As anybody who’s anybody is aware of, the second season of HBO’s video-game-turned-prestige-Sunday-night-appointment-viewing The Final of Us is properly beneath means; beloved characters are [SPOILERS] lifeless, faves are fingering one another, and shrooms are thriving in Seattle. No, not the nice ones. The dangerous ones: Cordyceps, the shrooms that turned most individuals into bitey zombies in 2003 and despatched society tumbling into apocalyptic doom.
[There are so many spoilers ahead—if that’s important to you, just stop reading here.]
Throughout this season , I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, and, since I didn’t play the online game (or actually any online game) I’ve been hit over the top by plot-twists so arduous it felt like getting lobotomized by way of golf membership. However for the previous couple of episodes, I haven’t cared about something that’s occurred or something that’s to return as a result of all I can deal with is that the present is in Seattle and this Seattle is each very Seattle and like no Seattle I’ve ever seen.
Now that we’re 5 episodes into the season and two full episodes into The Final of Us’s model of the Emerald Metropolis, I’d like to try a post-apocalyptic Seattle will get proper and what it will get so very unsuitable.
Seattleites like to be misunderstood in media (so we will appropriate the file, and have this sense of superiority). TLOU does higher than most media about Seattle; We get flashes of the town we all know: homosexual rights, defending a file retailer within the apocalypse, that a few of our inhabitants individuals would fuck off into the woods and spurn all know-how whereas the remainder grow to be anarchists. TLOU even acknowledges our Capitol Hill-centricity by making it the one named neighborhood within the present. However their largest mistake? Giving us a fully-formed transit system. Regardless of its confused, uncanny depiction of our metropolis, you may’t assist however surprise, is post-apocalyptic Seattle higher than us?
Let’s break it down by episode.
Season 2 x 3: The Path
This episode grants us about 5 whole minutes of Seattle. Our essential characters, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced), journey from Jackson, Wyoming to Seattle on their quest for revenge in opposition to the Washington Liberation Entrance (WLF), the group that killed Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal). They take what looks like I-90. The site visitors by means of the Snoqualmie Go is as dangerous as ever, gridlocked with long-abandoned automobiles.
Perplexingly, we see a shot of downtown Seattle that ought to solely come from the northern reaches of I-5. Then, the present cuts to our characters approaching from Beacon Hill. What! Doesn’t monitor. Anyway. The port is all dried up. Buildings have caved in on themselves. Moss grows thick and verdant. There’s no such factor because the Smith Tower anymore. The Columbia Tower nonetheless stands tall. And, but, WLF has chosen the substantially-squatter and worse-positioned House Needle as their lookout tower. Idiots.
The final snatch of Seattle we get earlier than blackout is a militia group and tanks rolling down what I assume is Mercer Avenue. All I can suppose whereas watching it’s, that is precisely what right-wing media thinks occurred throughout 2020’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest.
Episode 2×4: Day One
This episode begins inside a authorities, or FEDRA, tank rolling by means of 2018 Seattle. The troopers consult with Seattle residents snidely as “voters” since they took away their rights. They don’t stay lengthy. Lesson one: Don’t fuck with our NPR-listener inhabitants’s civic obligation.
Quick ahead to current day, Ellie and Dina, squarely within the midst of a will-they-won’t-they romance, decide their means by means of a Capitol Hill nonetheless embellished with tattered satisfaction flags and light rainbow murals. They don’t perceive what the rainbows imply. It means you two can kiss one another!!
Seattle viewers will notice this Capitol Hill makes completely no sense. There’s a normal essence that the present will get. Regardless of the defunctness, there’s a tender magnificence to Seattle in a means there isn’t in different TLOU locales. Heat mild—like the type proper after a spring rain. A lot inexperienced. However, the buildings aren’t our buildings. TLOU wrongly assumes Seattle is way denser than it truly is, even in our densest neighborhood. There’s, nevertheless, a Key Financial institution!
I imagine they’re on Broadway when Ellie and Dina discover their means right into a mossy file retailer which I’m assuming is the TLOU-equivalent of the very-real Spin Cycle Data. The record-shop-of-it-all seems like one other Seattle stereotype, however one I’m not mad at. Just like the writers have been like, “Effectively, what does that city have apart from rain and the gays? Oh, yeah, grunge.” Nonetheless, I’m right here for it.
