Later, a group of people, including Marlene (Merle Dandridge) come upon the farmhouse hoping to meet Anna, but soon realize that they are too late. Marlene apologizes for being late, telling Anna that leaving the Boston QZ was more challenging than anticipated. Anna leaves the baby, who she has named Ellie, and her knife with Marlene, asking her to protect the baby with her life and to kill her before the infection makes her lose control. The two have been friends their whole lives, so Marlene has a hard time pulling the trigger on Anna. But in the end, she respects Anna’s wishes and kills her before she turns.

Ellie and Joel Find the Fireflies

After the flashback to Ellie’s birth, we reunite with Joel and Ellie on their way into Salt Lake City. It seems like their journey has reignited something within Joel, and this is the happiest we’ve seen him since the outbreak and losing Sarah (Nico Parker). Ellie, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically quiet, barely acknowledging Joel’s attempts to connect with her. She seems sad that their journey is almost over and worried that they’ll go their separate ways after finding the Fireflies.

But despite Ellie’s fears, they manage to have some touching moments together as they make their way to the hospital. While trying to find a vantage point in an abandoned skyscraper, Ellie spots a giraffe eating the foliage that surrounds the building. Joel hands her some leaves, and she feeds the gentle giant before it walks off to join its family. They step outside and admire the view, mirroring one of their first scenes together in Boston before Joel tells her that they don’t have to find the Fireflies, that they can just go back to Tommy in Jackson and live out their lives. Ellie wants to continue forward, insisting that all of the loss that she’s dealt with since her bite can’t be for nothing and that they have to finish what they started. But she reassures Joel that she’s willing to stick with him, and once the Fireflies are done running their tests and working on the cure, then they can go back to Tommy’s, a sheep ranch, the moon, or wherever Joel wants to go.

They walk further into the city, coming across long abandoned medical triage tents in front of the hospital. Ellie asks Joel what these were for, and Joel tells her about the time he found himself in a similar medical encampment after the outbreak. It wasn’t because he was nearly infected, but instead because of the gunshot wound on the side of his face. In a heartfelt moment, he finally lets Ellie in and tells her about his attempted suicide after losing Sarah on outbreak day. The person who shot and missed wasn’t some random guy with bad aim, it was Joel himself flinching in a moment of hesitation. Ellie thinks that he’s telling her this simply because enough time has passed to finally heal the wound that losing Sarah left within Joel, but he lets her know that it wasn’t time that healed him, it was spending this time with her.

To lighten the mood, Joel tells Ellie that he’s in the mood for some “shitty puns.” Ellie gladly pulls out her pun book and shares more of Will Livingston’s gems before they’re suddenly ambushed by a group of armed men. Thankfully, these men are part of the Fireflies and not just some random raiders that Joel and Ellie have to fight off. Joel wakes up in the Fireflies’ hospital base, where Marlene apologizes for her patrol men and lets him know that Ellie wasn’t hurt by the smoke bomb.

Can Ellie’s Immunity Make a Vaccine or Cure for Cordyceps?

Marlene then fills Joel in on the tests they were able to run on Ellie while he was unconscious. They learned that the Cordyceps within Ellie has likely grown inside her since birth – a side effect of the unique timing of Anna’s infection. The Cordyceps within Ellie gives off chemical markers that makes “normal” cordyceps think that she is the fungus. The Fireflies’ doctor wants to remove this benign version of the infection from Ellie in order to replicate the chemical messengers that it gives off. With those chemical markers, the doctor believes that he can develop a cure for the fungus.

Danofgeek