Nightmare Fuel / The Last of Us (2023)

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Now would be a good time to run.

From the creator of Chernobyl, the HBO series has shown it could be just as scary as the video game series.

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When You're Lost in the Darkness

• The prologue sequence, set in a 1968 TV talk show, sees Dr. Neuman, an epidemiologist, explaining in full disturbing detail about the phantom danger of the fungus and how it can slowly take over living organisms, controlling them and feeding off from them at the same time, with the goal of spreading itself to other living beings until everything is infected. There's no treatment for it. No preventatives. No cure. Humanity can win against the occasional virus or bacteria pandemic, but if the fungus is able to evolve enough that it can take over humans? That's a game over. It's an exposition that masterfully tells us how terrifying the threat of fungus really is and gives us a sense of dread of what's to come, aided by John Hannah's chilling delivery. And what's the worst thing about all this? It actually happens in real life, though (thankfully) only within the life cycles of tiny insects like ants.
  • How dire? Best visually told through the reaction of the audience and the host. You can literally see a dark cloud of dread settle over their heads as they realize the danger that the fungus presents.
  • In the official podcast, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann talk about how they mutually decided to add the scene following COVID-19 Pandemic to basically tell the viewers, "We've all experienced a viral pandemic, but there's potentially something way more terrifying out there."
  • The most horrifying element about the explanation of why fungal infection isn't already a problem is how simple the obstacle is: fungi can't survive in an environment hotter than 94 degrees Fahrenheit, and the average internal human body temperature is 98.6, so it just can't live in our bodies. But should the planet become just a little bit warmer on average, then there might be a push for fungi to evolve resistance to higher temperatures, allowing it to cross the threshold and become a genuine threat to humanity. Now consider that climate change has been in full swing since the late 70's...
  • The choice of words used through Neuman's address send shivers down the spine. At first, he says that the prospect of a viral pandemic doesn't trouble him, since humanity has battled disease since time immemorial and "we always win." Towards the end of the prologue, after rendering the studio audience and the show's host nearly speechless by describing what a fungal outbreak could do to humanity, he simply states that the only possible result of such a thing is that "we lose."

