The Cage

“I’m going to make this man wish he never laid one finger on me.”

Nic: Ellie comes to in a makeshift cage in a kitchen. She immediately demands to be let out, but David refuses because he’s “so scared” because she’s “so dangerous”. The rest of his people apparently want him to kill her, but isn’t she just “so lucky” that he stopped them? (An overuse of quotation marks? Maybe. But I really need y’all to get my tone here. I hate this man.) He tries again to get her name and again she refuses.

Valerie: Which he hates, not being able to boss someone around, not having a girl be subservient to him. He hates it and for just half a second, you see his anger flash about it.

Nic: But David is a man who won’t be moved; he continues to emotionally manipulate Ellie by claiming that he wants to protect her because no one can survive on their own so she obviously needs him. But Ellie insists that she’s not on her own; she has Joel. So David tells her that the reality of the situation is that Joel’s not doing well and she needs to let that part of her life go. If she can’t trust him, then yeah, she will be alone. And there’s that word again: alone. In this world of human and infected monsters, loneliness is the thing that Ellie fears the most; and it is being weaponized against her by a man who is pure evil disguised as a savior. And while Ellie puts on her toughness in David’s face, I also think there’s a part of her that worries that he might be right about Joel. Not a big enough part for her to give up, but you can see her wheels turning as she makes herself small and stares into the corner of the cage.

While David is gone, Ellie tries to find some way out of her prison until something catches her eye and makes her back away as if she’s seen a ghost. David comes back in with food and follows Ellie’s eyeline so we can see what spooked her: a literal human ear. As if this is supposed to reassure her, David swears that what he brought her is just deer meat. So Ellie says out loud what has only been hinted at with nods and lingering eye contact; she asks if he’s going to chop her up into little pieces to feed to his people.

Valerie: The stew is Stu!

Nic: David doesn’t deny what he’s been doing, chalking it up to needing to take care of the people who look to him as their leader. He claims that Ellie would do the same because the two of them are similar; she reminds him of himself, he says. They’re both natural leaders, smart, loyal, and violent. He knows that Ellie would stab him if given the chance, and like, OBVIOUSLY dude. So would I. But here’s the thing, like you said earlier, cruelty and violence don’t actually come easy to Ellie; it’s not ingrained in her like it is in David. She only does what she needs to do to survive. He goes into a spiel about how beautifully violent the cordyceps virus is and blah blah blah.

Ellie wants to know why he’s even telling her this, and David tells her it’s because she can handle it, that she’s beyond needing a father, that the two of them could be equals. Here’s the thing – the differences between Joel and David are plentiful, and I think all of them are on display during this conversation. One of the first times that Joel lets down his walls is in an attempt to comfort Ellie after she shoots that hunter because while he knows that she can hold her own in this world, he also knows that she shouldn’t have to. Joel manages to treat Ellie like a human being who’s had lived experiences that necessitated her strength, while also protecting her in a way that does not strip her of her autonomy. But David is over here pandering to her to gain trust as a means to his own disgusting and violent ends.

Valerie: A grown man calling a child a “friend” or an equal is such a huge red flag. Blech.

Nic: And in the face of David’s manipulation, Ellie still asks about Joel. David says they’ll let him go, and her reaction makes him think that he’s convinced her. She walks toward him and he lets down his guard long enough for Ellie to attack. He slams her against the bars and in a moment ripped bar for bar from the game, she finally tells him her name so he can tell his people that the little girl named Ellie broke his fucking finger.

Valerie: If I’ve done something to make a man call me a cunt, I feel like I’ve won. Therefore, Ellie wins.

Nic: While this is happening, Joel is stumbling through the snow in pain and desperate to find Ellie. He follows a blood trail into a shed where he finds Ellie’s things, Callus, and three headless human bodies hanging on meat hooks.

Valerie: Casual.

Nic: David and James storm back into the kitchen to get Ellie, but she doesn’t make it easy, kicking and screaming all the way to the butcher block. As David raises the cleaver, Ellie yells that she’s infected and since she bit him, now he is too. The men don’t believe her, but in the split second when they’re questioning what she said, Ellie grabs the knife and uses it to kill Troy Baker (I mean James, whatever) before running out.

The Restaurant

“Hold your heart up to the fire. Walk across a razor wire. Even in the cruelest fight. Love is in the battle cry.”

Valerie: Ellie sprints out of the kitchen and throws a torch at David, missing him but hitting the curtains of the lodge. David considers for a second dealing with the FIRE to his TOWN he supposedly is in charge of, but instead chooses to chase the teenage girl around.

Nic: You know, like any decent man would.

Valerie: Ellie hides and bobs and weaves, eventually sneaking back around to the kitchen and grabbing a knife, plotting her next move.

While David is hunting for Ellie, Joel is looking for her too, with the opposite intentions. He’s clutching her backpack and hoping against hope that she’s okay, and not being turned into a Mrs. Lovett meat pie.

David continues to taunt Ellie while he hunts her down and the building burns. He’s sending confusing messages, saying both that he wants to be her father but also that he wants to “keep” her, which really is only cute when Casper says it. Eventually Ellie gets close enough to stab David, and she does, but just in his side, so he has enough energy to throw her to the ground and get on top of her. He grins a truly evil grin and tells her he likes that she’s fighting him, and when he takes one hand off her, she uses that opportunity to reach for the knife and stab him again. She throws him off her and stabs him, again and again and again, choking out screaming sobs as she stabs David over and over and over again.

Nic: The way I screamed along with Ellie though! DESTROY. HIM.

Valerie: It was very satisfying.

This is the part of the game that maybe haunted me the most (besides the general concept of stalkers and clickers), and I was dreading the show’s portrayal of it. Not only because I was stuck in this goddamned red-carpet hellscape for what felt like days (in reality it was only like 10 minutes but they were LONG, STRESSFUL MINUTES) but also because prestige streaming shows aren’t always known for their…tact when it comes to predatory men. They tend to show and do too much and claim it’s for “historical accuracy” even in shows about literal dragons when the truth is, most of us knew exactly what this man was about when he first put Ellie in that cage. That said, I think they ended up walking that line perfectly, and despite the fact that by this far into the season I did trust them, I still breathed a sigh of relief when Ellie’s hand wrapped around her knife.

Nic: You perfectly captured every thought I had coming into this episode. No notes.

Valerie: After Ellie makes sure David will never lay a cannibalistic rapist finger on anyone ever again, she stumbles outside in a daze. When she feels hands grab her, she uses what little is left of her strength to try to fight him off, until she realizes it’s Joel. Her fist pounding fizzles and she lets out a relieved noise, looking at him in disbelief. She lets him pull her into a hug and he calls her “baby girl” and holds her while she chokes out the rest of the cries that are stuck in her throat. She looks him in the eyes again to make sure he’s not a mirage, and lets herself shut down a little as he wraps his coat around her, leading her away from this hellish place.

Nic: Both times I watched this episode, I completely broke down at the split second between when Ellie looks at Joel and when she actually sees him. All she can think about is survival; it’s a different fear than what we’ve seen from her thus far and she’s still in self-preservation mode until she sees her Joel.

Valerie: For once, in the aftermath of her hardest moment, Ellie is not alone. Not this time. Not anymore.

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