In 1968, two doctors on a talk show debate about viruses. One of them, named Dr. Neuman, believes that mankind is used to fighting viruses, but fungi are something they are not prepared for, given their controlling and hallucinogenic capabilities. He theorizes that given the right environment, like if the world gets "slightly warmer", fungi can evolve to the point of being a considerable threat to humans, much like to insects, with no cures or vaccines to prevent a potential pandemic.
On September 26, 2003, Sarah Miller wakes up to prepare breakfast for herself and her father Joel. Given that it was Joel's 36th birthday, Sarah wanted to make pancakes for her father, but they ran out of pancake mix so they had eggs and bacon instead. Joel's brother Tommy soon arrives to pick them up for school and work. Before she leaves the house, Sarah sneaks into Joel's room and takes a watch and some money out of his drawer.
Outside, the Millers are greeted by their neighbors, the Adlers, who offer them biscuits. Joel turns them down, claiming to be on a diet, but offers to have Sarah go over later.
After school, Sarah takes the bus to a watch repair shop in town to get Joel's watch fixed. As a convoy of police and fire vehicles pass by outside, she comments to the repairman about the increased activity, and the repairman claims it's been going on all day. Shortly before the repair is complete, the repairman's wife urges him to close the store and they argue in Arabic. The repairman quickly finishes up with the watch before handing it to Sarah, who is then ushered out by his wife as the store closes.
As promised, Sarah goes over to the Adler house afterwards. She asks Mrs. Adler about the police activity but she dismisses it. As Sarah browses the Adlers' DVD collection, she asks to borrow Joel's favorite movie before returning home. Unbeknownst to either Sarah or Mrs. Adler, Nana Adler is spasming in her wheelchair...
Several hours later, Joel finally arrives home late, and without the cake that he promised he would get. Sarah makes him promise to get a cake the next day before presenting him with his repaired watch and the DVD of his favorite movie. Despite promising to stay awake, Sarah soon falls asleep in Joel's lap. Unfortunately, Tommy soon calls Joel to bail him out of jail; he intervened in a fight at a bar where a man went crazy and started swinging at a waitress, and was arrested when the cops showed up. Joel tucks Sarah into bed before heading out.
Sarah wakes up alone in the early hours of the morning to the sound of honking horns and helicopter flying overhead. She turns on the TV to find nothing but an emergency alert signal. A banging noise on the window draws her attention; it is the Adlers' dog, Mercy. Sarah tries to bring her back to the Adler house but she runs away in fright instead.
Inside the house, a horrified Sarah discovers a heavily bleeding Mr. Adler and Mrs. Adler on the floor being fed on by Nana, who has been turned by the Cordyceps fungus into a mindless monster with tendrils growing out of her mouth. The infected Nana soon notices Sarah and chases her out of the house. As Sarah runs outside, Joel and Tommy show up in their truck and order her to get in. When Nana charges them, Joel bludgeons her with his wrench.
The Millers attempt to leave town as Joel and Tommy try to reassure a distraught Sarah, passing by burning homes and stranded motorists on their way to the highway. Unfortunately, the highway is backed up due to a military blockade, so Tommy goes off-road as they make their way to another town. Once there, crowds of panicked people in the street block their way, so Joel orders Tommy to find another way around. At that point, their truck is knocked over by the force of a plane crash and totaled by a crashed police car so now they have to find their way around on foot. Joel is forced to carry Sarah as she broke her ankle when the truck flipped, while Tommy promises to find a way around after being trapped on the other side of the truck.
Making their way through an alleyway, Joel and Sarah runs into a group of infected feeding on victims. One of them notices and gives chase, almost catching them on the outskirts of town before being shot dead by a soldier. Joel pleads for help from the soldier for Sarah's injury. However, the soldier soon receives further orders from his superiors and points his rifle at them. Joel pleads with the soldier that they're not sick before the soldier opens fire. Joel and Sarah dive into a nearby ditch to try to dodge the gunfire. The soldier apologizes before preparing to finish them off, but Tommy arrives and shoots him dead before he can do so.