• While Sarah goes about her day, everything seems to be normal, but there are indications of the looming outbreak everywhere. A student convulses slightly during class, armored police cars drive by, the owners of the store where she gets Joel's watch fixed close early (with the wife being particularly fearful and all but throwing Sarah out of the store) and military jets fly overhead. It is the last normal day, but a sense of doom hangs over everything.
• Before the infection truly sets in, there's a moment early on while Sarah is at the Adler house looking through the DVD selection, and all of a sudden you can see Nana begin to contort with her mouth gaping open and silently gasping before Sarah leaves and Nana appears normal again. It's even worse because it's shot with Nana just out of focus. Adding to it, Mercy, the Adlers' dog, is whimpering and staring at Nana as Sarah leaves. The dog could tell.
• Tommy calls Joel to come and bail him out of jail. At first he makes the quite reasonable point that if his brother doesn't come, Tommy will be stuck in jail all weekend, but he grows more nervous and even scared as he begs Joel and insists that he doesn't want to stay there a moment longer than he has to — something's not right in the city.
• Once Joel's departed, Sarah wakes up in the middle of the night, hearing gunshots and sirens outside and seeing an EAS warning message about the chaos going on in the city, advising people to stay in their homes. A frightened teenager, home alone as the world begins to end...
• After trying to take Mercy back to the Adlers' house, only for the dog to flee in terror, Sarah goes inside to find Nana having turned and infected her daughter and son-in-law, with what appear to be tendrils coming out of Nana's mouth. When Nana spots Sarah, she stands, hisses and roars — it's abundantly clear that whatever might be in the driver's seat, it's not Nana. The podcast goes into detail about the sheer horror of this moment; the fungus essentially performed a miracle by fixing Nana's body and brain so that she could move again, but in the process it destroyed everything that made her who she was.
• While the Millers are about to drive off in Tommy's truck, Joel and Sarah's neighbor Denise comes out to see what's happening. Joel shouts at her to go back inside and then as they are about to leave the infected Mr. and Mrs. Adler run at his car. He hits them with his car and keeps driving but from Denise's perspective it looked like Tommy intentionally hit two elderly people with his truck for no reason. The last we see of her she is kneeling down to check if Mrs. Adler is okay while Mr. Adler gets up and jumps on her.
• Like in the video game, the escape out of the town is already filled with chaos and confusion. Joel outright tells Tommy to leave a few people to their fates, even when the people, including his own brother, call him out on this. They find themselves in a chaotic way out of the town. Instead of a car crashing into them, the Millers watch as a jetliner crashes through the town, wiping out a section of the town and their car.
  • Including the planes adds another level to the terror when how things could have unfolded are considered. A crowded plane with dozens of people, all sitting close to one another. Then the infected start to attack, and chaos ensues. The crashes could be considered a mercy in a way.
• After the truck crashes and Joel and Sarah are seperated from Tommy, they try to escape the carnage and get to the river; they run into a parking lot to find several infected attacking their victims, who can't even scream for help. As they look around for some way out, one infected suddenly looks up and locks eyes with Joel, and the hunt is on as he races through a diner while carrying his injured daughter and trying to outrun the infected man.
  • Here is demonstrated the danger of even immediate infection in humans. While Joel takes efficient routes between obstacles, the infected man crashes into objects and trips over chairs — but he isn't slowed down. By the time they exit the diner, the infected man is catching up again at full speed, and likely would've caught them if he wasn't shot dead.
• The first post-Outbreak day sequence we see involves a young child in oversized, duct-taped together kicks trudging through the wilderness to get to the Boston QZ. At first, it appears as if the kid has found a safe haven there with promises of new clothes, toys, and finding their favorite food. But first, they need some medicine. This medicine comes in the form of a clear injected liquid, only after the child gets a big red result to the infected test - the results the child themself does not see. The next scene is burning bodies, presumably infected, and one of the hooded, tied up corpses is so very small and has a pair of oversized, duct-taped together sneakers.
• Tess finding the remains of some poor bastard who was infected and essentially grew into the wall, with tendrils emanating from his eyes and silently screaming mouth. Joel doesn't make it any better when he suggests that the dead infected could have caught it from something else in the tunnels.
• Joel suddenly snaps and beats to death a FEDRA soldier he regularly had business with, and who was protecting him in the QZ, because in that moment he reminded him of the soldier who shot Sarah.
  • Ellie's expression as she watches Joel beat the soldier to death, and then as he looks at her, says a lot. So far, she's only considered Joel as just another lowlife, no more dangerous than the Fireflies and other people she's encountered in the Boston QZ. But it's in that moment that she understands that Joel is not like the others, that he is definitely someone you do not want to piss off.
    • This is rendered more disturbing, really, by the companion podcast. Ellie wasn't staring in horror. She was captivated by Joel's capacity for violence. Whatever she's seen throughout her short life, it's left her wanting to have that sort of power to hurt others, foreshadowing her future actions in season 2.
• Although it's hard to notice, at the end of the episode, we can see a Clicker detecting Joel, Ellie, and Tess escaping into Downtown, as the collapsed office building is in view. Fortunately it couldn't get to them from its rooftop, but it shows that FEDRA had a good reason to fence that area off.

