Guide: A Backpack Full of 'The Last of Us' Easter Eggs and References

Image via HBO

The Last of Us series opens with a talk show clip, where a scientist discusses the implications of climate change and presents a hypothetical scenario where a fungal infection could destroy the human race. It’s inspired by The Dick Cavett Show, a late-night show that ran from 1968-1975 and featured lengthy, conversational sit-down interviews.

Gustavo Santaolalla composes the show’s music. He is best known for writing the game’s main theme, which you can hear during the show’s opening credits.

The rock band t-shirt that Sarah wears is lifted directly from the game. It is for the fictional band Halican Drops, and the tour stops on the back of the shirt are locations that Joel and Ellie will visit.

In the establishing shot of Sarah’s room, you can look on her desk and see a hand-made birthday card with a dinosaur on its front. It’s in the game as well, and Sarah forgets to give Joel this card for his birthday.

The first episode gives us several hints that the fungal infection started in contaminated flour, which was distributed around the world. 

Sarah tries to make pancakes for breakfast, but she eventually settles on making eggs instead. It’s the first of three “close calls” where the characters almost eat the flour but veer away at the last moment.

We find out that Tommy is an armed forces veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm. This was a U.S. military operation in the early ‘90s, in which the U.S. responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 

The entire sequence where Sarah repairs Joel’s watch is original to the show; it occurred offscreen in the game.

Notice that all of the clocks are set to 3:15. In the game, this was the default for many of the game’s clocks, probably due to technical limitations or for the sake of expediency.

Here’s another “close call” for the contaminated flour. Sarah makes cookies with the neighbor, but doesn’t eat them because they’re raisin cookies instead of chocolate chip.

Here’s the last close call, where our heroes almost eat the contaminated flour, before the entire world goes to hell. Joel was supposed to pick up a birthday cake for Sarah and himself, but he auspiciously forgot.

We learn from The Last of Us Part II game that Curtis and Viper 2 is Joel’s favorite movie; he and Ellie were planning to watch it together and it also makes an appearance in the HBO show.

In the game, Joel and Tommy are out of the house at the start of the pandemic, but it isn’t clearly explained why. In the show, we learn that Joel left the house to bail Tommy out of jail for getting into a bar fight. It also foreshadows the early stages of the pandemic; people were becoming violent, but no one knew why just yet.

This visual, of a farmhouse on fire, is an iconic image from the game; Joel, Tommy, and Sarah flee from their neighborhood, and around them, they see unbridled chaos. Another scene right afterward, where Joel turns down a family of hitchhikers, is also lifted directly from the game.

As in the game, this scene plays out from Sarah’s perspective. This establishes Sarah as a main character, thus misdirecting the audience and accentuating the upcoming tragedy.

In the game, Tommy crashes the car when another car T-bones him at the intersection. In the show, the car misses him at the intersection. Instead, debris from a nearby plane crash causes the accident.

This entire flashback scene takes place in 2003 when the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have been fresh in people’s minds. Sarah’s first question when they get into the car is to ask whether the pandemic was a terrorist attack.

The show includes several timeline changes from the game.

In the game, the flashback scene takes place in 2013, and the bulk of the game takes place 20 years later, in 2033. In the show, the flashback takes place in 2003, and the bulk of the game takes place in 2023. It’s an interesting creative choice that places us, the audience, directly into this hypothetical scenario.

The show also aged Joel up; in the game, he’s 52 years old after the time jump. In the show, he’s 56.

One of the the more interesting world-building details was this sign, which explains that the rate of cordyceps infection depends on where a person is bitten or infected.

In this same scene, we see that the surviving humans take infection very seriously; anyone who is infected is killed and then burned—children included.

In the game, resources are limited; Joes cobbles together bits of rag and alcohol to make a molotov cocktail, or wraps duct tape around a blade to make a shiv. This scene, where Joel wants the bag back after the guard consumes the pills/drugs inside it, demonstrates this scarcity.

In the game, Joel and Tommy have a bitter, estranged relationship. It’s inferred that Joel had to do some pretty evil stuff to keep both of them alive, which have scarred Tommy and left him with many regrets.

In the show, Tommy and Joel seem to have a better relationship; they stay in regular contact over the radio, and Joel wants a car to travel west, because he fears that Tommy might be in danger.

