Well the cryfest that was last week was fun. Check it out before reading The Last of Us S01E04 Please Hold My Hand recap.
Ellie is playing with a gun, so this episode can’t end well. She loads and unloads and even pulls the trigger. She seems a little possessed. But I think if fungus people were taking over the world, maybe you would be too. Joel drains gas from nearby cars while explaining that gasoline is less efficient because it decomposes into water. It’s a long process and Ellie is going to read him jokes as he does it. She’s much better off than he is.
Back on the road, Joel tells her about the truck they are driving. She finds a tape of Hank Williams. She also finds a playgirl. After all, it’s Frank’s truck. The road trip has started as they pass amusement parks and highways that are completely deserted. All signs of the disintegration of civilization. In the end, Joel decides to pull the truck into the woods and spend the night. He cooks them chef boyardee. Joel talks about how horrible the people from the QZs are. They lay down in sleeping bags and fell asleep for the night. Ellie stays up to read her joke book. Ellie and Joel share a moment about a prank he knew the punchline to. Scarecrows stand in a field. She is afraid of the humans and Joel reassures her. Joel keeps watch in secret.
Ellie wakes up with fresh coffee in the pot. It seems good to me. She plots the route to Wyoming on the map. She wants to know Tommy’s name. She wants to know his story and Joel gives her his whole story. Tommy introduced Tess and Joel after they went to Boston with a group of survivors. Tommy then joined the Fireflies. He’s a bit of a wild canon, so Joel goes to Casper to help him out of trouble.
Later, a traffic jam arises because the truck cannot pass a scissors trailer. Joel tells her to stay in the car. He grabs his gun and peers through the clogged tunnel. On the other hand, it is clear. We also learn that we are in Kansas City. Sweet! Have a barbecue. They go off the main road into town. Yuck. They get lost. Ellie thinks she sees the QZ, but just then a grubby-looking dude asks them to stop and the trucks are ambushed with concrete blocks and tire strips before driving into a store’s front window. As they are fired upon, Joel tells Ellie to hide in a hole in the wall. Joel kills the two who shot at him. Joel’s gun jams and the third thug pins him to the ground and Ellie shoots him. He begs for his life. Joel puts him out of his misery. They begin to explore the space around them. Ellie grabbed her backpack. It has some food and a flashlight. Leaving the building, they see a group of people with armored trucks pull up in the building they just went to.
Kathleen is a new character who looks like a mother and sounds like a leading warlord. She interrogates someone who through the conversation appears to be someone who is in league with a fascist government. Kathleen’s brother turns out to be a victim of the government and the doctor she is now questioning. Fedra turns out to be the boogeyman of this group. Henry is the leader of Fedra and she leads a vengeance against them. She summons the heads of all employees. There are many people who are team Kathleen and the group she leads seems significant.
Joel and Ellie try to figure out if they aren’t Fedra or the Fireflies who they are. Joel tells her they are just desperate people. They devise a plan to move to a high-rise apartment building down the street. He’s got a lot of guilt because Ellie shot that guy. He tells her it’s his fault and apologizes. She admits it wasn’t her first time. He gives her back her gun and shows her how to hold it properly. He tells her to put it in her backpack. They prepare to leave the shop they have been hiding in.
Kathleen waits to hear about the associates who killed her men (it was actually Ellie and Joel). Her second-in-command leads her to the attic of a building. In the attic they find drawings and canned food. Someone lived there. Something is bothering Perry as he now leads her to the basement. Something moves under the cement, causing it to liquefy. I mean that’s not good. He asks her what they are going to tell the others. She tells him to lock up the building and not tell anyone. They have to stay focused
Ellie and Joel break into another building. There they will spend the night. They go very high into the building. They start climbing all the stairs. They talk more about his time with Tess and the group they were with. He quietly admits that they killed innocent people when they were all together. Once they sleep in an apartment, Joel puts broken glass down to warn him of footsteps. As they fall asleep, Joel asks Ellie how she hurt someone for the first time. She doesn’t want to talk about it. But Joel reiterates that it’s not fair for someone so young to go through that. She mentions that she can see that Joel is not hearing well from his right side. They laugh at a joke about diarrhea. Run in your jeans. Joel wakes up with two kids at gunpoint.
Tyler has been Signal Horizon’s editor-in-chief since its conception. He is also the director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University, a class that combines horror film criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he’s not watching, teaching, or thinking about horror, he’s the director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.
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