Infected

• In the Cold Open, the Indonesian Army brings in mycologist Professor Ibu Ratna to examine a fungus infecting a human in Jakarta.
  • At first Ratna's disbelieving, stating that Cordyceps cannot survive inside humans, but to her horror she's quickly proven wrong when presented with the corpse of a fungus-infested woman who appears to have been infected by a bite on her leg — which was made by another human. When she examines the woman's body, Ratna discovers that the fungus is not only still alive but moving, searching for a new host. She understandably flees the autopsy room in terror and disgust.
  • The entire examination scene is a master class of suspense building. The room is completely empty except for the corpse on a table and a tray of surgical tools. The body has only one immediately visible marking that appears minor at first glance, has only minor discoloration (possibly because the fungal infection prevents the onset of pallor mortis somehow), and is not restrained in any way. The framing of different shots seems to suggest that the corpse could come alive at any moment and attack Professor Ratna, especially when she reaches into its mouth to grasp something with a pair of forceps, but nothing happens. And then a cluster of tendrils starts reaching out after the professor pulls some free from the corpse's throat.
  • In the aftermath of the examination, it's revealed that the dead woman was employed at a flour and grain factory. Indonesia has some of the largest flour mills in the world and flour is one of the most consumed foods on the planet — and someone working there was either infected on site or brought the infection in, since the authorities have no idea who bit the dead woman or when she was infected. Even worse, before she was killed by the police, she bit three other people, who were taken into custody and within hours had to be executed... and fourteen people who work at the factory are unaccounted for. It is very telling that this last bit of information causes her hands to shake uncontrollably, making her put her glass of tea onto the table in order to not drop it on the floor; she now knows that there is no hope for containment at that point.
    • Alternately, we know one of the first signs of infection is shaky hands...
  • General Hidayat asks Ratna what can be done to create a vaccine or cure for the fungus. She bluntly tells him that there's no possible way to make either of those things. When he presses for what can be done to contain the outbreak, she responds by telling him to bomb and level the city (which had more than 8.5 million people in 2003), because even with just fourteen people unaccounted for, she knows there's nothing else they can do to stop it. The general is appropriately horrified. And the worst part? It failed.
  • What makes the above scene even worse is that in works like this which deal with impending disasters, it's usually the military officers who would make the tough calls while scientists are the ones trying their best to prevent the disaster or at least mitigate casualties as much as they could. Here, you know things are really dire when it's the scientist who immediately suggests crossing the Godzilla Threshold that terrifies even the general who's hoping for a less violent solution.
  • During the final scene between Professor Ratna and General Hidayat, there's the faint sound of an ambulance siren from the city outside. It could be a mundane, ordinary emergency. It could be the beginnings of the death of Jakarta.
  • The worst aspect is that this shows exactly why there was such a massive initial spread and the military failed to be able to stop it: All current real-life anti-zombie apocalypse scenarios are built around the idea that the infection would spread like, well, a standard infection, spreading from person to person, which would give the military time to react and work to slow, stop, and contain the spread before it gets everywhere. Widespread infection is essentially the failed state for such scenarios. But with the Cordyceps, due to having spread through one of the most commonly consumed crops on the planet, this scenario has already reached a failed state before anyone was aware of what was going on, and it only gets worse from there. No amount of military preparation or pop culture awareness is enough to stop this pandemic from happening, because it ignores all of the assumptions that everyone has ever made about how it would function on any level. In fact, all of that preparation and all of those assumptions would be detrimental to any attempt to stop it, due to how the Cordyceps works.
