The Most Terrible Episode Yet

“A worthless man, an evil man, goes about with crooked speech, strikes with his eyes, signs with his feet, points with his finger, a perverse heart does evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamities will come upon him suddenly; in a while it will be broken beyond healing.”

~ Proverbs 6:12-15

Sunday night episode of The Last of Us The best yet is HBO’s adaptation of the hit Playstation game. It’s as close to a direct adaptation as you can get, looking very closely at how the events unfold in the source material.

In both the game and the show, Ellie runs into David (played here by Scott Shepherd) and James (played by Troy Baker, the game’s original Joel!) and gets a cure from them. Here, Ellie has killed a deer that David and James want to kill and holds them at gunpoint to make them leave. David suggests they trade with her and sends James to get penicillin. But he soon realizes that she is one of the people involved in the death of his colleague. James wants to kill her, but David lets her go.

In both the game and show, David later organizes a search party and they go out looking for Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) the next day, eventually tracking them down and bringing a captive Ellie back to her settlement, where she wakes up locked up. in a cage, it is necessary to find out that these are not just normal pants, but cannibals. Many small details differ throughout the world, but the essence of the whole story remains more or less the same.

Joel manages to get out of his stupor thanks to the antibiotics and fights off his attackers, taking two people captive before interrogating them to find out where Ellie is. When he has the information he needs, he kills them, stabbing and beating the other to death with a pipe. Here we see Joel as he is in the game: Much more brutal, violent, less prone to second-guessing. I feel like we should have seen more of this version of Joel up to this point. It would make his confession to Tommy all the more powerful. But I think it helps emphasize how far he’s willing to go to protect Ellie, his surrogate daughter.

One of the biggest differences between the show and the game is David’s role as a preacher in the adaptation. He is not one in the game, but he is still the leader of this group. In the show, he let Ellie slip his mask, revealing that he is not even a true believer. He is a violent and energetic man who knows how to get what he wants. If not through persuasion and magic, then through violence and willingness to do anything, no matter how depraved. He makes it more clear that he wants Ellie, not just as a friend or a follower, not just to help him dominate, but sexually. She plays into this before breaking her finger.

Few details—like his threat to cut her into little pieces—come directly from the game. So does the mantra, “Everything happens for a Reason.”

James and David return and drag her to the butcher block when she refuses to join and cooperate. She manages to grab the cleaver and stab James in the neck with it, killing him. She flees and David chases her into the dining hall, where she throws a burning log at him, setting the drapes on fire. (In the game, lantern tips above).

David chases her, taunting her, until she rushes him, stabbing him with a kitchen knife. He knocks her to the floor and kicks her as she tries to run towards the splitter. He then puts her down, telling her that she is his favorite when she fights back. This, too, is different from the game, which does not include any express threats of rape. A lot is implied about David’s true intentions towards Ellie in the game, but the show makes it more obvious.

He’s over it and the room is on fire and Joel still hasn’t found her, although the bodies are found hanging, drenched in blood (next to the body of their horse, which apparently hasn’t been left to rot). Desperate, Ellie reaches behind her and grabs the discarded pile. She throws David away – then jumps on top of him and hacks him again and again.

In the game, David has a machete and Ellie has her switch. The weapons here change, but only slightly. Most everything else is the same.

Covered in blood, Ellie escapes from the building. Joel finds her and grabs her and breaks out, clearly scared and traumatized. He pulls her close. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s okay baby girl.” He pulls her into a protective suit and they disappear through the snow, away from that evil place and its ugly men, back into the forest, into the frigid expanse.

Towards the Fireflies and salvation.

Verdict

This was a powerful and moving episode. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had the sense to stick so closely to the match this time because it was one of the most intense and significant conflicts since the first game. I think it was a mistake to split episode 6 and episode 8 with a whole flashback episode. That killed a lot of momentum and while I liked Ellie and Riley’s story, I think it would have worked as a series of flashbacks within the 7th episode instead of the whole thing.

The tension of this episode really brought out the tension and fear that the game creates throughout – something that I argued was missing in the last few episodes of the show. The terrifying nature of David and his men, the realization that the whole world is frozen and inhospitable and dangerous, the desperate fight for survival – all together this is the best episode of the main story of the show so far (I love Bill yet). and Frank episode but it was more of an interlude rather than part of the main story arc).

All that said, a huge, if very disturbing, episode of it The Last of Us. In some ways, it actually makes me believe even more strongly that Kathleen’s subplot was a mistake and that fear should have played a bigger role – and many more infected! – until now. This episode was really interesting in ways that most of this season hasn’t been, at least from the first three episodes.

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Watch my video review below:

Before this Last Of Us summary/reviews from yours truly:

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