The Last of Us S2 is reaching its endgame. Over the last few episodes, we’ve had shock deaths (RIP Pedro Pascal, we hardly knew ye), not-so-surprise hookups and more zombies than you can shake a stick at.
Now, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) are in Seattle for a revenge mission, and it’s safe to say they’ve got a lot to contend with. In addition to finding Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who is hiding the depths of the ruined city, they’ve also got to puzzle their way around the various factions who have made Seattle their own personal battleground.
Most obviously, that’s been the WLF (which Abby is a part of) and the mysterious religious zealots known as the Seraphites – but who exactly are they, and who else is in play?
Let’s unpack.
WLF
The Washington Liberation Front (also called the Wolves) is a paramilitary group. They were first formed to fight against Fedra – the organisation that ran Seattle in the years after the outbreak – and campaign for better living conditions.
Though the initial members were labelled terrorists and killed by Fedra, they soon found a new leader in Isaac Dixon (played in the game and the show by Jeffrey Wright) – who defected from Fedra to join them. The WLF led a campaign of terror against the people they dubbed their oppressors, and (after several massacres on both sides) – Fedra fled.
Unsurprisingly, the WLF didn’t maintain their commitment to ‘liberation’ for long. All Seattle residents were ordered to swear loyalty to the new group in town, and many residents were forcefully moved to a new central community in the city’s SoundView football stadium.
As they consolidated power, the WLF became paranoid and soon tensions began to rise with the Seraphites. When the Fireflies were disbanded (aka slaughtered by Joel), Abby and her friends were accepted into the group as trained soldiers – and quickly rose through their ranks. Now, they’re a considerable force to be reckoned with.
Seraphites
Religious zealots who live on an ‘island’ – ie. a flooded suburb of Seattle. Nicknamed Scars, they were formed before the infection, when a woman living there supposedly had a vision which told her to live off the land, detached from moral pleasures and technology.
She soon formed a cult of devoted followers (her argument that Cordyceps was a punishment brought on my humanity’s sins was especially persusive) which was able to fight off the infected when the outbreak happened.
This woman was dubbed ‘The Prophet’ and was treated like a god by the other cult members. As they expanded, they soon found themselves at odds first with Fedra, then with the WLF. At one point, the Prophet was captured and killed, and things escalated into all-out war between the two factions, both of whom wanted to establish control over Seattle.
We first bump into the Seraphites as Ellie and Dina make their way into Seattle. Or more accurately, their corpses: the pair stumble across a whole group of people who appear to have been gunned down by the WLF.
As we later see, though, the Seraphites can be just as nasty – Ellie and Dina’s attempts to find the WLF see them stumble across a murder scene. The Seraphites have captured some WLF soldiers and hung them – oh, and pulled out their guts, too. It’s one of the most visually striking (and disgusting) images in the show so far.
They’re also fanatically committed to their cause. During a scene in episode four, Isaac tortures a Seraphite with a red-hot frying pan to try and get them to reveal where they’re planning to attack next. The Seraphite refuses to tell him anything and is eventually shot dead.
Fedra
They popped up more in The Last of Us season one, but still – they’re pretty nasty. Fedra is a government agency that was tasked with maintaining law and order in the aftermath of the Cordyceps infection. In practice, that means that these days they’re running a lot of America’s remaining infection-free quarantine zones – and they’re brutal with how they enforce the laws within them.
Essentially, they’re well-armoured thugs, but these baddies were banished from the Seattle area following an uprising led by Isaac. The opening moments of episode four shows us a flashback in which a convoy full of Fedra agents are joking about harassing Seraphites. Minutes later, Isaac (then a Fedra agent) betrays them, switching sides to join the WLF.
The Fedra agents end up locked in their own armoured vehicle, along with a couple of grenades. Safe to say, they’re not a threat to be reckoned with anymore.
Zombies
These guys. The zombies have been a mainstay all throughout The Last of Us – it is, after all, a show about a post-apocalyptic America – but they have been especially nasty this season.
Not only has there been the introduction of a new kind of ‘radar fungus’, which essentially scouts for human life and tells the zombies where to find it, but we’ve been introduced to the Stalker variant. Instead of the slower, more lumbering creatures of season one, this creature hides from humans, instead choosing to ‘stalk’ them from the shadows before striking.
Given what we know from the game, we’re also likely to run into more Bloaters: mega-infected creatures who have developed hard plates of fungus all over their bodies. They’re incredibly hard to kill, which means for either Abby or Ellie, taking one down will be a challenge.
The showrunners have also teased the introduction of spores, which was left out of season one due to the difficulty of filming actors’ faces in gas masks. Ellie is immune, but nobody else is, and breathing them in is basically a death sentence: uh-oh.
The Last of Us Season 2 is streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW
