The following story contains spoilers for The Last of Us Episode 8.
As we enter the final stretch of The Last of Us Season 1, one thing has become clear that maybe was not clear from the start: this is a road story. And it’s not just any road story, but a road story that helps give our main characters the clarity they may not even realize that they’ve been looking for from the very start—that they’ve made the right decisions.
Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have made their way across the country, finding groups who have overthrown FEDRA, a pair of doomed loving siblings, and even Joel’s own loving sibling. And with every step of the journey, it’s become more and more clear that in finding each other—or, let’s be real: being forced into each other’s life—was the best possible thing. Ellie never had a father figure, or any sort of adult in her life, who she could really love and trust. And, obviously, like the repaired watch he had gifted to him on his 36th birthday, Joel has been stuck in time for 20 years. Until now, when the two of them have been through so much that they’re willing to do anything to save the other.
The two have also made each other better in ways that are just abundantly clear when seeing them interact with other people. Consider Ellie’s meeting with David (guest star Scott Shepherd) in Episode 7, titled “When We Are In Need.” What David is saying to her initially feels reasonable enough, but she has learned from her time with Joel, essentially, to trust no one. And so she remains skeptical, despite David’s offer of trade (for Penicillin, which ultimately helps save Joel’s life) and a society.
And that skepticism is right! Because David turns out to be an absolute sicko. A sicko! This episode has proven something that has been hinted at but not yet shown in Season 1 in such complete clarity: the end of the world has turned some people, like Joel, into emotionally shut off brutes. It’s turned some people, like Marlene, into morally-questionable revolutionary leaders. It’s turned some people, like Kathleen, into power-hungry, vengeance-filled brutes. But there are some people that it’s just turned into absolute maniacs. And that gives Joel and Ellie even more reason to be happy that they found each other when they did.
This week, we’re going to talk about the episode not in terms of overarching plot points, but rather how each significant character in the Episode 8 story figures into things.
David
Let’s start our discussion of “When We Are In Need” with David. We get a pretty decent indicator that something is off with David at the back end of his introduction scene, when he tells a young girl that their community can’t bury her deceased father until the spring due to the cold weather. It’s sketchy and our eyebrows are raised, but we don’t realize until later just how sketchy it is.
Well, to cut to the chase, this all fits in. “Everything happens for a reason” is a familiar refrain in the episode, and it turns out that this young girl’s father was actually killed at some point by Joel (they realize it’s him because they knew that it was a man who was traveling with a young girl). But what we don’t realize is that the reason David is making excuses not to bury the girl’s father is, in fact, because there is no father to bury. He tells his henchman, James (Troy Baker, who voiced Joel in The Last of Us video game), that they’ve got a shortage of Venison and Rabbit. It turns out, with that shortage, they’ve been feeding human body meat to the community. David is a cannibal.
And, as the episode goes on, it turns out that David is not just a cannibal, but rather a former-teacher-turned-preacher, woman-beating, child-beating, pedophile, rapist, cannibal. Aside from that, he seems like a swell guy. Kidding, of course. But in a show filled with characters filled with differing shades of gray, it can be nice to once in a while have someone we can just use every fiber of our being to hate. It makes for compelling TV.
David is a charismatic leader who uses the appeal to faith to get people to do what he wants them to do. We don’t live in a post-apocalyptic society, but people like Charles Manson and Jim Jones exist. There’s a level of reality to David that’s perhaps even scarier than the cannibal aspect of things.
There’s some back and forth throughout the episode, from Ellie holding David hostage to Ellie holding David hostage and back again. But by the end of the day, Ellie is, of course, the one who comes out on top—only after this sicko made an appeal to be with her romantically and then tried to force himself on top of her as his kingdom literally burned down around him.
By the end of the episode, Ellie butchering David into bits—like the people he chopped up and ate—as his blood splattered on the camera was one of the most brutally cathartic moments of Season 1.
Ellie
With Joel still largely incapacitated—he’s struggling to recover from his stab wound—Ellie largely takes on the role of both ‘lead’ and ‘hero’ in this episode. Hunting for food—she shoots a deer, which runs off before dying of blood loss—is how she finds David, James, and their band of sickos. And, while it puts her in danger and in the crosshairs of a dangerous and depraved community, it also gets her the medicine she needs to save Joel’s life.
Ellie is badass as hell in this episode, and Bella Ramsey does a great job of portraying her in a way where, by all measures, we should be afraid for a teenage girl in this kind of spot. But she’s tough. We’ve seen her be tough. Last week we saw an intercut episode where she lost her best friend/first love, while simultaneously saving her new best friend/first father figure. Some cannibalistic sickos aren’t going to slow her down.
Joel
Joel is largely a supporting player this week, spending much of the episode simply shivering, barely conscious, and getting penicillin injected into his unsavory stab wound.
But when he needs to, Joel makes a miraculous recovery; Ellie becomes aware that David and his sickos are coming after Joel, and tells him this. People are coming. Joel forces himself to get up, and for much of the rest of the episode is in superhero mode, fighting guys off and taking no prisoners.
Seriously on that taking no prisoners part—at one point, Joel manages to tie two of David’s men up, forcing one to tell him where “Silver Lake,” their resort-turned-settlement, is on a map, before brutally killing him. He then kills his friend too. This is the kind of brutal, take-no-prisoners Joel that we’ve heard about from others throughout The Last of Us, but haven’t seen in a while. But this guy is still a badass capable of some serious violence if you piss him off.
The episode ends with one of the most rewarding, affectionate, and touching moments of the show so far. Joel finds Ellie, emerging from the burning wreckage of her violent final confrontation with David, covered in his blood. She’s clearly shell-shocked from the violence and the threat that just happened upon her; she fights Joel off until she realizes it’s him.
The two embrace, so, so happy to be both safe and with each other. Joel tells Ellie it’s him, and he’s here for her, and calls her “baby girl.” Pascal and Ramsey have been outstanding all season long—and this moment may be the best yet. Next week is The Last of Us’ Season 1 finale, and we don’t know what we’re going to do when it’s over.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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