The Last of Us – When We Are in Need

By: Kelly Kearney

We are coming into the final stretch of the first season of “The Last of Us” and after seven episodes of traumatic storytelling this week’s tale delivers an emotional climax that will both horrify you and have you cheering for more. After getting a glimpse of what led to Ellie’s often contentious adventure with Joel, this week we see how this unique friendship has grown into more than just a smuggler and his cargo, but into something that almost resembles a family. Not only has Joel given Ellie the skills to survive on her own, but he has also become the person in her life worth surviving for. It’s the penultimate episode, so hold on to your vegan lunches because we are diving into alternative meat sources and the apocalyptic cults who devour them!

Food Scarcity

We open in the snowy wintery tundra of Colorado where a man reads bible verses to a room full of survivors from in front of a banner that reads “when we are in need, he shall provide.” We see the congregation of followers in various states of sadness and realize this gathering is a funeral for one of their own. The deceased man’s daughter asks the pastor when they will bury her father but she is told the ground is too frozen and will have to wait until spring. Cut to after the service and we hear the Pastor, who is named David (Scott Shepherd), tell one of his followers that the community is running out of food and they have maybe a week left before starvation kicks in. If you think this post-funeral conversation is interestingly timed, you would be right, hunger makes people do crazy things. That’s why David asks if follower, James (Troy Baker) understands what this food shortage means and if he supports his leader’s plans to fix it. James nods like he is in agreement but the look on his face tells another story. David doesn’t seem to be the type of man who enjoys being disagreed with so James grabs a rifle and follows him out for the hunt.

Speaking of hunger, now that Joel (Pedro Pascal) is out of commission after taking a blade to the gut, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is living on melted snow and hope – the hope that Joel wakes up from her amateur surgical skills and helps her find food. After sewing up his wound last week, it is obvious Joel has an infection and it’s caused him to slip in and out of consciousness since the attack. Ellie dribbles some water into Joel’s feverish mouth and then chows down on the last of their jerky supply, sans one small piece for Joel if and when he wakes up. She knows they can’t survive this winter on one stale piece of jerky, so when Ellie spies Joel’s rifle she knows it could be her only chance at finding food. It is a good thing he taught her some basic hunting skills in recent weeks because after missing her shot with a rabbit, she somehow manages to take down a deer! The wounded creature takes off deeper into the woods with just a blood trail to follow and the droplets are easy to track in the snow. They lead Ellie right to the fallen deer, as well as David and James who saw the animal go down and are now standing over it practically licking their malnourished lips. Instantly Ellie holds her gun on the two men and orders them to drop their rifles. David, who is trying to play god cop to James’ angry cop, asks for a moment to tell her who they are before she pulls the trigger. He explains how he is a member of a large community that needs food and offers her a trade for the meat she just scored. Half the deer meat for anything she might want. He assumes this girl isn’t on her own but protecting her father who might be ill. When Ellie doesn’t deny it, David tells James to go back to their community and bring Ellie two bottles of Penicillin and a syringe while he stays behind as collateral. James leaves and David convinces Ellie to hide from the snowy elements in a crumbling structure where they can build a fire and wait for James to return.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

In the meantime, David tries his best to convince Ellie to return with him to his community. “You’re inviting me to your hunger club,” she asks, because if he doesn’t have enough food to feed his people, then why would he add another mouth to feed? David moves the conversation away from that question for information about his past and how he landed in Colorado. After the Fireflies brought down the Pittsburgh FEDRA QZ in 2017, he fled the East coast and managed to build a flock of followers en route to their final destination. This is when Ellie learns David is a pastor and also the leader of his community. He says he sent four of his people out looking for food nearby but only three men came home because one was killed by a crazy man traveling with a little girl. Sounds familiar and Ellie tries to control her reaction to throw David off. It doesn’t work; the pastor goes from warm and friendly to creepy when he lets Ellie know that finding her was some sort of holy kismet. From his almost flirtatious tone we can assume he doesn’t mean it’s because of the deer meat or her “father” he has darker thoughts about young Ellie that he struggles to keep hidden and she must see it. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says and that is when we see James aim his gun at Ellie’s back. Sensing his presence, she turns around with her own rifle just as David tells James to lower his gun and hand her the medicine she has been waiting for. The trade is done but David won’t give up on Ellie joining his flock. He tells her he can protect her, but she isn’t interested in buying whatever he is selling, so she grabs the antibiotics and takes off running. She leaves them the deer but James is still confused as to why David would let her get away–meat or not, but the pastor thinks the girl will lead them to her father.