Joel examines his wounds and finds that he was only grazed by the bullets, but he soon follows Tommy's look of horror to see Sarah lying on the ground with a large bloodstain on her stomach, having taken the brunt of the soldier's volley of fire. He rushes over and tries to move her, but she's in too much pain. A distraught Joel can soon do nothing but scream and cry as his only child dies in his arms.
Twenty years later, civilization has all but collapsed, with a few quarantine zones remaining under the control of the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), the last remnants of the US government ruling their enclaves with an iron fist. A little boy is seen wandering through the ruins of Boston before he collapses in front of a fortified concrete gate to that city's quarantine zone. The gate guards bring him inside, where he is scanned for Cordyceps infection. Unfortunately, he tests positive and one of the guards comforts the boy as her colleague administers a lethal injection. An aged Joel is seen burning his body a short time later.
Inside the quarantine zone, Joel and his partner Tess scrounge up a living in the shadows. He awaits news of Tommy, who now lives in Wyoming, and resolves to find his brother after three weeks of radio silence. He attempts to trade for a working car battery with a corrupt FEDRA soldier he regularly deals drugs to without success.
In another part of the quarantine zone, a teenage girl has been chained up inside a room by the Fireflies, a rebel group opposing FEDRA. The Fireflies perform tests on her, which the girl has grown increasingly irritated by as she has already passed the test several times in the past days. Marlene, the leader of the local Fireflies, visits the girl, addressing her as Ellie and revealing that she was the one who brought her to Boston. She swears Ellie to silence on a secret she tells her on pain of death.
After briefly spending time in the custody of the gangster Robert and later FEDRA, Tess gets wind that Robert is attempting to sell a car battery to an unknown party. They sneak through abandoned tunnels to reach the location of the deal, which turns out to be the Firefly headquarters. The deal went wrong due to the battery being broken, and resulted in the deaths of Robert and his gang as well as most of the Fireflies. Marlene, with no other options and injured herself, enlists Joel and Tess and tasks them with taking Ellie to the Massachusetts State House — in turn, the Fireflies will give them supplies, including a working vehicle so Joel can reach Tommy.
As they leave the quarantined zone, the trio are accosted by Joel's FEDRA acquaintance. When he tries to scan Ellie, she stabs him in the leg and Joel, triggered by the similarities to Sarah's death twenty years before, beats the soldier to death with his bare hands in the ensuing scuffle. Spotting the results of the scanner, Tess realizes that Ellie has been infected by the fungus, but the girl insists that she is immune. The three flee through a fence into a biological contamination area. Back in Joel's apartment, Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down Again" comes on over the radio, indicating trouble.
Tropes in this episode include:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: This episode's prologue is set in 2003, fittingly 20 years before the present day both in real life and in-story.
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: When the group is threatened by a FEDRA soldier, Joel flashes back to Sarah's death, goes into a rage and beats the man to death.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Some of the quarantine workers of FEDRA are still shown as willing to treat infectees in a humane way, even if it means going a bit of an extra mile. Instead of shooting the boy on sight as he approaches the QZ, they first confirm he is indeed infected and then the attending FEDRA officer takes her time to comfort the boy, even as her colleague administers the lethal injection. While it may be only due to the infectee of the week being a child, the treatment is far gentler than anything we have seen from FEDRA in the game's opening.
- Adaptation Expansion: The day of the initial infection is shown in more detail than it was in the original game. In particular, we get to see more of how Sarah spent the hours leading up to her death.
- Agonizing Stomach Wound: Downplayed. While Sarah is in severe pain after getting shot in the stomach, her death struggle is relatively short.
- And Then What?: The FEDRA guard that Joel deals with mentions he could just shoot Joel and not have to pay him; Joel's response is to ask him what he would do after that, which gets him to back down.
- Apologetic Attacker: In a slight divergence from the original game, the soldier that confronts Joel and Sarah quickly apologizes to Joel before attempting to kill him. Emphasis on 'slight', as this soldier made no attempt to protest the order to execute a child, as the one in the game had, although he is heard incredulously asking his superior to repeat the order.
