Ellie’s mother Anna (Ashley Johnson).
Every hero needs an origin story, and even messiahs, famously, have parents. The opening to the season’s final episode takes us all the way back to Ellie’s beginning, as her heavily pregnant mother, Anna (Ashley Johnson, the game’s original Ellie), staggers out of the forest and all but crawls into an abandoned farmhouse. There, in a bathroom birth that makes the one in A Quiet Place look like a weekend spa break, she fights off and stabs (with what will one day be Ellie’s switchblade) an infected, mere seconds before delivering her daughter. The idea came to Druckmann shortly after finishing the game, when he was approached with the idea of making an animated short.