REVIEW: ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Episode 5 — “Feel Her Love”

Last episode, Dina (Isabela Merced) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) imagined a life together, consummated their relationship, and more importantly, let loose their secrets. But after sentimentality, the episode ends with a far-off explosion. In The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, “Feel Her Love,” the WLF (Wolves) makes a dangerous discovery, losing their own in the process, and Ellie finds herself closer than ever to getting revenge. The only hiccup is that she must decide whether to continue with her plan and put Dina first or keep moving forward. As you can guess, she chooses the latter.

To open The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) interrogates Sgt. Elise Park (Hettienne Park). As we come to find out, the hospital that our lead character is trying to find is the site of a mass casualty event. Only, it was caused by Park choosing to leave her team on B2, which included her own son, Leon.

In an attempt to clear the Hospital’s lower levels, the Wolves discovered the infection in the air. As Sgt. Park recounts to Hanrahan the story of sealing her team in B2, the danger of the world comes into stark focus. The infection is in the air, and that’s why she sacrificed her people, only to save everyone. With resources in short supply and a war brewing with the Scars (Seraphites), the Wolves find themselves with valuable information, but that information may bring a larger end.

Dina is still the best part of The Last of Us Season 2.

As a cold open for The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, this scene raises the stakes. While we have only spent enough time with the Wolves to know that they’re foremost a military, and to be scared of Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), the series doesn’t allow that apathy to sit too long. After the intro, the lead characters are in the theater. Ellie found a way to turn on the lights, and Dina is charting their course to the hospital. You know, the one where a team of Wolves has been sealed in because the infection is inescapable?

Isabela Merced as Dina is once again a highlight of the series, and that is due in large part to the intelligence that she shows as Dina. Not only is Dina using her knowledge of maps to chart their course, but she’s also piecing together the positions of Wolves and their rotations, which she’s found by listening to the stolen radio. Dina is capable and competent, but Ellie also sees her as an expectant mother now.

Having lost Joel, it’s clear that Ellie doesn’t want the weight of losing someone else. To ease that fear, Dina talks about the first time she killed someone. She was eight, and she did it for her family. Dina doesn’t have a moment where she tells Ellie to see her as more than a girlfriend or a mother; instead, she tells her story and allows Ellie to pick. Dina will keep going if she chooses or turn back. But no matter what, her death would be on her, not Ellie.

With a series so invested in the stakes of the end of the world, these small moments of agency carry great emotional weight. Ultimately, this series is built on choices, and in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, the choices keep coming. Shoot, don’t shoot. Run, don’t run.

The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 also invests deeply in the need to hide and run. As Dina and Ellie make it to their desired point on the map, Dina institutes a no-shooting rule. With Wolf watchtowers shining lights into the building and guarding the perimeter, shooting will put them in even more danger. And Ellie is trigger-happy, something that Dina notes and Ellie can’t disagree with.

Someone, please, teach Ellie how to fire a gun; she needs help.

It’s a moment that calls out directly to how combat evolves in the source material and how much further you can play the game when you invest in stealth over firepower. But there isn’t much to hope for when they find more infected than they thought they would. The building is a home for the infected, and right now, it’s a home for Stalkers like the one who stalked Ellie in Episode 1. With their backs against the wall, Dina has to run. Ellie has to accept being bitten, and still, they have to shoot. Then, Jesse (Young Mazino) saves them.

While this action sequence of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 is supposed to be frantic, the way that Dina and Ellie approach using their guns is wildly different. Where Dina is calm and mostly measured, Ellie has no control of the gun and no ability to aim. As the Stalkers descend, and the quest seems like it’s about to fail, we’re supposed to know that Ellie was making the call to protect Dina. The shoe is on the other foot; it’s her turn to step up, but ultimately, she can’t. And even if she could, as a viewer, it’s hard to see how she could have even fought one off.

This has been a blight on many of Ellie’s action sequences throughout the season, and it makes it hard to accept that she’s someone built for the environment that she’s supposed to survive in. It’s also what pulls the fact that Jesse and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) snuck out to help the duo into focus. I’m sure that Dina is capable, but Ellie? I don’t know if she would survive if she weren’t immune.

Additionally, the scene itself is another example of how “natural” lighting does a disservice to stunt teams. The entirety of the scene is nearly illegible. It’s hard to make out Stalkers unless the flashlight is directly on their bodies, and it obscures any sort of prop and effects work that could shine, or rather, that we shine in episodes like the premiere.

At the episode’s midpoint, Ellie has the hospital and Abby in her sights. Having run from the Scars in the park, Jesse takes a wounded Dina back to the theater, and Ellie chooses to run toward revenge instead of toward her people. It’s a moment that pays off the set-up from the opening of the episode, but it ultimately keeps driving Ellie down an entirely unlikable path.

However, while Ellie choosing revenge over others feels wrong in the moment, it leads to a moment that makes her unlikable, but at least compelling. Everyone, when pushed, can beat someone to death if they think they’re in the right. As Ellie sneaks into the hospital, she finds Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and they both wind up in level B2, the hospital section where spores have taken hold.

Nora struggles to breathe as Leon Park’s body is affixed to a wall by the blooming infection. In this last sequence of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, production design is the star. The entire basement is gorgeously constructed, and the vile blooms are dynamic in their setting on the walls.

Spores were a difficult element that I wasn’t sure how the team would pull together. But it’s a decadent example of what practical effects can do when given the chance. Between the episode’s finale and the setting in the park that highlights the production design as the Scars sting up a Wolf, there is depth to every surface, and the deadly consequences they cause.

Ellie is ultimately driven by revenge, which is the clearest element of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 as it completes its sub-50-minute runtime. When Nora asks if Ellie knew what Joel did, she responds that she doesn’t care, which makes the next part of Nora’s last words crucial for the audience. Joel killed every person in the hospital so that Ellie wouldn’t be taken. He shot Abby’s father in the head. Joel was death, and Nora knew he deserved it when it came back around to him.

Ellie finally gets a piece of her revenge in “Feel Her Love,” and we know she’s no longer the same.

That exposition, however, is just for us at home. It’s never going to change what Ellie feels. Ellie’s retort that she doesn’t care about Joel’s sins paints who she is now. For the majority of The Last Of Us Season 2, I’ve been annoyed with Ellie.

While Bella Ramsey has put their all into the character, seeing her as anything more than an angry girl throwing multiple tantrums has been difficult. They’re spurred by grief, but they’re also devoid of understanding the importance of the people around her and their safety.

In the final minutes of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5, however, the psychopath underneath the trigger-happy, crazy Dina comes out. There is a level of distance when a character fires a gun. But when they beat another person with a pipe, it’s all intimacy. It’s an enjoyment of violence that cascades through the air just like the spores, and it’s also a signal to the audience that Ellie is far removed from the person we’ve seen her to be.

While I still don’t believe that The Last of Us as a story truly understands the cost or cycle of violence, or even the “choices” to continue cycles of violence it attempts to engage with, it is good at peering into it. The problem with this series, though, is that nothing usually peers back, which leaves things empty. We can see the start of repercussions for the violence the characters enact. So long as that person has a friend or family, the moment they’re killed, another Abby and another Ellie take shape. But beyond that, there’s not much.

On the surface, The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 is a good episode. But it’s the surface that’s the problem. Much of the show’s thematic investigation of violence is a thin veneer layered onto spectacle. Once you try to dig deeper, you just see the empty glamor shots made for prestige television. That’s no different in this episode, and at the mid-point of the season, I don’t think that’s going to change. But then again, given its inspirations, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 is streaming now on MAX (formerly HBO Max) with new episodes every Sunday. 

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