Episode 7 sees Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Riley (Storm Reid) talk Fireflies and FEDRA school. We run down the factions in The Last of Us before episode 7 so you can keep track.
Life in The Last of Us is hard, to put it extremely, extremely mildly. Traveling anywhere is tough and involves siphoning off 20-year-old gas from abandoned cars. Zombies are everywhere, in increasingly terrifying forms. No one will laugh at your pun book. Perhaps worst of all, there’s the sense that danger is all around, even from the other people around you.
The Last of Us universe is filled with factions, all clamoring to dominate in one form or another. Pretty much wherever Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) find themselves, they find groups posing a threat, either trying to enlist them, menace them, or worse. In a world with so many contingents one might be forced to wonder: What is the difference between all of these factions? What do they all want? And what exactly is there to fight over in a post-apocalyptic wasteland anyway?
The short answer is power. They all want it, most are willing to kill to get it, and the difference is in who has it, or how much they are able to exert it. As a collective, The Last of Us’ factions further the aims of the show (and the game), each one its own exploration of how connections to others are their own threat in this world. But each group’s actual goal within the story is a little different, hence all the division.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers through episode 7 of The Last of Us.]FEDRA
What they want: To be a government agency, ostensibly, and also govern the people (possibly by brutal means; see below).
The Federal Disaster Response Agency is the dominant ruling authority in The Last of Us’ United States. It’s a militarized government that oversees the quarantine zones, presiding with punitive force over cities around the United States. FEDRA clearly has some sort of unifying structure, but it seems individual chapters get a lot of leeway, as they do in Kansas City (again, more on that later).
At least in Boston, they operate with high-minded goals (even if they still appear to fall short). As one captain tells Ellie: “I care because no matter what anyone out there says or thinks, we’re the only thing holding this all together. If we go down, people in the zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know.”
Though they’re ostensibly the highest authority in the show (or at least the figures with the most organized power, including manufacturing necessary goods), The Last of Us doesn’t prominently feature them. Mostly they’re a force in the narrative, with soldiers lining the streets of Boston in the early episodes, sometimes attacking or bartering with Joel as part of his smuggling work.
