Leave Seattle and go your own way if you haven’t watched season 2, episode 5 of “The Last of Us,” titled “Feel Her Love.” Spoilers lie ahead!

In the most recent episode of “The Last of Us,” we learn a lot more about Dina, the pivotal character played by Isabela Merced. Despite living in a full-on zombie apocalypse, Dina tends to find the dark humor and lightness in even the worst situations, marking a stark contrast to the deeply intense Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Dina’s best friend turned lover. In “Feel Her Love,” the second season’s fifth episode, we learn what happened to Dina’s entire family … and it’s horrifying. At the tender age of eight, Dina returned to her family home to find that a raider (meaning a human, not a zombie) slaughtered her mother and sister, so Dina killed him, marking her “first kill.” As Dina says to Ellie, “Would it have made a difference if my family had hurt his people first?” To both of them, the answer doesn’t matter; both Dina and Ellie understand the innate need for revenge (the two of them happen to be hunting Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby, who killed Ellie’s father figure Joel, a major character played by Pedro Pascal).

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Bear in mind that both Ellie and Dina were born during the cordyceps infection, so they don’t know of a world before infected zombies roamed the earth; as we also know, “The Last of Us” places an enormous focus on the horrible things human beings do to each other while they’re also fighting off those infected zombies. As Dina tells Ellie, that’s why she’ll help kill Abby, and Dina delivers all of this information so calmly. In an interview with Elle, Merced discussed the thought process behind her line delivery.

“What I thought was important about this scene was that Dina deliver her monologue in a nonchalant way,” Merced said. “It wouldn’t be melodramatic. It was very much like, ‘I know how messed-up of a situation it was, but that’s just the way things are.'”

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“I think 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,” Merced continued. “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.'”

Isabela Merced continued that train of thought by saying that, though there’s a contrast between Dina and Ellie, they understand each other on a primal level … and as such, they’re able to keep each other level. “On top of that, I think the scene establishes what a ride-or-die she is for Ellie,” Merced said of the scene where Dina tells Ellie about her first kill. “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 where Ellie does for Dina what normally Dina does for Ellie.”

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Dina is a “new” character in the television adaptation of “The Last of Us” — she’s pivotal in the Naughty Dog video game “The Last of Us Part II,” though, so gamers have been familiar with her for a long time — and, for my money, Merced has done a genuinely phenomenal job of building Dina brick by brick to the point where it sort of feels like she was a part of the show this whole time. Part of that is Dina’s admittedly dark sense of humor — which, again, provides a contrast to Ellie’s intensity. The series does go to great lengths, though, to show she’s a formidable fighter; like Ellie, she can easily dispatch a room full of cordyceps zombies, and she’s incredibly fearless, despite a sunnier demeanor. As Merced put it, this is what she genuinely loves about Dina.

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“The cheeriest people in the room are often the most underestimated,” Merced mused. “I think that’s what makes Dina so wonderful in my eyes: She’s equally as strong and potentially terrifying as Ellie, but she goes about it in a different way. I think she plays into who people want her to be, whereas Ellie doesn’t care to do that.”

There is one big thing that could stop Dina from seeing Ellie’s quest for revenge through to the end, though; as we learned in the fourth episode, “Day One,” she’s carrying Jesse’s (Young Mazino) baby after ending their on-again, off-again relationship. Obviously, knowing she’s pregnant changes Dina’s whole perspective, particularly because there’s no discussion of not carrying the baby to term. So what does Isabela Merced think about Dina’s point of view — especially when it comes to Ellie’s quest to kill Abby — with that in mind?

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“She’s initially terrified, and then I think she goes through acceptance,” Merced said of Dina’s mindset. “It’s also why she’s really emotional in the music shop scene [in episode 4]. A lot of that is the baby hormones, but also she’s imagining a future with Ellie and what it could look like. Then she goes through all these near-death experiences, and in realizing her love for Ellie, she understands how much… It’s like when people are like, ‘I didn’t think I wanted a kid, but then when I met my partner, suddenly I knew I didn’t want a kid without them.’ Maybe the only piece Dina was missing was that security from Ellie, that she’s not going to do it alone. And if they can overcome this mission together, they can overcome having a baby, absolutely. Raising a child, it’ll be easy work compared to taking down a whole army!”

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Still, despite Dina’s clear love for Ellie — which she expresses verbally for the first time in “Feel Her Love” — the knowledge that she’s going to be a mother will undoubtedly start to affect Dina.

“The Last of Us” airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and Max.