• When a ray of sun passes over the horde of infected, they can be heard writhing and moaning en masse as the light hits them.
• The build-up to the encounter with the clickers in the museum:
  • Before arriving at the museum, Joel, Ellie, and Tess hear the screeching of a clicker in the distance
  • The museum is shown to have been overgrown with fungus, which had just been established to form a Hive Mind.
  • Inside the pitch-black of the museum, they find a fresh corpse with its neck torn open.
  • While silently walking up the staircase, they see dust falling from the ceiling from movement up above.
  • Finally, once they enter the exhibits, the hallway they came through collapses and attracts one of the clickers, which skulks around the exhibit room while they silently pray it doesn't find them. Unfortunately, Ellie lets out a little gasp when the Clicker turns to face them, which immediately alerted it.
• The Clickers are even more terrifying than in the game. Just two of them are almost too much for the trio to handle. It takes six shots from a fully loaded revolver or an axe and two rifle rounds just to bring them down, and they don't escape unscathed.
  • Joel gets separated from Tess and Ellie when he holds off a Clicker with just his arm, and gets chased by it into the next room. While hiding there, he reloads his revolver as silently as possible, evoking the fear many gamers have felt when out of ammo in a room with several Clickers inside. It's even worse when the camera slowly zooms in to Joel's dreaded look as he reloads his ammo and the noises from the Clicker in the hallway are getting closer and closer, until he dares to peek out the corner to look and finds himself almost face-to-face with the Clicker in front of him.
  • While trying to sneak out of the room with Ellie, Joel accidentally steps on a shard of glass and attracts the Clicker's attention. He struggles to keep it from biting them before finally unloading his revolver into the infected to bring it down.
• We find out that merely stepping on some fungus - if its underlying tendrils stretch far enough - could alert whatever infected the long-reaching tendrils are wriggling around on. While that already pays tragic dividends at the ending of this episode, that's a horrifying implication for a world where this fungus has stretched and infected so far already.
  • In a way, this version of the Cordyceps fungus infection is perhaps even more dangerous than its game counterpart. While the fungus in the game spreads itself by airborne spores, the infected within the spore areas will only become highly aggressive if humans go out of their way to disturb them, and the spores are noticeable enough from the distance. The fungus tendrils in the series, on the other hand, could be anywhere on the ground that's lush enough for it to thrive, and all it takes is one wrong step - no matter how quiet - to alert hordes of infected in the surrounding area that shared the same hive mind to go after the unfortunate victim.
• Tess getting "kissed" by a Stalker with a mouth full of tendrils is full-on Body Horror.
  • Word of God is that Tess was struggling to work the lighter because she was already being rapidly taken over by the fungus and it was affecting her motor control, and not moving away from the Stalker because if she fought back or ran the Infected would rip her to shreds. She spent her last moments of life full of terror and dread, being physically violated and battling her own body to save herself from a Fate Worse than Death and to protect Joel and Ellie.