The player spends the first chunk of the game chasing after Robert, who sells Joel and Tess’s guns to the Fireflies behind their back. Tess shoots him in the head for his betrayal.

In the show, Robert cheats Tess and Joel out of their money over a car battery, which ends up being a dud anyway. It is the Fireflies who kill him after the deal goes south.

Merle Dandridge, the actress who plays Marlene, is the only performer from the original game who reprises her character in the show.

When Ellie calls Marlene a terrorist, Marlene retorts, “Was Riley a terrorist?” This stuns Ellie into silence.

Riley is a key character to Ellie’s character arc in the game, and she appears in the Left Behind DLC. We know she will be in the show as well, as part of a flashback based upon the DLC. Storm Reid (Euphoria) will perform the role.

When we first meet Ellie in the show, she is chained to a radiator in the Fireflies’ hideout. It changes the relationship between Marlene and Ellie. In the game, it seems that Ellie and Marlene have known each other for some time, and she implicitly trusts Marlene with her life. In the show, Ellie also trusts Marlene, but it is a hesitant trust, since she just met her and seems to believe FEDRA’s pronouncements about the Fireflies.

We see a butterfly motif throughout the series. Butterflies are common symbols of rebirth and hope. Ellie embodies this hope, as a potential source for a cordyceps vaccine.

Al Gore and Joe Lieberman ran for President against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000. They lost the election by a single state. In the years since, Gore has become a climate change activist. Since the cordyceps virus could only thrive in a slightly warmer environment, this T-shirt is a wry commentary; maybe we should have elected him for president instead.

We see Joel beat a guard to death at the end of the first episode. It’s framed as a redemptive act; this is what Joel would have wanted to do to the soldier who killed Sarah. It also establishes Ellie as the new daughter figure in Joel’s life.

A huge theme in both the game and the show is humanity’s impermanence. It’s been only 20 years, and nature is already reclaiming human habitats, collapsing buildings, and growing grass and moss over concrete roads and highways. There’s something both creepy and beautiful about the scenery, and about the planet’s utter indifference to us.

The second episode opens with a flashback to Indonesia at the time of the outbreak, which they trace to a flour mill. The country’s leading mycologist, Agus Hidayat, urges military officials to bomb the entire city in order to stop the infection. Clearly, they do not listen to her, and the parasite spreads and destroys the world.

It’s a utilitarian “impossible choice.” It is true that Hidayat makes a horrific proposal. But it is decidedly less horrific than what ended up happening.

When Ellie asks Joel and Tess about the rumored Infected, she brings up a myth about exploding fungus spores. This references an enemy in the game called a Bloater, which will also appear in the show.

The second rumor Ellie brings up is an Infected type that is blind, but can communicate and “see” via echolocation. This describes an Infected known as a Clicker. Our heroes meet two of them by the end of the episode.

Joel boosts Tess up over a pile of debris. In the game, you do this frequently. It’s a clever way that the game disguises its load screens when Joel moves from one room to the next.

In the game, Ellie’s switchblade is the only weapon that does not degrade or get damaged with repeated use. Joel, on the other hand, must constantly find and craft new melee weapons to defend himself when enemies get too close.

In the game, getting grabbed by a Clicker means instant death. The show creates that sense of dread and urgency; everyone is quiet and careful until there is the slightest noise. And that’s when all hell breaks loose, because survival is what matters.

In the game, noisily reloading one weapon does not attract clickers’ attention. The show changes that; we see Joel gingerly reloading his gun as the Clicker searches for him a couple of yards away.

Joes wraps Tess’ foot in electrical tape. Tape is a treasured resource in the game, and can be combined with a blade or sharp object in order to make a shiv.

After the Clicker encounter, Tess is in a great hurry to get Ellie to the Fireflies before nightfall—an early clue that Tess knows she is Infected and wants to do the right thing before she turns.

It’s an act that stands in direct contrast to how she and Joel have survived, selfishly, for the past 20 years. And shortly afterwards, they discover that the Fireflies that were supposed to meet them at the state house are all dead; one of them got infected, and the rest of them turned on each other.

Even the people who knew they were going to be transporting the potential savior of humanity were too selfish to think of the bigger picture. And so, when Tess asks Joel, as her dying wish, to get Ellie to the Fireflies, it hits that much harder.

