I’ll say this for the puffies, AKA the hulking, gruesome creatures at the most advanced stage of fungal infection in The last of us: They have impeccable timing.
Because if that big old shiitake man and all of his friends hadn’t shown up by the end of this week’s episode, Joel and Ellie would have been bonkers, thanks to Kathleen’s relentless quest for revenge. There’s a lesson here somewhere: my vengeful enemy’s infected enemy is my friend? Hey, I’ll continue to the workshop.
In related news, we officially meet Sam and Henry during the episode. And because we fall in love with them pretty quickly, of course, they’re both dead by the time the credits roll. Everyone, please join me in raising your fists to the sky and shouting “Druckmann!”
HOW WE GOT HERE | The beginning of the episode jumps back a bit, when Kathleen and her group have just taken control of the Kansas City quarantine zone. Crowds roam the streets chanting “Freedom! FEDRA officers are hanged. “The city belongs to the people. Collaborators, surrender now,” a man announces through a megaphone as a truck dragging a corpse rolls slowly through the chaos.
The kid and the young man seen briefly at the end of the previous episode are hiding. They are respectively Sam and Henry, the brothers that Kathleen goes all over town to find. In fact, at this precise moment, she interrogates a cell full of accused informants in order to find out where the brothers are; one says they’re with Edelstein, who turns out to be the doctor Kathleen killed in episode 4. She orders Perry and his team to go door to door to find them, then orders his second in command to skip a trial. and just kill all the collaborators. “When you’re done, burn the bodies,” she said. “It is faster.”
Henry and Sam are with Edelstein, entrenched in a building in the city, but they lack food and ammunition. Sam, who is deaf, is scared. Henry hands her a bag of pencils and, as a distraction, asks her to spruce up their lodging. So the boy starts drawing a Super Sam hero on the walls.
THE STRENGTH OF NUMBERS | Ten days later, it has been 24 hours since Edelstein left to try to find food; Henry knows the doctor was probably killed and doesn’t sugarcoat the possibility when Sam asks. Henry adds that they are going to have to leave too, because they are very hungry. The little boy is understandably SCARY, so Henry makes him close his eyes, then uses orange paint to draw a mask on Sam so he’s Super Sam. Henry shows him his reflection in a knife, and it’s a sweet moment in a landscape of hell.
They are about to leave when they witness the ambush that happened to Joel and Ellie in the previous episode. the laundromat is directly across from where Sam and Henry are crouching. Henry takes a good look at Joel’s face and signals to his brother that they have a new plan.
Cut to where we last left Angry Dad and Wonder Kid: with Ellie screaming for Joel, who is sleeping with his good ear muffled by the pillow, to wake up. Sam and Henry cornered them. Henry and Joel are off to a bad start. (“That’s just how he sounds! He’s got a hollow voice!” Ellie intervenes, trying to defuse the situation. Ha!) Henry nods to Sam that he’s going to trust their new acquaintances, and a temporary peace is reached.
‘ENDURE AND SURVIVE’ | Joel and Ellie share their food. She immediately goes after the brothers, but Joel is – shockingly – much more guarded. It gives them a context for everything they’ve been through. The Kansas City branch of FEDRA was a terrible group of people who tortured the residents of the QZ, hence its overthrow. But Henry quickly confesses that he collaborated with FEDRA, which angers Joel. Henry has a plan: he will help Joel and Ellie get out of town if Joel will be the heavy gun he needs; despite all these postures with the gun, he never shot anyone.
Joel agrees, and then Henry lays out his plan to leave. FEDRA drove all of the infected underground 15 years ago, but the FEDRA guard Henry worked with confessed to clearing the maintenance tunnels three years prior. And indeed, when the four get there, there is no evidence of “mushroom heads”. There East proof – in the form of a classroom for young children – of a community that survived, and perhaps even thrived?, underground after Outbreak Day.
Ellie and Sam bond over a comic book series they both love; he teaches her ASL to “endure and survive”, a central phrase in the comic. While everyone is waiting for it to get dark outside – better to take shelter when they go out later – the youngest are playing football. “If you were working together to take care of him, I shouldn’t have said what I said,” grinds a chagrined Joel. Then Henry admits he killed someone (“a big man”), the leader of the resistance movement in KC, in order to get leukemia medicine for Sam, who badly needed it at the time. . The man was Kathleen’s brother.
