Spoiler Warning: Major plot points from The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5 are discussed below, including character deaths, game-to-show comparisons, and emotional reveals. If you haven’t watched it yet or played the game, this is your cue to bounce and come back later.
Alright, let’s talk about The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 5: “Feel Her Love”. If Episode 4 felt like a slight misstep, Episode 5 grabbed the wheel again, swerved around the cringe, and got back on track – mostly.
Was it perfect? Nah. But it had grit. It had tension. And it had some of the most horrifying sequences we’ve seen since … the last episode?
The Spore Revelation
Let’s talk about that cold open. We drop into a tense interrogation at a hospital, where a WLF leader questions Sergeant Elise Park. She had ordered her men to sweep the hospital basement for any clickers – her son, Leon, was part of the team. During the mission, Leon radios in with a chilling discovery: Cordyceps are now airborne. He tells his mother to seal the doors.
She does.
Rather than reprimand her, the officer commends Elise’s decision. The hospital is too valuable, they say, and only a select few will be told the truth about the spores. It’s an unsettling moment. After living through a pandemic, there’s something eerie about hearing “airborne transmission” on screen again.
After the cold open, we pick back up with Ellie and Dina, who are still listening to WLF radio broadcasts while trying to chart a safe course through the city. Dina teases Ellie about her “non-school-oriented” thinking during their map triangulation – which is a flirty way of calling her girlfriend a bit of a dumbass. I will say that these little moments of levity make their relationship feel a bit more authentic amidst all the horror happening around them, unlike the out-of-left-field sex scene from the last episode.
Ellie, still weighed down by grief, stumbles across yet another conveniently placed guitar. She begins to play but can’t quite make it through the song. It’s a small but powerful moment that shows how Joel’s death has tainted even the things they once shared joy in.
Dina’s Heartbreaking Backstory
As they hit the road again, we get Dina’s origin story during a walk-and-talk sequence. Her family had holed up in a cabin near Santa Fe when the outbreak first hit. But as she tells Ellie with resigned fatalism,
“You already know how this story ends, because I don’t live in a cabin north of Santa Fe anymore, and I don’t have a mom or sister anymore.”
What follows is a disturbing tale: a raider killed her family, and Dina killed the raider. But what makes this scene so powerful isn’t just the tragedy – it’s how Dina uses it to try and reach Ellie. She poses a moral question that cuts right to the heart of one of the season’s themes: “Would it make a difference if my family had hurt his people first?”
The answer, of course, is no. Revenge is revenge, regardless of who started it. And Dina’s candid admission that she “would have hunted him down forever” if he’d escaped is both a confession and a warning. She understands Ellie’s drive for vengeance because she’s gone through it herself, but also knows the cost it takes of oneself. It’s a beautifully written scene that adds depth to Dina’s character while also serving as a subtle critique of Ellie’s mission.
Ellie and Dina arrive at what looks like an abandoned industrial site, which the WLF seems to deliberately avoid. Naturally, that makes it the perfect shortcut on their way to the hospital, where Nora – one of Abby’s crew who was there when Joel was killed, is supposedly at.
But it doesn’t take long to figure out why the WLF steers clear of the place: it’s completely infested with Stalkers, those creepy, hide-and-seek-style infected we saw earlier in the season. Still, Ellie and Dina push forward and enter a room crawling with them. Unsurprisingly, they’re quickly overwhelmed and completely outmatched.
Jesse Steps Into the Fray
Just when all seems lost, Young Mazino’s Jesse appears out of nowhere like the cavalry, saving Ellie and Dina from certain death. His entrance was perfectly timed, if not a bit deus ex machina – just when our duo was about to become infected chow, in comes Jesse with a few well-placed shots.
Jesse explains that Jackson didn’t officially send backup – he and Tommy just couldn’t sit around while Ellie and Dina were potentially walking into a death trap (which they did). But his appearance raises the stakes in a different way. Now it’s not just Ellie and Dina risking their lives – it’s the father of Dina’s unborn child, too.
