Does an eye for an eye make the whole world blind, or in a savage world, does it keep other survivors from returning to take your other eye?

It’s the question facing the survivors in Jackson, who spent weeks cleaning up the wreckage and staging funerals following the assault from the infected.

But Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is not satisfied letting Abby’s actions go unanswered. When she woke up in the hospital in the aftermath of that awful day, a tube in her chest helping her breathe through what’s likely cracked ribs and maybe even a collapsed lung, her first act was to scream as the memories returned. She had to be sedated to turn her screams into sobs.

But it’s three months later, and although that initial devastation still dogs her, she’s ready to act.

Well, she’s ready to act as soon as Gail (Catherine O’Hara) clears her to leave the hospital. Both of them know that Ellie is BS-ing her way through their session when Ellie declares herself “fine” and Gail wryly responds, “If you say it that fast, it kinda implies you’re not.”

She’s not fine, of course. She misses Joel. She’s upset and sad. She regrets not talking to him on the porch on New Year’s Eve night, even though she knows her final moments with him don’t define their entire relationship.

Gail asks why Joel told her in a session that he both wronged Ellie and saved her in the same act. Ellie badly acts out her confusion, then sarcastically lets herself off the hook since she can’t do it for Joel any longer. In the end, Gail approves her release.

While she’s been recuperating, the town’s been rebuilding — successfully, I’ll add. Well done to Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Jesse (Young Mazino), and the rest of the crew. Hey, speaking of renovations, any of y’all spot any wriggling tendrils in the pipes? Seems like an important part of the clean-up process, ya know?

Ellie returns home, walking past notes, flowers, and other mementos left for Joel. The tree in the yard is in full bloom, a sign of life and rebirth as she enters the silent, empty house. Her first stop is her bedroom, which has been unoccupied since her move to the garage. Then she braces herself and walks into Joel’s room.

It’s a life interrupted. A flannel’s slung over his chair. A wood carving of an owl sits unfinished on a bench next to a tidy line of tools. (In the game, it’s his owl mug and a different wood carving, but this visual neatly combines Joel’s love of ornithology with his capacity for folk art.)

On the neatly made bed, Ellie finds a box containing his broken watch from Sarah, as well as his gun. And in the closet, his clothes hang neatly, still smelling like him. Ellie buries her face in the cloth and lets it soak up her tears.

Her grief is interrupted by Dina (Isabela Merced) arriving with apology cookies. In all of the times she visited Ellie in the hospital, she never shared any useful details about the people who killed Joel. But she comes clean now that the threat of Ellie yanking out all of her tubes and hopping onto a horse in a hospital gown has passed.

Ellie is furious that this delay allowed Abby to get away, but Dina calmly reminds her, “I loved him too, you know,” before sharing everything she knows.

And she knows a lot. Their names. (“Abby,” Ellie breathes almost reverently.) The wolf head logo and the initials W.L.F. Eugene’s old stories about small regional troops, including the Washington Liberation Front, that fought FEDRA without ever joining forces to present a unified force.

Forgiveness is sharing apology cookies with the person who wronged you, and Ellie does just that before the two of them go straight to Tommy.

He threatens Dina with a month of rendering duty if she ever keeps this kind of intel from him again, but he’s reluctant to send a party after Abby when the town’s still recovering. After all, he’s the one who cried for his brother as he washed the blood from Joel’s body in the makeshift morgue full of the others they lost that day.

The best Tommy can do is put it up for discussion and vote at a town meeting. He also tells Ellie where Joel’s buried, but she wants to put off visiting his grave until she’s on the way to Seattle.  

She immediately attempts to secure votes, starting with Jesse as he helps her get back into fighting shape. (She’s a few weeks away from a full recovery, which is 80 percent of where she should’ve been in the first place, he says as she wails on a punching bag.)

Jesse’s on the council now — apparently losing a chunk of your town’s residents in a fungus zombie attack is a fast-track to promotion — but he won’t tell her how he’ll vote. “Dude, you were there,” she retorts.