Back at the community dinner the flock slurps some suspicious stew as Pastor David tells them about his run-in with Ellie in the woods. He says he found the man who killed one of their own – the same man waiting to be buried. And when the sun is up he will send a group out to hunt down the killer’s hideout. The daughter of the dead man chimes in with her two cents on how Ellie and Joel should die for what they’ve done. David might agree but apparently he is the only one to have good ideas because he walks over to the grieving girl and slaps her down to the floor in front of her hand-wringing mother. The slap follows a reminder that the girl, Hannah (Sonia Maria Chirilia), might think her father is gone but he is her father now and she would do well to stay quiet when he is talking. Cults are going to cult and this one is textbook Kool-aid creepy…if the Kool-Aid was human flavored! It is obvious the hungry flock isn’t thrilled with what’s on the menu that night as we watch them all choke down spoonfuls of gratitude with whatever mystery meat they’ve been served.

Speaking of fathers, Ellie might not be Joel’s child by blood–and let’s be real, they have only recently been able to tolerate each other, but the fear of being left by the only person left on earth who even slightly cares about her is enough for Ellie to bring Joel back to life. The second she gets back to the house, she injects the antibiotics directly into his infected wound. She is no doctor but is hoping it will work because after feeling his forehead, he is burning up. After a sip of melted snow, all Ellie can do is wait and see if the medication works. In the meantime, she lies her head down on his chest and rests for the night as if the sound of his continued heartbeat is a calming lullaby. It is the first time we’ve seen Ellie act like a worried daughter, and since Joel is asleep he won’t ever know how afraid she is,

The next morning Joel is in the same unconscious and infected state as the night before. Hoping the second time will do the trick, Ellie drives the syringe into his wound and plunges the antibiotics directly into the infection again. While Joel rests, she heads outside and spots David and James leading a group of armed men through the suburban neighborhood and she knows they are looking for Joel more than they are for her. They are going house to house searching for the man David said killed one of his flock and it won’t be long before they find him lying on a filthy mattress in a basement. Ellie takes off back to the house to try and rouse Joel but he is a sweaty feverish mess and can’t really help her. He needs to stay awake in case anyone enters the house and finds him sprawled and unable to fight. She hands the dazed Joel a knife and orders him not to fall back asleep while she and her horse create a distraction. Things go well until James spots Ellie and takes out her horse– sending her tumbling down into the snow and facing the group’s homicidal urges. James orders the group to kill her but David steps in, shouting for them to stop. “You’re so hungry for vengeance?” he accuses them, “so deliver it!” The raiders continue their hunt for Joel, while David drags the dazed Ellie back to their community like he planned to do the moment he saw her take down that deer. The question is, does he want to join the flock for her hunting skills, or are his interests in the girl far more sinister?

HANDS OFF THE CARGO!

David’s men do wind up finding Joel, but not napping on the mattress in the basement where Ellie left him, but ambushing anyone who enters the house. The first of David’s men to enter the basement gets ambushed from behind with a knife to the throat. Joel might be feverish but he is still a brutal killer and David’s followers are no match for him. He winds up capturing two men and duct tapes them both to chairs for an interrogation that makes waterboarding look like the log flume ride at your favorite amusement park. Joel is brutal and repeatedly stabs one of the men in the leg when he refuses to reveal the location of where David took Ellie. With a lot of screaming and blood pouring out of the men like gory inspiration, one of the men breaks and tells Joel his community is at the old resort at Silver Lake. After pointing it out on a map, Joel kills both men and staggers out into the snow looking for Ellie. After all, she saved his life so Joel owes her, and considering she is being Hansel and Gretled by David from behind the bars of a cage, that rescue cannot come soon enough.