Before they can argue too much about their next move, the trio stumbles upon something truly horrific – a Seraphite interrogation that makes previous violence look tame by comparison. Our trio witnesses the Seraphites questioning a WLF soldier and … umm … literally gut him alive. His intestines are all over the ground. I think the visuals of this scene are shocking, unflinching, and purposeful. It establishes immediately that these aren’t misunderstood religious folk – they’re every bit as capable of atrocity as the Wolves.
Anyways, out of nowhere, Dina is shot in the leg with an arrow, and the Seraphites begin to hunt our trio of protagonists, splitting up along the way, setting up this game of cat-and-mouse that reinforces the “maybe we should just go home” sentiment that any sane person would have.
The show is making it abundantly clear: there are no good factions in Seattle. Just different flavors of brutality.
Nora and The Red Zone
After escaping the Seraphites, Ellie finds herself within reach of the hospital. She manages to sneak in and find Nora. What starts as a seemingly calm encounter quickly deteriorates when Nora reveals her true colors:
“It was a terrible thing, the way he died. Yeah. Yeah, the little bitch got what he deserved.”
Ellie pursues Nora as she flees into the restricted area of the hospital – the same area where those early cordyceps patients were treated, now completely overrun with infection. Ellie flips on the red emergency lights, bathing everything in a hellish glow that feels like a descent into the underworld. And in many ways, it is. The set design here deserves an Emmy nomination – decaying medical equipment, abandoned stretchers, and walls covered in fungal growth create an atmosphere of absolute dread.
But the real showstopper are the wall-embedded clickers – human bodies completely consumed by the cordyceps, fused to the wall, and somehow still alive … though I’m not too sure I would consider that being alive, honestly. It’s breathing spores into the room like some grotesque air filter. The image is nightmarish, body horror at its finest, and it serves as a grim reminder of what awaits anyone who isn’t immune.
Nora gets infected. Ellie doesn’t. And in that moment, the power dynamic shifts completely.
“Don’t You Know What He Did?”
When Ellie finally corners Nora, we get the confrontation we’ve been waiting for. Nora, facing death, throws Joel’s sins in Ellie’s face: “Don’t you know what he did? He killed everyone in that hospital. Including the only fucking person alive that could make a cure from you. That was Abby’s father. And Joel… Joel shot him in the head. That’s what he did.”
And Ellie’s response? A cold, unwavering
“I know.”
Those two words change everything. If Ellie truly knew what Joel did – that he sacrificed humanity’s chance at a cure to save her – then her quest for revenge takes on a much more complex dimension. Is she avenging Joel, or trying to atone for what he did in her name? Is she angry at Abby, or angry at herself for being the reason it all happened?
The scene ends with Ellie bludgeoning Nora, the screen cutting to black as the violence escalates. It’s a brutal moment that marks Ellie’s first deliberate killing of someone who isn’t actively trying to kill her. She’s crossed a line, and there’s no going back.
A Sweet Dream or a Beautiful Nightmare?
The episode ends with a jarring shift. Ellie wakes up in Joel’s house, looking happy and well-rested. Joel opens the door with a warm “Hey, kiddo.”
Is it a flashback? A dream?
We don’t know yet, but seeing Pedro Pascal back on screen, even briefly, is a bittersweet reminder of what’s been lost. There’s something almost cruel about this moment of peace sandwiched between acts of extreme violence.
Whatever it is, it suggests we’re going to get some answers about Joel and Ellie’s relationship in the aftermath of his fateful choice at the hospital. And those answers might reshape how we understand everything that’s happened so far this season.
Final Thoughts
Feel Her Love delivers exactly what The Last of Us does best: unflinching violence juxtaposed with genuine human connection. The horror elements are back in full force, with infected sequences that actually feel threatening again.
The episode isn’t without flaws. Some of the dialogue still feels a bit forced, and certain story beats happen a little too conveniently. But these are minor complaints in what is otherwise a confident return to form from the last episode.
As we approach the end of the season, the stakes are clearer than ever. Ellie is losing pieces of herself with every step she takes toward Abby. The question is no longer whether she’ll find Abby – it’s whether there will be anything left of the Ellie we know when she does.
Score: 8/10
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