The Last of Us Episode 4 review: Joel and Ellie finally become a team

After a heart-wrenching apocalyptic love story in last week’s episode, The Last of Us returns. “Please Hold to My Hand” veers back into territory that should feel familiar to fans of the 2013 video game, as Joel and Ellie’s westward journey leads them through the perilous remnants of a fallen quarantine zone.

As always, there will be SPOILERS for this week’s episode of The Last of Us below.

The Last of Us Episode 4 review: “Please Hold to My Hand”

In many ways, “Please Hold to My Hand” is the opposite of last week’s episode, “Long Long Time.” While that one was a decades-long saga that focused on the new characters of Bill and Frank, Episode 4 clocks in at a lean 45 minutes and spends the vast majority of that time with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). It also contains a bit more action.

The result is a pretty wonderful compliment to the preceding episode, which should go a long way toward settling aside any concerns fans might have that the show is going to stray overmuch from the story of the original video game. Yes, it’s adding or cutting things when that better suits the television medium, but it’s also working in plenty of stuff from the source material.

The opening act of “Please Hold to My Hand” is all about Joel and Ellie finally starting to bond a little. We begin with Ellie getting a feel for her new gun (Frank’s gun, ugh), before hiding it away in her pack and then going out to bombard Joel with puns from her handy pun book. The pun book is a nice call back to The Last of Us: Left Behind game expansion, which shows where Ellie got the book, among other things. We expect to learn more about Ellie’s backstory later in the season.

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s chemistry and the tight scripting really sell this scene, as he begs her to stop and complains about how stupid the puns are while she takes masochistic glee in tossing one after another at him. It’s relatable, it’s cute, and dammit I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to these two.

This rolls straight into an iconic scene from the game that more than a few people were bummed not to see in last week’s episode, where Ellie finds one of Bill’s gay porn magazines and uses it to troll Joel, asking why the pages are sticky before laughing and tossing it out the window. To top it off, Joel and Ellie even play a Hank Williams tape with the song “Alone And Forsaken,” which features in this same exact scene in the game.

Generally, the next few scenes are all a joy after many of the show’s heavier moments. Joel and Ellie go camping, where they bond even more and he actually guesses one of her puns correctly, cracking the barest hint of a smile. The following morning Ellie complains about how gross coffee smells, while Joel noisily slurps his drink. Things get a little more serious for a moment when Ellie finally pries for a bit more information about Joel’s brother Tommy, and why he’s seemingly stranded out in Wyoming, but on the whole these scenes are heartwarming.

Something is wrong in Kansas City

Despite my fervent wishes that nothing bad ever happens to Joel and Ellie, things go south in pretty spectacular fashion. After coming to a blocked off section of highway, the pair detour into the ruins of Kansas City hoping to hop back on at the next exit. All doesn’t go according to plan, however, and they end up getting lost. The building sense of tension throughout this sequence is great; they drive by piles of charred bodies, getting more and more agitated as they realize that what should have been a quick detour is getting out of hand.

The tension breaks when Joel and Ellie discover that the Kansas City QZ is seemingly abandoned, just before they’re ambushed by a group of human raiders. The crash into the storefront, the firefight as Ellie hides in an adjacent building, and the brutal bit where one raider begs for his life are all pitch perfect. The show combines a few different scenes from this section of the game, like Ellie shooting a guy who’s trying to kill Joel as well as the initial truck crash into one edge-of-your-seat action set piece.

It’s a gripping moment has a ton of emotion behind it. As much as Ellie tries to act confident in front of the mirror with her gun at the beginning of the episode, she’s shocked after she shoots the raider. Ramsey and Pascal are excellent throughout the episode, and this scene is a particular standout. The choreography and camerawork also deserve a hearty nod for keeping things tight and focused and intense, taking care what to show us as well as what not to show, like Joel murdering the final raider with his knife. It’s refreshing to see a series be so intentional about when and how it depict violence.

Despite making it out of that initial ambush in one piece, the fact that Joel leaves three dead bodies behind alerts the rest of the raiders occupying the area to their presence, setting off a city-wide manhunt.

Never kill the doctor during a zombie apocalypse

The remainder of “Please Hold to My Hand” is split between Joel and Ellie sneaking through the city and the hunters who are out there searching with them. The show deviates a bit from the game by giving us an inside look at the hunter group and its leader, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey). This lets us get to know the group a bit better as well as sets up the eventual appearance of brothers Sam (Keivonn Woodard) and Henry (Lamar Johnson), who Kathleen has a personal vendetta against.

There are a lot of things I enjoyed about the hunter scenes; Lynskey does a good job in the role, and the appearance of Jeffrey Pierce (who voiced Joel’s brother Tommy in the video game) as her right hand man Perry was a welcome nod to the game. There were moments where things felt a tiny bit forced, like Kathleen asking if having a doctor would help save the very-clearly-dead raiders so she would then have an excuse to then go kill the doctor she had been interrogating earlier in an attempt to locate Henry. The idea that the hunters are out for Henry in general is a little weird; the show plays it off like it’s a personal grudge Kathleen has because Henry got her brother killed by FEDRA, but how did she sell the idea that he’s a threat to the rest of the hunters?

Meanwhile, Joel and Ellie continue to grow closer with a couple of great scenes where they talk about how Ellie is coping with having shot someone. Both come close to revealing important bits of their backstories to each other. Ellie claims this isn’t the first time she’s hurt someone in that way. Joel, we come to find, has been on both sides of raider ambushes and killed innocents at some point in his past. They’re great little details that add a lot.

But the best scene by far is the final moment when the pair hunker down and Ellie drops one last pun about diarrhea. After their hellish day, the joke is dumb enough that it finally gets Joel to crack up. The Last of Us may have lots of gritty, intense scenes, but it’s the little human ones that truly make it special.

The episode ends with us getting our first look at Henry and Sam, as they wake Ellie and Joel up at gunpoint while motioning for them to stay quiet. Perhaps clickers are afoot? We’ll find out next week!

The Last of Bullet Points

• There are a few callbacks to Bill and Frank in this episode, just in case you weren’t emotionally devastated enough. Ellie has Frank’s gun, for one. When she says that her sleeping bag smells good, Joel says it must be Frank’s. And Bill’s supplies like Chef Boyardee and coffee come in handy. Bill and Frank may be gone, but their shadows loomed over this episode.
• Joel and Ellie drove by a herd of wild bison! I love how this story depicts cordyceps as not a world-ending plague, but one that specifically effects humans while leaving the rest of nature more or less intact. That means endangered bison have an easier time of it.
• A lot of Ellie’s puns are from the Left Behind expansion. This includes the diarrhea one, which also gets her friend Riley to crack up in the game.
• In the game, the encounter with the raiders happens in Pittsburgh, not Kansas City.
• Something I think both the game and the HBO series do well is showing how the “villains” are mainly people just trying to survive. They can be awful and scary, but also vulnerable and scared.
• Kathleen and Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) find a place in the basement of one building where the floor seems to be heaving. I’m guessing this is hinting at infected being under there; surely that will go well.

Verdict

“Please Hold to My Hand” was another very solid episode of The Last of Us. It focused on the leads and delivered some feel-good moments mixed with intense action and gravitas. It’s clearly part one of a two-part arc, and left me very excited for next week’s episode. The show’s hot streak continues.

Episode grade: A-

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels