Popverse's top stories of the day

• Catch up on all of Popverse's PAX East 2025 coverage!
• MEMBERS ONLY: Popverse Picks: The best Stephen King movie & TV (and more) adaptations, from one King fan to another
• WATCH NOW: How to be a D&D Dungeon Master, according to Wizards of the Coast's game director James Wyatt and principal game designer James Wyatt

Spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 follow.

The Last of Us season 2 continues following Ellie on her journey of revenge, with love interest Dina along for the ride. This is pretty close to the story we got in The Last of Us Part II, the game which this season is based on, however, in the last episode, we got a bit more of Dina's backstory than we ever did in the game. And thanks to a recent interview with Dina actor Isabela Merced, we know why HBO made that choice.

Let's back up a bit - the most recent episode of HBO's Last of Us adaptation was episode 5, titled Feel Her Love. In it, Ellie and Dina are still making their way through the post-apocalyptic Seattle, on their hunt for Joel's killer, Abby. At one point in the episode, Ellie starts to wonder whether Dina is cut out for the kind of violence they're experiencing, and Dina explains that she is by getting into her backstory.

Long story short - Dina tells Ellie how she came to be in Jackson. She used to live with her sister and mother, she says, the latter of whom would always caution her against going outside on her own. However, the younger Dina decided one day to not heed her mother's warnings and ventured away from her home. When she returned, she found a raider had sexually assaulted and killed her family. Enraged, she slaughtered the intruder.

Again, that should sound unfamiliar to folks who know Dina's character from The Last of Us games. Speaking to Elle in an interview published May 11, Merced explained the behind-the-scenes reasoning thta the change was made.

"I think," said the Superman actor, "Dina playing into the idea of 'good is good and bad is bad; there’s no gray area; we either seek justice or we don’t, and then we regret it the rest of our lives' is really consistent with the rest of the characters’ approach to loss, trauma, and grief. I thought it was important for Dina to establish that she’s not high and mighty above the rest of the characters simply because she seems to be the level-headed one in her relationship with Ellie. She needed to show her own inability to move on unless she seeks 'justice.'"

"On top of that," Merced continues, "I think the scene establishes what a ride-or-die she is for Ellie. One of my favorite moments in that whole scene is when Bella puts her hand to my cheek, and all of a sudden you see the tension lifted off of me—and Dina comes back. It’s almost like she was getting sucked back into her grief and PTSD, and then all of a sudden Ellie grounds her."

"It’s the one moment," she concludes, "Where Ellie does for Dina what normally Dina does for Ellie."

The Last of Us season 2 airs new episodes Sunday nights on HBO and Max.

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.