The Last of Us’ Dawn of the Wolf Easter egg nods to game and Twilight

2003 was an amazing year, for both our world as well as the world around us. Last of Us. Reality got The Return of the King, Iraq War and completion of Human Genome Project Last of UsA zombie pandemic hit -verse and the sequel to Twilight was released. You might miss the latter for the former in all the hubbub, but episode 7, “Left Behind,” certainly nods to the in-universe lore of the (we’re guessing) great franchise Dawn of the Wolf with a tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter egg.

As Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her friend and would-be paramour Riley (Storm Reid) go on their tipsy escapade that Riley has prepared for them, there’s plenty of details to admire around the Boston mall they’re wandering in. This includes a marquee and movie poster. Dawn of the Wolf Part II, a movie that — like any piece of media referenced in just about any piece of media — feels important. But also important to this story: It’s not a real movie.

Dawn of the Wolf Part 2(and most likely) Part 1. If I could guess, it is an entirely in-universe movie that the whole world can enjoy. Last of UsA glimpse of the billboard poster shows that it is. In the game Ellie and Joel have a short discussion about one of the billboards, with Ellie skeptical of the movie, and Joel waving it off as a “dumb teen movie.”

If Last of Us was in development at Naughty Dog back in the late 2000s, the biggest “dumb teen movie” in the world would have been the Twilight franchise. And the film series’ final installment, Breaking Dawn Part 2The movie, ‘The Killing of Santa Claus,’ was released in theatres in 2012. Last of Us. Though the connection doesn’t amount to much — the title, a nod to the vampire/werewolf fever sweeping the nation; the implied YA melodrama; etc. — it’s certainly one fans latched onto at the time the game came out.

Who can blame them? We all long for the days when Twilight was a movie we could look forward to. It is an amazing film that contains everything: young, eternal, and chaste love; werewolves with pants for their transformations. Every chapter of the film franchise is a manic masterpiece. I would happily absorb more.

The Easter egg may be a simple nod to an even larger universe than the show’s. But in another, it’s an incredibly representative one, one that tells us (as players or viewers) something about almost every element of Last of Us: To Ellie, it means very little, a relic from a bygone era she’ll never be able to know. To Joel, it’s a memory of his time with Sarah (who, in the game, had a poster for the first movie in her room) and the life totally lost to him. This poster, taken together, is very evocative about the end coming up really quickly.

In the time period of the game, it’s both an easy potshot at a 2013-era heavy hitter and a visual nod to the bond between our protagonists. As a relic from HBO’s Last of Us’ 2003 pop culture, it’s a bit of an anomaly (the first Twilight book wouldn’t be released until 2005, at least barring a CordycepsHowever, it is not beyond the limits of reason. As with all details, the show communicates so much in so few words. And ultimately it’s all just another way that normalcy — within their world or ours — feels so off as to be unrecognizable.

Imagine if we only had the first two Twilight movies — who would play the Batman then?