The hotly anticipated Season 2 of HBO Original The Last of Us is right around the corner, and if you’re anything like us, you’re chomping at the bit to see what creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who were also behind 2019’s Chernobyl) have in store for Joel and Ellie in their Cordyceps-infested world.
But The Last of Us Season 1 ended over two years ago. That’s a long time in TV land, especially with so many amazing shows coming out all the time to capture our attention. Even if you’ve played the popular video games that the series was based on, it can be tough to remember exactly what happened in each episode despite the incredible, immersive viewing experience that it was.
If you feel like you’ve got Cordyceps on the brain and need a quick refresher to get ready for Season 2, we’ve got your back! Here’s our detailed recap of each The Last of Us Season 1 episode to help you get back up to speed ahead of the Season 2 series premiere.
Rather re-binge (or watch for the first time) The Last of Us Season 1 to get ready for Season 2? You can watch the entire first season on DIRECTV.
Don’t have DIRECTV yet? Let’s fix that today!
WARNING: THE LAST OF US SEASON 1 SPOILERS AHEAD
What Happened in ‘The Last of Us’ Season 1?
Here’s our episode-by-episode summary of The Last of Us Season 1.
Episode 1: ‘When You’re Lost in the Darkness’
The season’s pilot episode kicks off with some scene-setting: The episode opens up with a brief scene in which two epidemiologists discuss potential pandemic threats on a 1960s talk show, settling on a fungal infection as the most serious, since there’s no cure. One of the scientists dismisses the idea, since fungi have never been able to survive in the human body, but the other reiterates that it could become more realistic as the climate warms and fungi evolve to adapt to higher temperatures.
Flash forward to 2003: Joel (Pedro Pascal), his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) and his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) are living in Austin, Texas when area residents begin to exhibit strange and aggressive behavior. Things quickly get worse, and it becomes apparent that there’s a pathogen of some sort driving people mad. Society swiftly collapses around Joel, Sarah and Tommy as they attempt to escape the city, and Sarah is tragically killed in the chaos.
Twenty years later, the Cordyceps fungus outbreak has ended civilization almost entirely. Joel is living in Boston with his partner Tess (Anna Torv), where they smuggle contraband to survive in a locked-down quarantine zone.
When a job goes sideways, Joel and Tess are commissioned to transport a 14-year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the Massachusetts State House for a resistance group called the Fireflies. During their flight from the quarantine zone to the deserted city, the trio runs into a guard who scans Ellie and reveals that she has been infected with Cordyceps, but she convinces Joel and Tess that she’s fine because the bite happened weeks prior, and she has yet to exhibit any symptoms.
Episode 2: ‘Infected’
Episode 2 starts with another flashback, this time to Jakarta, Indonesia in 2003, the year the outbreak began. A mycology professor is asked to examine a corpse with a human bite mark on its leg, and the professor discovers that Cordyceps fungi has evolved to infect humans, just as the scientists in the 60s has worried could happen. Mortified, she tells the Indonesian military that there’s no cure for the infection, that it probably will spread worldwide … and that they should bomb the entire city in a likely futile attempt to stop the spread.
Back in 2023, Joel and Tess interrogate Ellie to find out why she is so important to the Fireflies. She says the group wants to take her to a medical facility in the western United States where they’re conducting work to develop a vaccine for the infection. Since she was infected but unaffected, her DNA may hold the key to making the treatment work.
The trio makes their way across the deserted city, narrowly evading monstrous infected humans along the way. At the Statehouse, they expect to find the Fireflies they were supposed to meet, but instead only find dead bodies with bite marks. Tess reveals that she was bitten during the journey, and Joel has to shoot an infected Firefly that tries to attack them right afterwards, alerting the dozens of other infected of their presence.
Tess, knowing that she’s done for, tells Joel to bring Ellie to a pair of other smugglers for help, then stays behind and sacrifices herself so they can get away. Looking for some serious gross-out factor in this series? You don’t have far to look, but this scene is right up there near the top.
