hear Pittsburgh get a mention. David claiming that the city fell aligns with
events in the canon, as Pittsburgh is overrun with hunters who rule the streets in the game.
In "The Last of Us Part 2," Ellie tells her girlfriend Dina that
Joel's favorite movie franchise is a cheesy fictional '80s action series,
and she wants to use it as an olive branch to help ease their strained relationship.
"What movie you guys gonna watch? What's Joel into?"
"Uh, Curtis and Viper 2."
Later in the game, while taking shelter with Dina and Jesse in a Seattle theater,
Ellie notices a "Curtis and Viper 4" poster on the wall in one of the back
rooms and makes a comment to herself that it was one of Joel's favorites.
In the show, fans will notice that the DVD Sarah borrows for Joel on his birthday in Episode 1 is
"Curtis and Viper 2," a film that obviously holds importance in their relationship. So,
what's the plot? In "The Last of Us Part 2," Ellie explains that it's about,
"Two former commandos that go rogue to fight bad guys. And I think in [Curtis and Viper 2],
they go up against Russian spies or something. [...] The young one,
Viper, he’s a trained ninja. And he’s a complete badass."
"Oh, this is the one with the deleted scenes!" "Yeah, imagine how bad those have to be."
This Easter egg makes the impact the franchise has on Ellie and Joel in the
video game much more dynamic, as it emphasizes what Ellie means to Joel
and how she has become a surrogate daughter to him after Sarah's death.
Joel is eventually willing to share his interests with Ellie — interests that
he once shared with Sarah, whose absence he felt so much that he
could barely talk about her in the original "The Last of Us."
When players wake up as Sarah in the video game, they have the option to pick up a birthday card
in her bedroom. The card reads "Congratulations!" and features an illustration of a green cartoon
dinosaur wearing a party hat. Sarah says that she forgot to give the card to her dad,
but that worry is soon overshadowed by the noises and chaos outside.
In Episode 1 of the show, there is a shot of Sarah's bedroom,
and that exact same birthday card can be briefly seen on her desk,
underneath some art supplies. The inclusion of the art supplies in the scene could mean
that Sarah went to the trouble of hand-making her father's card, a neat detail left out of the game.
Much like in the game, the shots of the birthday card are not lingered on for very long. Sadly,
Sarah forgets to give it to Joel after gifting him his
repaired watch and falling asleep while watching a movie together.
Another neat detail from the opening: Sarah is wearing a t-shirt for the fictional band
"Halican Drops" in both the show and the game. In both versions, the list of tour stops on the
back include several locations that will be important to the story down the road.
One of the most infamous scenes from the original game comes when Tommy, Joel,
and Sarah are attempting to drive out of Austin amidst the outbreak. When they end up downtown,
Tommy's truck is totaled by another vehicle as the infected attack survivors and fires
break out across town, which leads to Sarah injuring her leg in the escape.
Fans were likely expecting that very same outcome to unfold in the first episode of the show, given
how pivotal this event is in "The Last of Us" and the fact that the scene mirrors the perspective
players experience in the game. Instead, the writers changed the layout of the scene, opting
to first fake audiences out with an oncoming truck that just narrowly misses Tommy's truck.
The chaos that flips Tommy's truck in the show does not stem from another
road-bound vehicle. Instead, a plane crashes in close proximity to Tommy, Joel, and Sarah,
which leads to debris flying at the truck and causing it to crash. The switch-up gave
the scene a fresh feel in an episode that was largely faithful to the original game.
Speaking of "faithful to the game" – here's an easy-to-miss small detail that fans of the game
likely picked up on. When Joel is forced to kill his infected neighbor with a wrench in Episode 1,
he discards it, likely out of disgust for what he just had to do with it.
But in the "The Last of Us" game series, wrenches can be used as weapons, and the
player is forced to discard them all the time, since they only have a limited number of uses.
So switching out Joel killing his neighbor Jimmy for Joel killing Nana, the mother of
his neighbor Connie, was a fresh take that also nodded at the mechanics of the game.
The world of "The Last of Us" is plunged into chaos after the cordyceps fungal outbreak. In
the game, it begins with infected crops in South America. However, the show takes one of the main
sources of the spread — airborne spores — and substitutes them with tendrils that grow out of
the infected. There must be some explanation for how cordyceps took over the world in the show.