The show makes a couple of changes to the nature of the cordyceps fungus. In the game, the parasite is airborne and spread by spores. In the show, it spreads via fungal filaments to protrude from the victims’ mouths. The showrunners changed this so the main characters would not have to wear masks all the time and conceal their faces from the audience.

The second change is that the cordyceps fungus works as a sort of hive mind. In the show, the fungus is networked into the ground for miles, and so if someone steps on the fungus in one part of the city, it can send a signal for a horde of infected to run to that area. In the game, there is no apparent communication between the Infected; instead, they are motivated by a common desire for sustenance.

The most disgusting scene is where Tess gets “kissed” by an Infected, and, in her last moment of lucidity, she lights her lighter and destroys the attacking horde.

In the game, she’s killed while holding off FEDRA, so that Ellie and Tommy can escape from the city.

Ellie sees a Mortal Kombat II arcade machine and starts nerding out over Mileena’s Fatality finisher (hold HK for three seconds, move in close, let go). In The Last of Us game, there is a similar scene, but instead of gushing over Mortal Kombat, Ellie gushes over a made-up 1-on-1 fighting game called The Turning.

The Infected that Ellie finds in the house basement seems, based on its physical appearance, to be a Stalker. It is the second phase of infection, after Runners but before Clickers. They are not completely blind, but they prefer dark spaces and will ambush the character from hiding places.

Occasionally in the game, the player sees a door painted red with symbols or marked with an X. Based on the game, we know that the military painted these symbols on the houses they evacuated or were empty.

In both the game and the movie, Bill is a resourceful survivor who uses a combination of rigged traps and deep paranoia to stay alive during the pandemic. We get a look at one of these traps midway through the third episode, which are rigged to explode when anyone comes into contact with them.

The story of Bill and Frank is one of the most significant changes from the game to the show. In the game, Frank is already dead by the time Joel hears about him; he and Bill had a falling out, and he planned to leave Bill, along with one of the only working car batteries. However, he was infected, and then decided to commit suicide; Bill is the one who finds and subsequently cuts down his body.

In the show, Frank and Bill have a long term romantic relationship that spans over years. They meet Joel and Tess earlier on, and become friendly with the mercenary duo. And then Frank gets sick, they commit suicide together and go out on their terms.

The third episode is titled “Long, Long Time,” after the Linda Ronstadt song of the same name. The song plays twice during the episode: once when Frank tries playing it on the piano, and again at the end of the episode when Joel and Ellie are driving away from Bill’s town. The song experienced a 4,900 percent increase in Spotify streams after the episode aired.

In the first episode, we see that that Joel and Tess use a coded system to communicate over the radio, in case anyone is listening. They communicate via pop songs; a ‘60s song means no new cargo, a ‘70s song means new cargo, and an ‘80s song means trouble. If you listen to Tess and Frank’s background conversation during this scene from the third episode, you can hear them devising the system together.

The open window at the end of the third episode is a reference to the start screen of the first game, which also features an open window from the exact same angle. There is also an open window in the final shot of the second game, right before the credits roll.

At the beginning of Episode 4, Joel struggles to explain to Ellie how siphoning gas works, and he starts making things up.

In the game, this is a tendency that both Miller brothers share. Joel struggles to explain to Ellie how hydroelectric power plants work in the first game, and Tommy struggles to explain to Ellie how migration works in the second game.

Ellie reads groan-worthy jokes from a book called No Pun Intended: Volume Too in both the game and the show. It provides the briefest moments of levity in the midst of constant misery, and in both story iterations, Joel is surprised to learn that he and Ellie share a sense of humor.

We get some more classic country during Joel and Ellie’s car ride out to Wyoming. The song is called “Alone and Forsaken,” and it’s written and performed by ‘40s and ‘50s musician Hank Williams.

While Joel and Ellie are driving through Kansas City, you can see the movies that were playing in the local theatre 20 years prior, right when the pandemic hit: Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage, and Underworld, starring Kate Beckinsdale.

In the game, we don’t see the leader of the Hunters, who survive by systematically robbing and killing anyone who crosses into their territory. In the show, the Hunters have a leader named Kathleen, who puts a human face on what was originally, for the most part, a faceless, impersonal threat.

