Hello! We’re back with a recap of the penultimate episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, titled “When We Are In Need”. And per usual, by “we” I mean me (Nic) and Valerie Anne; two queer nerdy friends having lots and lots of feelings about our favorite video game turned television show and its tiny murder lesbian. I think we say this every week, but this is an emotional one folks, so buckle up.
Valerie: Previously on The Last of Us, Joel got shanked, sending Ellie into a flashback of the last time she was left behind by Riley, her best friend and first love, with whom she had a magical night in an abandoned mall before they both got bitten by a clicker. In the present day, Ellie dragged an injured Joel to a basement in an abandoned house, sewed him up and hoped for the best.
The Hunt
“I bet Riley would know what to do.”
Nic: It’s snowing, it’s blustery, it’s beautiful; and as we take in an apocalyptic winter wonderland, the voice of a man reading from the book of Revelation cuts through the peace. We’re in a place called Silver Lake where a group of very forlorn looking white people (I don’t know why this stuck out so much to me in this episode, but it was giving Westboro…) are listening to a man preach about the comfort that God provides even in the most trying times. A girl about Ellie’s age is crying, and as her mother comforts her we learn that this gathering is to mourn the death of her father. The girl asks the man when they can bury him, and after an interesting glance to another member of the group, he tells her that because the ground is too cold, they’ll need to wait until the spring.
After the “service”, the man, who we learn is called David, and his buddy who happens to have the face of Troy Baker aka the voice of OG Joel from the video game, discuss just how dire their situation is – they have enough venison to last 1-2 weeks at most. Before they ready themselves to go hunting for more food, David accuses James of doubting him, but James insists that although it’s been a rough few months, he still believes in him. The episode has barely started and I’m already creeped out and uncomfortable with this entire situation.
Valerie: Two things: 1) Once you escape the cult of Christianity, it’s hard to imagine how you ever thought things like “He Shall Provide” were anything but creepy. 2) Troy Baker is one hell of an actor because he put on quite the voice for Joel. If I didn’t know it was him, I wouldn’t have guessed it.
Nic: Back at the abandoned house they’ve been hiding in, Ellie continues to do everything in her power to take care of Joel. She checks his wound which is looking…pretty gnarly to be honest. He’s been asleep or resting the entire time, but that hasn’t stopped Ellie from talking to him or asking if he’s hungry or thirsty. She dabs some water on his lips, takes a bite of food for herself, and leaves a piece for him as she ponders what the heck she’s supposed to do next. The rifle catches her eye and in that moment she knows that she’s got to put those hunting lessons to good use otherwise the two of them will starve.
So Ellie heads out with the rifle, checks all around her just the way Joel taught her, and then makes her way into the woods. She starts to follow some tracks, scares away a rabbit, and then falls on her face into the snow. Our girl is going through it, y’all. Before long, she spots deer tracks and hot damn, she actually sees one in the distance. She readies herself, gets into position, breathes, and remembers the way Joel told her to squeeze the trigger. It works! She hits the deer and then it attempts to run, well limp, away.
We see its blood trail, only it’s David and James who find the deer first. They start to discuss whether it’s okay to just take it when Ellie’s voice rings out, demanding that they back away from her kill before she puts a bullet right between their eyes. They drop their guns and step back before turning to see that the voice belongs to a literal child. A child who is having NONE of their shit, to be fair. And thus begins David’s emotional manipulation. He pleads for just 10 seconds to tell Ellie that they’re from a large group of very hungry people so they need that deer more than she does. Honestly, the audacity of this white man to just reap the benefits of Ellie’s work?! I’m not surprised by any means, but everything about David makes my skin crawl. :shudder:
Valerie: Ellie using her Joel impression for good instead of for mocking him. (Which, arguably, is also good, but you know what I mean.)
Nic: Ellie lies and says that she’s also from a large group, but even so, David knows that she can’t carry that deer back by herself. So he offers a trade, and Ellie nearly jumps at the chance to potentially get medicine for Joel’s infection. Bella’s face work is impeccable in this entire episode, and right here, they depict Ellie’s immediate shift from badass negotiator to scared and hopeful child in the most perfect way.
Valerie: THE VOICE CHANGE. IMMEDIATE. Agreed, perfect line read, no notes.
Nic: David and James agree to the trade, but Ellie’s a smart girl and refuses to follow them anywhere; instead, she tells James to go get the medicine while she and David wait for him. Once James leaves, Ellie keeps her gun trained on David while she unloads the men’s rifles. It’ll be a bit before James gets back, so Ellie, David, and the deer take up shelter in a nearby shed.
Venison and Vengeance
14 is too young to have the world on your shoulders.
Valerie: Sitting around the fire with only a dead deer for company, David tries to make conversation with Ellie. Tries to ask her name, but she won’t give it; invites her to join his group, to which she points out he JUST said they are low on food. He says he’s a decent man, a thing most decent men don’t have to say out loud, and Ellie asks if he’s their leader. David claims it wasn’t his choice, that the people looked to him to lead. Hilariously, Ellie asks exactly what I would have asked next: is he leading a cult? He tries to laugh it off, admitting there’s a religious element to it, but claims it’s “standard Bible stuff” as if there are no cults that would claim just that. Ellie doesn’t believe how anyone could watch a mushroom virus take over the world and believe there is a god but he says he only became a preacher after the world ended. (One might say he found god in a hopeless place.)
