The Last of Us – Please Hold My Hand

By: Kelly Kearney

After last week’s tragic love story, Ellie and Joel hit the road for Wyoming in search of Tommy and anyone else who can point them in the direction of the Fireflies’ top-secret medical base. Instead, what they find is a vengeful leader of a rebel faction hell-bent on making their Kansas City pit stop a deadly one.

On The Road Again

The FEDRA could use an expert in gun safety after watching Ellie (Bella Ramsey) play Rambo in the mirror with the pistol she swiped from Bill’s house. Still on the run with Joel and without his knowledge, Ellie practices her reloading and aim–ready for whatever is lurking beyond the walls of their latest gas station hideout. When she hears Joel (Pedro Pascal), she packs up her weapon and heads outside with her “No Puns” joke book. He’s siphoning gas and tells her they need to stop and look for gas every hour because it quickly breaks down into water. He explains the process like a mentor but she’s too busy cracking cheesy jokes and trying his already brittle patience. Gassed up and back on the road, Ellie searches the truck for anything to cure her boredom and comes upon a Hank Williams cassette tape and a porno magazine tucked behind the front seat. This amateur comedian cannot control herself as the jokes pour out of her about large members and questioning how certain men sit down. Joel can’t take these awkward observations and is apparently having issues shedding those fatherly vibes because he practically begs her to toss the magazine out the window. She complies but not before joking about all the pages being stuck together–one last joke to close this roadshow.

As the sun starts to set Joel pulls off the road into the woods to camp for the night. Over a can of two-decade-old Chef Boyardee, he explains how these woods are safe from the infected because it’s too remote, but that doesn’t mean they can stave off the nighttime chill with fire. People–mostly raiders, will see it. The cordyceps aren’t smart enough to associate smoke with human hosts but desperate people who are willing to kill for some moldy ravioli would. After a few more jokes and a very nice-smelling sleeping bag courtesy of Frank, Ellie shelves her humor to get real for a second. She wants to be sure what he said about people not finding them was true, and he does his best to put her mind at ease, “no one is going to find us.”

Bright and early finds Joel up making coffee– thanks to Bill’s (Nick Offerman) supply, for the two-day drive to Wyoming. Ellie must be a tea drinker because she not only shames Joel’s morning swill, she questions if it’s the same disgusting drink the Starbucks in the QZ used to sell. Apparently, corporate ice coffee conglomerates will outlive the majority of mankind, so at least we have that to look forward to in the apocalypse. As Joel savors his coffee over their morning drive, Elle follows the map and attempts to guide the way which is tough for a kid whose first time in a car was yesterday, According to the coordinates, Wyoming is a long way down Route 70 west and even longer for Joel who is worried about his brother’s recent radio silence. If he isn’t at the last stop he radioed from, he should be at a nearby settlement or any town close to a city.  Ellie asks about Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Joel explains how his brother is a joiner; he joined the army right out of high school, and twelve years later convinced Joel to join a group heading to the Boston QZ. This is how Joel met Tess (Anna Torv), and it is also how Tommy met Marlene. After that, the joiner joined the Fireflies  stating,“The same mistake he made at eighteen. He wants to save the world.” Tommy eventually quit the Fireflies and now he’s out there on his own. Ellie picks up on the fact Joe ridicules his brother’s hope and she asks why he even bothers to go on if he doesn’t believe that things can get better. He responds with an ominous foreshadowing, “You haven’t seen the world so you don’t know.” He tells her he keeps going for family, which she succinctly points out she isn’t a part of, and he agrees, she’s cargo, no matter how precious Tess thought that cargo was.

After a long nap, Ellie wakes to a rough road on the outskirts of Kansas City. The highway is blocked by burnt-out cars, so Joel has no other choice but to grab his gun and figure out a way around it on foot. He can see the road is clear beyond the pile-up, so checks the maps to see if there is a way around the blockade. The detour takes him inside the city limits but Ellie has no idea how to find the way back to the highway. Plans change when they notice the walls surrounding the Kansas City QZ are down and FEDRA seems to be missing in action. That’s when they see an injured man begging for help and Joel makes the split decision to hit the gas and gun it. Assuming the man was part of an ambush. Joel was right,  this group starts reigning concrete blocks and bullets down on their fleeing truck and the chaos forces him to drive over some road spikes and lose control of the vehicle. With no other options, the two take cover in a building and Joel orders Ellie to squeeze through a hole in the wall as he trades gunfire with an unseen assailant. In the shootout, he manages to kill one gunman but another is lying in wait and this guy is homicidal over the loss of his friend, He charges at Joel and pins him to the ground in a strangle move. Ellie can see the whole thing unfolding from her hidden vantage point and sneaks out, aiming her pistol and shooting the young man attacking Joel! She paralyzes him and almost instantly this young man is apologetic for the attack. He begs them to find his mother because, Brian (Juan Magana), what he says his name is, doesn’t know what to do. Ellie is shaken by the reality of what she’s done, and Joel tells her to leave as he finishes the kid off.  For as tough as she acts, this sort of violence is foreign to her and a bit too much as she hears Brian’s attempts to barter for his life. In the end, she follows Joel’s orders and hides behind the wall as she hears Brian scream for his mom before what we can assume is the final death blow. With the coast minimally clear for now, Ellie and Joel lock the doors behind them and make their way deeper into the factory building until they find an exit. The problem is, outside they see cars lining up with armed people looking for the two men they killed. Now they are trapped and that road to Wyomng is getting longer by the minute.

