What happens in the fourth episode of season two, ‘Day One’?
WARNING: Major spoilers for season two episode four ahead.
We open in the Seattle Quarantine Zone in 2018. In an armoured personnel carrier, a squad of FEDRA soldiers are shooting the breeze. When the newest recruit asks the squad why they refer to civilian protestors as “voters”, the sergeant, Isaac Dixon (Jeffrey Wright), grimly informs him that it’s a pejorative term as FEDRA removed their rights to vote.
The vehicle comes to a halt as a number of civilians block the road. Isaac exits the vehicle, bringing the rookie with him, under the pretence of talking the civilians into letting them through. But instead, Isaac greets the leader of the group, Hanrahan, who welcomes him to the fight. He throws a frag grenade into the vehicle and slams the door behind it. The driver is the only one able to scramble out but is immediately shot dead by Isaac. He then asks the rookie to make a choice.
Into Seattle
Back in the present day, Dina is pawing through an abandoned pharmacy in search of supplies. It’s mostly been picked clean, but she finds something of interest. She tells Ellie she needs to take a toilet break before joining her outside.
The pair roam the streets, finding relics of the city’s progressive past. However, being raised after the cordyceps outbreak, neither of them understand what the Pride murals and rainbow flags symbolise, and they misinterpret them as symbols of optimism.
They finally find a sign of WLF activity – a TV station with WLF graffiti painted on the satellite dish. Ellie begins to head toward it, but Dina reminds her that a sign that easily visible means that they would expect infiltrators to head towards it, and that to do so in the middle of the day would be ill advised. They wait out the time in an old record store, where Ellie finds a guitar in good condition, treating Dina to an acoustic cover of A-ha’s “Take On Me”. She poignantly notes that Joel taught her the song.
The Prisoner
Elsewhere in the city, Isaac is talking to someone in a kitchen. He heats a copper pan over the stove and mentions how he never thought he’d own a set of Mauviel cookware until the apocalypse made such things meaningless. His “companion” is revealed to be a Seraphite prisoner, bound, bloodied and naked on the kitchen floor. Isaac asks the “scar” when and where the next Seraphite attack is taking place, and when he gets no response, he tortures him by burning his arm with the pan.
The Seraphite prays to his prophet, and Isaac asks him where his prophet was when his group killed a WLF child. The hostage fires back that the WLF have murdered Seraphite children, and the WLF will eventually see the prophet’s light. Isaac looks to inflict another burn, but upon realising that no amount of torture will yield results, he executes him with his sidearm. Outside, two WLF troops stand guard. One is disturbed by Isaac’s actions, but the other, the rookie from the start of the episode, is entirely unmoved.
“Feel Her Love”
Back with Ellie and Dina, they prepare to infiltrate the TV station. While the plan is to just to find and kill Abby and her crew, they share an unspoken agreement that any WLF member is fair game. However, breaking into the building, they make a grim discovery. Bodies lie everywhere – peppered with arrows. Several are hanging from the upper floors, gutted and with entrails pulled out. On the wall is the same symbol they found on the dead bodies on the path to Seattle, but daubed in blood and accompanied by the message “Feel Her Love”. The scene is enough to make Dina sick for the second time.
A static noise grabs their attention. They find an active walkie talkie, which Dina quickly deduces was probably used to send out an SOS. Once again, she is proven correct, as a unit of WLF soldiers arrive on the scene. Ellie and Dina hide, while the unit pans out to search the building, with the leader giving a kill-on-sight order.
Ellie heads upstairs to look for an exit, but the windows do not open. She is located by one of the WLF and a struggle ensures. Dina makes the save, but not without alerting the rest of the unit. Shooting out a window, the pair flee out of the building and attempt to escape into the city’s disused subway system.