- Armor-Piercing Question:
- Abe tries reassuring Joel that Tommy is okay after Tommy goes no-contact for three weeks. When Joel decides to go to the tower himself, Abe shoots back that there are worse things out there than infected. Joel responds thusly:Joel: But you're sure Tommy's okay?
- Ellie likewise receives one from Marlene when she questions why terrorists would put her with FEDRA.Marlene: "Terrorists?" Was Riley a terrorist?
- Abe tries reassuring Joel that Tommy is okay after Tommy goes no-contact for three weeks. When Joel decides to go to the tower himself, Abe shoots back that there are worse things out there than infected. Joel responds thusly:
- Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: During the night of the outbreak the soldier has Joel at gunpoint and is about to pull the trigger. A gunshot rings out but it's the soldier getting shot by Tommy who was positioned off-screen.
- Birthday Beginning: After a brief opening scene set decades earlier where people on a news program talk about the danger of fungi, the first thing we see is protagonist Joel celebrating his birthday.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: Exaggerated on Joel's 36th birthday, during which not only does the zombie apocalypse begin out of nowhere, but he also has to see his daughter bleed out after sustaining a fatal gunshot wound.
- Brick Joke: Ellie figures that 80s songs on Joel's radio means trouble after he reacts to her claiming that Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go played while he was asleep. In the ending, Never Let Me Down Again plays on the radio, foreshadowing the danger Joel and Ellie will face on their journey.
- Buzzing the Deck: As the Millers are trying to escape, Tommy is startled by a passenger jet screaming directly overhead, close enough that the retracting landing gear can be seen in detail through the sunroof with two more jets right on its tail, all likely trying to flee the city in desperation to risk such low flying and tight formations.
- The Cameo: John Hannah and Christopher Heyerdahl make brief appearances as scientists on a TV talk show in the prologue, set in 1968. Josh Brener also appears as the host interviewing them.
- Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: When Tess walks the streets, we hear orders coming from loudspeakers on every street corner.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Lampshaded by Joel when he meets up with the FEDRA guard. The guard tries to intimidate Joel by suggesting that he could just shoot Joel and take the drugs. Joel does not bite and points out that doing so would cost the guard any future supply of pills.
- Chekhov's News: While going about their normal lives right, Joel, Sarah and Tommy hear about a fungal disease showing up in Jakarta on the radio - a disease that will soon show up in horrifying fashion in their own home.
- Comforting Comforter: Joel is shown to be a caring dad when he carries Sarah, who fell asleep in front of the TV, to her bed and pulls the bedsheet over her.
- Composite Character: An extremely minor instance, but in the game, the first infected seen is the Millers' neighbor Jimmy Cooper; later they drive past "Louis's farm" which is on fire. In the series, Jimmy is replaced by Nana Adler, but they drive past "Jimmy's place," which is on fire.
- Covert Distress Code: Joel uses 80s songs appearing on the radio as code for being in trouble.
- Crowd Panic: On the night of the outbreak in 2003, the Millers are forced to drive through the center of town to escape the quarantine zone. As they attempt to drive through, they encounter a mass of people running in all directions, some of whom are already wounded by the Infected, with others being attacked by Infected in the streets, which only adds to the chaos.
- Death by Cameo: The soldier that confronts Joel and Sarah as they attempt to escape Austin is played by series co-creator Craig Mazin. As in the game, said soldier is shot by Tommy.
- Decoy Protagonist: This episode lures the viewer into thinking Sarah is the protagonist much longer than the game did. About half of the 85 minute runtime is seen through her eyes and follows her through the entire day of the outbreak and into the next morning. The game opens with Sarah being woken up by the commotion the night of the outbreak and she's dead within fifteen minutes.
- Defiant Captive: Ellie acts quite bratty towards her captors.
- Desolation Shot: The shot right after the Time Skip to 2023 where the young boy looks upon destroyed Boston from a hill.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Joel cradles Sarah's body to himself as she lay dying from her wounds.