Episode 3: ‘Long, Long Time’
Joel and Ellie go to Lincoln, Massachusetts in search of Bill and Frank, two smugglers that Joel and Tess had made friends with over the years and two of the most beloved characters in the first season. They scavenge for supplies on their way.
In another flashback, we see Bill (Nick Offerman), a paranoid survivalist who has an underground bunker, watching news of the outbreak. After the initial chaos of the outbreak subsides, he begins scavenging the local area and fortifying the town. A few years later, another survivor named Frank (Murray Bartlett) arrives at his doorstep, asking for help. Bill begrudgingly lets him in, and the two enter a romantic relationship. Eventually, they meet Joel and Tess and the group starts their smuggling operation.
The rest of the episode chronicles Bill and Frank’s love story over the years, set against the backdrop of a devastated world. Eventually, Frank comes down with a degenerative disease, asks Bill to help him die and the two drink poisoned wine together.
In the present, Joel and Ellie reach Bill and Frank’s compound. They realize Bill and Frank are dead but find that Bill left Joel his truck and some supplies. They decide to travel to Wyoming, where Joel believes Tommy lives, and seek his assistance.
This episode and its emotional performances from Offerman and Bartlett garnered critical acclaim and won Offerman an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor.
Episode 4: ‘Please Hold to My Hand’
Joel and Ellie arrive in Kansas City, Missouri and are forced to travel through the city to avoid a roadblock on the highway. Soon, they’re ambushed by members of a local militant group, and Joel kills two of them before nearly being choked to death by a third, who Ellie shoots and paralyzes. Joel stabs him to death.
With Bill’s truck wrecked, Joel and Ellie are forced attempt to escape the city on foot. They climb a high-rise to get a better view of the area. Joel teaches Ellie how to properly hold a firearm, and they begin to bond. They rest for the night at the top of the tower but are woken up at gunpoint by a man and a young boy.
Episode 5: ‘Endure and Survive’
The man introduces himself as Henry (Lamar Johnson), and the boy as his little brother Sam (Keivonn Montreal Woodard). Henry says he is being hunted by the same group that attacked Joel and Ellie because he stole medication from their leader, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), to treat Sam’s leukemia.
Joel, Ellie, Henry and Sam band together and use a series of tunnels to try to escape the city, but they’re spotted by a sniper who alerts the militants. Members of the group, including their leader Kathleen, attack them, but a massive horde of infected arrive on the scene and attack everyone.
Joel, Ellie, Henry and Sam escape while the horde kills all of the soldiers, but Sam reveals to Ellie that he was bit during the attack. She tries to spread her blood on the bite mark in an attempt to save him, but it’s too late. What follows is one of the series’ heaviest and most emotional moments.
Episode 6: ‘Kin’
In the sixth episode, Joel and Ellie have made it to Wyoming three months after the events in Kansas City. By now, the pair have begun to form a surrogate father-daughter bond, though Joel attempts to ignore his paternal instincts. At the same time, Joel begins to experience panic attacks. The pair is surrounded by a group of armed survivors on horseback, which turns out to be Tommy’s group that lives in a fortified compound in Jackson, Wyoming.
Joel and Ellie are invited into the compound, which is the closest thing they’ve seen to a civilized society. Ellie learns more about Joel’s past, including the death of his daughter, and Tommy provides intel on where the Fireflies working on the vaccine might be. Joel tells Tommy about Ellie’s immunity and that he’s not confident that he’ll be able to protect her amid his repeated panic attacks, then asks him to take Ellie to Colorado himself.
Ellie, angry, gets into a fight with Joel. He allows her to choose who will take her to Colorado, and she picks him. They are ambushed at the abandoned research facility they find. Joel kills the attackers but is badly wounded.
