BLOODY NORA!

Fans of The Last of Us’ may have been shocked by Ellie spending so long torturing a minor’ character in the latest episode, and the show’s puzzle-like structure means they could have to wait years for clarity

- Louis Chilton

"Wasn't last night's The Last of Us just devastating?" That's the sort of question HBO's hit post-apocalyptic series seems intent on courting, week in and week out. The latest episode - the fifth of its misery-packed second season - continued its headlong plummet into grimness and depravity, as Ellie (Bella Ramsey) hunts for Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in a mission of bloody vengeance. This week, that mission takes her to a Seattle hospital, where she finds and tortures Abby’s acquaintance Nora (Tati Gabrielle). Devastating? Perhaps. But I suspect many viewers will finish the episode with a different question: “Who?”

To be clear, this is no discredit to Gabrielle, who has done nothing wrong in the small snatches of screen time she’s had thus far. But episode five places a whole lot of narrative significance on her, all of a sudden. As Ellie takes a rusty pipe to her foe-of-the-moment, it is Nora we are invited to sympathise with, whose raw, scared humanity fills the screen. Looked at in isolation, it seems like a strange decision to pull focus from Ellie at this point. It’s hard to really give a damn about this new character, so little have we seen of her.