‘The Last of Us’ Episode 4 Review: Strengthening Joel and Ellie’s Bond While World-Building
Jeremy Webb had a very tough job when directing the fourth episode of The Last of Us; not because the script was challenging, but because he had to follow up on last week’s extraordinary piece of television, an episode that will be remembered perhaps even longer than the series overall.
Craig Mazin, who wrote Please Hold to My Hand, laid out a vital episode for the entire series for him. The setup of the show is now behind us, and really for the first time, we can focus on the relationship between Joel and Ellie. More than anything else, this episode spends time building that out, from spending time together in the car or out in the woods, to having them face near-death scenarios that will make them trust one another even more.
Additionally, the fourth episode of the series focuses on exploring what the world looks like beyond the confines and surroundings of the quarantine zone where we first saw Pedro Pascal’s Joel after the 20-year time jump. FEDRA is not everywhere, and neither are the infected. In an interesting turn of events, we realize that we don’t have to be on the edge of our seats every time our characters turn the corner. This is not that story. The Last of Us focuses on exploring human dynamics on the edge of the apocalypse and the lengths we would go to latch on to the last bit of hope. It is a beautiful examination of what makes us humans and how that can help us build a better future. It removes all the complications of our time and puts us back into survival mode.
In that expansion of the world, we find out there are more Fireflies-like movements all across the country. In particular, we meet Melanie Lynskey’s Katherine, an original character created for the series to expand upon a group of characters that appeared in the game. These insurrectionists took over the quarantine zone of Kansas City from FEDRA, and soon show off just as much ruthlessness as the military organization.
Before going into more spoiler-filled details, I’ll simply add that the new episode of The Last of Us didn’t quite reach the heights the previous one did, but it definitely laid the groundwork for future episodes to have a large impact on the viewer by spending a lot of time building necessary bonds and exploring relationships and characters necessary for the series to work.
Spoilers ahead…
The truth is that there aren’t a lot of spoilers in the new episode. Firstly, I was surprised by how quickly the show paid off Ellie’s picking up the gun last week without Joel noticing it, but I liked how that was used for the two characters to bond even more. Joel refers to Ellie as “cargo”, but at this point, he definitely doesn’t think that anymore. We see in more than one instance in this episode that he’s protective of her, and not just because of what she could mean for the world, but because he starts to see her as a daughter.
As far as the people in Kansas City go, I definitely need to rewatch the episode to pick up a few things that I may have missed at first glance. I was slightly overwhelmed by all the new characters, trying to figure out their rankings and true intentions. “Just give it time”, must have said Craig Mazin, because he and Neil Druckmann are planning big things here. The third act of the episode teases that there is an evil force coming from below the ground, though there is clearly a backstory here we haven’t been told yet, and then the episode ends on a completely unrelated cliffhanger.
It is this show’s attention to detail that makes it stand out in the crowd and the reason why it will be relevant to pop culture for many years to come. And this doesn’t simply apply to the rebels in Kansas City, but to practically every scene, as almost every frame has some detail left there by ghosts from the past whose stories we’ll never hear — that helps make the world more expansive and lived-in.
The Last of Us will return for a fifth episode sooner than we thought. Trying to avoid the Super Bowl online traffic, HBO has decided to release the next episode this Friday, February 10. What that means for the viewership numbers, we don’t know yet. But we do know at this point that those are stronger than ever on the fourth episode, which accumulated 7.5 million viewers on Sunday night according to the network; it’s a 17% increase from last week.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
