Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 episode 1 ahead.
The HBO sci-fi drama The Last of Us has returned with a Season 2. Some big revelations have been made, we have been reunited with an older Joel and Ellie, and fresh faces have been welcomed in Dina and Jesse.
The show also introduced a new kind of infected, and creepy is an understatement for them. The first episode shows Dina and Ellie heading on patrol with some other members of the Jackson community, but they eventually break off to explore an abandoned market. Ellie accidentally slips and falls through the ceiling to a shop floor below, and realises she isn’t alone.
What kind of infected was seen in Season 2?
The infected following Ellie is unlike anything she has seen before – it is not like the Clickers, Runners, or the Bloater. Viewers first see it crawling the background over the shelves, and then Ellie begins pursuing it around the shop floor.
Dina shoots the infected dead, and then the show cuts back to Ellie and Dina trying to describe to Tommy and the council what they saw.
“So you’re saying it was what, smart?” Tommy asks.
Ellie replies, “I’m not saying it can do math or anything but it didn’t run at me. It did what we do, took cover, planned, waited, lured me in, stalking.”
According to gamesradar.com, this kind of infected has origins in The Last of Us games, called a ‘Stalker’. Stalkers appear in the first The Last of Us game, and are tricky to spot and kill. They are believed to have been infected from anywhere between two weeks to about a year, and have the same speed as the Runners and the ferocity of the Clickers. They generally attack their victims by stalking them.