Not only was he there, but it’s almost certain that he was the one who did the hard work of wrapping Joel’s body and carrying it outside to secure to his horse while also making sure the two shocked and grieving women were able to make the journey back to town. He was there, and if he ends up not supporting Ellie’s proposal, that speaks volumes about Jesse and his thoughts on violence and revenge.

His best advice is for Ellie to write down what she wants to say in advance, not because she’s stupid but because she’s so angry that her words might get away from her otherwise. Weird that he’d think that was a possibility.

Rutina Wesley and Gabriel Luna in ‘The Last of Us’. Liane Hentscher/HBO

Isn’t there something comforting about weirdo citizens dominating local government meetings with their niche, single-minded interests, even when the world has ended? 

Boring Scott (Haig Sutherland) prattles on about corn and turkeys, but has no opinion on “the Seattle thing.” Rachel is (Erica Pappas) next to speak, and she opposes sending 16 of their best people to Seattle, even for Joel: “We are too hurt, and it is too soon.”

Carlisle’s (Hiro Kanagawa, an always welcome presence, even in small role) stands to advocate mercy over revenge; It’s what separates Jackson from the rest of the bloody world.

Then a surprising voice speaks out of turn. It’s Seth (Robert John Burke), and he demands that everyone in town grow up and strike back before the outsiders attack again, thinking they’re weak.

Ellie is last to address the town, and she showily takes her handwritten notes out of her pocket to read from them. Her plea isn’t for revenge but for justice. Justice, she says, is what makes Jackson a community — far more than potlucks and New Year’s Eve dances. This isn’t for Joel, she says. “Do it for us.”

But in the end, the council votes 8-3, and the motion to send a group to Seattle fails. Ellie accepts the decision with grace and equanimity. The end.

Ha. Kidding, obviously, although Seth’s the one who sits frozen in anger as the townsfolk file out.

Gail, meanwhile, is still living better than anyone else in Jackson — on the outside, anyway. Tommy finds her on a sunny afternoon, drinking beer and watching the kiddos play tee-ball. He cops a squat on the cooler when she offers him a bottle, and they agree that Ellie’s speech wasn’t even close to the truth.

Tommy frets that there’s too much of Joel’s anger in her, but Gail assures him that nature, not nurture, does most of that work, and Ellie and Joel always had that in common. Tommy may have inherited Ellie, but he can’t keep her out of trouble.

Despite her relaxed appearance, Gail admits that her job’s been brutal, and she doesn’t have her own therapist to talk to about it, as would’ve been the practice in the old world. (How does she cope, then? “I’m an alcoholic, and I smoke as much weed as I can.” That’s making mushroomy lemonade out of the cordyceps lemon.)

Dina, too, knows that Ellie won’t settle for the town’s decision and knocks on her door that night to find Ellie getting ready to set out on a secret solo mission.

She busts Ellie for making zero actual plans outside of which weapons to take, then pulls out a handwritten list and a paper map with a route meticulously planned out. Guess it takes the apocalypse to get Zoomers to appreciate Rand McNally.

Dina’s thought of everything: medical supplies, batteries, cold-weather and sleeping gear, chlorine pills, bear spray, boots instead of Chucks for Ellie. Dina’s got a guy to get them all of these supplies, and they’ll set out on Shimmer at 3 a.m.

“The guy” turns out to be Seth, who trades Ellie her long gun for his with a gruff, “It’s better.” Is he regretting his bigotry on New Year’s Eve, or is he intent on revenge and using Ellie as a convenient tool? Either way, when he holds out his hand, she shakes it. (And don’t worry, Ellie’s got his long gun, but she’s saving Joel’s pistol for Abby.)

A few miles outside of town, Ellie finally visits Joel’s grave. The marker reads “Beloved Brother and Father,” and Ellie drops coffee beans onto the grass. A slight smile appears, then slips off her face as she presses her hand into the earth that covers his body. 

 It’s a gorgeously shot scene, all golden sunlight and yellow grasses waving in the soft wind, and once she’s spent time being as close to Joel as she’s able to now, she turns and walks silently back to where Dina waits. She’s now ready to begin their journey through the United States of Loss.