The game heavily implies that in the past, Joel partook in similarly evil acts of violence, and is too embarrassed or disturbed to tell Ellie about them.

Jeffrey Pierce plays Perry, an ex-military who is Kathleen’s right-hand man. Perry is an original character, created for the show. Pierce is best known to Last of Us game fans as the performer for Tommy, Joel’s younger brother.

At the end of the fourth episode, Joel wakes up to see Henry, who has a gun pointed at Ellie’s head. Based on earlier scenes, Kathleen has a pre-existing relationship with Henry and is specifically hunting him down. In the game, Henry and his brother are strangers from out-of-town and are the last-known survivors of their original group.

We also meet Sam at the end of the episode, who is Henry’s little brother. When casting for Henry, the show sought out a deaf child to portray Sam. In the game, Sam is not deaf, so it will be interesting to see how this affects the plot.

In the game, the Hunter faction is completely unsympathetic and dehumanized. The game hints that Joel, like the Hunters, was once a bad man, who killed innocent people to selfish ends. The show gives additional context to their actions, and suggests that they started with good principles.

We get a flashback to the night when the insurgents, led by Kathleen, took over the QZ. We witness the insurgents hanging and dragging the QZ officers behind their trucks. The killings are brutal, and they remind us that often times, when one brutal dictator falls, someone even worse could fill the power vacuum.

Sam sees his older brother Henry as a superhero; that’s how he draws him. And to help take Sam’s mind off the horrors surrounding them (and to make his little brother feel more powerful and brave), Henry draws a superhero mask on Sam’s face. Later, when Henry’s looking out the window, the reflection makes it look like he has a mask on, too.

Henry has an entire backstory in the show that he did not have in the game.

In the show, the Kansas City QZ government is corrupt and bloodthirsty, and a group of citizens organizes an underground rebellion. Henry was part of this rebellion, but turned traitor against the rebels. Sam had cancer, and he gave up the rebellion’s leader in exchange for life-saving meds. The leader was Kathleen’s brother, which explains her grudge against Henry.

In the game, Henry and Sam, like Joel and Ellie, are just passing through the city. They have no relation to the people hunting them.

Sam and Ellie play together, and for a brief moment, they’re innocent kids again. They paint a vivid picture of what Joel and Ellie are fighting for and what humanity stands to lose should they fail.

Among other activities, we see Ellie and Sam play soccer with a makeshift goal. This is taken directly from the game, from when they are exploring the sewers and come across a former human settlement.

We see a child’s drawing subtitled “Our Protectors,” with a crude drawing of Danny and Ish. This is taken directly from the game; it is a collectible that you can find while exploring the sewers.

The game has an entire backstory for Ish and this underground human settlement. We never meet him in the game, but we learn, through a series of artifacts we can pick up in the area, that Ish was a survivor hiding in the sewers. After roughing it on his own, Ish gets lonely and decides to invite a family to live with him. It goes really well, and as the settlement grows bigger, Ish and these survivors begin to build a life. They create a nursery for the babies and a school for the children. They create rain catchers so they can have potable water.

Of course, it all goes to hell. One careless mistake, and multiple people die. The adults kill the children out of mercy, lest they be torn apart by Infected. And the survivors go on the run; we don’t know their ultimate fate.

In the game, the Savage Starlight comics are some of Ellie’s favorites. If you come across them while scavenging, you can pick them up and eventually put together an entire set for her to read.

Kathleen stands in her childhood bedroom while reminiscing about her brother. This is reminiscent of an optional conversation in the game, where Ellie approaches Joel while he’s scavenging in Bill’s town and expresses sympathy for what happened to Tess.

In the game, the sniper is a young man who attacks Joel when he walks into the room. In the show, it’s an old man, which makes his eventual death more pathetic. Joe even gives the old man a way out, but he turns it down and dies for his loyalty to Kathleen.

In the game, there are no Infected children; it’s a line the developers decided not to cross, and for good reason. But in the show, a clicker child nearly kills Ellie and succeeds in killing Kathleen.

Kathleen’s death demonstrates the destructiveness of revenge; her obsession with catching Henry, while ignoring bigger problems that are literally right beneath her, costs her and her followers their lives. Revenge is a the key theme of The Last of Us: Part II, and the show’s creators are setting it up early, under the assumption that the show will have future seasons to explore this further.

