Put down the flashlight and stop exploring if you haven’t watched “Day One,” the May 4 episode of “The Last of Us.” Spoilers lie ahead!
Isabela’s Merced’s Dina goes through a lot in “Day One,” the fourth episode of the sophomore season of “The Last of Us” — to say the least. Now that she and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are officially in Seattle to hunt down Ellie’s new nemesis Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) — who, you may recall, brutally murdered Ellie’s surrogate father Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) in the season’s second episode — Dina realizes she’s been getting sick quite a lot. (While not every single pregnant person has morning sickness, film and TV fans know it’s the surefire way to express that someone is pregnant if you just keep making them puke on-screen.) Off-screen, Dina takes a pregnancy test … and then, after she and Ellie escape a Washington Liberation Front squad and get attacked by infected cordyceps zombies, Ellie gets bitten.
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Dina, naturally, is devastated, particularly because she was almost the bite victim (Ellie, Dina believes, sacrificed herself to save Dina). Ellie finally has to confess, to her best friend, that she’s immune; Dina understandably doesn’t buy it and stays up with a flashlight trained on a sleeping Ellie. Once she’s convinced, Dina reveals that she’s pregnant, and the two take their relationship to the next level, sleeping together for the first time in an abandoned theater where they’ve found shelter.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Merced discussed the major differences between this moment on screen and how it plays out in the game “The Last of Us Part II.” In that game, Ellie and Dina have sex before Joel dies, so it takes place earlier in the narrative, and Dina learns about Ellie’s immunity because of spores, not a bite. Plus, the pregnancy reveal is different; it happens after Ellie gives Dina her gas mask to protect her from said floating cordyceps spores. Merced, for her part, thinks the show’s version is a little more amped up. “I think it’s more of an intense sequence,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “The game is a little bit more casual. She finds out in a completely different setting and it’s too fast, so she doesn’t really get to fully process it.”
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As Dina waits to see what happens to Ellie, we don’t see her face, and Merced said that helped. “I was able to ramp myself up because the scene starts in an already emotionally charged place. I was kind of nervous to get myself there and then stay there throughout the whole day, but luckily, every take my face was hidden,” Merced said. “We knew it would be hidden, and we were very smart and careful with the choreography of the lantern versus the flashlight versus the walk and the speed. I always had to end up at the same point right before I tell her that I’m pregnant. It was really calculated.”