The file retailer appears principally undisturbed, as if its contents have been so holy the mushroom zombies wouldn’t dare do any injury. Upstairs, the place daylight streams by means of a gaping vine-covered gap within the wall, Ellie finds a mint-condition guitar and strums “Tackle Me” by A-Ha. Dina watches. Dina cries. I’m selecting to imagine it’s the magic of the Seattle air that lastly lets Ellie absolutely grieve Joel, her dad-figure who taught her the best way to strum. Additionally, the overwhelming gayness of Capitol Hill clearly withstood the hell of the apocalypse and lights the semi-lit match of lesbian love already contained in the hearts of Ellie and Dina.
Subsequent, we transfer to the deserted FOX 13 constructing (Q13 in actuality). Everyone knows that is in West Lake. I assume that is the place we’re. Horrors await on this constructing—and never simply 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 couple of WLFs.
“What the hell is unsuitable with Seattle?” Dina asks, a query most likely requested loads in these conservative media halls.
WLFs present up. All hell breaks free. Ellie and Dina scramble and battle. They run out of the constructing that we all know is in West Lake and scurry right into a transit tunnel? At first, I assumed, possibly this was the Alaskan Means tunnel, as a result of geography—timeline be damned. However Ellie and Dina emerge by means of rubble into what might be the downtown transit tunnel, and that is the place we get to essentially the most unrealistic a part of the entire present for me: TLOU thinks 2003-Seattle had a sturdy public transit community.
Gentle rail first got here to Seattle in 2009, however a toppled subway prepare blocks their path. Indicators pointing to different traces—1, 3, 4, and so forth.—level up the steps. As of 2025, Seattle solely had one actual, related “subway” line. And the two line nonetheless hasn’t related Bellevue and Seattle and I’m starting to suppose it by no means will. The apocalypse-version of Seattle has it higher than us. Was the dream of the 15-minute metropolis a actuality right here? If it was, it was too highly effective and needed to be stopped.
Zombies occur. Ellie and Dina make a slender escape. They break into the Pinnacle Theater—what’s clearly the Paramount Theater. There, after extra plot issues, Ellie and Dina, make candy, homosexual love. Thanks, Seattle.
Episode 2 x 5: Really feel Her Love
Within the morning, Ellie and Dina wake to large booms. One thing is going on! They climb to the roof. The WLFs are at an enormous hospital, Lake Hill Hospital, seen from the highest of the Paramount Pinnacle Theater. The view showcases a sprawling downtown and what seems like a way-too-narrow Elliott Bay with Bainbridge Island and Bremerton seen.
The place the hell are we within the metropolis? That’s clearly not our enterprise. Dina triangulates the WLFs actions on a map of Seattle to search out the perfect path to the hospital. Present us the map, Dina. Please, present us the map! She doesn’t present us the map.
We subsequent see them within the Worldwide District. The streets are lined in ferns out of the Jurassic interval. An deserted King County Metro bus supplies a pleasant contact for us Seattleites. It’s, like all issues in apocalypse Seattle, lined in inexperienced progress. With out individuals, the moss has grow to be king.
Ellie and Dina run into the “good” sort of zombies she first encountered episodes in the past again in Jackson. However—uh oh. There’s a complete hoard of good zombies. This is smart. Seattle is the most-educated large metropolis. It could solely monitor that our contaminated could be quick, artful, and make bother for our heroines.
After a slender escape, our characters run into “The Park.” Judging solely by the massive, fats bushes and the truth that a couple of episodes in the past there was an indication for “Arboretum Path,” I’m assuming that is the Washington Park Arboretum. Which implies when the Seraphites disembowel a captured WLF member, I can solely image their guts spilling throughout Azalea Means. In TLOU, does Rhodendron Glen run purple with blood?
Ellie runs for it by means of the evergreens. She stumbles out of the park into—would you take a look at that!—Lake Hill Hospital. As a result of I can’t divorce geography from my viewing expertise, my finest try at inserting this hospital is assuming it’s Pacific Medical Middle, that austere psychological well being hospital that retains 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 partitions. Our bodies which have fused with the shrooms inhale and exhale airborne contaminants that float within the air. It seems like we’re on a night-time scuba dive. This marine-like vista paired with Ellie’s sadness-fueled vengeance jogs my memory of 1 final Seattle reference: native indie band Coral Grief.
This Seattle just isn’t our Seattle. Even when on this model, Seattleites had 5 minute headways for trains connecting them everywhere in the metropolis and a large park in the midst of an industrial district, their bizarre metropolis has a lot worse views. Nonetheless, as with consuming all media about us, it’s a pleasure to be a part of the zeitgeist and an absolute pleasure to maintain feeling misunderstood.
Okay, that’s all. I can’t wait to see the place within the metropolis we go subsequent week.
