In The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 4, Dina discovers that Ellie is immune after she gets bitten – and if you’ve forgotten why she can’t be infected, you’re in the right place.
Ellie’s immunity is at the heart of The Last of Us. It’s what drove the first game and Season 1: Tess’ dying wish was for Joel to take Ellie to the Fireflies on the other side of the country, hoping they’d be able to develop a cure to the Cordyceps virus from her blood.
Of course, we know how that went: the doctors could make a cure, but the procedure would have been fatal, so Joel murdered everyone and fled to Jackson with Ellie.
At the start of Season 2, it was quickly clear that Ellie hadn’t told anyone else about her immunity (except Tommy). As far as we know, nobody else is immune – so how did it happen to her?
Ellie’s immunity comes from her mom in The Last of Us
It’s heavily implied Ellie is immune because her mother Anna was bitten while she was in labor. She cut the umbilical cord quickly after giving birth, and it’s assumed she’d already passed the antibodies to her daughter.
Season 1 Episode 9 opened with a flashback to Ellie’s mother giving birth. She’s attacked by an infected, and while she manages to fight it off, she realizes she was bitten. Thankfully, she’s still able to give birth before she asks Marlene to kill her.
It’s an extraordinary stroke of luck that came with a massive price, but Anna’s bite would have transmitted antibodies to Ellie as a baby, thereby making her immune (a bit like how it’s rare to get chickenpox twice).
Ellie is bitten and scratched a few times throughout the show, but she shows no signs of infection. When Sam was bitten in Season 1, she cuts her hand and massages her blood into his wound, hoping it’ll work like medicine, but it’s not that simple.
When they got to the Fireflies hospital in Salt Lake City, Marlene tells Joel that the doctor believes the Cordyceps in Ellie has grown since birth, and it produces a “chemical messenger… it makes normal Cordyceps think that she’s Cordyceps, it’s why she’s immune.”
“He’s going to remove it from her, multiply the cells in a lab, produce those chemical messengers, and then we can give it to everyone. He thinks it could be a cure, Joel. A cure,” she explains.
In the game, a surgeon’s recorder goes into further detail about why Ellie is the only person capable of producing a cure.
“April 28th. Marlene was right. The girl’s infection is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we’ve seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient’s Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid,” the recording explains.
“Blood cultures taken from the patient rapidly grow Cordyceps in fungal-media in the lab… however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal. There is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an MRI of the brain shows no evidence of fungal-growth in the limbic regions, which would normally accompany the prodrome of aggression in infected patients.
“We must find a way to replicate this state under laboratory conditions. We’re about to hit a milestone in human history equal to the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we’re about to come home, make a difference, and bring the human race back into control of its own destiny. All of our sacrifices and the hundreds of men and women who’ve bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.”
Keep tabs on The Last of Us Season 2 release schedule, and until next week, read more about Abby’s fate in The Last of Us games, what you need to know about the WLF, and why Eugene is so important in Season 2.
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