Elsewhere in town, Terry finds Kathleen brooding in her childhood bedroom. She tells how her brother, Michael, would be horrified by what she did, and how the last time she saw him, in prison, he told her to forgive. But she doesn’t see justice in forgiveness, and Terry is on the same page. Michael was a great guy but didn’t bring change, Terry notes. However, “You made it. We are with you.” She exhales saying “Good”.
BLOATER? I KNOW IT LITTLE! | Sam, Henry, Joel, and Ellie emerge from the tunnels, and Henry rejoices that his plan has worked when a sniper begins shooting at them from a nearby house. Joel sneaks out the back, goes inside, and arrests the old man, who kills himself. Then Joel realizes that the sniper has been in radio communication with Kathleen’s team, who are about to arrive.
“RUN!” Joel shouts from the window, and the trio on the ground do so as he tries to cover them from his perch in the house. He manages to remove the lead car, which crashes into a nearby house and creates a huge fire. During the ruckus, Ellie falls; Henry comes for her and helps her hide, and Joel takes notice of her selfless action.
Kathleen is irritated. She stands in the road and orders Henry out; he shouts from his hiding place that he will if she lets Ellie and Sam go. She says no, the monologues about how kids are dying all the time. “Do you think the whole world revolves around him? That it’s worth… everything? she laughs, and my, it was a little on the nose.
When she screams “that’s what happens when you f—k with fate!” it’s clear we’re through the looking glass here, and Henry tells Ellie to grab Sam and run as he comes out of their hiding place with his hands up. Kathleen is about to shoot him when everyone’s attention is drawn to the truck that drove into the house minutes before. The vehicle slowly slides into a sinkhole… releasing a TIDAL WAVE OF INFECTED, including the aforementioned bloat. Man, this thing is big and really hard to kill.
The scene changes from arm wrestling to everyone for themselves. Ellie is estranged from Sam, and Joel does his best to protect her from the house. She finds herself inside a car and has precisely a nanosecond to breathe before a clicker who was apparently a circus performer in her previous life climbs up and twists her body on the seats until it be on his face. She manages to escape in time, notices that Sam and Henry are under a car and attacked, and with Joel covering for her once more, uses her knife to single-handedly dispatch two infected people. I LIKE THIS GIRL. When the puffy comes out of the hole, Perry tells Kathleen to run and take cover. He empties his weapon into the hulking creature, which barely slows as it approaches, then easily tears its head from its body.
Ellie, Sam, and Henry break free from the melee but walk right past Kathleen, who yells at them to stop… then gets blown up by an Infected, who rips her apart like she’s a downed piñata. Joel meets them, and all four make it out safely and take refuge in a motel to rest.
NO! SAMMMMM! | Joel offers the brothers to come to Wyoming, and Henry gladly accepts, planning to tell Sam in the morning. “New day, new beginning,” he says in a way that’s far too optimistic for anything that could happen on this show. (And, as we see, it confirms!)
In the adjoining bedroom, Sam and Ellie have a conversation via her wipeboard. He asks if she’s scared, and she says she’s scared all the time, especially “being alone.” When she asks him, he writes, “If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?” Then he pulls up his trouser leg to show her that he got bitten during the fight. OH NO.
She quickly writes, “My blood is medicine,” and pulls out her knife to slice his palm and press it to his wound. He asks her to stay awake with him, and she promises she will, then hugs him as he tries not to cry.
‘WHAT DID I DO?’ | Of course, everyone is exhausted and Ellie falls asleep. When she wakes up the next morning, Sam is sitting on the bed with his back to her. He turns around and we see that he is completely infected. He attacks her.
The noise wakes Henry and Joel, who are sleeping on the floor in the living room. As Sam and Ellie fall across the room, Sam on top of her and growling, Joel reaches for the gun but Henry grabs it first. Then, in an anguished and momentary decision, Henry shoots and kills his baby brother.
Joel seems genuinely affected and concerned for Ellie, perhaps for the first time openly? (He asked about her after the car accident, but it felt more…distressed?) He goes so far as to walk towards her but Henry stops him, panics and repeats “What the hell? that I did?” Joel tries to get the young man to hand him the gun, but Henry puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger, spraying blood everywhere. Ellie, dazed and still kneeling on the ground, begins to cry.
Joel buries Henry and Sam outside the motel. Ellie writes “I’m sorry” on Sam’s wiping board and leaves it on top of the dirt covering her body. Afterwards, she asks Joel which direction is west, and after he tells her, starts walking in that direction and motions for him to follow her.
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