Episode 7: ‘Left Behind’
The seventh episode opens with Joel and Ellie take shelter in a deserted town, with Joel having become delirious from his wounds. The rest of the episode is a flashback to Ellie’s time in Boston as a student at a military school run by FEDRA, a government organization that runs the quarantine zones and enforces hardline rule.
Ellie’s friend Riley (Storm Reid) tries to convince her to leave the FEDRA school and run off to join the Fireflies. In an attempt to give her a taste of freedom, Riley takes her to an abandoned mall where the two turn the power on and enjoy themselves in stores and arcades. Ellie finds out that Riley has been making improvised bombs for the Fireflies and that they’re reassigning her to Atlanta, Georgia.
Ellie asks her not to go, the two kiss, and then an infected attacks them. Ellie kills the infected, but both girls are bitten, revealing how Ellie realized that she was immune.
Episode 8: ‘When We Are in Need’
Ellie leaves the basement of the house she has been tending to Joel’s wounds in to try to find medication for his infection. She encounters a group of survivors in the woods, led by their preacher David (Scott Shepherd). He tells her that the man Joel killed was a member of his group, then tries to convince her to come to their settlement by offering her a bottle of antibiotics. Ellie declines and runs away with the medication.
Ellie gives Joel the medication, but David’s men descend on the town to find and kill him. Ellie tries to lead the men away but is captured. Joel, using a knife that Ellie left with him, hunts down and kills some of the men after obtaining the location of their settlement.
Meanwhile, Ellie is held captive in a restaurant while David reveals that he is a cannibal who has been feeding his people human flesh and telling them it was hunted deer meat. He asks her to enter a romantic relationship with him, but she breaks his finger. They attempt to butcher her alive, but she bites him, convinces them she has infected them, then escapes and sets the building on fire.
David hunts her down in the burning restaurant and attempts to assault her before she kills him with a meat cleaver. She meets Joel outside, badly traumatized from the experience. This is one of the darkest episodes of the season in a what was already very grim show.
Episode 9: ‘Look for the Light’
In the season’s penultimate episode, the true origin of Ellie’s immunity is revealed in a flashback to her birth, where her mother is attacked shortly after going into labor.
Joel and Ellie make it to Salt Lake City, Utah, where they are captured by the Fireflies and taken to their research facility. The Firefly leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), who tasked him with transporting Ellie in the first place is there and tells him that they plan to extract Ellie’s brain, where the Cordyceps has been growing, to test a cure. Joel doesn’t take this news well and carries out an assault on the facility, killing most of the Fireflies and rescuing Ellie.
Joel lies to Ellie when she wakes up from anesthesia, telling her the facility was sacked by raiders and that the Fireflies had tried to make a cure using other immune people but failed. Ellie makes him swear that everything he said was true, which he does. Ellie reluctantly accepts his story, and they return to the Jackson compound.
And there you have it: an episode-by-episode recap of The Last of Us, just in time for the upcoming second season.
How Many Episodes Will ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Have?
The Last of Us Season 2 will have seven episodes, starting with the season premiere “Future Days” on April 13, 2025.
Watch The Last of Us and tons of other top-rated TV shows on DIRECTV.
Can’t get enough of The Last of Us? Check out these articles:
- The Last of Us Season 2: Release Date, Cast & More
- ‘The Last of Us’ Character Guide
- Everything We Know About the Infected in The Last of Us
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes is The Last of Us Season 1?
Season 1 of The Last of Us was nine episodes long.
Who plays Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us?
Joel is played by Pedro Pascal and Ellie is played by Bella Ramsey.
When does The Last of Us Season 2 come out?
The second season of The Last of Us premieres on April 13, 2025.
DIRECTV Insider brings you our views on what’s happening in streaming, t.v., movies and sports. Companies and persons mentioned are not necessarily associated with and do not necessarily endorse DIRECTV. We will disclose sponsored content on our site when we show it to you, and some of the links on the site may be ads or affiliate links which means DIRECTV may earn compensation from your purchases.
