This Week’s ‘The Last of Us’ Goes Out to All You Pearl Jam Fans

“If I ever were to lose you,” Ellie sings while sitting alone on the stage of her theater hideout, strumming a guitar. Then she stops, and thinks, and puts the guitar down. If she’d continued singing Pearl Jam’s “Future Days,” the next line would have been, “I’d surely lose myself,” but maybe that would have been a spoiler. In the moment, I assumed she was imagining the danger facing Dina for following her on her quest for vengeance, but by the end of the episode, it’s clear she was singing about losing Joel - and when she finally gets her hands on the first of Abby’s cohort, she does lose herself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This week’s episode, “Feel Her Love,” is a busy one. Ellie and Dina head out for the hospital, where they know Abby’s friend Nora (Tati Gabrielle) is stationed. They assume the biggest hurdle they’ll face is passing through the mysterious large building that the WLF patrols seem to be intentionally bypassing, and using it as cover. Unfortunately, we know the hospital itself is going to be a problem, thanks to the cold open: Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) questions a lieutenant who lost her team while scouting the basement levels for infected. Only the team wasn’t lost — they sacrificed themselves when they realized they were infected with airborne Cordyceps spores, and told her to block off the floors entirely. The lieutenant did so, even though it meant abandoning her son Leon, who was leading the search team. The hospital is too strategically important to abandon, so Hanrahan decides to keep the truth about the basement quiet while continuing to utilize the upper floors.

But back to that big-ass building! Ellie and Dina make quick progress through the suspiciously quiet warehouse until they spot one of those smart Infected — “Stalkers” — watching them. They duck for cover to strategize, and when they pop back up, they see more Stalkers. Like, a lot more, surrounding them. Ellie sends Dina to a fenced-in area for protection while she faces the Infected head-on, but the pair is quickly overwhelmed. And that’s when the cavalry arrives! Jesse (Young Mazino) saves their bacon in the nick of time, and the trio escape into a nearby park that, again, the WLF patrols seem rather suspiciously to be avoiding.

Jesse explains that he and Tommy left Jackson shortly after they realized Ellie and Dina were missing and tracked the girls all the way to Seattle to bring them home. Upon arrival, the pair split up to cover more ground, and Jesse discovered Dina’s detailed map in the theater and followed them to the warehouse. Jesse is clearly pissed at Ellie for putting Dina in danger, but we don’t get to spend much time with this new love triangle before there’s even more danger. The trio stumble upon a group of Scars ritualistically torturing a Wolf in the same manner we saw last week in the broadcast tower (strung up by the neck and disemboweled), and then Dina takes an arrow to the leg. Ellie sends Jesse off with Dina while she distracts the Scars, though she manages to lose them in the woods. And that’s when she realizes she’s right next to the hospital.

What comes next is a nice little nod to the game, as Ellie sneaks through tall grass while avoiding not just the WLF guards but also their watchdogs. Those dogs were a big addition to the second game, and a serious pain in the butt for players as they complicated any attempts at stealth, but Ellie fares just fine. She gets into the hospital and easily locates Nora, who sounds the alarm while running away. Ellie chases her target while avoiding the rest of the WLF, but Nora — desperate to escape — ducks into the elevator shaft and drops to the basement levels. Ruh roh. Ellie follows her through the halls, discovering the remains of the team we heard about, stuck to the walls by fungus and exhaling plumes of spores into the air. Ellie, of course, is fine - and that’s when Nora realizes she’s dealing with the rumored Immune Girl from Salt Lake City. When she asks if Ellie knows what Joel did back then, how he killed everyone in the hospital including Abby’s father, the only doctor in the world capable of making a cure, Ellie confirms what we all suspected.

Yes, she absolutely knows what Joel did. And she still wants revenge. Nora refuses to give up any information about where Abby is, though, so Ellie grabs a pipe and beats her for answers. The episode ends before we find out if she got any, but before the credits roll (to another Pearl Jam tune, “Present Tense (Redux)”), we get a hint at what’s coming up next: JOEL FLASHBACK! Pedro’s back, baby! Finally, something to save the ratings from the questionably-real legions of viewers who supposedly quit the show after Joel died! Are we finally going to learn why Ellie and Joel became estranged, or are we going to get a solid 45 minutes of cozy daddy-daughter apocalypsecore? Honestly, I’m down either way.

With two more episodes to go this season, we know that Ellie will need to rejoin Jesse and Dina, find Tommy, and hash out whether they’re going back to Jackson or continuing after Abby, while maybe dealing with a little guilt and trauma from all that torturing Ellie just did. You know, as a treat! If next week is a flashback episode, though, that’s all going to have to wait for the finale. So the real question is: are we ever going to see Abby again this season? Or could she take over as the main character for season three?