‘The Last of Us’ Chapter 4 Analysis: ‘Please Don’t Let Go of My Hand’

SPOILERS WARNING!

*This article contains spoilers for Chapter 4 of “The Last of Us”.

After our hearts are taken and drained in its third episode, “The Last of Us” continues its journey with “Please Don’t Let Go of My Hand,” the first of two episodes directed by Jeremy Webb (“The Umbrella Academy’, ‘Masters of Sex’, among others). In this episode we will see how Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) really get to know each other. They will have time. Ahead of them are many kilometers of highway in search of Tommy (Gabriel Luna).

The episode opens with Ellie in a gas station bathroom, admiring the gun she took from Bill and Frank’s house (and hasn’t yet shown Joel). You can see that she knows how to handle it perfectly, her past continues to be a carrot to chase throughout the series. Her pimp is pumping gas from abandoned cars around as she recalls how they could go almost anywhere with a full tank. “Where did you go?”Ellie asks. “Actually, Nowhere”. Your curiosity knows no bounds. The girl opens her backpack and takes out a book that video game fans will easily recognize. Your joke book! Bad jokes get on Joel’s nerves. And it won’t be Bella Ramsey’s fault, who releases them with perfect timing.

Back in the car, Ellie finds a tape of Hank Williams, So We Won’t Cry Our Hearts Again with Linda Ronstadt, and she also sees another nod to the video game: Bill’s gay porn magazine. This is the biggest nod to the character’s sexuality we’ve had in the video game, and the HBO Max series takes the opportunity to play the scene practically sentence for sentence. After throwing it out the window, “The Last of Us” is recreated in abandoned but inexplicably beautiful settings, such as an amusement park. As night falls, Joel turns off the road and they go into the woods to sleep. Joel plays her father asking her to slow down her meal. He refuses to light a bonfire not because of the infected, but because of potential looters. He clearly fears them far more than zombies, and he manages to instill some of that fear of her into her girlfriend, though later he tries to reassure her. Joel doesn’t go to sleep, but keeps watch.

Already in the morning, a strange smell wakes up Ellie. She’s clearly not a fan of coffee, but for her, Joel is a privilege that puts into perspective the little things we take for granted every day. Once on the road, the young woman asks Joel what happened to her brother Tommy. She explains that Tommy has always felt the need to join the band of heroes, first the Army, before the Cordyceps outbreak, and once in Boston the Fireflies. It was Tommy who had the idea to go from Texas to Boston, and on that road they met Tess. Tommy ended up leaving the Fireflies and skipping town. Ellie talks to her about her motivations for continuing in such a world and Joel reminds her that he has known nothing else. Despite the fact that the girl is catching up with him, he still considers her “goods”, and if he goes on it’s because he made a promise to Tess (Anna Torv). She refuses to let Ellie enter her heart again. It won’t be Sarah, but she doesn’t want to expose herself to that possibility either.

When they reach Kansas City, the tunnel to continue their journey is blocked. They are forced to go into town, which Joel is not amused at all. Lost along the way, because Ellie keeps reminding her that this is her first time in a car (let alone reading a map), they pass the door to the quarantine area. It is open and there is no sign of Phaedra. A man appears out of nowhere asking for help, but Joel is rightly wary. They are ambushed and end up with their car stuck in a laundromat, just like in the video game. While urging Ellie to hide in a hole in the wall, Joel neutralizes all enemies (we miss the controller at times like this). Just when it seems like it’s all over, a cute little boy takes Joel by surprise and starts strangling him. Ellie sees him and draws her knife, but then has second thoughts, draws her gun and shoots the young man, but not fatally. Joel is puzzled, then angry (probably more at him than at her), and finally tells her to go back to the hole in the wall. His enemy, who is practically a teenager, begs for mercy and offers him a truce, but Joel kills him. When they flee the place, leaving Bill’s truck abandoned, they come across several cars with armed people.

