The Last of Us Season 2, episode 5: Who is Leon?

We're digging further into new characters and storylines in The Last of Us Season 2, with one hell of a basement situation opening up in episode 5.

A name that comes up during the opening scene is Leon. But who is he, how does he relate to the storyline, and does he appear in Naughty Dog's game? Let's go through the details.

In the opening scene of episode 5, Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) interrogates Washington Liberation Front (WLF) commanding officer Elise Park (Hettienne Park) about a mission that went terribly wrong in Seattle's Lakehill Hospital. During their conversation, Elise says she sent her team into the hospital basement to secure it after clearing the floors above it of Infected — orders Hanrahan gave her.

Elise mentions that a soldier called Leon was put in charge of the unit for the mission "because he's my best," and we also learn in this scene that Leon was her son.

It was always a risky mission, as Elise mentions the hospital basement is where doctors brought the first Cordyceps patients to be treated in 2003. After finding the first floor of the basement strangely empty, Elise sent her unit to the second, with Leon up front.

"Few minutes in, he radios back, 'There's Cordyceps on the walls, the floor.' Chances are they'll find Infected next, but that's what they were down there for, so I told them to proceed," Elise says. "Five minutes later, he radios again — this time he was struggling to breathe."

It's here Leon reveals his team discovered not only that villainous fungi, Cordyceps, growing on the walls as usual, but also spores from it floating through the air. And in a tragic moment of heroism, he tells his own mother to seal the unit in the basement's second floor.

"We did what Leon said. We sealed them in," she says.

Later in the episode, when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) chases Nora (Tati Gabrielle) into the hospital basement, she discovers the area overrun with Cordyceps — and spores are not only floating through the air, they're being emitted by a couple of humans infested with the mushrooms and sealed on the walls.

One of these poor souls is wearing a name patch, L. Park, which confirms him as the ill-fated Leon (Cheonguk Park), doomed to spew spores in a half-alive state.

The name Leon is mentioned only in environmental storytelling in The Last of Us Part II, and it references another character. But there's some ironic overlap.

Ellie and Dina find a note in the abandoned Westlake Bank in Seattle beside a gym bag of cash, describing a bank robbery gone wrong at the outbreak of the Cordyceps pandemic. In the letter, written by a very pissed off person involved in the heist, you learn that he was attacked by Infected then sealed in the bank by his accomplices, including his friend Leon Travis.

It could be a coincidence here, but if this is a deliberate use of Leon's name, The Last of Us creator Druckmann is almost giving cruel poetic justice to Leon's imprisoned bank robber friend — both of them sealed in thanks to the threat of Infected.

The Last of Us Season 2 is now streaming on Max. New episodes air weekly on Sundays 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

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