And Melanie Lynskey has arrived.
She ejects a bullet, studies it.
When she returns to the lot, Joel is siphoning gas from the scattered cars.
Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey.Liane Hentscher/HBO
That’s a whole lot of pit stops.
As he siphons, Ellie giddily regales him with puns from an ancient joke book.
Joel acts annoyed, but he’s quietly amused.
Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal.Liane Hentscher/HBO
“Why are all these pages stuck together?”
she asks, making Joel squirm before revealing she’s notthatoblivious and chucking it through the window.
“What are they gonna do, rob us?”
Melanie Lynskey in ‘The Last of Us’.Liane Hentscher/HBO
He replies ominously, saying, “They got way more on their mind than that.”
After more puns, Joel tries to comfort Ellie.
“No one is gonna find us,” he says as she drifts to sleep.
But he’s more worried than he lets on.
When she wakes in the middle of the night, she sees he’s standing watch over them.
They set off the next morning, Ellie navigating with map in hand.
Joel says they’re heading for Cody, Wyo., where Tommy (Gabriel Luna) was last seen.
After Tommy met Marlene (Merle Dandridge), he joined the Fireflies.
Ellie is put off by his nihilism.
“If you don’t think there’s hope for the world, why bother going on?”
“I keep going for family, that’s about it,” he says.
When they drive by what seems to be the city’s QZ, it also looks abandoned.
“Where’s FEDRA?”
Suddenly, a man stumbles into the road, begging for help.
Joel instantly knows it’s a trap and hits the gas.
From above, a tossed cinder block shatters their windshield.
Road spikes tear up their tires and armed interlopers cross their path, guns pointed.
Joel loses control of the car, which crashes through the storefront of a laundromat.
Bullets ring against the side of the car as Joel and Ellie take cover.
She does so as Joel picks off the would-be thieves.
Ellie, hiding in the back room, pulls out her knife, but quickly puts it away.
She reaches for the gun.
Ellie sneaks up on the man choking Joel and shoots him in the back.
He’s young, a teenager not that much older than Ellie.
“We can trade with you guys.”
He even unsheathes his knife and offers it to Joel.
Unfortunately for him, Joel takes it, then tells Ellie to get back behind the wall.
They look like FEDRA vehicles, but they’re spray painted with phrases like “We the people.”
“They’re not FEDRA and not Fireflies, so who are they?”
“People,” Joel replies.
One of those people is Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey).
When we meet Kathleen, she’s interrogating a doctor in a makeshift cell.
One of them was her brother, who was beaten to death.
The man tries to reason with her.
He’s known Kathleen her whole life.
He was the doctor who delivered her when she was born.
It’s “gone too far,” he says.
(That doesn’t work, either; Kathleen shoots him just minutes later.)
Kathleen retreats outside, where a crowd gathers over the bodies of the men who ambushed Joel.
Her soldiers believe “outsiders” are responsible, but she’s convinced they were called in by Henry.
“Find every collaborator and kill them all.”
They’ll hide out there until the trucks disappear, then head to the tallest building in sight.
Once there, they can get a look at the whole city and plot their escape.
Joel feels awful about Ellie having to shoot Brian.
He takes responsibility and apologizes.
She tells him, “It wasn’t my first time.”
He’s struck, but doesn’t ask her to elaborate.
Instead, he gives the gun back to her, then shows her how to properly hold it.
When she tries to put it in her pocket, he tells her it’s safer in her bag.
“You’ll shoot your damn ass off,” he grumbles.
Moments later, he adopts a softer tone: “We’ll get through this.”
He leads her to the attic of an empty building.
There, empty cans of soup are scattered beneath childish drawings of superheroes.
We learn that Henry isn’t alone a boy, Sam, is with him.
“He’s close, I can feel it,” she says.
That’s not all Perry wants to show her.
He leads her to the basement of the same building.
In one room, there’s a concave impression in a patch of cracked concrete.
Furthermore, there seems to be something moving beneath it.
Kathleen is as scared as Perry, but tells him they’ll deal with it after they find Henry.
For now, she says, they’ll seal off the building.
As the sun sets, Joel and Ellie find their way to the tall building.
He and Tess and Tommy, they “did what we needed to survive.”
“Did you kill innocent people?”
she asks, the image of young, bloody, pleading Brian likely running through her head.
But Joel doesn’t answer, leaving her to ponder how deep his darkness goes.
They both have secrets.
“So it gets easier when you get older?”
“No, not really,” he says.
“But still.”
The episode ends when Ellie wakes Joel from his slumber.
They’re not alone in the room.
It’s Henry and Sam, who greets Joel with an ominous shush.
