During a significant portion of this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” it seems as if not much is going to go place, and that maybe all that will take place is a continuation of “The Chill Road-Trip Adventures of Joel and Ellie.
” They take in some Hank Williams performances. Ellie is instructed by Joel in the art of stealing gasoline from parked vehicles; however, when he clumsily attempts to explain the physics underlying the process, she smirks wickedly and tells him, “You don’t know.”
They consume some ravioli that was made by Chef Boyardee twenty years ago. (It tastes great!) Ellie humiliates Joel by telling him jokes from a book of puns that she discovered at a convenience store. For example, “What did the mermaid wear to her math class?” An algae bra.”
Sadly, the good times can’t stay forever. Our heroes run into roadblocks in Kansas City around a third of the way through the episode.
As they attempt to find an alternate path through the city’s center, they are attacked, and in the end, they become caught in the crossfire of a power struggle involving a local militia. During the initial commotion, they manage to total Bill’s vehicle.
When everything was taken into account, it seems likely that they should have gone via Des Moines.
Even as the final credits roll, there is a great deal about the situation in which Joel and Ellie find themselves that we do not yet know. We are aware that the headquarters of the Kansas City militia, whose armored vehicles bear the inscription “WE THE PEOPLE,” are located in a Quarantine Zone that FEDRA had previously abandoned. We are aware that the head of this group, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), is so icy that she has her former family doctor put to death. We are aware that Kathleen is on a crusade against “collaborators” working for FEDRA, and that as part of her mission, she is searching for a person called Henry who is with a person named Sam.
Sam is reportedly a youngster who creates images of himself and Henry dressed up as superheroes.
We are aware that Henry and Sam were recently hiding out in a structure whose concrete base is cracking and rippling, maybe as a result of some cordyceps activity or infection taking place underneath.
And we all know that next week, Joel and Ellie are going to have to figure out how to cope with the two guns that were pointed at the cliffhanger finale of the episode.
The fact that Joel and Ellie’s relationship was strengthened by the challenges they faced in Kansas City and the fact that they were required to be more open and honest with one another was the aspect of the story that had the most significance in this episode, presuming that our protagonists will not perish in the very next episode, which is a pretty safe assumption to make given that there are still five episodes left.
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After he had eliminated the immediate threat by discharging his weapon, Joel was ambushed by an assailant who came close to choking him to death.
Ellie shoots the assailant, but she does not finish him off since she is no longer able to conceal the fact that she carries a pistol. That lets one of the tigers out of the cage.
When the assailant throws up his knife and begs for his life, he tells Ellie his name is Brian in an obvious effort to humanize himself. He also says, “We can trade with you! It’s possible for us to get along! — Ellie has some second thoughts about killing him. However, Joel has been playing this game of survival for quite some time. He takes Elle’s pistol and instructs her to hide behind a wall so that she won’t see how nasty he needs to be with the knife. He does this so that she won’t notice how vicious he has to be.
Because of the circumstances, more honesty has come to the surface. After learning that Ellie is not the wide-eyed innocent he imagined her to be, Joel expresses guilt for the burden he believes Ellie must feel as a result of having shot someone for the first time.
In the past, she has been responsible for hurting another person. Concerning himself, he has an obligation to admit openly that he definitely needs her, as well as her readiness to pull the trigger, more than he would have liked to.
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Unluckily for both of them, that other guy’s name is Brian. It was definitely a very solid clue that his mother was Kathleen since he offered, as he was dying, to take them to his mother.
(Her subdued response to the sight of his lifeless corpse very certainly provides conclusive evidence of this.) There is no way that won’t come back to bite them later.
As the episode comes to a close, Joel and Ellie are demonstrating an improved amount of faith that they can protect each other as they make their way up 33 flights of stairs in a skyscraper in order to locate a location to sleep that is secure.
As a result, at this point in the story, it is only normal for them to be startled awake in the middle of the night by two new characters armed with firearms, one of whom looks to be in his 20s while the other is only a little lad.
Given that the younger one is wearing a superhero mask that has been painted on, it’s probable that they are Henry and Sam.
Even when Joel and Ellie were simply driving aimlessly along roads that were mainly deserted and making jokes, this type of existential menace was always present.
Even yet, they were unable to pause for a break without always worrying who or what may be waiting in the shadows, all set to put an end to their trip.
This is what makes Ellie, and Bella Ramsey’s performance with all of its nuances, such an essential part of this narrative. She does not let fear rule her life; rather, she is making the most of the time she still has.
She is remarkably knowledgeable about a significant portion of the world before the apocalypse, to the extent that she is able to crack witty remarks about the homosexual porn magazine that she discovers in the back of Bill’s vehicle. However, she also has a tendency to romanticize the past too much.
Ellie enthusiastically asks, “Where did you go?” in response to Joel’s remark that back in the old days, the gasoline supplies hadn’t run out and people were able to drive for more than an hour on a full tank since the infrastructure hadn’t broken down. The answer to that question is “pretty much nowhere.”
At one point, Joel tells Ellie that despite the fact that he does not think that this fallen planet can ever rise again, he continues to survive “for family,” while simultaneously making it clear that she is nothing more than “freight.” However, it is evident that his perspective is shifting; it is quite difficult to not find Ellie lovely. The need of working together with her is quickly becoming into something more.
It should come as no surprise that people like Kathleen also have families. There is a good chance that things will get more difficult.
Snippet quests
A wonderful illustration of the deliciously puckish side that Ellie may have: While they were getting ready to spend the night in the woods, she asked Joel in a solemn and anxious manner, “Can I ask you a serious question?” She wonders, “Why did the scarecrow earn an award?” after he confirms that she can talk to him. (Joel is aware of the answer to that one: “Because he was exceptional in his profession.”)
In this episode, there is no pre-credits sequence like there was in the previous one, and there is also no flashback like there was in the previous one. When Joel tells Ellie about Tommy, he explains that his brother, who is by nature a “joiner,” has spent the years of the plague connecting with anyone who claims to have a plan to fix the world, while sometimes dragging Joel along with him.
This is the moment that brings us the closest we get to returning to the past. Later on in the episode, as Joel has begun to relax his guard around Ellie, he explains that during his days as a wanderer with Tommy and Tess, he sometimes set up ambush traps similar to the one they were confronted with in Kansas City.
The contrast between Bill’s well-maintained vintage vehicle and all of the decaying garbage that Joel and Ellie drive through is one of my favorite things about the show. A fortnight ago, I wrote an article in which I complimented the job that the show’s digital effects artists had done by populating the backgrounds of images with incredible-looking ruins. (As an illustration for this week’s topic, picture a derailed railway trestle on the horizon with derailed railroad cars hanging.)
But I feel that I must also give credit where credit is due to the production designer John Paino, whose team constructed the dilapidated physical environments that Joel and Ellie navigate through, from the wrecked gas stations to the wreckage-strewn streets of Kansas City.
Ellie recoils in disgust after taking a smell of Joel’s percolated campfire coffee, and she later questions, “Is that really what those Starbucks in the Q.Z. used to sell?” It’s encouraging to learn that Starbucks managed to survive following the downfall of civilization.
