As anyone who’s anyone knows, the second season of HBO’s video-game-turned-prestige-Sunday-night-appointment-viewing The Last of Us is well under way; beloved characters are [SPOILERS] dead, faves are fingering each other, and shrooms are thriving in Seattle. No, not the good ones. The bad ones: Cordyceps, the shrooms that turned most people into bitey zombies in 2003 and sent society tumbling into apocalyptic doom.
[There are so many spoilers ahead—if that’s important to you, just stop reading here.]
During this season, I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, and, since I didn’t play the video game (or really any video game) I’ve been hit over the head by plot-twists so hard it felt like getting lobotomized via golf club. But for the last few episodes, I haven’t cared about anything that’s happened or anything that’s to come because all I can focus on is that the show is in Seattle and this Seattle is both very Seattle and like no Seattle I have ever seen.
Now that we’re five episodes into the season and two full episodes into The Last of Us’s version of the Emerald City, I’d like to take a look at what post-apocalyptic Seattle gets right and what it gets so very wrong.
Seattleites love to be misunderstood in media (so we can correct the record, and have this sense of superiority). TLOU does better than most media about Seattle; We get flashes of the city we know: gay rights, protecting a record store in the apocalypse, that some of our population people would fuck off into the woods and spurn all technology while the rest become anarchists. TLOU even recognizes our Capitol Hill-centricity by making it the only named neighborhood in the show. But their biggest mistake? Giving us a fully-formed transit system. Despite its confused, uncanny depiction of our city, you can’t help but wonder, is post-apocalyptic Seattle better than us?
Let’s break it down by episode.
Season 2 x 3: The Path
This episode grants us about 5 total minutes of Seattle. Our main characters, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced), journey from Jackson, Wyoming to Seattle on their quest for revenge against the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), the group that killed Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal). They take what seems like I-90. The traffic through the Snoqualmie Pass is as bad as ever, gridlocked with long-abandoned vehicles.
Perplexingly, we see a shot of downtown Seattle that should only come from the northern reaches of I-5. Then, the show cuts to our characters approaching from Beacon Hill. What! Doesn’t track. Anyway. The port is all dried up. Buildings have caved in on themselves. Moss grows thick and verdant. There’s no such thing as the Smith Tower anymore. The Columbia Tower still stands tall. And, yet, WLF has chosen the substantially-squatter and worse-positioned Space Needle as their lookout tower. Idiots.
The last snatch of Seattle we get before blackout is a militia group and tanks rolling down what I assume is Mercer Street. All I can think while watching it is, this is exactly what right-wing media thinks happened during 2020’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest.
Episode 2x4: Day One
This episode starts inside a government, or FEDRA, tank rolling through 2018 Seattle. The soldiers refer to Seattle citizens snidely as “voters” since they took away their rights. They do not live long. Lesson one: Do not fuck with our NPR-listener population’s civic duty.
Fast forward to present day, Ellie and Dina, squarely in the midst of a will-they-won’t-they romance, pick their way through a Capitol Hill still decorated with tattered pride flags and faded rainbow murals. They do not understand what the rainbows mean. It means you two can kiss each other!!
Seattle viewers will note this Capitol Hill makes absolutely no sense. There’s a general essence that the show gets. Despite the defunctness, there’s a soft beauty to Seattle in a way there isn’t in other TLOU locales. Warm light—like the kind right after a spring rain. So much green. But, the buildings aren’t our buildings. TLOU wrongly assumes Seattle is much denser than it really is, even in our densest neighborhood. There is, however, a Key Bank!
I believe they’re on Broadway when Ellie and Dina find their way into a mossy record store which I’m assuming is the TLOU-equivalent of the very-real Spin Cycle Records. The record-shop-of-it-all feels like another Seattle stereotype, but one I’m not mad at. Like the writers were like, “Well, what does that town have other than rain and the gays? Oh, yeah, grunge.” Still, I’m here for it.
The record store seems mostly undisturbed, as if its contents were so holy the mushroom zombies wouldn’t dare do any damage. Upstairs, where sunlight streams through a gaping vine-covered hole in the wall, Ellie finds a mint-condition guitar and strums “Take on Me” by A-Ha. Dina watches. Dina cries. I’m choosing to believe it’s the magic of the Seattle air that finally lets Ellie fully grieve Joel, her dad-figure who taught her how to strum. Also, the overpowering gayness of Capitol Hill clearly withstood the hell of the apocalypse and lights the semi-lit match of lesbian love already inside the hearts of Ellie and Dina.
