The following article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 5.
Ellie’s descent into violence truly kicks off in this week’s episode of The Last of Us. The show’s fifth chapter sees her brutally assault Nora in the spore-infested basement of the WLF’s hospital base. It’s one of the game’s most recognisable scenes and remains similarly harrowing in HBO’s adaptation.
This and three other key sequences from the original game were adapted for this episode. Here we’ve compared them against the original source material, analysing what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. You can see both versions in the video above, or read on below for our written explanations.
Seattle Day 2
In both the game and the show Dina listens in on WLF radio chatter to work out the group’s location and patrol patterns. In the game, we see Dina explain all this to Ellie – in part because it helps establish the objectives of the upcoming level. In the show, Dina takes notes but there is no like-for-like conversation about what the WLF codes mean.
Elsewhere in the theater, Ellie explores the auditorium and finds a guitar. It’s one of the more memorable scenes from the game – Ellie takes a seat in the front row and begins to play. In the show, Ellie instead sits on a stool up on the stage. Both versions play the opening of Pearl Jam’s Future Days, although Ellie in the game sings the first two lines – show Ellie sings just the first.
In the game, Day 2 sees Ellie head out to Hillcrest. That section of the game is pretty much cut entirely from the show – there’s no hiding from dogs in overgrown houses – but we do get a version of the Seraphite mural that is seen shortly after Ellie leaves the theater. In the game, the “Feel Her Love” graffiti is on the back of a truck. In the show, a similar image is painted on a wall. The WLF have left dead Seraphites below it as some kind of ironic gesture.
Stalkers
Later in the episode, Ellie and Dina have a tense encounter with a group of Stalkers. While Ellie does come across Stalkers on Day 2 in the game, this scene isn’t a direct translation of that moment. For one, Dina is now with Ellie – in the game, Dina stays at the cinema. The location has also changed; Ellie was attacked in an office building in the game, where the show’s Stalker showdown takes place in a warehouse.
More significantly, though, the show’s Stalkers behave in a very different manner to their game counterparts. In the game, Stalkers are cautious, almost skittish predators, and so this encounter is a tense game of cat-and-mouse as you try to spot where they are hiding. While the show has made suggestion that Stalkers are more intelligent than the more animalistic Runner variants, in this scene there’s little evidence of that. The Stalkers pretty much just charge – or, indeed, run – at Ellie and Dina, and attempt to break into the cage the duo have barricaded themselves inside of.
Another change comes with the reintroduction of Jesse into this section of the story. In the game, towards the end of the Hillcrest section, Jesse emerges from the shadows to catch Ellie before she walks into a WLF patrol. In the show, Jesse turns up to help Ellie and Dina escape from the Stalkers.
The Seraphites
While much of what players will remember of Hillcrest has been removed for the show’s version of events, memories of the game will very much be evoked by the group’s encounter with the Seraphites. The forest and foliage is very similar to Part 2’s environment, and the sequence in which a hanging man is killed by his Seraphite captors is very close to the events of the game.
The key difference here is in the people present. In the game, Ellie explores this area on her own, whereas in the show she is accompanied by Dina and Jesse. This directly impacts a key moment when a Seraphite fires a bow and arrow; in the game, the arrow strikes Ellie and she is forced to wrench it from her shoulder. In the show, it is Dina who is shot, the arrow hitting her leg. This forces the group to move on, carrying Dina to safety.
St. Mary’s Hospital
This episode’s big, climactic event takes place in St. Mary’s Hospital. It’s the sequence that most closely resembles the video game – a near 1:1 recreation of Nora’s final minutes. Like the game, Ellie finds Nora in the WLF-occupied hospital and holds her at gunpoint, demanding to know where Abby is. Their exchange culminates in Nora saying that Joel got what he deserves, her wording in the show closely resembling the script of the game. She then makes a run for it, throwing a container of liquid at Ellie to momentarily stun her. That last detail is slightly different to the game, in which Nora just throws a steel tray that only catches Ellie off guard for a second.
The chase through the hospital is similar to that in the game, although notably shorter and less game-y. Nora shouts for her allies to shoot and they do so from a balcony, replicating the gunfire that sparks around Ellie as you push her forward in the game.
The chase finally ends in the same spore-filled corridor bathed in red light that we saw in the game. Nora, collapsed and breathing in fatal spores, finally realises who Ellie is. “You’re her,” she says in both versions of the story. In the show, Ellie then takes a single swing with a metal pipe and the show cuts to black. In the game, Nora’s death is much, much more violent – with the camera lingering on Ellie’s twisted face, she strikes Nora three times. While this shot isn’t used for the show, HBO does somewhat replicate it a minute earlier by holding the camera on Ellie’s face as she holds Nora at gunpoint. It’s not as viscerally powerful as the shot from the game, but you can see where the inspiration comes from.
For more from The Last of Us, check out our spoiler-free season two review and our spoiler-filled review of the fifth episode.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