Nic: HAHAHAHAHA (thank you, I needed that laugh).
Valerie: Using humor to cope is my specialty.
Ellie puts on a mocking tone and asks if he switched from teacher to preacher because it rhymes, and it’s another one of those moments where you go “oh god she’s only 14.” Because she’s trying so hard to be tough and fling insults but all she knows how to do is swear a lot; despite the show she puts on for everyone, cruelty doesn’t come naturally to her.
He tells Ellie everything happens for a reason, which makes her scoff, and he offers to prove it. His example is that one of his men got murdered the other day by a man traveling with a girl who is just her age. Ellie’s body tenses and she tightens her grip on her gun and whips around to follow David’s eyeline; James is back with a gun on her. She points her gun at him anyway, but David tells James to stand down, give Ellie the medicine, and let her go. James questions this order, but Ellie doesn’t wait around to hear David’s explanation, she grabs the medicine and high-tails it back to Joel, much to James’ chagrin.
When Ellie gets the medicine in the needle she realizes she doesn’t know how to give someone a shot (which, fair) and when Joel can’t answer her pleas for help, she decides to jab it right into the wound. Then she tucks him in and curls up next to him which reminded me too much of that one scene in The Lion King for my heart’s comfort. And Joel, perhaps instinctively, almost imperceptibly turns his head into hers.
Nic: Wow, I was already emotional about Joel leaning toward Ellie here, and then you hit me with that Lion King reference? Rude.
Valerie: Back in Cultville, a cook prepares fresh meat stew; he claims it’s venison, but there’s an awful lot of it, and David and James don’t return with the deer they stole from Ellie until after dinner is served.
When they do return, David and James are met with awkward stares, so David addresses the room. He says that in the morning, they’re going to follow the girl’s tracks to the man who killed their friend and enact justice. The dead man’s daughter shouts that they should kill them both, to which David answers by strutting right up to her and backhanding her across the face.
Nic: This fucking guy was a teacher.
Valerie: He basically says he’s her father now and tells her to obey him and despite it leaving a bad taste in MY mouth, after he finishes blessing the meal, everyone goes to town on their meal. If you look closely, you can see David’s mouth turn up in a slight hint of sick pleasure as he watches Hannah eat the stew, which makes me more nauseous than thinking about the stew itself.
Back in the basement of bad vibes, Ellie checks Joel’s fever again and jabs more antibiotics into him. She goes upstairs and gives Callus some snow to drink and is standing in the yard trying to decide what to do next when she sees a flock of birds fly off as if startled, so she slinks around to take a look. She spots David, James and a few more men heading her way, all armed, and clearly looking for her. While they trace her, James protests David’s plan of bringing “the girl” back to town with them, but David doesn’t want to hear any of his lip.
Ellie books it back to Joel, and when she can’t rouse him, she presses a knife into his hand and tells her to kill anyone who comes down to the basement on sight. She leaves the house, cleverly blocking the basement door with a bookshelf, and takes off on Callus, on a mission to distract the men and lead them away from Joel.
Nic: She came up with this plan so fast?!?!
Valerie: David yells after his men to make sure he brings her in alive so James shoots her horse, sending her flying, disorienting her enough for James and his boyz to catch up to her. They’re about to take justice into their own hands, but David interrupts, determined to take the girl alive. David carries Ellie herself, tells two of his men to drag the horse back to town, and lets the rest hunt for Joel to enact the vengeance they so desperately crave.
One of the men rolls a natural 20 on his investigation check and sees through Ellie’s bookshelf trick, heading downstairs. But when he gets there, Joel isn’t on his mattress; the combination of antibiotics and adrenaline got him up and at ’em, at least enough to kill the man trying to ambush him. Joel uses the body of this man as bait to trap two more, torturing them just long enough to get the name of the town/resort David took Ellie to, kills them both, and takes off with his newly marked map.
Nic: Joel’s “it’s okay, I believe him” got me GOOD.
Next page: “DESTROY HIM!!!!”
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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Oh oh omg. This show. That’s all.
Whew. This episode was tough. Really good but so tough, even when I knew what was coming.
I appreciated y’all’s humor tho! “One of the men rolls a natural 20 on his investigation check” so good
Bella effing Ramsey. 19. Can I just say, oh my god. We are watching a star being born. I often wondered who would be the next great dramatic actress would be and I think she’s been found.
Sorry meant they have been found.
Phew, that was an uncomfy watch (likewise for the game), even if Ellie managed to slash herself out of a horrific situation.
On the plus side, it was great to see Bella carrying the whole episode on (their) her own, while comically landing on (their) her face or fighting tooth and nail to survive.
Definitely an intense episode, though I was very glad it was less heartbreaking that last week. (I don’t know that I could have survived two in a row like that.)
I watched the Inside the Episode afterwards and thought it was weird that the show runner described David as seeming like a good guy/dad at first, when I definitely though the was clearly creepy from the start. 😕
I really wonder if people’s backgrounds inform how they saw David’s introduction. As someone who grew up in culty christian churches, as soon as he was on-screen reading bible verses my alarm bells started going off. But I’ve seen some mixed reactions where people didn’t pick up on things as quickly. Either way, Ellie taking him out was so incredibly satisfying and cathartic.
I also read a review where the reviewer seems to think he’s good from the start and I’m like dude were we watching the same show?! I had such a deep visceral discomfort from moment one. So interesting.