- Diegetic Switch: The Depeche Mode song at the end changes from playing on a radio in-universe to playing on the soundtrack when the credits start rolling.
- Dirty Cop: At least one of the FEDRA guards is willing to trade ration coupons and cigarettes with Joel in exchange for drugs and access to a car battery. The drugs themselves are mentioned to have been made in a FEDRA factory in Atlanta and wound up in the hands of the smugglers who supply Joel. The same guard later catches Joel, Tess, and Ellie sneaking out of the quarantine zone and demands free drugs going forward to even consider letting them go.
- Distant Prologue: The Teaser for the pilot takes place in a 1968 talk show, 35 years before the actual start of the story. Then after showing the beginning of the outbreak, the story makes a 20-year jump to where things really start.
- Ear Ache: One of Marlene's companions had her ear shot off during an offscreen shootout between the Fireflies and Robert's men.
- Early-Bird Cameo: In addition to his watch, Sarah also gifts Joel the extended edition of Curtis and the Viper 2, which was established as Joel's favorite film in The Last of Us Part II.
- Emergency Broadcast: When Sarah wakes up at night and turns on the TV, there is a test screen and a national alert broadcast running.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Joel orders Tommy to drive past a family on the side of the road needing help, establishing that he will only look out for himself and his family and will do anything towards that end.
- Ellie is introduced as a captive, chained to a radiator for days on end, and she still gives her captors no end of sarcasm and foul language.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: The Adler's dog seems to sense something is up with Nana long before she obviously turns. Before Sarah leaves, she notices him sitting frozen, staring at Nana while doing a Quizzical Tilt.
- Fascists' Bed Time: There is a mandatory curfew in the QZ to "fight infection and insurrection".
- First-Episode Spoiler: Sarah dies on the first night of the outbreak and Ellie is immune to cordyceps.
- Gilligan Cut: Sarah promises not to fall asleep while watching Curtis and the Viper 2 because it's "so riveting". Hours later, she's firmly asleep on Joel's lap.
- Hostage MacGuffin: Joel wrongly assumed that Ellie is important because she's the daughter of some high-ranking official. The end of the episode reveals to him and the audience that she actually is The Immune.
- Improvised Imprisonment: The Fireflies keep Ellie in a room chained to a radiator while trying to gauge her immunity.
- It's Going Down: During the evacuation sequence, a very prominent shot is shown of a huge fleet of passenger aircraft leaving the city. Pessimistic viewers might have been able to guess what was about to happen sooner or later.
- Just Before the End: The first segment of the episode proper focuses on Sarah going about her daily routine while the world begins slowly unraveling all around her. It ends with the apocalyptic outbreak in full swing, society dissolving into madness as she and her family try to escape the city, and her death at the hand of a paranoid national guard soldier trying to enforce quarantine.
- La Résistance: Marlene paints the Fireflies as this, fighting against FEDRA's military dictatorship to restore democracy.
- Last Day of Normalcy: The opening scenes show Joel, Tommy and Sarah living their normal life before the outbreak.
- Lecture as Exposition: The episode opens with two scientists being interviewed on a chat show in the 1960s, where a mycologist (played by John Hannah) speaks in detail about how parasitic fungi like cordyceps can infect their hosts and change their behavior in order to reproduce. He ends his lecture by theorizing that while these fungi can only infect insects, the world getting warmer could cause them to evolve the ability to infect humans.
- Let Them Die Happy: The FEDRA soldier with the infected little boy tells him that he'll get food and toys as her colleague is giving the child a lethal injection.
- Life Saving Misfortune: Tommy gets arrested after trying to break up a fight in a bar, but thanks to this and Joel having to drive to the jail to bail him out, the brothers get a front-row seat to the chaos that's starting on outbreak night and realize they have to grab Sarah and flee. Sarah tragically ends up dying, but if things had gone otherwise the Miller family might have been attacked by the Adlers or other turned neighbors before they realized what was happening.
- Loose Floorboard Hiding Spot: After he decides to go find Tommy, Joel pushes aside a closet in his room and takes out a couple of floorboards. Underneath are some weapons and supplies for the trip.