The WLF are in hot pursuit, however. As Ellie and Dina hide in the shadows, the unit arrives to hunt them down, using flares to light up the darkness. Unfortunately for them, by doing so they disturb a patch of cordyceps tendrils, and soon the sound of infected fills the tunnels. Dina counts, and quickly realises a horde is coming their way. As the infected quickly overwhelm the WLF unit, Ellie and Dina retreat into a subway train littered with dead bodies. They narrowly escape and find their way to the station level but are slowed by a rusty turnstile. As an infected attacks Dina, Ellie thinks fast and protects her by allowing it to bite her own arm. Dina drops the attacker, and the pair slip out the turnstile and seek refuge in an old theatre. But Dina is very aware of the bite, and knows there is only one thing she can do for Ellie…
Revelations
Safe in the theatre, Ellie bars the door and turns to find Dina has drawn her weapon, unaware of Ellie’s miracle immunity against the cordyceps infection. Ellie pleads with her to not shoot and fills her in about how she had been bitten before without changing. Dina is understandably sceptical, and distraught. Ellie convinces her to wait until morning – under gunpoint, if necessary – and assures her she will be fine. Dina agrees, and after seeing that her wound shows no signs of infection, she makes a revelation of her own: she’s pregnant. This bombshell is all that is needed to crank the sexual tension between them, and they make love on the theatre floor.
Afterwards, Dina explains that despite always being bisexual, she was told to supress those feelings by her mother. She realised Ellie had feelings for her, but it wasn’t until she saw her get bit that she realised how much she reciprocated those feelings. After showing Ellie several positive pregnancy tests (found in the pharmacy at the start of the episode) the pair share a tender moment, imagining some kind of three-parent family with Jesse.
They are interrupted by radio chatter from the walkie-talkie they found in the TV station, while explosions ring out from somewhere else in the city. The chatter mentions Nora, one of Abby’s crew, and her location – Lakehill Hospital. Heading to the roof to get a lay of the land, the pair share a moment together as they look over the city as gunfire and explosions ring out. The war between the WLF and Seraphites rages on.
Who is Hanrahan?
As a character created for the TV series, many fans of the video game, The Last of Us Part II, might be asking who Hanrahan, the insurgent that meets with Isaac at the start of the episode, might be. At this moment, much remains to be seen about this new character and how she might influence future events, (if she is still alive after the time jump). But we might assume she, along with Isaac, is one of the founding members of the Washington Liberation Front that expelled FEDRA from Seattle.
Who played the solider at the start of the episode?
If the solider telling his “thoughtless” anecdote at the start of the episode seemed familiar, you might have spent some time watching Nickelodeon back in the mid-noughties. The solider named Janowitz was played by Josh Peck, known to many as the “Josh” from Nickelodeon sitcom “Drake & Josh.” Suffice to say, it’s not going to be a recurring role.
Who plays Isaac?
Isaac Dixon is played by Jeffrey Wright, who viewers will recognise for his roles in series like Westwold, Boardwalk Empire and the Agency, in films like The Batman, The French Dispatch and for his Oscar-nominated turn in 2023’s American Fiction.
Fans who haven’t played the games may be interested to know that actor Jeffrey Wright also provided the voice and motion capture for Isaac in the video game. This makes him the second actor to reprise his role from the source material, the other being Marle Dandridge, who played Marlene in season one.
What are the differences between this episode and the video game?
As with previous episodes, The Last of Us continues to follow the main story beats from the video game while adding original elements of its own.
Scenes in the record store, TV station, the subway and the theatre all reflect events that take place in the game. However, the character of Isaac is introduced later in the game’s sequence of events, and this episode’s prologue and the torture scene featuring him are new creations for the series.
The timeframe differs slightly, as Ellie and Dina make their journey to Seattle without a three-month time jump in the game. This means Dina and Jesse do not get back together in the game, and Dina is aware that she is pregnant before leaving with Ellie on their mission. Ellie’s reaction to news of her pregnancy also plays out differently – by this point in the game the two had already consummated their relationship, and instead of being happy at the news, Ellie feels more burdened – her fixation with Abby is just too prevalent.
There is one other difference between the two narratives, and animal lovers may want to stop reading now. We last see Ellie’s horse, Shimmer, when they camp out in the record store. It remains to be seen if she will make a reappearance in the series, but by this point in the game she is sadly the victim of a WLF tripwire explosive on the streets of Seattle.