Role Reversal, Joel Traversal: Breaking Down Episode 8 of ‘The Last of Us’ (2024)

In the eighth episode of The Last of Us, “When We Are in Need,” Ellie faces her greatest challenge since she left the Boston quarantine zone with Joel and Tess. After Joel was badly wounded at the end of the sixth installment, Ellie suddenly found herself all alone. She could have left Joel behind and returned to Jackson, but she chose the more difficult path, opting to stay with him in hopes that he would recover. For months, Ellie had been under Joel’s protection, even if he faltered at times. Now, as Joel is forced to rest in an abandoned house, their roles have switched—with Ellie becoming Joel’s protector and provider.

Over this season, we’ve seen how much every character’s past experiences shape who they become and the decisions they make, even—or perhaps especially—in dire situations. The loss of Joel’s daughter, which for a time turned him into a shell of his former self, has loomed over his relationship with Ellie and heightened its significance to him as they’ve grown closer. In Ellie’s case, last week’s departure from the present timeline into her past demonstrated how her best friend, Riley, taught her to fight until the bitter end for your own survival and the lives of those you love. Riley’s death only intensified Ellie’s fear of losing someone else, leading her to stay with Joel and jeopardize her greater purpose of helping the Fireflies develop a cure for the Cordyceps infection.

While Ellie is out hunting a deer early in this week’s episode, she comes across a couple of strangers: David (Scott Shepherd) and James (Troy Baker, who played Joel in The Last of Us video games). The pair are part of a group living at a nearby resort, and they were also hunting when they stumbled upon the deer Ellie had just shot. David is the group’s leader, and after a brief standoff with Ellie, he strikes a deal with her: In exchange for half of Ellie’s deer, James will go back to their camp and return with two bottles of penicillin. For Ellie, it seems to be a miraculous opportunity to help save Joel. But—as she soon finds out—there’s more to these strangers than it first appears.

Through David’s group at Silver Lake, we see how another community has managed to survive in the years since the Cordyceps outbreak. Starting in the season premiere, The Last of Us has depicted how different groups of people from across the country have adapted to this new broken world. In Boston, FEDRA represented the last remnants of the pre-outbreak U.S. government, and led via violence, strict regulations, and creating grunt work for civilians who received ration cards as payment. In Kansas City, Kathleen and her resistance group violently overthrew FEDRA and survived thereafter by preying on unsuspecting travelers such as Joel and Ellie. In Jackson, the community thrived by isolating itself and living as a commune, where power and resources are shared equally and decisions are made by an elected council. But even there, the residents gained a notorious reputation for leaving behind bodies of the Infected and the living alike in the process of protecting their own.

As for the dwellers at Silver Lake, we find the group in rough shape. Not only are they starving members of a “hunger club,” as Ellie refers to them, but they live in fearful subservience to David. A number of them fled the Pittsburgh quarantine zone after it fell in 2017 due to conflicts between the Fireflies and FEDRA, and they picked up new members as they eventually found their way to Colorado. Now, David feeds them with religion in order to maintain hope during challenging circ*mstances. And in the midst of a particularly harsh winter in which food has been scarce, they’re also being fed human remains—even though only a handful of them seem to be in on the secret. (I have to ask: What’s up with all the cannibalism content these days?)

As Ellie and David wait for James to return with the penicillin, David tells her about how his group wound up in Colorado, how he found God after the apocalypse, and why he believes that everything happens for a reason. As proof, he cites the recent murder of a member of the group at a nearby town by a “crazy man” who was traveling with a little girl. His eerie smile makes it clear that he believes he’s found that little girl. Once Ellie has the penicillin in hand, she flees to safety without trying to claim her share of the deer. (After seeing this guy’s creepy grin, it’s hard to blame her.)

But when David and James are back at their camp, David—after slapping a child with so much force that she flies off of the chair she was sitting in—announces that he and several others would pick up Ellie’s trail in the morning. It doesn’t take long for David and his acolytes to track down Ellie and Joel. Ellie does her best to lead them away from Joel, but she and her horse are quickly taken down. In the aftermath, David carries an unconscious Ellie back to camp while most of the group stays behind to search for Joel and bring him to justice for killing one of their own.

While Ellie is held in captivity back at the camp, David makes his interest in her abundantly clear, as he offers her the chance to stay with the group and lead it alongside him. It’s a pretty tough sell given the circ*mstances, especially after Ellie spots a severed ear that leads to her discovery of the group’s cannibalism. In a futile effort to win her over, he mentions how he found truth after the world ended—not in God, but in Cordyceps. “What does Cordyceps do?” he asks Ellie. “Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful, it multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.”

In a way, this logic feels like the thesis of The Last of Us, and it’s fitting that the line is delivered by the clearest-cut villain in the series so far. Not even the Infected—who razed the modern world as we know it—are truly evil; it’s always a matter of perspective.