"I was thinking we'd make some cookies!"
"Chocolate chip?" "Raisin."
Joel and Sarah manage to avoid eating flour-based products at least four
different times in Episode 1. First, they find they have run out of it at breakfast
and make eggs instead of pancakes. Later, they politely decline when their neighbors
offer them biscuits – the same biscuits the infected neighbor ate. After that,
Sarah and Connie bake cookies together, but Sarah doesn't take any because they
have raisins in them. Finally, Joel forgets to pick up his birthday cake after work.
Beyond that, the creators of the show may have hinted at all of this in "The
Last of Us Podcast." There, Craig Mazin mentions that,
"Careful viewers of this episode will be rewarded repeatedly because little
bits of breadcrumbs have been planted that are going to pay off later in interesting ways."
Plus, it just so happens that the world's largest flour mill is in
Jakarta, which appears to be at the center of the outbreak on the show.
"Jakarta. Where is that? Middle East? Doesn't ring a bell."
"Definitely a country. Maybe part of Asia?" "Jakarta isn't a country."
The second episode of the series reveals the first cases of the human variant of Cordyceps took
place near a flour factory in Jakarta. An episode later, Joel explains to Ellie that it was indeed
contaminated baking ingredients that helped the outbreak spread throughout the world so quickly.
"Dad, you love biscuits."
"I do … But I'm on Atkins."
When Ellie awakens at the beginning of Episode 2, a butterfly hovers above her.
This is a direct callback to various scenes in the original game, where Ellie is constantly
enamored by the beauty of the butterflies and fireflies living outside of the quarantine zone.
Butterflies become a symbol of hope,
which mirrors the hope that the Fireflies have in Ellie's resistance to the Cordyceps
virus -- which they think may hold the key to producing a viable vaccine.
"A vaccine."
Any child born after Outbreak Day is brought into a world of immense violence
and cruelty. When Ellie is falling in love with nature, taking the time to read comic books,
or cracking jokes about the adults, it's a reminder that she's still just a kid
trying to piece together some semblance of fun amid a hollow and deadly reality.
On top of all that, before the events of "The Last of Us Part II," Ellie gets a tattoo of a moth,
signifying the changes her character was starting to develop compared to the butterfly imagery.
"Um, just so it's out there, I can't swim."
In the original game, it's a running joke -- and nuisance -- that Ellie can't swim. In
numerous missions, Joel is forced to push Ellie across bodies of water using a wooden pallet.
In "The Last of Us Part II," flashbacks show that Joel teaches her to swim and
she actually becomes quite skilled at it. She even gets good enough to make a joke about her
past shortcomings when the two encounter a stray pallet near a museum in Wyoming.
"Joel! Look! Wanna give me a ride?" "Those days are long gone, kiddo."
When Joel, Tess, and Ellie reach the hotel in Boston,
there is a lot of water separating them and the stairwell they need to get to.
Ellie says that she can't swim because there aren't many pools in the quarantine zone.
Annoyed by her point, Joel shows Ellie that the water only goes up to his knees.
Ellie's inability to swim isn't as much of a plot point in the show as it was
in the game -- and those ubiquitous pallets also never come into play.
In the game, as Joel and Ellie are about to reach the hospital in Salt Lake City
where the Fireflies are stationed, they stumble upon a group of giraffes in an
open field. It's one of the most beautiful and enchanting parts of the first game,
and it gives the player a break from the never-ending brutality. Players
can stand at the ledge and watch the giraffes for as long as they'd like.
"It's got its ups and downs. You can't deny the view, though."
In Episode 2 of the show, as Joel, Tess, and Ellie are traveling across Boston and
heading toward the Capitol building, they stop and take in the sights from a rooftop.
"You can't deny that view."
Fragments of the same composition that soundtracked the giraffe encounter in
the game are used to score this scene – a subtle link between the game and the show.
In the finale, we get a live-action version of the
giraffe scene, a touching moment in a heartbreaking and violent episode.
"Is it everything you'd hoped for?"
"It's got its ups and down. But you can't deny that view."