Who Dies in The Last of Us Episode 2?

[Warning: this story contains The Last of Us spoilers for Episode 1, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness.” There are no game spoilers.] “’80s means trouble.” Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” isn’t just the latest ’80s song to see a streaming boost in playtime after its use in a hit TV series: the track signaled a warning for Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and Tess (Anna Torv). After sneaking out of the Boston QZ, Episode 1 ended with the trio failing to heed another danger sign reading “DO NOT PROCEED” as they fled FEDRA forces into a Biological Contamination Area.

The Depeche Mode song wasn’t the only warning that there would be trouble in Sunday’s Episode 2, “Infected”: look closely, and you’ll see Episode 1 ended with a lightning strike illuminating a screeching Clicker in the darkness. (For the uninitiated, Clickers are a stage of the zombie-like Cordyceps-infected creatures roaming outside the fortified Wall of the Quarantine Zone.)

A first look at The Last of Us Episode 2 appeared to show flashbacks to a potential Cordyceps brain infection origin story. In present-day 2023, Joel, Ellie, and Tess enter a building crawling with Infected — an encounter that could cut the trio down to a duo, as hinted by a conspicuous absence in “The Weeks Ahead” trailer released by HBO. 

Unlike the video game, there are no save points and no do-overs. In HBO’s live-action adaptation of the post-pandemic world of The Last of Us, series co-creators and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wanted death to carry weight. 

“It was almost the opposite of a standard gaming experience when it came to violence. I’m a gamer, so I’ve in my lifetime killed 10 million NPCs [non-playable characters]. But watching the show, I wanted you to feel every bullet, every stab. I wanted you to feel people be afraid to die,” Mazin told Consequence. “There’s a sequence where, without getting into too many specifics, we get into the head of somebody that I think any other show would’ve just been like, ‘Oh, that’s just the guy that you killed,’ and make that therefore feedback into Ellie’s experience and Joel’s experience and how they relate to each other.”

Mazin continued: “So in our show, every act of violence, whether it’s small or massive, is very intentional because we chose to depict it and we do so as purposely as we can.”

The Last of Us Episode 2: “Infected” premieres Sunday, January 22nd, on HBO and HBO Max. Follow for more The Last of Us on ComicBook.