Long Long Time

• Ellie shows off a sadistic streak in this episode. When she discovers the infected trapped under rubble instead of leaving or just killing it immediately she almost seems to...play with it, waving her blade in front of its eye and slicing its forehead before finally putting it out of its misery by stabbing it through the scalp...while smiling! Considering what Ellie ends up doing in the games this is a dark sign of where she might be heading...
  • Another interpretation. Considering how the cordyceps infection works with its victims, the poor sod under the rubble is actually fully conscious and aware of his surroundings, even as the fungus in his brain is eating him away little by little while he's trapped there in the dark waiting to die (and if you look closely at his facial expressions it becomes more obvious). Ellie stabbing her knife into his brain could probably be considered a Mercy Kill compared to the long and agonizing fate that he was trapped in.
    • There's also Fridge Horror in there, the scene could be interpreted as Ellie comparing herself to the infected, in a combined sort of "I wonder if that's what my brain looks like too" and "There but for the grace of God go I" way.
• After the pair stumble across a mass grave, Joel tells Ellie that after FEDRA evacuated the countryside they only brought refugees into the quarantine zones if there was room for them; otherwise they were executed regardless of whether they were infected or not, since that meant fewer potential hosts for the fungus. In trying to contain the cordyceps, FEDRA likely killed far more people than the outbreak ever did. And as the camera focuses on the skeletons of a baby and their mother...the story flashes back to when they were alive and the woman was soothing her child while anxiously waiting (along with the rest of Bill's town) to be evacuated to a safer place by FEDRA. Scores of innocent people are following directions and getting into vehicles, totally unaware that they're being shipped off to be murdered.
  • The horror of the scene is increased by the simple fact that you can completely understand - and maybe even at some level agree - with what FEDRA is doing. Anyone they couldn't bring to safety and left on their own will almost certainly become either one of the infected, or a raider. How many of us, if faced openly with this situation, wouldn't want to simply have a bullet put in their head rather than become infected? Especially since there are a number of hints that underneath the fungal control, the person is still awake and aware of their situation.
• Joel's recounting of the "best guess" at how the pandemic started is Paranoia Fuel at its finest, mainly because it's so crushingly banal. The cordyceps fungus mutated, and got into foodstuffs (flour or sugar)... somewhere. That "where" doesn't matter (although the previous episode suggests Indonesia), because thanks to global trade and interconnectivity, soon those ingredients were everywhere. It wasn't a single, localized disaster that spread beyond control; it was the fungus being distributed... then being consumed... incubating... and then two days later, millions if not hundreds of millions all turn at once, and "start bitin'". Humanity never stood a chance.
  • And worse yet, this has a basis in reality. Flour is an excellent environment for a fungus to grow in and all it would take is a tainted shipment getting out into the international market to start the infection spreading. Of course, that kind of fungus can't currently survive in humans, but that could easily change if something like Ophiocordyceps develops the right mutation. The specific effects displayed in the show are probably a bit of Artistic License, but one would still imagine that a full-on fungal pandemic wouldn't be pretty.