In each of the aforementioned communities we’ve peered into during Joel and Ellie’s journey, we’ve witnessed the emotions and rationales that back the most desperate measures people have taken to survive or protect what’s theirs. It’s a noticeable strategy that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have employed in their adaptation of the video game, as they add a greater sense of depth and humanity to its non-playable characters and antagonistic factions by harnessing the show’s capacity to depict perspectives outside of Joel and Ellie’s limited purview. Mazin and Druckmann have spoken at length about this effort on HBO’s The Last of Us podcast, hosted by Troy Baker. As Mazin said during their conversation about FEDRA in last week’s episode: “One of the things that Neil and I talked about a lot throughout the development of the show was never painting one side or the other as purely bad or purely good.”

David gets closer to being “purely bad” than just about anyone else Joel and Ellie have met, but even he is doing his best to lead his people, as unsettling and twisted as he may be. The decision to turn to cannibalism didn’t come easily (or so he says), and in Ellie, David believes he’s found an equal who can help lead the group to salvation. What really prevents any opportunity to truly empathize with him—compared to Kathleen, another “villain”—is the lecherous intentions accompanying his offer. David wants to be more than just “friends” with the teenaged Ellie, and he’s shameless in how little he hides that.

While Ellie tries to escape, Joel is forced into action as David’s followers search for him. At this point in the series, Joel has exhibited his capacity for violence time and time again, and we’ve heard from a number of different characters about all the innocent lives he’s taken over the years. But he’s also shown mercy at times—even to the old man who attempted to snipe him, Ellie, Henry, and Sam in Kansas City near the end of the fifth episode. Here, Joel shows no mercy.

With Ellie missing, all of Joel’s previous panic-inducing fear of losing her is supplanted by unflinching rage as he confronts his latest failure to protect her. It doesn’t matter if David’s men are members of a community, or if they’re still fathers or sons to someone else somewhere; all Joel knows is that they’ve taken or hurt Ellie. And so he responds the only way he knows how: with violence. Admittedly, viewers may have to suspend some disbelief about how quickly Joel regains his strength after barely being able to keep his eyes open in earlier scenes—the guy pretty much turns into Wolverine. (Granted, Joel may or may not have fallen asleep while stabbing the first intruder in the neck, a high-key remarkable feat that deserves further inspection.) He kills all four of the men, despite his lingering injuries, brutally torturing one of them first in order to locate Ellie.

All of this portends further violence, as Ellie faces David in an epic showdown amid a burning dining room. When David has her pinned down, he appears to reach down toward his belt, suggesting an intention to sexually assault Ellie, despite the fact that the building is burning down around them. (This feels like a gratuitous narrative choice on the show’s part, especially given the showrunners’ stated principle of not painting anyone as “purely bad.”) But Ellie manages to grab the same cleaver she used to kill James moments before and kills David too, slashing him repeatedly while screaming in agony.

The scene is a rather shocking display of excessive violence, in which Ellie continues to hack into David’s body for what feels like an eternity—a horrific act to match his own horrific intentions. It recalls the moment at the end of the series premiere when Joel kept smashing the FEDRA agent’s head in, even after he was clearly dead, as Ellie looked on with some indeterminate combination of horror, excitement, and aspiration. As David told her earlier in the episode, she has a “violent heart” and, though that may have always been the case, her bloodlust has only grown as she’s traveled with and become more like Joel.

In David and his followers’ deaths, we see another community collapse due to the obsessiveness of a leader who lost sight of their larger responsibilities. Just as Kathleen doomed her Kansas City resistance group by neglecting the looming threat of the Infected that her lieutenant warned her of in favor of finding Henry and Sam, David’s bizarre obsession with Ellie—as well as his acolytes’ thirst for vengeance—has left the already-struggling Silver Lake group in shambles. The cost of revenge is high in The Last of Us, and the series continues to emphasize that takeaway. In a world where Infected hordes can rise out of the ground like swarming ants at any moment, it’s still human conflict and the endless cycle of violence in the pursuit of vengeance that keeps tearing communities apart.

When Ellie finally escapes the burning building, she’s reunited with Joel. He does his best to console her, holding her and calling her “baby girl” as she reels from this string of horrific events, still covered in blood. The endearing words sound slightly strange coming from the emotionally inarticulate Joel (particularly after David just tried to take advantage of Ellie), but it’s a seamless return of an old habit; the pet name is exactly what he used to call his own daughter, Sarah, as we saw in the premiere. It seems as if there’s now little distinction between the bond he had with Sarah and the one he’s forged with Ellie, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to prevent losing another daughter.

Through eight episodes of The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie have come as far psychologically as they have geographically. Their odyssey has taken them from Boston to Colorado and, based on the clues left by the Fireflies at the University of Eastern Colorado, they’re set to head farther West to Salt Lake City. They’ve encountered hordes of Infected, raiders, and even a few cannibals for good measure. They’ve watched friends die, and claimed the lives of many others along the way. Through it all, Joel and Ellie have broken down their emotional barriers to become like parent and child to each other. Yet even after another traumatic chapter for the 14-year-old Ellie, the journey to find the Fireflies isn’t over: The season finale, and any additional trials it may bring, approach next week.