“You Were Wronged”

While Ellie and Joel try to figure out how to get out of Kansas City unseen, we head inside the overrun FEDRA complex where we meet the leader of this rebel faction, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey). A FEDRA hostage is being questioned by her about the whereabouts of a man named Henry. She wants to know where Henry is and makes it a point to mention the cell they are standing in is probably the same place where men tortured and killed her brother after people like the hostage turned him in to FEDRA authorities. This truth doesn’t bode well for the hostage’s survival. Kathleen, for all her rage, is a soft-spoken take no prisoners type of leader but just because her tone is pleasant doesn’t mean she won’t shoot this guy in the head. He acknowledges that she and her friends “were wronged” by FEDRA, but overthrowing the entire QZ complex because of it is wrong. She points out his hypocrisy over wanting the suffering to stop now because he is the one doing the suffering, but before, when he was the one reporting people to FEDRA-namely, her brother, the suffering of others was fine. The shoe on the other foot always hurts the most and this guy is feeling those consequences now. He begs her to realize he never turned her brother in and that It was Henry who alerted the troops. Kathleen thinks this doctor- the same man who delivered her in childbirth, knows where Henry is and that’s why this interrogation– this fact-finding mission, is fueled by vengeance. Before Kathleen can end the doctor’s life for his refusal to give up Henry she gets word about two more attacks on her group–one dead, and one, Brian, still clinging to life. Her lieutenant, Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) tells her they think the attackers are from the outside and not members of the Kansas City FEDRA. If they have supplies but aren’t FEDRA, then Henry must have called them for backup. This possibility enrages Kathleen so much that she goes back inside the complex and shoots the doctor dead. She is convinced that all of this is Henry’s doing, and orders her soldiers to find the attackers and kill them all.

From their hiding spot in a dilapidated bar, Ellie and Joel watch as Kathleen’s troops scour the city looking for them. They notice the group is wearing tattered FEDRA armor and driving their trucks with the words spray painted on the side “WE THE PEOPLE.” If they aren’t FEDRA, and they aren’t the FIreflies, then who are they? Joel tells Ellie they’re just people and it’s a reminder of what he said in the woods. It’s not the robberies that you have to worry about, it’s the killings. Kathleen’s soldiers raid homes and buildings across the city while Joel and Ellie lay low until they can make their escape. As the two wait it out, the two talk about how Ellie feels after what happened with Brian. She admits he wasn’t her first kill and Joel doesnt ask her to elaborate. Instead, he gives her the pistol back he took from her after she shot Brian and teaches her a little gun safety–mostly reminding her not to stick the weapon down the back of her pants or else “you’ll shoot your damn ass off.” He follows that up with a kinder “We’ll get through this” to settle her nerves and give her some of that hope she accused him of not having.

Henry

Elsewhere, Perry has news for Kathleen. He thinks he found Henry’s hideout and takes her to an attic filled with soup cans littering the floor and superhero drawings adorning the walls. Henry isn’t alone–a boy named Sam is with him and it looks like they might be out of food which means they are scavenging out in the open and can be found. She orders Perry to beef up security around the group’s food supply. She is sure that’s how they will catch the two. That isn’t the only news Perry has for Kathleen. After they check out Henry’s attic, he takes her to the basement of the same building and behind the cracked concrete the two see something moving. Kathleen seems terrified but tells Perry they will deal with it after they find Henry. She orders the building to be sealed off until then.

As night creeps across the horizon, Joel and Ellie make their way to the tall building adjacent to the clear path out of the city. They walk up thirty-three flights of steps and agree to sleep tonight and leave first thing in the morning. As they settle in, Ellie asks Joel how he knew the screaming man was an ambush and he admits he has been on both sides of this raiders/victims coin. He used similar tactics to survive. She goes on to ask if he killed innocent people too, thinking of what she just witnessed with Brian, but his silence is the best answer he could offer her. This prompts him to push her to talk about her first kill, but she won’t budge. Joel’s response to this shows how Ellie is softening him up because he almost mourns the loss of her innocence when pointing out how unfair it is that any child her age should have to live like this. “So it gets easier when you get older?” she asks. “No, not really,” he says.

After spreading broken glass as an alarm system by the barricaded door, the two get ready for bed. Ellie is still slinging jokes but this time Joel is actually laughing! It is the first smile we’ve gotten from the character and another example of the “Ellie Effect” on his grumpy attitude. Eventually, sleep overtakes their giggles but when they wake up, the laughter has been replaced by terror. The two are not alone in the room anymore, Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodward) are there too, and they have a gun trained on Joel. Once he realizes what is going on, Henry shushes him to be quiet. So much for manmade glass alarms!