This past weekend’s episode of The Last of Us saw our scrappy duo of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) caught in a dystopian warzone in what remains of Kansas City. While Joel managed to fight off the initial raider ambush, the bodies left in his wake alerted the rest of the people in control of the city that there’s a threat on the loose.
Led by a woman named Kathleen (played by Yellowjackets’ Melanie Lynskey), the raiders occupying Kansas City overthrew the government and dismantled the Kansas City QZ at some point before Joel and Ellie arrive. Upon finding out about the raiders that Joel killed, Kathleen immediately pegs the crime on a man named Henry, whom she has a personal vendetta against. Now Joel and Ellie are caught in the middle of this fight.
The episode ended with their paths crossing with Henry and his younger brother Sam. But who exactly are these new characters, and why is Kathleen so dead set on finding them?
Who is Henry in The Last of Us?
Let’s start with Henry. While he only appeared in the final scene of “Please Hold to My Hand,” Henry is a character fans of Naughty Dog’s video game have known to expect. He’s played by Lamar Johnson in the show, and his younger brother Sam is played by Keivonn Woodard.
In the game, Henry and Sam were part of another group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, which eventually gets attacked by the raiders who control the remnants of the Pittsburgh QZ. The raiders kill every other member of Henry and Sam’s group, but the two brothers manage to give them the slip long enough to eventually cross paths with Joel and Ellie. They have no other ties to the raiders beyond their hope to escape the city with their lives.
However, the HBO show has a slightly more intricate backstory for Henry and Sam, which we’ll likely learning more about in Episode 5. What we can glean from “Please Hold to My Hand” is that at some point, a revolutionary force overthrew FEDRA (the militarized remains of the United States government) in Kansas City, taking control of the quarantine zone there. We can’t say for certain whether Henry was a part of that force, but he’s known to them. Moreover, Kathleen believes he was at least partially responsible for the death of her brother, who was the leader of the raiders before he was killed.
Who is Sam in The Last of Us?
As for Sam, he’s Henry’s younger brother and traveling companion. Sam will be slightly different in the series than he is in the game, both because he’s younger (9 as opposed to 13), and because the TV version of the character is Deaf.
Showrunner Neil Druckmann spoke about this change to The Washington Post. “Some of the best storytelling sometimes in passive media in TV and film is scenes that don’t have any dialogue, and it is just about reading a person’s expression,” he said.
"One of the changes that we made for the TV show is we made Sam deaf. And it started from a place of just like talking with Craig [Mazin] and we’re like, ‘What if we could use less dialogue?’ That kind of constraint led to really interesting storytelling decisions that I would say in some ways make that sequence [with Sam and Henry] more impactful than it is in the game."
Who is Kathleen in The Last of Us?
That brings us to Kathleen, the leader of the raiders in Kansas City. Unlike Henry and Sam, Kathleen did not appear in The Last of Us video game and is a totally new character created for the show.
Kathleen was added to better develop the bad guys that Joel and Ellie would be forced to contend with in Kansas City. In the game, Joel and Ellie encounter henchmen who allude to a new leader, but we never actually meet this person. The raiders occupying the city come off as a relatively standard set of bad guys trying to get by in the ruins. The show tries to humanize them as revolutionaries who overthrew FEDRA’s oppressive quarantine zone. Kathleen’s brother was the leader of that revolution, and she stepped into a leadership position when he died.
We learn that Kathleen’s brother was killed by FEDRA; Kathleen believes that Henry leaked information that led to his death. When Joel turns up and starts killing raiders, Kathleen quickly spins the situation to make her followers believe that Henry was responsible.
No doubt we’ll learn more about Kathleen and Henry’s complicated relationship in the fifth episode of The Last of Us. The Last of Us Episode 5 premieres two days early, dropping this Friday on HBO Max. It will still air linearly on HBO proper this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. EST.
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h/t Digital Spy