Please Hold to My Hand

• For both Joel and the audience: the Wham Shot of the gate for the Kansas City QZ left wide open with no sign of FEDRA, meaning the entire city is up for grabs.
• Ellie shoots a man who is attempting to kill Joel, paralyzing him in the process. The attacker, a young and terrified man, begs hauntingly for his life and cries out for his mother before Joel finishes him off, with his own knife that he just gave to Joel, no less.
• Kathleen and Perry discover an area of cracked and sunken ground, rumbling as if something is about to break through. Though Kathleen convinces Perry to not tell the other bandits until after Henry and Sam are dealt with, the discovery has clearly shaken her. What the hell could be lurking underground?

Endure and Survive

• In a visceral case of The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized, this episode opens up with the citywide purge that occurred in the aftermath of the Kansas City Revolution. Anybody remotely suspected of being a collaborator of the old FEDRA regime or a sympathizer is rounded up under the promise of being subjected to a fair trial, only to instead be interrogated and promptly executed. And that's if you're lucky, as Kathleen's forces patrol the city as roaming death squads lynching soldiers and civilians alike on the spot.
  • Henry's entire situation as The Most Wanted man in Kansas City while struggling to also safeguard his deaf younger brother from Kathleen and her death squads. The only reason the two have survived as long as they have amidst the chaos is out of the kindness of one doctor they both befriended before shit hit the fan who provided a safehouse for the brothers to take shelter in. But as the days go by, it's clear that the doctor is never coming back, their food supply is running out, and the death squads are now doubling down on their manhunt by raiding every single building in the area in search of them.
• When Kathleen is about to execute Henry, the bulldozer that crashed into a nearby building and caused it to burn sinks into a hole. After the vehicle falls down the hole, roars and growls can be heard at the bottom, causing everyone to focus their attention on it as they are all aware what’s likely down there. A large horde of infected immediately emerge from the hole and attack the survivors. The militias attempt their best to defeat the horde by shooting them down and running them over, but there are just so many. The sight of the horde exiting the hole next to the still burning building and attacking invokes the imagery of demons coming out of a portal from hell to wreak havoc upon the mortal world.
• The sheer amount of infected that pour out from the crater, from Stalkers to Clickers, an immense mass climbing out almost instantly, some even trampling on others as they scurry into the open. Within seconds, the militia is overrun and annihilated. This is before the Bloater emerges. And once everyone in the area is dead or infected, the horde moves onto the city, now left without any defenses due to the uprising and Kathleen’s obsession with killing Henry.
  • The last shot we see of the aftermath shows the horde moving towards the city, having wiped out all of the militia defenders. And there are still dozens of Infected streaming out from under the ground, almost as fast as they did when the hole first opened up. The people never had a chance.
• As with the Clickers in the museum, the Bloater is even more terrifying in the show than its game counterpart. Its arrival is heralded by a guttural roar from underground before it emerges from the crater like a demon. It strikes dead an unlucky militiaman with a single blow of its fist, and Perry unleashes a hail of bullets which just bounce harmlessly off of its fungal armor. When it catches Perry, he can be heard screaming as the Bloater yanks his head off with its bare hands, and none of the other fighters have better luck with it. After the Kansas City resistance is wiped out, it leads the charge towards the defenseless survivors left in the city with nothing able to stop its rampage.
• Joel, from a sniper's vantage point, is in agony for Ellie's safety throughout as she tries to avoid being attacked and he can only do his best to defend her with headshots. Just when he thinks she might be safe when she hides inside a car, he sees a Clicker that used to be a little girl slide in after her and he has no way to kill it without running the risk of shooting Ellie.
• The little Clicker girl; the blunt reminder that children can be Infected is horrific enough, but the Clicker writhes over the car seats trying to get at Ellie and claws at the window when Ellie manages to lock it inside the car, shrieking all the while.
  • The girl is also wearing a Blue's Clues T-shirt to maximise the Subverted Innocence impact.
• Henry and Sam end up hiding from the swarm under a car, but two Infected find them and start dragging them out while they scream in terror.
• Kathleen's death at the hands of the little Clicker girl is quite gruesome. The Infected leaps onto her, claws her face while she screams in terror and agony, and finishes her off with a bite to her throat. Not that she didn't deserve it.
• The fact that Ellie fell asleep while sharing a room with a bitten Sam, who turned into a full-blown Infected at some point while Ellie was still asleep. The only reason that Ellie wasn't attacked in her sleep was because Sam, in his last moments of being in control of himself, deliberately sat on his bed facing away from Ellie so that when he completely turned into a "monster," he wouldn't acknowledge her presence (on account of being deaf) and attack her.
• Henry's story about the Kansas City FEDRA, who used the Quarantine Zone as a playground for their sadism. For 20 years.

