Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 4.
The cold open of The Last of Us season 2, episode 4, gives us a shocking glimpse at the backstory of W.L.F. leader Isaac Dixon. The bulk of the episode focuses on Ellie and Dina’s attempts to track down the W.L.F. upon their arrival in Seattle. But it cuts away a couple of times to expand on Isaac, played by Jeffrey Wright, reprising his role from the video game. In the present day, Isaac is the ruthless leader of the Wolves in the midst of a brutal civil war with the Seraphite cult.
But the episode also goes back to show Isaac’s origins, which were only hinted at in the game. In the game, if the player explores downtown Seattle as Ellie, they can find an armored truck containing the skeletons of several FEDRA soldiers who were killed during Isaac’s uprising. In the cold open of The Last of Us season 2, episode 4, we see how they died. Isaac was a FEDRA soldier himself, but he turned on his own men and killed all the other soldiers he was riding with. Why did he do it?
Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac Killed The FEDRA Soldiers To Show His Allegiance To The WLF In The Last Of Us
Isaac Would Eventually Become The Leader Of The WLF
In the cold open of The Last of Us season 2, episode 4, Isaac is seen riding with a group of FEDRA soldiers in an armored truck. While the other soldiers take great joy in swapping stories of terrifying and brutalizing innocent citizens, Isaac makes it known that he’s grown jaded with FEDRA’s fascistic practices. When the other soldiers keep referring to the Q.Z.’s citizens as “voters,” Isaac points out that it’s an insulting term that was coined to mock the fact that FEDRA had taken away their democratic rights.
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The truck stops when it’s blocked by a school bus that the local citizens have parked in the middle of the street. Isaac gets out, ostensibly to talk to these citizens and amicably resolve the conflict. But when he confirms that the citizens are being led by a woman named Hanrahan, played by Alanna Ubach, who he’d presumably already been in contact with, he changed his tune. He chucked a couple of grenades into the truck and locked his own men in there to die horribly in the ensuing explosions.
Over the following 11 years, Isaac would rise through the ranks of the W.L.F. and successfully overthrow FEDRA.
Hanrahan and these protesting citizens are an early version of the W.L.F. Isaac killed his own men to show his allegiance to their cause. Over the following 11 years, Isaac would rise through the ranks of the W.L.F. and successfully overthrow FEDRA. When Isaac’s story continues, he’s become the leader of the W.L.F. — and he’s become just as evil as anyone in FEDRA.
Why Isaac Let One FEDRA Soldier Live
Isaac Saw Potential In This Young, Uncorrupted Soldier
Before getting out of the truck he knows he’s going to bomb, Isaac asks a young soldier to come with him. This young soldier is too green and inexperienced to have been corrupted by FEDRA’s fascistic ways — he didn’t even know why they kept calling the citizens “voters” — so Isaac saw potential in him. He could still be taken off the path to bureaucratic corruption and be swayed into following the Wolves instead. This soldier ends up having a minor but significant arc in the episode; his role points out the irony of the W.L.F. replacing FEDRA.
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As Isaac tortures a Seraphite, this soldier is shown to be enjoying their screams of pain, and seems satisfied when Isaac kills him. Isaac took him out of that truck and recruited him to the W.L.F. so he wouldn’t get blindly corrupted by FEDRA, but he just wound up getting blindly corrupted by the Wolves instead. Isaac led the W.L.F. to victory against FEDRA in the hope of running the city in a less oppressive way, but the Wolves ended up being just as oppressive as FEDRA. The Last of Us season 2 is all about this cycle of violence.