The Bloater makes its on-screen debut during the night sequence in Kansas City. In the game, it debuts in Bill’s town, but it is no less intimidating.

Bloater is the fourth and final stage of human infection. First is Runner, then Stalker, then Clicker, then Bloater. A Bloater’s fungal extensions form a tough armor, and it has the ability to throw spore bombs at its prey. As with all Infected, the Bloater is susceptible to fire.

In the background of this shot, you can see the Bloater kill Perry by grabbing his lower jaw in one hand, grabbing his upper jaw in the other, and ripping his face apart. This is the Bloater’s signature kill animation in the first game.

In the game, Sam doesn’t tell anyone that he’s been bitten; everyone finds out the next morning when he attacks Ellie. In the show, Sam shows Ellie the bite right before bedtime. And because she’s immune, Ellie tries to “heal” Sam by putting her blood on his wound. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

Henry kills himself after Sam’s death, which underlines the running motif of the show: people stay alive and keep going for family. And because Henry has no other family left, he has no reason to continue living. Joel is beginning to view Ellie less like cargo and more like family, which will compromise his decision making and put him at risk.

The sixth episode opens with a man returning home from a hunt. He’s carrying a number of dead rabbits.

Late in the game, we see Ellie hunting rabbits to feed her and Joel. For anyone who played the game, this rabbit visual is a reminder of the difficulties to come, and of how Ellie will have to assert her independence for both of them to survive.

The indigenous couple that advises Joel and Ellie not to head west are new characters, and they do not appear in the game.

Joel has them both point out a location on a map to see if their stories match. In both the first and second game, this is something Joel and Tommy do to draw information out of prisoners; if the stories don’t match, they torture the prisoners until they both tell the truth. 

The indigenous couple warns them not to go west of the river, and that anyone who goes west of the river dies—both Infected and non-Infected.

It turns out that the dangerous people west of the river are actually Tommy and the other survivors of the Jackson settlement, who we would typically view as the ‘good guys.’ It goes to show that in this world, matters of “good” and “bad” often come down to perspective.

Unlike the game, the show uses panic attacks to show how Joel’s mental state is breaking down. His efforts to protect Ellie remind him of his failed attempts to protect his daughter Sarah, and he fears that he will fail again.

Ellie tells Joel about her dream of being an astronaut and her idolization of Sally Ride. Ride was the first American woman to fly into space in 1983.

Ellie also dreams of being an astronaut in the games, and it culminates in a heartwarming flashback scene in the second game, when Joel takes Ellie to the aeronautics and space wing of a local museum, as a surprise.

In the show, Joel says he doesn’t understand how the hydroelectric dam works, and Ellie tells him he should have made something up, and she would have believed.

In the game, Joel does try to make something up, and Ellie calls him out immediately.

There’s a scary moment when the Jackson dog sniffs Ellie to see if she’s infected. It doesn’t sense anything, much to Joel and Ellie’s (and our) relief.

In the second game, we can read Ellie’s journal, and she’s always worried about what will give away her infected status, and if she can spread this infection to other people. When she writes about the first time she kisses a girl, she expresses relief that she’s not contagious.

The Jackson settlement isn’t nearly this developed when Joel and Ellie visit it in the first game. At that point, it’s more a military compound than a village. It is not until the second game, five years later, that it attains this level of civility, with stores, livestock, crops, and children playing in the street.

Ellie calls out a girl in Jackson for watching her eat. Based on her appearance, this might be Dina from The Last of Us: Part II. Dina is Ellie’s girlfriend and accompanies her on her journey to Seattle. There’s actually a throwaway line in the game where Dina recalls Ellie gorging herself on food, which would match up with what we see in the show.

At the stables in Jackson, Ellie meets and pets a young horse named Shimmer. In the second game, Shimmer is an adult horse that belongs to an older Ellie.

Ellie visits Tommy and Maria’s house, and she sees a candle-lit tribute to Kevin, Maria’s son, and Sarah, Joel’s daughter. Based on their birth and death dates, Kevin was three years old when he died. Sarah was 14 when she died—the same age Ellie is now.

The movie the Jackson settlers are watching in the theater is 1977’s The Goodbye Girl. It’s a romantic comedy starring Richard Dreyfuss and written by Neil Simon.