Next, we move to the abandoned FOX 13 building (Q13 in reality). We all know this is in West Lake. I assume this is where we are. Horrors await in this building—and not just because right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse used to work there. The luddite cult at odds with WLF, the Seraphites, have strung up and disemboweled a few WLFs.
“What the hell is wrong with Seattle?” Dina asks, a question probably asked a lot in those conservative media halls.
WLFs show up. All hell breaks loose. Ellie and Dina scramble and fight. They run out of the building that we all know is in West Lake and scurry into a transit tunnel? At first, I thought, maybe this was the Alaskan Way tunnel, because geography—timeline be damned. But Ellie and Dina emerge through rubble into what is probably the downtown transit tunnel, and this is where we get to the most unrealistic part of the whole show for me: TLOU thinks 2003-Seattle had a robust public transit network.
Light rail first came to Seattle in 2009, but a toppled subway train blocks their path. Signs pointing to other lines—1, 3, 4, etc.—point up the stairs. As of 2025, Seattle only had one real, connected “subway” line. And the 2 line still hasn’t connected Bellevue and Seattle and I’m beginning to think it never will. The apocalypse-version of Seattle has it better than us. Was the dream of the 15-minute city a reality here? If it was, it was too powerful and had to be stopped.
Zombies happen. Ellie and Dina make a narrow escape. They break into the Pinnacle Theater—what is clearly the Paramount Theater. There, after more plot things, Ellie and Dina, make sweet, gay love. Thank you, Seattle.
Episode 2 x 5: Feel Her Love
In the morning, Ellie and Dina wake to big booms. Something is happening! They climb to the roof. The WLFs are at a big hospital, Lake Hill Hospital, visible from the top of the Paramount Pinnacle Theater. The view showcases a sprawling downtown and what looks like a way-too-narrow Elliott Bay with Bainbridge Island and Bremerton visible.
Where the hell are we in the city? That is clearly not our business. Dina triangulates the WLFs movements on a map of Seattle to find the best path to the hospital. Show us the map, Dina. Please, show us the map! She doesn’t show us the map.
We next see them in the International District. The streets are covered in ferns out of the Jurassic period. An abandoned King County Metro bus provides a nice touch for us Seattleites. It is, like all things in apocalypse Seattle, covered in green growth. Without people, the moss has become king.
Ellie and Dina run into the “smart” kind of zombies she first encountered episodes ago back in Jackson. But—uh oh. There is an entire hoard of smart zombies. This makes sense. Seattle is the most-educated big city. It would only track that our infected would be fast, crafty, and make trouble for our heroines.
After a narrow escape, our characters run into “The Park.” Judging solely by the big, fat trees and the fact that a few episodes ago there was a sign for “Arboretum Trail,” I’m assuming this is the Washington Park Arboretum. Which means when the Seraphites disembowel a captured WLF member, I can only picture their guts spilling all over Azalea Way. In TLOU, does Rhodendron Glen run red with blood?
Ellie runs for it through the evergreens. She stumbles out of the park into—would you look at that!—Lake Hill Hospital. Because I cannot divorce geography from my viewing experience, my best attempt at placing this hospital is assuming it’s Pacific Medical Center, that austere mental health hospital that keeps a watchful eye on all downtown from Beacon Hill.
Ellie chases a WLF member into the bowels of that fucked up hospital basement. Inside, the doomed basement, cordyceps snake up the walls. Bodies that have fused with the shrooms inhale and exhale airborne contaminants that float in the air. It feels like we’re on a night-time scuba dive. This marine-like vista paired with Ellie’s sadness-fueled vengeance reminds me of one last Seattle reference: local indie band Coral Grief.
This Seattle is not our Seattle. Even if in this version, Seattleites had five minute headways for trains connecting them all over the city and a giant park in the middle of an industrial district, their weird city has much worse views. Still, as with consuming all media about us, it is a joy to be part of the zeitgeist and an absolute pleasure to keep feeling misunderstood.
Okay, that’s all. I can’t wait to see where in the city we go next week.