“We, the People”

Soon after we meet Kathleen, a character created for the series and played by Melanie Lynskey, an expert at looking like a lovely woman and having a dark face that makes your hair stand on end. When we first see her, she is interrogating a man in a cell in an abandoned Phaedra facility. You’re asking for a certain Henry, a name that may sound familiar to anyone who’s played ‘The Last of Us’. Later in the conversation we understand that the man being questioned was a doctor (“I gave birth to you!”) and that he was an informer, selling many of his neighbors to FEDRA in exchange for protection. Henry was also a spy, and Kathleen is looking for him because she turned in her brother, who ended up dead in such a cell. Revenge, what a common feeling in the universe of this video game … When Kathleen is warned of the ambush and the boy Joel killed is brought inside her, she has no doubts that she is working with Henry. She begins a massive search of the surrounding area to find them, but she is so blind with rage that she returns to the cell and shoots the doctor dead. She may look like a “football mom”, but she’s capable of doing whatever it takes to achieve her goal, maybe that’s why she’s the leader of Kansas City. On one of her trucks we see the slogan “We the People (We, the people)”. In Kansas City, civilians opposed FEDRA’s military rule and won. But, as Kathleen demonstrates, it wasn’t a change for the better..

Joel and Ellie hide out in a bar and use the moment to have another deep conversation about the first time Ellie fired a gun. “It’s Not the First Time” Ellie admits, and Joel is sorry that someone so young had to go through this, and apologizes. He also teaches him how to use the weapon well because he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of Phaedra’s military academy teaching methods. Gradually, Pascal’s character shows more trust in the girl. Deep down he knows that if it weren’t for her, he’d be dead by now.

Meanwhile, Kathleen and Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) find an attic filled with a child’s drawings and a pile of empty food cans. Kathleen knows Henry has been there and she feels a little victory when she sees they are out of food: “He won’t let Sam starve”. They investigate the building and go down to the basement. There they see a huge hole and fear the worst. His suspicions are confirmed when that hole seems to start moving. A possible nest of infected underground? Kathleen orders them to ignore the matter and not tell anyone until they find Henry. Perry disagrees, but resigns.

Joel and Ellie sneak into a skyscraper with the intention of climbing to the top floors and finding a way out of the city. But Joel weighs 56 years. They go as far as they can and since it’s dark they decide to rest in an apartment where they sneak in. Joel fills the floor with crystals that act as an alarm if someone enters while sleeping. Ellie asks Joel why she knew the man calling for help was an ambush, and he tells her he’s been on both sides. “Did you kill someone innocent?”. Pedro Pascal’s gaze says it all. Joel then asks Ellie about the first time she ever hurt someone with a gun, but Ellie tells him something Joel has told her many times: “I don’t want to talk about this”. She changes the subject and asks Joel if his right side feels worse because he was shot (in fact, we saw it in the prologue), but he blurts out that it was probably because of the shooting that much, and suggests that he use more his razor instead of the gun if you want to keep your hearing. Ellie decides, before going to sleep, to lower the tension a little with one last joke, which finally makes Joel laugh.

The good mood won’t last long. Joel wakes up to hear Ellie’s screams. At one point in the night he turned over and slept on his good ear. The girl is on her knees, with a gun to her head. That gun is being held by a boy older than her. But Joel is also in danger. A boy with a mask painted over his eyes turns a gun on him and orders him to shut up. Since the next chapter is also directed by Jeremy Webb, it seems that we will be talking about two parts of a story arc in this journey. If they manage to escape their captors, they still have to find a way out of Kansas City alive while avoiding Kathleen and her men. But before we see what happens, conclusions.

This episode can give the impression that it hasn’t had such a transcendent development as the third (a peak that will mark the rest of the season), and that not as many things happen as in the second. However, It’s an important episode because it gives Joel and Ellie a chance to have meaningful conversations that help them bond., to generate ever-increasing trust, which is much needed in a world that, as we see in this chapter, is much more filled with people who want to put a bullet in our temples rather than reach out to help us. Ellie has proven to Joel that she can protect him as much as he can protect her, and that a young woman in this world is nothing like a young woman like her daughter. And Joel is slowly dropping the walls, even though he’s based on bad jokes. He knows that there is a lot at stake to let in someone who reminds her so much of her daughter, but everyday loneliness weighs much more.

The fifth episode of ‘The Last of Us’ will premiere on HBO Max Saturday 11 February.