The final episode of ‘The Last of Us’ solves one of the biggest unknowns in Ellie’s history

— SPOILERS for the final episode of ‘The Last of Us’ —

The first season of ‘The Last of Us’ has had a final stretch of impact. Joel and Ellie found the Fireflies (or, rather, it was the other way around), and we saw Marlene again. But while that was the goal of the entire series, once they got there and Joel discovered the true plans of the rebels to try to find the cureHe felt betrayed. The Fireflies wanted to investigate Ellie, yes, but the young Ellie wasn’t going to survive the process.

Joel lost the roles in the finale of ‘The Last of Us’ and embarked on a crusade against an entire army, emerging victorious, but he hasn’t had the courage to tell Ellie. Bella Ramsay’s character is saturated with so many deaths behind her back. Tess, Sam, Henry… And now Marlene, a mother figure to her. But most tragic of all, Ellie doesn’t even know that Marlene picked her up from her mother shortly before she died..

‘The Last of Us’: Who is Ellie’s mother?

According to what we have been discovering about Ellie since the start of the HBO Max series, the young woman was born after the pandemic broke out and the only world he’s ever known is the one that’s riddled with clickers and infected by the cordyceps fungus. We met her chained in a safe house in the Fireflies, with no trace of her parents, and shortly after we learned that she herself did not know them.

However, the prologue of this final episode has revealed to us Ellie’s mother and how she was borna piece of information that could be very important to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the series.

Ellie’s mother Her name is Anna, and she is played by Ashley Johnson, the actress who voiced Ellie in the original ‘The Last of Us’ video game. In this opening scene we see her about to give birth, fleeing until she reaches an uninhabited house in the middle of the field. There she discovers that her water has broken and that labor is imminent, but also that there is a clicker hanging around the house.

Anna, in labor, does the impossible: stabs the infected while giving birth to her little girl, with the bad luck that she is bitten in the process. And by now we all know what a snapper bite means…

When Marlene arrives at the house and discovers what has happened, she finds Anna ready to end her own life with a knife to her neck and the girl in her arms. Anna tells him to take the little girl (“her name is ellie“) and to take care of her, and after a very emotional exchange of farewell words, Marlene puts an end to Anna’s suffering. But we have left out a very important detail:

‘The Last of Us’: The reason why Ellie is immune to the fungus

When Anna discovers that she has been bitten and that, at the same time, she has just given birth to Ellie, rushes to cut the umbilical cord before the fungus reaches the little girl. This is something we have seen in countless zombie series and movies before. If you are bitten on the hand, the arm must be cut off immediately so that the virus does not spread to the rest of the body (then the hand takes on a life of its own and tries to attack you, yes, but that is another story).

Anna assures Marlene that she cut the cord before she was bitten, but we know that’s a lie.. And those few seconds between the wound and the cut in which Ellie remains attached to her infected mother seem to be the key to her having developed an immunity to the fungus.

It is something that is not explained even in the original video game, so not even the most die-hard fans anticipated this scene and this explanation. It will be necessary to see if Ellie ever manages to find out what happened (with Marlene dead, it will be difficult), and if this information is useful in season 2 of ‘The Last of Us’ to try to find a cure for the plague that ended the world.