- Meaningful Background Event:
- While Sarah is getting Joel's watch fixed, a convoy of armored vehicles can be seen speeding by outside, serving as a warning of what's to come.
- While Sarah is browsing the Adlers' shelf for a movie to borrow, an out-of-focus Nana Adler can be seen having some kind of seizure in the background, indicating the initial stage of her infection with the cordyceps fungi.
- Meaningful Echo: On the night of the outbreak Joel carries Sarah in his arms in a desperate attempt to flee from the infected. Twenty years later Joel carries the corpse of a euthanized boy in his arms — and dumps him in the fire to be burned.
- Mercy Kill: The soldiers from FEDRA do this to any infected refugees who come to the quarantine zone (or at the very least, they do with children). It's assumed to be partial because death by humane euthanasia is obviously preferable to being simply shot on sight or turning into a Runner or worse.
- Mexican Standoff: In a corridor between the Fireflies and Joel/Tess. It ends peacefully after they manage to strike a deal.
- Mythology Gag:
- The extended driving sequence includes several nods to changes between the game and the television series.
- When driving past the burning farmhouse, Tommy refers to it as "Jimmy's place." The burning farmhouse belonged to someone named Louis in the game, but Jimmy was the name of the newly infected neighbor whom Joel had to kill in the first game. He was replaced by the Adlers.
- In the game, the driving sequence ended with the car getting T-boned by another car, forcing the family to escape on foot. In the episode, the very same car comes very close to hitting them but stops in time, and they eventually have to leave the car for a different reason.
- Tess offers to Robert that she'll tell Joel that the wounds Robert's thugs gave her were from an attempted mugging in order to keep Joel off his back. This is the same explanation Tess gives to Joel in the game to explain her wounds and her tardiness when the player first meets her.
- When Joel shifts his wardrobe to uncover his equipment under the floorboards, the camera focuses on a shot of dust particles stirred up in the air, which resemble the Cordyceps spores from the games. Spores as an infection vector were removed in the show in favour of fungal tendrils.
- The extended driving sequence includes several nods to changes between the game and the television series.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The 1968 talk show at the start of the series resembles The Dick Cavett Show.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
- Tommy tries to break up a fight in a bar after a fellow patron goes berserk and starts attacking a waitress, and gets arrested by the police for his trouble when they show up.
- Joel's neighbour Denise rushes to help the infected Mr. & Mrs. Adler after Tommy hits them with the truck. As he drives away, Mr. Adler can be subsequently seen getting up and attacking her.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Outside the QZ, Joel tackles the soldier holding him at gunpoint and beats him to death with his fists after the situation triggered a Flashback Cut to Sarah's death.
- Not His Sled: The extended prologue plays with the expectations of players who are watching the adaptation. In the game, Joel, Sarah, and Tommy's escape through the city is cut short by a car crash. Here, they're shown narrowly avoiding the car crash in roughly the same place... Only to have the car taken out of commission by a giant piece of shrapnel from a plane crash thousands of feet away. Followed by a car rear-ending the vehicle after they come to, for good measure.
- Not Me This Time: When Joel gets a phone call from Tommy asking him to bail him out, his extreme annoyance tells the viewer that this isn't the first time Tommy's been arrested for brawling. Tommy protests that it wasn't his fault this time, as he was trying to break up a fight in a bar after a patron went wild and starting swinging at a waitress.
- One, Two, Skip a Few: When Ellie is tasked to count to 10, she goes until 8 until she changes to a "Fuck You" with a Flipping the Bird hand gesture towards her captors for good measure.
- Party Scattering: Joel and Sarah get separated from Tommy when a crashed car blocks off an alleyway. This leaves Joel without protection and eventually gets Sarah killed.
- Past Experience Nightmare: It's implied that Sarah's death keeps haunting Joel in his dreams.
- Please Wake Up: Still in denial, Joel wants Sarah to get up while it's obvious that she is already dead.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- Joel loses Sarah to this mistake when dealing with the military cordon around Austin, as he fails to specify that his daughter's ankle injury isn't from a bite.
