Following last week’s instant classic episode is no small feat, but The Last of Us is up to the task in “Please Hold My Hand.” This week Joel and Ellie continue their trek through middle America, but run into several complications. Ellie faces trouble while trying to get Joel to open up.
Lock and Load | Ellie (Bella Ramsey) practices shooting the gun that she stole while in a truck stop bathroom, while Joel (Pedro Pascal) siphons gas from the abandoned cars nearby to refuel their truck. Ellie emerges with a book of puns that she reads to Joel, which he isn’t thrilled about. As they drive down the empty freeway, Ellie finds a Hank Williams tape, as well as a pornographic magazine- her first comment? “I want to see what all the fuss is about!” After driving for quite a while, Joel pulls over into the woods and they set up camp eating 20 year old Chef Boyardee.
The Long Way Around | After going to sleep in sleeping bags, with Joel watching the woods with a gun all night, they pack up and keep driving. As they do, Ellie inquires about Joel’s brother Tommy and he says that Tommy was convinced to join the Firefly gang by Marlene, but quit some time ago. Several miles later, they run into a roadblock near Kansas City and have to take an alternate route through an abandoned QZ. They then see someone begging for help, but Joel immediately recognizes that it’s a trap, as people start throwing bricks at their truck and they drive over a trap that flattens their tires.
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The truck crashes into a building and Joel shoots down some of the attackers as Ellie hides. One of them gets the upper hand on Joel, so Ellie pulls out the gun that she stole and shoots the man attacking Joel. The bullet paralyzes him and he begs them to spare him, but Joel orders Ellie to look away as he kills him.
The Bad People | In a building, a woman named Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) is interrogating a doctor in a cell about the whereabouts of someone named Henry. When he insists that he doesn’t know anything, Kathleen puts a gun to his head, but is interrupted by someone showing her the bodies of the men Joel killed. After seeing them, Kathleen returns to the cell and unceremoniously shoots the doctor before ordering legions of men to raid the city.
Joel and Ellie are hiding in a bar and Joel tries to comfort Ellie about her having shot the man, but she just says that it wasn’t her first time killing. He then teaches her how to properly hold the gun and lets her keep it. As Kathleen’s men are searching the city, one of her soldiers shows her a basement with something moving beneath the collapsed floor. Kathleen, however, doesn’t tell anyone else about it.
Joel and Ellie make their way up thirty floors of a building and decide to sleep in a locked room. Before they go to sleep, Joel asks Ellie who else she’s killed, but Ellie won’t answer. They drift off the sleep, but when Joel wakes up, two young men are pointing guns at them.
The Last of Us airs Sundays on HBO.
