Jeffrey Wright as Isaac in Episode 4 of The Last of Us Season 2. Credit – Liane Hentscher—HBO
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 4 of The Last of Us Season 2.
Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) may have made it to Seattle, but it’s clear they weren’t aware exactly how much they’d be up against upon arriving in the city. Not only are there hordes of infected to deal with, but the ongoing war between the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) militia group and the religious cult known as the Seraphites (or, as the Wolves call them, the Scars) has turned Seattle’s streets into a violent battleground.
As we learn in Episode 4, one of the people at the center of this fight is Isaac Dixon (Jeffrey Wright, who also voiced the character in The Last of Us Part II video game), the ruthless leader of the WLF who holds an uncompromising stance about how the Seraphites should be dealt with. We see this attitude laid bare in a scene based on a sequence from the game in which Isaac brutally tortures a captive Scar before shooting him in the head when he taunts him about the number of people defecting from the WLF to the Seraphites.
In the game, Isaac is a former U.S. Marine who became the leader of the WLF following the so-called Thursday Market Massacre, an incident that saw Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) soldiers open fire on Seattle residents peacefully protesting Quarantine Zone food shortages and flipped civilian support from the military to the Wolves. This was also after FEDRA had hunted down and killed the founders of the WLF, Emma and James Patterson.
FEDRA pulled out of the city soon after, leaving Isaac in control of Seattle. However, as people continued to starve and the conflict with the Seraphites began to escalate, Isaac’s reign became more and more dictatorial. Episode 4 flips the script of Isaac’s WLF beginnings a bit, suggesting that he was originally a FEDRA commander who switched sides after witnessing the military’s inhumane treatment of Seattle’s citizens.
“People have asked…whether we’ll get a little bit of a backstory about Isaac,” Wright teased of the moment in a November interview with TVLine. “We might. It might not be pretty.”
Isaac’s storyline will also tie into Abby’s character arc as, in the game, Isaac is the one who took Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and the rest of the Salt Lake City crew in when they arrived in Seattle after Joel (Pedro Pascal) murdered the other Fireflies. He is also who turned her into a soldier and allowed her to go to Jackson to seek revenge for what Joel had done. In Episode 2, Abby made reference to a code of ethics her commander in Seattle (presumably Isaac) taught her decreeing that you shouldn’t kill people who can’t defend themselves.
Unfortunately, neither she nor Isaac seems to take that mandate too seriously.
Write to Megan McCluskey at The Last of Us Season 2 Puts a New Spin on a Pivotal Video Game Character&body=https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F7281564%2Fthe-last-of-us-season-2-episode-4-isaac-jeffrey-wright%2F” data-ylk=”slk:megan.mccluskey@time.com;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link rapid-noclick-resp”>megan.mccluskey@time.com.