- Earlier, Joel and Tommy involuntarily do everything on their part to look like it's them who have become aggressive and attacked the Adlers for no reason. Denise, the neighbor across the street, sees this and rushes to help the Adlers, who attack and infect her.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: Sarah has posters of female singers hanging above her bed.
- Properly Paranoid: During a talk show in 1968, a renowned epidemiologist named Dr. Neuman expresses concern that in theory, while humanity has dealt with many viruses for centuries, fungal infections on a pandemic level is something humanity is not prepared for, especially if global warming is involved that allows fungi to evolve. Fast-forward to 2003, and a fungal infection occurs which devastatingly impacts the country for the next 20 years.
- Public Execution: In Boston, the FEDRA hang smugglers caught sneaking into or out of quarantine zones while the public is forced to watch.
- Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: The military, lacking any information about the nature of the infection, starts shooting at anyone remotely looking like they could pose a danger. It gets Sarah killed.
- Refusal of the Call: Joel initially turns down the request for Ellie's Escort Mission but changes his mind when realizing that it would be his best shot at getting hold of a vehicle to look for Tommy.
- Run for the Border: When they sit in the truck on the night of the outbreak and consider their options, Joel suggests heading for Mexico.
- Say My Name: Tess screams Joel's name when she finds out Ellie is infected.
- Shout-Out: The shot of Nana Adler facing up at Sarah while feeding on Mrs. Adler is nigh-identical to the reveal of the first zombie in Resident Evil 2 (Remake).
- Talking in Your Sleep: Ellie mentions that Joel is mumbling in his sleep. We don't learn any more details though.
- These Hands Have Killed: Joel looks at his bloody hand after giving the soldier a lethal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
- Throwing Off the Disability: Downplayed Trope, if not Subverted. As the fungus takes control of a person, it will also patch up their bodies to some extent and override the brain's inhibitors to help in its spread. In this episode, the non-walking, non-talking, dementia-ridden Nana Adler's body was able to stand, walk, and bite after the fungus essentially became her new brain.
- Time Skip: There is a time skip of 20 years after the initial outbreak.
- Too Dumb to Live: Tess calls Robert as much for trying to sell a bad car battery twice. He tried selling it to Joel and the Fireflies to boot. The second time causing a shoot-out which results in his and his crew's deaths.
- Tragic Keepsake: Joel is shown to still wear the watch that Sarah had repaired for him twenty years earlier despite it being damaged and nonfunctioning.
- Trail of Blood: Sarah finds one in the Adler's kitchen leading to the house owner lying severely injured in a corner.
- Trauma Button: When Joel, Ellie, and Tess are being arrested by the FEDRA Soldier at the end of episode, the event triggers traumatic memories of Sarah's death resulting in him snapping and viciously beating the poor soldier to death with his bare fists.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Ellie's reaction to Joel brutally beating a FEDRA Soldier to death, in stark contrast to Sarah's horrified reaction to Joel killing an infected Nana, is utter amazement and awe.
- Twisted Ankle: Sarah hurts her ankle in the car crash and has to be carried by Joel which limits his agility.
- Weapon Stomp: During their initial encounter, Ellie attacks Joel from behind with a knife but he fends her off and stomps on the knife to keep her from doing any harm with it.
- Wham Line: The line revealing what makes Ellie so important:Ellie: (showing her bite) Look! Look! This is three weeks old! No one lasts more than a day! Does this look a day old to you?!
- Would Hurt a Child: On Outbreak Day, an army soldier shoots at Joel and Sarah on the off chance they might be infected. While Joel is only grazed, Sarah takes several bullets to the stomach and dies in Joel's arms.
- Wrench Whack: Joel knocks down Nana Adler with his wrench with Sarah looking on in shock.
- You Just Told Me: Ellie tricks Joel into giving away what code 80 means when she pretends that "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" played on the radio while he was asleep and he responds with "Shit".Ellie: Gotcha. '80s means trouble.
