Ellie and Joel are finally back on our screens, but things are a little different now. At the end of the first season of The Last Of Us, Joel discovered that the plan to save humanity involved the removal of part of Ellie’s brain so the Fireflies could study it and replicate her immunity. When Joel finds out that Ellie has to die in order for this to happen, he decides to get her out instead – killing a bunch of soldiers, the surgeon operating on Ellie and even an ally.

As they drive back to Jackson, Joel avoids Ellie’s questions at first, but then Ellie makes Joel swear that the lie he has told her is the truth.

In the opening moments of the new season, Ellie repeats the question to Joel again while walking towards the town, and after some hesitation, Joel swears to her that he’s told her the truth. The show then cuts to a group of new faces standing around a graveyard in deep discussion about the events that have just transpired. It’s the first time we see Kaitlyn Dever’s Abbi, who is a pivotal character in The Last Of Us storyline. The graveyard they’re grouped around seems to be the burial place for the Fireflies who were killed by Joel when he got Ellie out of the makeshift hospital she was in. “Slowly. We kill him slowly,” Abbi tells the rest of the group, talking about killing Joel. We still don’t know what her connection is to the killed Fireflies, but it seems that she had a close relationship with someone who died, which is spurring her need for revenge.

The episode then jumps forward five years, and we begin to see Ellie and Joel living a more settled life in Jackson. But it appears things aren’t too great between the pair; they aren’t really on speaking terms, and Ellie has moved out into the garage next to Joel’s house. Their relationship is strained, and everyone around them can see and sense Ellie’s animosity towards him. Joel is even in therapy (with Catherine O’Hara’s Gail) to explore his relationship with Ellie and why things are so strange between them, concluding that it’s likely due to her being a 19-year-old. But is it? Or could Ellie have figured out over the years that Joel is lying to her, and she’s decided to distance herself from him?

O’Hara is brilliant as Gail, and Joel’s therapy session scene poses so many questions. She reveals Joel’s role in the death of her husband, Eugene, and how she can’t forgive him for it, even though she understands why. Was Eugene infected and had to be killed? Or did something more sinister happen?

We meet a lot of new characters in this episode, but perhaps the most important is Dina, Ellie’s best friend and potential love interest. Played by Isabela Merced, Dina is witty, charismatic and completely loyal to Ellie. On a standard recon patrol of Jackson’s outskirts, Ellie, Dina and the other patrollers come across several dead infected and a half-eaten bear. Instead of following their captain’s orders, however, Ellie and Dina deduce that there must be more Infected inside the abandoned building. They’re right, but things don’t exactly go to plan.

After Ellie falls through broken floorboards, she comes across another Infected. But this one is different. She doesn’t run at Ellie as they usually do; this infected woman plans her next moves, manages to get to Ellie and bites her stomach. Nobody sees this happen, including Dina, who doesn’t know about Ellie’s immunity. In fact, very few in Jackson do.

So, it seems the infected have learned some new tricks and have stalkers within their ranks now. After reporting the events of the patrol to the town’s council, Ellie and Dina join the rest of Jackson at the New Year’s Eve party. While dancing together, Dina and Ellie kiss and their intimate moment is broken by a man shouting “dykes” at them. Joel gets involved and pushes the man onto the floor, but this infuriates Ellie. “I don’t need your help!” she tells him. There is certainly something simmering underneath the surface between them; her anger doesn’t seem to be related to her being a teenager or not wanting to follow his rules. It feels deeper.

As the episode comes to an end, we’re given glimpses of what happens next in this new season. So far, the episode had been setting the scene for what Ellie and Joel’s lives have looked like over the past five years and how the life they’ve known may change. There were two major glimpses: the first being the broken pipes we saw at the beginning of the episode suddenly showing infected fungus tendrils. Jackson’s residents may work tirelessly to protect their town from the infected, but they seem to have managed to infiltrate the town in a rather quiet and unexpected way.

In the final moments of the episode, we also see that Abbi and her allies have also been working tirelessly over the past five years, and have now managed to track down Joel. We see Abbi perched on a snowy hill surrounding the town as she slightly smiles to herself, her quest for revenge edging ever closer.

Images: Warner Bros