It’s the end of season 1 for The Last of Us. A scene completely absent from the game solves a mystery that had never been addressed in the game. And, moreover, it is not with any actress. We explain, but beware: spoilers.
It does not matter whether we already know the end of the story or not, this final season of The Last of Us was emotionally intense. The conclusion does not really deviate from that of the game. An entirely new appearance, however, proves to be decisive: a flashback presents Anna, Ellie’s mother. The actress in this role is none other than Ashley Johnson, the original interpreter of Ellie in the games – for motion capture and voiceover.
We never see Anna in video games. But this appearance of Ashley Johnson in this key role is not just a poetic wink: the unfolding of events delivers an answer on theorigin story of Ellie.
WARNING SPOILERS on episode 9!
Why is Ellie immune? The Last of Us series responds
The sequence is a chase: Anna, Ellie’s mother, then pregnant with the latter, is chased by an infected person. She takes refuge in an abandoned house, where she locks herself, alone, in a room. It is in this rather gloomy and distressing context that she gives birth.
But, when Ellie is barely born, the infected breaks down the door and attacks Anna, who succeeds in killing her. Safe and sound ? Not really: we discover that this one has been bitten. She is now infected. It is for this reason that she asks Marlene to kill her. Anyway: when Anna was just infected, Ellie was still connected by the umbilical cord.
It would appear that it was this tenuous preliminary contact with the pathogen that elicited the immunity. Moreover, again in a scene that is absent in the game, the character of Marlene explains that Ellie’s body would have developed a kind of chemical agent “cheating” the Cordyceps – making it seem that the body is already infected and preventing the fungus from growing.
In episode 7, when both Ellie and Riley are bitten by the infected from the mall, the heroine seems to believe that this is the first time she has been confronted by Cordyceps (so she is not at the aware of what happened with his mother). But, technically, this isn’t his first exposure to the fungus.
It remains to be seen whether this question of immunity will be deepened or not in season 2 of the series, already confirmed and in which Bella Ramsey will be back.
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