One of the most famous scenes in the video game is this one, where Ellie confronts Joel about his fears and reminds him that she’s not Sarah. Fortunately, the show creators recreated it, nearly word-for-word and shot-for-shot. You can’t improve upon perfection.

Joel and Ellie ride on horseback to find the Fireflies after leaving Jackson. They travel across incredible natural vistas, in a clear homage to classic Western films like John Ford’s The Searchers.

In the show, the raider who attacks Joel wields a baseball bat, but it breaks on the first hit.

In the game, melee weapons only last for a certain number of hits before they break, which forces you to scavenge and find additional weapons. It creates a constant atmosphere of desperation; you are always outnumbered and outgunned.

Joel chokes out and breaks the neck of the raider who attacks him. In the game, Joel uses the choke hold as a ‘stealth kill,’ which allows him to eliminate an opponent without drawing any attention from nearby reinforcements.

The song we hear while Ellie is running is “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s a track from their 2002 album Riot Act.

The keychain on Captain Kwong’s desk has the Naughty Dog paw print logo on it. Naughty Dog is the developer of The Last of Us video game.

We see that Ellie has the first volume of No Pun Intended in her room. Its sequel, No Pun Intended: Volume Too, is the book that Ellie reads to Joel. We later learn that Riley gave Volume Too to Ellie as a gift.

Both cassette tapes on Ellie’s desk have significance. The bottom one, by Etta James, is the cassette that Riley and Ellie are listening to when they’re bitten at the mall. The top one is by 80’s rock band a-ha, most famous for their hit single “Take on Me.” In The Last of Us: Part II, Ellie sings this song to Dina in an optional scene during the Seattle sequence.

We also hear this song in the mall scene later, when Ellie is playing on the escalators. In the season finale, Anna sings a-ha’s “The Sun Always Shines on TV” to Ellie after she is born.

We see a poster for the ‘90s video game Mortal Kombat II in Ellie’s room. Later in the episode, this is the game that Riley and Ellie will play when they visit the mall arcade.

In the game, Riley and Ellie play a fictional game called The Turning. It doesn’t work, however, so Riley and Ellie use their imaginations instead.

While playing the video game, Riley says “Woo-hoo” with a very specific intonation and pitch. This is an Easter egg reference to Mortal Kombat II. In that game, performing an uppercut will occasionally result in sound programmer Dan Forden appearing in the bottom-right corner of the screen, yelling, “Toasty!” in the exact same intonation.

To perform Mileena’s Fatality in Mortal Kombat II, hold down the High Kick button for three seconds, move in close to the opponent, and let go.

The song that plays while Riley and Ellie are dancing together is “I Got You Babe” by Etta James. It is a cover; the original song was performed by Sonny and Cher.

The kiss between Riley and Ellie also occurred in the game. It is widely considered a watershed moment for queer representation in video games. The entirety of Episode 7 is based off the DLC of The Last of Us, which follows Ellie as she takes care of Joel and thinks back to the day she was bitten. Like the television episode, it is also titled “Left Behind.”

Ellie tears through drawers looking for something to patch up Joel’s wound. To anyone who’s played the game, this is a very familiar scene; you’re constantly opening drawers and cabinets looking for a packet of sugar to build a smoke bomb or a bit of rag to build a molotov cocktail.

The game implies that David is a cult leader of sorts, with his talk about predestination and his palpable charisma. But the television series makes this explicit, and opens the eighth episode with David quoting the Bible.

In the game, Ellie also goes hunting for deer, but it’s with a bow and arrow instead of a sniper rifle.

Ellie tries to put on a tough, gruff voice when she meets David, but she drops it for a second when she asks if David has medicine to heal Joel. She betrays her vulnerability, and from that moment forward, David has the psychological upper hand.

The man who plays James, David’s right-hand man, is Troy Baker. Baker plays the role of Joel in the game, providing both motion and voice.

David and his cult of survivors have turned to cannibalism for survival. And we get the impression that the meat that they claim is venison isn’t really venison. This is likely confirmed when David hauls in an actual deer later in the episode and expects to be applauded for it.

David talks a big game about caring for his flock, but notice how when they’re eating dinner, David gets a bigger plate of meat than everyone else. Being a cult leader has its benefits.