Kin

• Marlon and Florence describing how bad it is on the western side of the river, where there are apparently a group of marauding survivors who murder anyone who come that way. For an added dose of Nothing Is Scarier, they say they've never actually seen them, just the corpses they leave behind. Even though it turns out that it's simply the Jackson survivors defending their own territory, there is a tense air of dread hanging over Joel and Ellie's trek across the river, because as we already know, there are certainly bad people in this world like the ones Marlon imagined.
• Ellie's predicament at the end of the episode- lost in the wilderness with a gravely wounded Joel, raiders potentially roving around any corner.

Left Behind

• While in the mall, Ellie and Riley are attacked by a Stalker. They manage to kill it, but quickly realize that they were both bitten in the process. Knowing they have little time left, they decide to wait out their remaining hours together. Of course, the audience knows Ellie will survive this... and that Riley will not.
  • During the fight, Riley is briefly knocked out by the Stalker. As Ellie attempts to fend it off, the camera cuts to a shot of Riley's hand twitching- the first sign of infection.
  • The Stalker is deeply unsettling, as fast as a Runner and as brutal as a Clicker while still retaining eyesight. It also first appears in a state similar to the dead man that startles Joel and Tess in the first episode, growing into the wall from the spread of the fungus.

When We Are In Need

• David is the worst antagonist the series has had so far- he's a violent, psychopathic cannibal who lusts after Ellie. Though he keeps up a fatherly facade around his flock, he is despicable to the core.
  • David tells Ellie that before the apocalypse, he was a teacher for children around her age. And that he always had a violent heart. Combine that with his desire for Ellie and let it sink in.
• Hannah's punishment for speaking up—David slaps her across the face and then watches as she unknowingly eats what likely remains of her father.
• David's dialogue makes it clear that he's been raping girls for a long time, and he adopted his fake preacher guise in order to more easily dominate and terrorise his 'flock'. Hannah's mother, Joyce, is clearly a young woman who may well have been a child herself when she came under David's control. So when David lifts Hannah up and tells her she's "always had a father", the look of horror on Joyce's face may be due to the fact that it could well be the literal truth.
• When Joel knifes one of the cannibals down in the basement, the man's face is frozen in a Dies Wide Open rictus with bared, bloodied teeth. It's a deeply unsettling Nightmare Face.
• Joel brutally interrogates two of David's men, torturing one for information before stabbing him and beating his partner to death with a pipe. From the cannibals' point of view, Joel really is a sadistic and crazy old man bent on killing them all.
  Cannibal #2: He told you what you wanted! I ain't telling you shit!
  Joel: It's okay...I believe him.
  • On a slightly unsettling note: Troy Baker's reading of the above line in the game is a casual, dismissive Pre-Mortem One-Liner that comes off as a badass moment. Pedro Pascal's reading sounds almost earnest, like he's genuinely trying to reassure the man that he believes them.
• When Joel is searching for Ellie, he finds her backpack in an outbuilding, and immediately after that comes across a row of hanging, headless, mutilated bodies — strung up like carcasses for their meat.
  • Before that, Ellie is clued into the cult's true nature when she spots a dismembered ear on the ground.
• The final confrontation between Ellie and David is almost even more horrifying than its game counterpart. Trapped in a burning building, David beats Ellie and attempts to rape her. Though the latter was implied by the game, David's dialogue and actions make it excruciatingly clear what he intends to do with his captive. Ellie does manage to get away, grabbing David's butcher knife and hacking at his face until he is far beyond dead, but she emerges utterly traumatized.
  David: (holding down a screaming Ellie) I thought you already knew. The fighting is the part I like the most. Don't be afraid... "There's no fear in love."
  • Even more horrifying, this line implies that Ellie would not have been David's first victim.
  • Ellie's screams of pure terror are incredibly disturbing.
  • The religious theming of this episode makes the setting of the confrontation terrifying. Ellie is essentially trapped in a burning Hell with a demon. Or even worse, the Devil himself.
• Note how the camera gradually grows more blurry the more Ellie swings the cleaver. That's actually because of David's blood spattering all over the lens with each vicious strike.

Look for the Light

• The circumstances of Ellie's birth are nightmare fuel in its purest form. Anna goes into labor as she's being pursued through the woods by a Runner, clearly terrified as she tries to keep herself moving through the pain. She barricades herself inside an empty Firefly safehouse, but is forced to fight it off by herself as she gives birth when it forces its way inside, and ends up getting bitten before she can kill it. By the time Marlene finds her hours later, Anna's got a knife at her own throat while she cares for a newborn Ellie, knowing she hasn't got much longer before the infection turns her and makes her attack her own child.
• From the perspective of the Fireflies and medical staff at the hospital, Joel becomes one himself. He single-handedly rampages through the entire building with ruthless, methodical proficiency, killing every single Firefly including those who surrendered; picking up their guns to continue mowing through them one by one in an attempt to save Ellie. All while knowing he is potentially dooming mankind to the cordyceps. Even the doctor operating on Ellie is gunned down while the two nurses can only stare in terror. Marlene herself tries to talk Joel down only to meet the same fate.
  Marlene: Please. Let me go!
  Joel: You'd just come after her. (shoots her in the head)
  • What's worse, Joel wears the same stoic expression throughout the entire massacre, having completely dissociated due to his trauma. This only serves to make his rampage more horrific to the audience, with Joel appearing more like an emotionless killing machine than a human. For a brief few minutes, we are shown the man that Joel used to be in the years following the outbreak, one who wouldn't flinch at killing other people in order to survive and feeling absolutely nothing for them when doing so.
  • And with that…Joel has robbed humanity of their chance for a cure and potentially doomed it to the cordyceps.
• Notable about the rampage, Joel's One-Man Army is played in the game as a fast pace action level. In the show, however, little diegetic sound is heard. Just a somber soundtrack, to show a stunned silence element to the rampage.