The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 5 Review – “Feel Her Love”

With Ellie and Dina caught between the WLF, the evolving Infected, and the Seraphites, “Feel Her Love” affords The Last of Us a fitting metaphor for how this revenge quest to Seattle has felt, leaving its main characters stuck in the middle of other running plot lines. And though its another The Last of Us episode continuing to show material improvements over its first season, it’s an episode too short and anticlimactic to be effective at anything but getting our characters from point A to point B – before dropping one of the most strange, abrupt endings in recent television memory, a strange choice that nonetheless helps give the last two episodes of the season (and season three, presumably) some shape.

“Feel Her Love” is clearly an episode more about where it’s going, then where it spends its time; look no further than how disinterested Ellie is in Dina’s triangulation efforts for a fitting visual of how The Last of Us treats its plot details this season, floating from moment to moment with an approximation of logic – though again, it feels more like Dina eyeballing her angles without a protractor; it mostly works, but there are times where its approach feels a bit off, as we saw in “Day One”. As one might expect from two young adults, Ellie and Dina’s careful preparation (at one point after seeing a pile of Scar bodies, tries to convince Dina to turn back) is immediately betrayed by impulsive, emotional decision-making – which leads them from the safety of the church into Seattle’s mostly-abandoned hospital, where their plans swiftly devolve into predictable disaster, when they find themselves surrounded by a group of classic and newly-improved Infected.

That set piece, which reveals Jesse and Tommy followed them to Seattle knowing they were being reckless idiots, is the most effective part of the episode; both in how quickly it descends into complete, frightening chaos, but how The Last of Us uses its opening scene – in where a WLF squad leader details the death of her team (including her son, another classic ‘TLoU extra twist of the knife’), establishing that Ellie and Dina are heading directly into the most dangerous place in the city half an episode before they arrive there. It’s a smart bit of foreshadowing, a long game with terror The Last of Us has played to lesser effect in the past (see season one’s “the big hole we’re totally going to ignore” problem) – with a pregnant Dina and an emotionally overwhelmed Ellie, this familiar bit of story takes on a bit of added drama, an effective bit of tension that leads to Tommy’s incredibly predictable – and thus, not quite as heroic as intended – ‘surprise’ reveal, taking out the group of Infected and setting the stage for the group’s near-clean escape out of Seattle.

Before they do, of course, they once again run into a group of Seraphites, this time in the middle of killing someone in the very fashion seen in Seattle’s TV station studio; and once again, it remains the weakest part of The Last of Us, the amorphous group of religious fanatics with their murder rituals and chant going through the motions of being another violent sect among many (both on The Last of Us, and the genre as a whole). Though their goals and motivations need not be entirely clear for them to be effective, their presence on the fringes of season two (at least, until one of them puts an arrow in Dina’s knee, right before she’s whisked off screen until the season finale in two weeks) has been rather performative, especially as the series dips its toes into the operations and inner workings of the WLF, and never into the robed maniacs whistling and ineffectively using crossbows in the woods outside Seattle.

Their presence distracts from the more effective central story, which sees characters making rational preparations for their irrational, emotionally driven decisions; effectively introduced when we see WLF leader Hanrahan talk to Sergeant Park (Hettienne Park, who was wonderful as Beverly Katz on Hannibal), about her failed mission to secure all the basement floors of the hospital. As she explains to her, she sent the team (led by her son Leon, whose fate Ellie sees later) down to the second basement floor, fully prepared to face a lot of Infected – but not prepared for the air to be full of cordyceps spores, eventually pushing her to make the horrifying decision to seal off the basement floors, letting her son and team die in the process.

How “Feel Her Love” maintains that thoroughline through the episode – right down to Ellie running away from the Seraphites back into the hospital to confront Nora, chasing her into the dreaded spore-filled basement to (presumably) meet her maker. At that, it is fairly consistent; however, it’s not exact establishing anything new, as this thoroughline plays back to Joel’s decisions in the season one finale, Ellie’s choices preceding that, so on and so forth. That The Last of Us is finding new wrinkles to poke at this idea is intriguing – but the execution of them remains stagnant, which saps some of the emotional potency of stories like Sergeant Park, or Dina’s sad story about the first time she broke the rules and left her house.

However, it also spends the middle third of its episode on the growing romantic entanglements of Ellie and Dina, their bonds deepening through sharing their trauma (Dina recalls killing a raider who attacked her family), while shielding them with mostly the same plot armor they’ve had all season; it’s not quite reductive, but it posits them as a test case for the rationality of everyone around them – which isn’t exactly convincing, or treading any sort of new ground narratively for the series.

It’s much more effective, if tunnel-visioned, when its just two women being reckless in their twisted pursuit of justice; which works, until the two are separated, and Ellie finds herself with a lead pipe, trying to beat Abby’s whereabouts out of a dying, infected Nora. As she demands information, The Last of Us suddenly cuts back in time, ending on the supposedly-surprising image of Joel’s smiling face as it cuts to black…. a moment that probably felt a lot cooler and exciting on the page, where in execution it feels like an unnecessary setup for a flashback episode in a season that absolutely does not have time for it.

Creatively, it’s certainly an interesting adaptive choice, to turn Ellie and Joel’s intermittent flashbacks from the game into one single sequence; why this moment was chosen to end the episode, both in mystery of what happened to Dina and Jesse (and Tommy!), and why Ellie is suddenly having such a vivid, extended flashback while she’s beating the shit out of one of Abby’s bretheren. The tonal shift may have been necessary – but it’s a jarring one, and a disappointing one once it quickly spoils that next week’s episode is a Penultimate Flashback Episode (a Prestige TV Bingo Spot Card moment we’ve all seen a thousand times the past ten years).

Though The Last of Us has felt incredibly and unwieldly large this season, “Feel Her Love” is the first time it really feels like the show’s overlapping plots have started to drown out some of its emotional coherency, leading it to lean on repetitive narrative beats as it clearly builds to a season finale, where the proverbial protagonist torch will be handed Ellie to Abby for some portion of season three (with all its cult stuff, Lev material, and lots of death).

Do we really need to spend the penultimate hour in a flashback to learn how Ellie came to despise Joel? It feels like an episode brought to us by the character Gail, at a time when The Last of Us has so many other rich storytelling avenues to explore and expound upon. It only compounds the issue of how clumsy it leads us into this story in “Feel Her Love”, cutting away from a formative moment of traumatic violence for Ellie in her destructive pursuit of vengeance (again, which parallels nicely with the Seraphites and some of their choices, had The Last of Us wanted to explore some really twisted thematic symmetry) for an unnecessarily ploying, momentum-breaking shift back into the dark past between season one and two.

Time will tell whether the narrative gamble pays off (even if next week’s episode is great, I’m still not convinced it is in the best interest of the series to do it now); the fact it needed to end this episode with a ten-second tease is probably not a great sign for how confident the series feels about where it is with two episodes left (an obvious byproduct of last year’s strikes and delays, I can only imagine). In the moment, however, it is a jarring shift, one taken at a moment where The Last of Us could’ve really married its many story threads together, for an episode that looks to unnecessarily foreground a story this season’s already told, in so many fewer words. “Feel Her Love” feels like an episode falling back into some old, reductive habits for the series – and with only two episodes left, seemingly split between the past and present, there really isn’t a lot of time for the series to right this creative stumble before it heads into hiatus.

Grade: B-