Locked in a cage inside the kitchen at Silver Lake, Ellie spots a human ear on the floor and a smirking David sitting outside the bars trying to explain why cannibalism is a gift from God. Claiming their taste for humans was based on two factors: food scarcity, and meat going to waste, he points out how like him, she is a “natural leader” with “a violent heart.”  Did he say eating humans was a last resort? Ellie learned how to hunt last week and she almost killed a rabbit and shot a deer on her first try. Did David just skip right over those tasty options to order a five course Hannibal Lecter-inspired meal? Apparently so, and he will eat Ellie too if she refuses to bend to his will. But what does David want if not her rack of ribs? The same thing all cut leaders want: A child bride. His proposal is as creepy as you can imagine and of course, when Ellie doesn’t jump at the chance to be this pedo-pastor’s cannibal bride he goes from warm and fuzzy to a full-on INCEL rage. When Ellie realizes this unhinged pied piper of flesh and fetid fetishes can be manipulated, she caresses his hand long enough to get a grip on it and break it! As he shouts in pain he drops the cell’s keys and when she reaches through the bars for them David grabs her with his other hand and slams her head into the metal cage. Bleeding from the nose he spits out threats about siccing the others on her for her bad behavior. He also leaves her with a vague threat about chopping her into little pieces, which is always a big seller when proposing marriage to a teenager.

Ellie Bites Back!

When David returns to the kitchen with James the two men grab Ellie from the cell and in the struggle she manages to bite David as he tosses her onto a butcher block. He grabs a knife and just as he’s about to start hacking her to pieces, Ellie screams out “I’m infected!” If she’s infected, so is that bite wound she gave him. When David looks down he sees the evidence of the Cordyceps slowly crawling its way up through the veins on his arm. While he and James talk about whether or not she’s lying because the scar on her arm is confusing, she manages to grab the butcher knife away from David and drive it into James’ neck and then runs out of the kitchen and directly into the dining room of the restaurant at Silver Lake. It’s the same location we saw in the beginning for the funeral and unlucky for Ellie, it seems David has locked all of the doors. Ellie is trapped with a cannibal who has nothing left to lose but the keys he is holding in one hand and a butcher knife in the other he intends to use the second he finds her. Ellie hides behind the restaurant’s bar with a piece of fiery wood she snagged from the working fireplace. When she tosses the burning weapon at David she misses and the flames wind up setting the restaurant’s curtains on fire. The room goes up in flames as David taunts Ellie by waxing poetic about all the things a good guy like him could have done for her if she would have just agreed to be with him. That’s when she comes out of her hiding space and charges at him with a steak knife she found behind the bar. She manages to stab him in the side but he is stronger than her and gains control of the situation. He knocks her down and kicks her repeatedly as she tries to get away and in the process, drops his butcher knife next to Ellie. When she makes an attempt to grab it. David puts the boots to her until she is writhing in pain and begging him to stop. That is when he takes his chance and jumps on top of her to say “the fighting is the part I like the most.” David is going to rape Ellie and possibly eat her and once that realization kicks in she goes into fight or flight mode and reaches for the knife and stabs him like the squealing pig he is. Now the roles are reversed and Ellie from on top of David pummels him repeatedly with the pointy end of the knife as if every bit of pain loss and heartbreak in her short life has culminated into one homicidal moment and it is as gratifying as any mystery meat stew. Who’s chopped into pieces now, David?

As the fire rages on Ellie crawls out of the restaurant and runs right into Joel, who just got to Silver Lake carrying her backpack and conscience full of new victims. With her face covered in blood and everything about her demeanor saying she has just survived something more horrible than he could ever imagine – and he’s imagining a lot considering there are corpses hanging high above the streets like Peking ducks in a Chinatown restaurant, Joel wraps her in his coat and hugs her saying “It’s ok, baby girl. I got you.” This is the same thing he whispered to his daughter Sarah when she was shot by that guard in the premiere episode! No matter how hard Joel tried to lock Ellie out of his heart, this mouthy girl full of puns and bad ideas somehow found the key, and now that heart is as open as his loving arms we see him embracing her. Together these two will save each other–smuggler and cargo, mentor and mentee, father and daughter because when one of them is in need, the other will be there to provide. They are all each other has now and it took a cult of cannibals for them both to recognize that.