Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) hide out after an ambush in Kansas City. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Last week, Joel and Ellie hit another literal dead end when they reached Bill and Frank’s house. Joel was supposed to drop off Ellie with them and be done. Instead, they found a note from Bull explaining that he and Frank had ended their lives days earlier. Bill left everything he had to Joel, so he and Ellie set off in Bill’s pickup truck with weapons and supplies. Ellie also found Chekov’s gun in a drawer and stashed it in her backpack. This is not only Ellie’s first road-trip, it’s her first time in a car.
A few important things happen before they get to the clusterf@!#k in Kansas City.
1.) Ellie is hopeful and excited about the future. Joel is decidedly…not. She asks him why he goes on without hope for humanity and he tells her he goes on for family. Tess was like family and she wanted him to get Ellie out west, so he’s doing it. He’s quick to tell Ellie she’s only the “cargo.” Yeah, sure. Ellie is unfazed and unconvinced.
2.) Joel shows Ellie how to syphon gas though he’s unable to explain how it works. “You don’t know” she tells him with an amused ‘gotcha.’
3.) Ellie finds a book of puns with at least equal excitement as when she found the gun last week. She chips away at him with the puns throughout the episode.
4.) They camp out in the woods for the night sans campfire. Joel knows very dangerous people lurk about in areas too remote for the infected and they’ll “do much worse than rob you.” He then assures he no one will find them. There are terrible monsters but don’t worry! Yeah, yeah, people of worse than the infected (I’m still more freaked out by the infected.)
5.) In the morning Joel does light a campfire…to brew some of Bill’s coffee and we get our biggest revelation yet. There are still Starbucks locations twenty years into the apocalypse.
Next stop, Kansas City, “the heart of America.” Welcome back, paper maps. They decide to drive through Kansas City on their way west, which seems like a bad idea. There’s a QZ zone there and aren’t people not supposed to come and go through those? Also lots of place from which people and the infected could pop out. Whatever, it’s not like a terrifying Melanie Lynksy will be there.
They find their way blocked by abandoned, wrecked cars people definitely got attacked in, Ah, it’s the little things, like the empty stretcher half out of the open ambulance doors. The Sara Lee truck jammed across the entrance. Rather than take the long way around the city, Joel decides to drive through. Isn’t FEDRA there? Don’t we want to avoid the new world order jackboots?
They back up and find another exit into the city. Things go wrong quickly. The QZ zone gates are wide open. The streets look deserted. Then a man who’s not a very convincing decoy pretends to be injured and pops out in front of the car and begs for help. Joel knows it’s an ambush because he later tells Ellie “I’ve been on both sides of them before.” Too bad he never encountered a dddddddd because the tires get blown out and they have no choice but to crash through a store window.
Multiple assailants shoot at Joel and tell him to surrender and “he’ll make it through this.” He makes Elli crawl to a hole in the wall and hide. It gets quiet, then a man sneaks up on Joel’s left side. Ellie has noticed Joel has trouble hearing from his left ear. The man viciously attacks joel and pins him to the ground with his rifle.The guy talks serious smack while choking him and telling him he’s going to murder him so hard.
Ellie hears all this and gets her gun and sneaks up behind the very loud and destructive attacker and shoots him in the back, paralyzing him and saving Joel in the process. Bro does a one eighty and begs for his life and his mom. Joel knows they can’t let him live, although I feel like he could have just knocked him out. Of course, how do you know how hard to hit someone out and not kill them? It always seems trivial onscreen. They escape through the building and find their way to another where they can hide.
Meanwhile in French revolution land, we meet mid-western Madame DeFarge, but scarier. Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) holds an elderly doctor Edelstein () in a former FEDRA jail and questions him about all the FEDRA collaborators they can’t find and roundup. I’m guessing doctor Edelstein has never won poker night or covered up who is middle school crush was because when she gets to someone on her hit list named “Henry”, he couldn’t have telegraphed that he knows with great specificity where Henry is. Dr. Edelstein had been a FEDRA collaborator but insists they had a gun to his head. Kathleen puts a gun to his head and he still refuses, telling Melanie the violence has gone too far. She makes a fair point that it didn’t seem too far when he collaborated with FEDRA and her brother ended up beaten to death in the same jail. He tells her he never told FEDRA anything about her brother, but she counters that Sam did.
One of her foot soldiers interrupts her interrogation. The out-of-owners have shot Brian. She asks if a doctor could save him and it’s an emphatic no situation. He mind circles back directly to Sam and wonders if he brought them into town. Of course they don’t mention they were trying to kill Joel unprovoked. She orders a massive search to avenge Brian but really mostly for her brother. I’ve read comments that Brian may be her son, but I think she’d have a bigger reaction and mention him by name ever again. Now that she knows a doctor can’t save Brian she goes back and shoots Edelstein without hesitation. America still runs on Dunkin’s Starbucks but Kathleen runs on vengeance, because, like, he could probably save a lot of other people in the future.
Joel and Ella climb up a lot of stairs in their new hideout and then settle down for the night. Joel scatters broken glass on the floor she he’ll hear if someone sneaks up on them. Ellie knows he might not given his hearing loss. She gives him one last pun and he finally laughs. Later, Ellie wakes up Joel, who definitely didn’t hear Henry and Sam sneak up on them. Henry points a gun at them. Sam is a little boy with a superhero mask painted on his face, Sam is a very young man. Neither seems like the most wanted poster type, so I’m assuming whatever Henry did involved protecting Sam. Almost every major relationship in the show is a mirror of Joel and his biological daughter’s, and now Ellie’s, relationship.
Scariest moment
Imagining Kathleen ever being mad at you.
Cutest moment
Joel finally laughs a one of Ellie’s puns.
Most shocking revelation
Starbucks still exists.
All of Ellie’s puns, rated
1.) No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll always be stationary.
2.) Why did the scarecrow get an award? He was out standing in his field.
3.) I stayed up all night wondering where the sun went. Then it dawned on me
4.) Diarrhea is hereditary. It runs in your jeans.
5.) What did the mermaid wear to math class? An aglae-bra.
Final thoughts
There’s not one infected in this episode. I miss my buddies.
The Last of Us producers missed an opportunity not releasing the No Pun Intended books IRL.
