“Feel Her Love” calls back to The Last Of Us’ beginnings in a number of ways.
It calls back to the game, to the series, to the beginning of Ellie and Joel. It uses not just knowledge, but perceived certainty of knowledge, to create terror. In its opening scene, Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach, Coco), a WLF (Wolf) leader interrogates Elise Park (Hettienne Park, Hannibal), on why she ordered the deaths of fellow Wolves. Elise was told to investigate the abandoned hospital, which was apparently ground zero when the cordyceps hit in 2003. Hanrahan’s initial perception of the event is that Elise committed a crime against her people. This is refuted when Elise points out Leon was among the dead Wolves. We, the viewers, don’t learn that Leon is Elise’s son until the end of the scene, but when Hanrahan forgoes her tense demeanor and grabs a cigarette, this tells us she knows exactly who Leon is to Elise. This presumes a weight to her decision, that it’s not one she would make likely, so what’s the reason she made it? The Wolves were just doing a customary sweep of a hospital basement, with no signs of anything out of the ordinary. B1 looked just fine, so what could have happened on B2 that’d make Elise order their deaths?
“It’s in the air,” is what Leon tells his mother over the radio. “Seal us in.” Hanrahan’s throat is bulging. The weight of a mother speaking about her son’s death, a death she unknowingly ordered when she sent him to B2 and knowingly accepted when she sealed them in there, is briefly lost in the noise of this existential terror. Hanrahan entered the scene like a shift supervisor ready to reprimand an employee, but the revelation that Elise killed her own son relaxes her demeanor. The cordyceps have made death commonplace in the world of The Last Of Us, so now Hanrahan is talking to Elise like they’re having an awful day at work.
Now what has made death so commonplace has evolved, adapted. The decades they’ve spent fighting these tendrily bastards have been upended — all by going back to the beginning of the franchise, a beginning we thought had been retconned. Even if gamers have known about the spores from the game, they should not feel comfort by this knowledge. Hanrahan, Elise, the Wolves, all of humanity, are barely hanging by a thread dealing with the devil they know. Now, the spores have given them a devil they don’t.
All of this is to say that knowledge of the old, that certainty, does not save a person in “Feel Her Love.” This knowledge, this certainty, only twists minds and violates hearts. That Ellie and Dina revealed their love with such certainty to each other in “Day One” does not sanitize the darkness of Ellie and Nora’s (Tati Gabrielle, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) showdown in “Feel Her Love.”
Fans of the game might have thought that. In the game, the throughline between the scenes of Dina revealing her pregnancy and of Nora’s interrogation is that Ellie exhibits similar emotions in both. In the game, the pregnancy reveal is actually much tenser, because Ellie and Dina were already a couple, and Dina revealing her pregnancy is a point of tension, a reason for Ellie to be concerned about Dina. Ellie then says something cruel, stupid, and impulsive about how Dina’s a burden. Even if she doesn’t apologize immediately, it is immediately obvious that she regrets it.
The same can be said about Ellie’s scene with Nora. Even if calling Ellie “cruel” to Nora is an understatement, the action-reaction of rage-regret is seen in both Ellie and Dina’s scene, and Ellie and Nora’s scene. This is how Ellie in the game shows both sides of herself early in her arc. This is not to say the game justifies a “Sorry baby, I feel so bad for hitting you” view of cruelty. Her regret only establishes that she’s capable of redemption, but capacity for an action is not the same as fulfilling it. There’s a difference between survival and cruelty, and Ellie needs to forgo the latter.
This makes the show’s deviation with the pregnancy reveal interesting. Here, Ellie’s love is not filtered by the regret of her rage, but seems to be pure. No longer struggling with their first argument like the game, she and Dina are now two lovers ready to take on the world. “The power of love wins! Yipee!” It’s understandable that viewers might have thought this, and it’s understandable that fans of the game wondered what this would make of her interrogation with Nora. If Ellie’s confrontations in the game with Dina and Nora have the emotional throughline of rage-regret, what could the throughline be in the show, when there’s only pure love and joy with Dina?
The throughline, as it turns out, is inverse of the internalized conflict intrinsic to Ellie’s rage-regret in the game. That throughline is certainty. Because Ellie’s wrestling with herself when she interrogates Nora in the game, we’re meant to wonder if she’s putting pieces about Joel together, but not here. Here, we know what Ellie knows about Joel. Her violence is not her hiding a truth from herself, but an extension of that truth. This means her hatred of Nora is as certain as her love for Dina, and that should haunt anyone who knows the heart of real hatred.
Really, this moment brings us back to the beginning of The Last Of Us as a show. If her certain hatred of Nora reflects her certainty about Joel, then this harkens back to the ending of the series premiere, when Joel beat a FEDRA agent to death to protect Ellie. When this happens, Ellie looks at Joel and his violence with a delighted awe. Not understanding the weight that violence takes on a soul, only relishing in it.
This, however, should make us wonder: does Ellie know the heart of real hatred? If she doesn’t, does this mean that she doesn’t know the heart of real love? In this season’s episode “Through The Valley” Jesse mockingly calls out Ellie’s “certainty masquerading as knowledge.” This should give viewers some hope, just as it should frighten them. Maybe when Ellie sees the true heart of hatred, she’ll know to look away. She’ll have the same lump in her trembling throat Hanrahan had in the opening of “Feel Her Love”, when the spores brought us back to the beginning of The Last Of Us, to give us a terrifying new world. Maybe if Ellie can do that, can move past her certainty masquerading as knowledge, she can fear real hatred like she should.
Unfortunately, given her certainty of her hatred of Nora, she’s obviously not afraid of hatred yet. This means hatred will take even deeper, even further, to darker depths. We may hope Ellie will be reminded of the joys of life, of Dina’s pregnancy, of her dopey lesbian Dad jokes, but will these joys be waiting for her to climb out?
