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Spoilers follow.
“The Last of Us” has leaned heavy on big-name cameos and guest roles since the start of season 1. Nick Offerman won an Emmy for his single-episode turn in the critically acclaimed “Long, Long Time,” and the rest of the season was full of stellar short-term performances from the likes of Nico Parker, Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker, and Melanie Lynskey. All of those turned out to be meaty roles, but season 2 delivers a more traditional cameo in episode 4.
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The episode opens on a flashback to 2018, 10 years prior to the main events of “The Last of Us” season 2. We see an armored vehicle carrying FEDRA soldiers through the Seattle quarantine zone. As the squad bumps through the city, one among them — the obligatory jokester of the group — tells a “funny” story about one of their superior officers brutalizing civilians. While the actor playing this part is somewhat obscured by his massive helmet, you may have recognized his face or voice as belonging to Josh Peck, former child star of Nickelodeon’s “Drake & Josh.”
Though his compatriots laugh at the story, the soldier’s commander, Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), isn’t so amused. Soon, we learn why. When the truck stops at an obstruction in the road, Isaac gets out with the one new, fresh-faced soldier in the group, then promptly throws a grenade into the vehicle, killing everyone inside, including Peck’s character. It turns out that this was all planned with a rebel leader named Hanrahan, with whom Isaac joins forces. This changing of sides foreshadows the state of Seattle seen in the show’s 2028 timeline, and there’s more to Peck’s monologue than you might think.
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Josh Peck’s The Last of Us cameo hints at a major season 2 conflict
The story that Josh Peck’s character tells in the APC involves a group of civilians in Seattle caught “disseminating pamphlets.” One of the other soldiers asks if the literature concerned “WLF stuff,” referring to the Washington Liberation Front — the same militant group that Abby belongs to in the main story. Peck’s character responds, “I thought it was, turned out later it was some religious crap.”
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These couple of lines are actually quite telling about how Seattle got to the state we see it in when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabella Merced) arrive. Later in the same episode, we see that Isaac is a ranking member of the WLF, suggesting that he defected to join Hanrahan and her faction after growing frustrated by FEDRA’s repeated abuses of power. The religious pamphlets mentioned likely refer to the other major group in 2028 Seattle — the cult-like Seraphites, with whom the WLF are locked in a brutal war.
In the present-day story, Isaac brutally tortures a captured Seraphite, displaying the exact same kind of brutality he apparently found so distasteful when Peck’s character and the other FEDRA agents were joking about it. Like the game on which it’s based, “The Last of Us” season 2 seems primarily interested in the cyclical nature of conflict, and this is a prime example of that idea.
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Josh Peck has recently popped up in some major shows and movies
Those of a certain age (guilty) still know Josh Peck primarily from his time on “Drake & Josh,” but he’s done a lot in the years since that show went off the air. He’s voiced Eddie throughout the “Ice Age” franchise and Casey Jones on the 2013 “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” cartoon, also on Nickelodeon. In live-action, he played roles on shows like “Grandfathered” and in movies like “Red Dawn” and “Danny Collins.”
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Lately, though, Peck’s roles have been of a slightly higher profile. He starred in the short-lived 2021″Turner & Hooch” reboot on Disney+ and landed a main series role on Hulu’s “How I Met Your Father” in 2023. That same year, Peck earned a small part in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”
Though his role in “The Last of Us” is also small, it’s another part in a major, dramatic, big-budget project, showing that Peck clearly has aims to continue redefining himself outside of the comedy world where he’s most frequently worked. But given how quickly he’s dispatched of in the dystopian HBO series, we likely won’t be seeing his character again. Solana Token Creator
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