The second episode of HBO’s apocalyptic investigates our heroes’ faith and backstories
begins its muted second episode, “Infected”, in Indonesia, where a professor of mycology has been summoned to examine a dead body. Except, of course, the body is now a home to the Cordyceps infection. No one has any idea what’s going on: it is pre-Outbreak Day. Suited and masked up, the professor finds stems growing inside the corpse’s throat. They emerge, queasily, like a magician’s never-ending handkerchief.
Back in the off-limits, open city streets of Boston, Joel , Tess and Ellie are continuing their quest. After the revelation that Ellie has been bitten, the adults are understandably suspicious. But she hasn’t displayed any symptoms yet, and besides, they really want that car battery . Ellie offers reassurance by way of explanation. There’s a Firefly base camp out west, with doctors working on a cure. Her apparent immunity could be key to developing a vaccine.
The state house, their destination, is only about a ten-minute walk away. The short way, though, is a little more like the “we’re fucking dead way” according to Tess, so they take the long route, good for their safety as well as exposition. Ellie has never seen the city before, a stranger to its collapsed skyscrapers and destroyed car parks. As foreshadowed in the prologue, most cities were bombed to slow the infection, but while it worked in Boston, it didn’t in many places.
We learn that Ellie was bitten in a solo trip to an off-limits shopping mall , that she is an orphan , that she can’t swim . We learn that Tess is from Detroit, that she once had the hots for Joel. We learn more about the infected – how some wander about for months but others last for years. We discover all this as they walk through the streets, as they wait in the corridor of an abandoned hotel, as they travel through their increasingly-compromised route.
After the museum chase, Tess is nursing a twisted angle as well as something more sinister: a zombie bite. It colours the entire last sequence, in which they find the troop of Fireflies dead, with a desperate urgency. She urges Joel and Ellie to go ahead, and tries to instil hope in the former about the latter’s potential for the universe.
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