Bella Ramsey in ‘The Last of Us’. Courtesy of HBO

As they travel past mountains and waterfalls, rivers and flat lands, grassy stretches expanses and ruined homesteads, they talk. First it’s music, but as these conversations tend to do, the conversation shifts to the first person they killed. You know, “fun stories of childhood.”

Ellie bypasses her real first kill and instead talks about the kid in Kansas City who attacked Joel. And because she also grew up in this world, Dina says she’s sorry for Ellie, not the dead boy.

When rain rolls in, they take shelter in the small tent for the night, wringing out their damp hair and clothes. Ellie extinguishes the lantern, but after a beat, Dina turns it right back on to talk about — the kiss. At last, we’re getting to it. 

Yes, Ellie was drunk, and Dina was high. Ellie’s gay, and Dina’s not. Still. Although Ellie says it didn’t mean anything, Dina’s quick, “Yeah, I know that” lands like a blow. Maybe that’s why, when Dina asks her to rate the kiss on a 1-to-10 scale, Ellie gives it a 6. 

Dina doesn’t believe her, and neither do we. But hey, she’s already gone back to Jesse, so it’s moot, right?

Then Dina turns serious as she asks whether Jesse’s sadness comes from somewhere inside of him or if it’s maybe because of her. After that unsettling self-analysis, she offers a matter-of-fact good night and shuts off the lantern again.

Somehow, talking about all of this leaves things even less settled, especially when Dina speaks up in the darkness to say, “Ellie? I wasn’t that high.”

As they near Seattle, the women stumble across a massacre. The first warning is an overturned cart and a man with a sigil drawn on his coat, shot in the back and left in the road. Dina investigates the nearby trees and returns to puke her guts out. 

Ellie looks for herself and finds the man’s entire group, including children, shot dead, their bodies buzzing with flies. The different caliber bullets on the ground indicate that it’s not FEDRA, and Elie is ready to blame Abby and her crew for it.

After this, there’s no more cheerful talk as they ride, and before long, they reach a highway clogged with long-dead vehicles slowly being covered by green, growing things as nature reclaims its territory.

When Ellie declares it “too quiet,” she admits to quoting both Curtis and Viper from all four movies. From their vantage point, the city itself looks empty and dead, and they speculate that there must not be that many Wolves left after all — and Ellie declares there’s about to be a lot less.

But we know differently. Manny (Danny Ramirez), the most bloodthirsty of Abby’s crew by my estimation, sits in the ruined Space Needle on watch duty. He thought he was monitoring checkpoints 6 and 8, but a voice on the walkie-talkie asks for the all-clear to move through checkpoints 3 and 5. He grumbles but sweeps the area with his binoculars before giving them the go-ahead.

At his say-so, a series of military vehicles rolls slowly down the overgrown Seattle streets, followed by a small army of armed soldiers.

Although we don’t know how Ellie and Dina will be entering the city, what are the odds that it’ll be somewhere near checkpoints 3 and 5, and they’re in for a rude awakening?

Spores for Thought

• What a relief to see no resentment from Ellie because Dina was there when That Thing happened to Joel. I was worried there might be a sense of, “If I’d been there, I would’ve fought harder,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case. 
• “Give Sarah my love.” That’s how Tommy bids farewell to his brother before (presumably) removing the broken watch from Joel’s wrist to leave for Ellie. Mourning the loss of one niece and the grief to come for the other.
• Speaking of Tommy, he was one of the three “yes” votes, right? Maria is (Rutina Wesley) a likely no. But where did Jesse fall, do we think? I’m leaning no, despite Ellie’s direct appeals.
• A note about that group of massacred travelers: We saw them before their murder, communicating through a series of whistles as they traveled. They had curved scars sliced into their cheeks, and a father spoke to his daughter about their prophet, who may be dead, but who saw hidden truths that she shared at all costs. (Cheerful!) The hammer the man gave to his daughter, sporting still-healing cuts on her cheeks, wasn’t able to protect her from whoever left their bodies in the woods, and there’s no way we don’t see more of this group in future episodes.
• What up, Seattle Wolves? Where are you getting gas for your tanks? You got enough guns and ammo for all those soldiers? Answers to come as we approach the halfway point of the season. See you next week, fungi friends.