‘The Last of Us’ Stars Break Down Season 2 Premiere: From That Kiss to Joel & Ellie’s Tense Bond (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 1.]

The Last of Us is back and already tearing our hearts out as the father-daughter bond between apocalyptic survivors Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) continues to fray in Season 2’s opening installment.

While they’ve enjoyed the comforts of Jackson in the five years between Season 1’s finale and this latest return for the characters, danger looms as a flashback reveals one young woman’s quest for revenge: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). Visiting the hospital once operated by Fireflies, Abby and her crew come to the realization that the former rebellion group is ultimately gone, with just a few witnesses able to share information about the massacre Joel fronted at the Salt Lake City location.

Unaware that the woman who is thirsty to spill his blood looms, Joel fronts operations to build new homes for incoming settlers, getting into a small disagreement with his sister-in-law Maria (Rutina Wesley) about not having enough resources to build in enough time. As for Ellie, she’s training to keep her skills sharp with friend Jesse (Young Mazino) as well as running patrols with the help of her adoptive uncle Tommy’s (Gabriel Luna) position as a council member.

Her participation is something Joel has challenges with as he struggles to accept she’s grown up, now 19 and no longer the little 14-year-old girl he first met in Boston. The tension between Joel and Ellie comes from a deeper place that isn’t immediately clear. As viewers will recall, he lied to her about their experience at Salt Lake City, promising that there were other immune people in the world to help the Fireflies, that raiders had attacked the hospital, and he’d saved her from danger, when in fact he couldn’t let her go.

While this isn’t exactly discussed in the episode, Ellie’s uncertainty about it all has certainly had time to fester and grow. When Ellie goes on a patrol with Jesse and her best friend and crush Dina (Isabela Merced), the girls take some risks by entering a market with blood trails and a bear carcass outside of it.

Taking on a few clickers, the girls manage to kill with success until Ellie falls through the ceiling of the store into the aisles below the second level. There, she encounters an advanced infected that has the ability to hide and sneak up on victims, known in the games as a stalker. During this encounter, Ellie is bitten, and due to her immunity, she lies to Dina when they reunite and head back to Jackson.

Together, they tell Tommy, Maria, and other board members about the stalker and other peculiarities they noticed during patrol. Ellie then goes home to try and fix the bite mark on her abdomen, cutting the teeth marks and sewing the wounds shut. Later on that evening, Ellie attends the New Year’s Eve celebration with Dina, where they dance and share a kiss before a community member, Seth (Robert John Burke), calls them a slur.

This leads Joel, who is a bystander, to step in and push Seth to the ground, asking Ellie if she’s okay, but she tells him she doesn’t need his help. Later that evening, she returns home and walks by Joel, who is sitting on the front porch, strumming her newly strung guitar, leaving things icy between them.

The perspective shifts to Abby and her team, revealing they’ve reached the outskirts of Jackson after all these years, planning to strike with surprise on their side. But Abby’s group isn’t the only threat, as one of the pipes that is undergoing construction in Jackson is housing cordyceps, hinting at major problems ahead.

“The way that it plays out in the show in the first episode is very different from how it plays in the game,” Dever says of Abby’s introduction in this premiere episode. “In game, you just meet this woman, you don’t know her name, you don’t know who she is, and it’s a very intense sequence, and there’s no back story or any information on her.”

“I think what Neil [Druckmann] and Craig [Mazin] did so beautifully… in this story is really give her some lead up,” Dever says of Abby, whose role isn’t immediately clear amidst her cohorts. “We get a little bit of a little taste of Abby and what she’s about… she is sort of a leader, but hasn’t quite figured out that dynamic yet with Owen [Spencer Lord].”

Meanwhile, viewers’ perspective of Ellie is likely to shift as Ramsey’s performance delivers an older version of her still stubborn character. “A lot happens over those years in anyone’s life,” Ramsey points out of the older Ellie. “Especially with how your relationship with your parents or parental figures changes.”

“I think that has obviously happened with Ellie and Joel, but it’s amplified by the world that they’re in and the sort of thing in the back of Ellie’s head that she’s had this whole time, that maybe Joe lied to her. And now, him being super overprotective and having this vice grip on her that she doesn’t want… there’s just a lot of like tension there and frustration from both sides probably,” they reveal.

While the episode reveals Joel’s bond with Dina, who is on better terms with him, as he points out to therapist Gail (Catherine O’Hara) in their session during the installment, her connection with Ellie is the strongest. But can we trust her with Ellie’s heart? After all, she apparently has an on-again-off-again relationship with Jesse. And as fans will recall, Ellie’s first love with Riley (Storm Reid) in Season 1 was short-lived.

“Dina’s not as aloof as she seems to be,” shares Merced. “I think Dina is actually very intelligent and knows exactly what she’s doing, and that’s kind of what I love about this character, is there’s just so much nuance behind it,” Merced teases about Dina’s motivation to kiss Ellie at the New Year’s Eve party. “You can only trust what you see, and that’s, in a way, part of the gag is like Ellie doesn’t know, and you don’t know until Dina starts to reveal herself later on.”

In other words, stay tuned to see where their relationship might lead following this all-important kiss. As for what’s next, with those cordyceps seeping into Jackson, Luna teases, “The threat is great. We’ve done so much work and we’ve built so much to keep the monsters at the door… what you call the trickle, I call the tidal wave,” Luna shares, hinting that the Season 2 trailer has some good teases for what’s to come.

To hear even more on the latest episode, see the full, more in-depth interview in the video above, and stay tuned for more on The Last of Us as it unfolds on HBO and Max.

The Last of Us, Season 2, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and Max