The Most Terrifying Episode Yet

“A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.”

~ Proverbs 6:12-15

Sunday night’s episode of The Last Of Us is the best one yet in HBO’s adaptation of the hit PlayStation game. It’s also about as close to a straight adaptation as you can get, hewing very close to how the events transpire in the source material.

In both the game and the show, Ellie runs across David (played here by Scott Shepherd) and James (played by Troy Baker, the original Joel from the game!) and gets medicine from them. Here, Ellie has killed a deer that David and James want and she holds them at gunpoint in order to get them to leave. David suggests they trade with her and sends James to get penicillin. But it doesn’t take him long to realize that she’s one of the people involved with the death of their compatriot(s). James wants to kill her, but David lets her go.

In both game and show, David organizes a search party later and they go out looking for Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) the next day, eventually tracking them down and taking Ellie captive back to their settlement, where she wakes locked in a cage, only to discover that these aren’t just ordinary bandits, but cannibals. Many small details differ throughout, but all the basics of the story remain roughly the same.

Joel manages to wake from his stupor thanks to the antibiotics and fights off his attackers, taking two captive before torturing them to find out where Ellie is. Once he has the information he needs he kills them, stabbing one and beating the other to death with a pipe. Here we see Joel as he is in the game: Far more brutal, violent, less prone to second-guessing. I do think we should have seen more of this version of Joel up to this point. It would have made his confession to Tommy more powerful. But I do think it helps underscore just 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 preacher in the adaptation. He’s not one in the game, but he’s still the leader of this group. In the show, he let’s his mask slip for Ellie, revealing that he’s not even a true believer. He’s a violent and charismatic man who knows how to get what he wants. If not by persuasion and charm, then through violence and a willingness to do anything, no matter how depraved. He makes it increasingly clear that he wants Ellie, not just as a friend or follower, not just to help him lead, but sexually. She plays into this before breaking his finger.

Little details—like his threat to chop her up into tiny pieces—come directly from the game. So does the mantra, “Everything happens for a reason.”

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

David hunts 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 crawl toward the cleaver. Then he pins her down, telling her that his favorite part is when she fights back. This, too, is different from the game, which includes no explicit threats of rape. Much is implied about David’s true intentions toward Ellie in the game, but the show makes it more obvious.

He’s above her and the room is on fire and Joel still hasn’t found her, though he’s found the bodies hanging, drained of blood (near the body of their horse, who has not been left laying to rot apparently). Desperate, Ellie reaches out behind her and grabs the discarded. She hacks David off of her—then leaps on top of him and hacks him again and again and again.

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

Covered in blood, Ellie flees the burning building. Joel finds her and grabs her and she freaks out, clearly terrified and traumatized. He pulls her close. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s okay baby girl.” He pulls her into a protective embrace and they shuffle through the snow, away from that wicked place and its wicked men, back into the forest, into the frigid expanse.

Toward the Fireflies and salvation.

Verdict

This was a powerful and disturbing episode. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann were wise to stick so closely to the game this time given that it was one of the most intense and memorable conflicts from the original. I do think it was a mistake to split episode 6 and episode 8 with an entire flashback episode. That killed a lot of momentum and even though I liked the story of Ellie and Riley, I think it would have worked as a series of flashbacks within the 7th episode rather than the whole thing.

The tension in this episode really captured the tension and fear that the game creates throughout—something I’ve argued has been missing in the last few episodes of the show. The terrifying nature of David and his men, the sense that the entire world is frozen and inhospitable and dangerous, the desperate fight for survival—all of this together made this the best episode of the show’s main story so far (I still love the Bill and Frank episode but it was more of an interlude rather than part of the main story arc).

All told, a tremendous, if deeply disturbing, episode of The Last Of Us. In some ways, it really makes me believe even more strongly that the Kathleen subplot was a mistake and that fear—and lots more infected!—should have played a larger role up to this point. This episode was riveting in ways that most of this season simply hasn’t been, at least since the first three episodes.

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Watch my video review below:

Previous Last Of Us recap/reviews from yours truly:

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