In the game, you can craft a shiv out of scissors and tape and use it to score a one-hit kill. When Joel kills David’s henchman in the basement, he uses the same motion that video game Joel uses when he performs a Shiv Kill.

Joel tries his double-blind torture test again. The first time he tried it was on an old indigenous couple on his way to Tommy’s. He didn’t have to kill or hurt anyone, however, because they both told the truth. This time, he nearly pops one of the guy’s kneecaps off. This scene is a beat-for-beat match of a scene in the game, right down to the final, chilling words: “That’s okay. I believe him.”

In the game, Ellie faces David in a boss fight, in which you have to sneak behind and stab him with your knife. You have to stab him three times to trigger the next cut scene. In the show, they cut this down to one.

When Ellie hacks David apart with the machete in the game, Joel is the one who interrupts her and comforts her. In the show, Ellie finishes hacking David apart. Joel comforts her outside after everything is already done. 

Joel refers to Ellie as “baby girl,” the same thing he called his daughter Sarah before she died. From this, we understand that Ellie is no longer mere cargo; Joel sees himself as her surrogate father.

We see a flashback where Anna is attacked by a stalker while giving birth to Ellie. Anna uses a switchblade to stab the Stalker who attacked her. She later gifts this switchblade to Ellie, which explains why Ellie treasures it so much.

Ashley Johnson plays the role of Anna, Ellie’s mother. Ashley Johnson performed the motion capture and voice of Ellie in the game, making her the character’s mother in a figurative sense.

We see Joel trying to draw Ashley into a conversation. Ashley is quiet and trapped in her own head; she doesn’t hear him, and when she does, she gives one-word responses. It’s a role reversal from earlier in the game; Joel was experiencing PTSD, and Ellie tried to provoke a response. And now that Ellie has been traumatized by David, Joel’s trying to help in a similar way.

The giraffe scene is lifted almost directly from the game, as is the following conversation, where Joel offers to take Ellie home, and Ellie tells him that she wants to finish what she started. The scene and conversation serve a dual purpose—to emphasize the father/daughter bond that Joel and Ellie have created, but also remind the audience that Ellie wants to give her life meaning, and would not have approved of Joel’s actions at the end of the story.

Marlene explains to Joel that Ellie has to die in order to create the vaccine.

Earlier in the episode, we get a flashback to Ellie’s birth and the death of Ellie’s mom, Anna. We learn that Anna was attacked and bitten while giving birth. She cuts the umbilical cord afterward, which means that for a fleeting moment, baby Ellie was connected to a person who was infected. Could that be the reason for her immunity?

Marlene killed Anna (at Anna’s request) and promised that she would protect Ellie. So when she has to kill her to potentially save humanity, we know it’s not an easy decision.

The show also goes into a little more scientific detail on why the Fireflies need to kill Ellie to make the cure. Fans criticized the game for this lack of clarity, which led many to believe that the Fireflies were incompetent and that they wouldn’t have figured out the cure even if they killed Ellie as planned.

The final episode actually makes Joel look worse than he did in the game. In the final action sequence, we see Joel shoot a man with his hands up, and we also see him go over to someone he shot and stab him to death. In the game, Joel is extremely outnumbered; he’s hiding from as many people as he’s killing, and has to run to the elevator when they spot him, rather than trying to shoot his way out.

During Joel’s murderous rampage through the Fireflies hospital, we see a dark figure running in the other direction. Joel spares this person, and some fans believe this might be Abby, the co-protagonist of The Last of Us: Part II. The dark figure appears to have Abby’s signature ponytail, though that is a common hairstyle.

We don’t know it yet, but the doctor that Joel kills is very important to the second season of the show. In The Last of Us: Part II, we learn that this is Dr. Jerry Anderson. After he dies, his daughter Abby seeks revenge on the person who killed him, and that triggers the entire plot.

One of the nurses who unhooks Ellie from the machines is performed by Laura Bailey, who plays main character Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part II video game.

Joel lies to Ellie. He tells her that they couldn’t have used her to create a vaccine, and the Fireflies have stopped looking a for a cure. He also adds a detail that wasn’t in the game: raiders attacked the hospital. It’s a good addition to the lie, because it explains why she’s on the road with Joel without her clothes, and it also explains why they’re never going to hear from Marlene again.