Why Ellie’s terrible puns are important to The Last of Us

The latest episode of The Last of Us, “Please Hold My Hand,” gave Ellie (Bella Ramsey) a new weapon: a joke book called No Pun Intended Volume Too, full of puns so cheesy and stupid you will have no choice but to laugh. She gives us a bunch of puns in Episode 4 (I’d heard the one about diarrhea, by the way), and one of them even gets the grizzled Joel (Pedro Pascal) to crack a smile!

The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin talked about all this pun fun with SyFy Wire. “For me, as a fan [of the game], I was delighted the first time I experienced Ellie just suddenly pulling out her joke book, No Pun Intended Volume Too, and began reading them. And so of course, we had to do it,” he said.

"And what I loved was that over the course of this episode, it was like she kept getting Joel to come a little bit closer and a little bit closer to kind of laughing over these terrible jokes with her. And then at the very end, there’s that moment where she gets him. For the first time — we’ve seen three episodes, and the first one is really a long episode, so we’re over fours hours into this thing — Joel laughs. He smiles and he laughs again. The last time you saw that was when he was with Sarah (Nico Parker). And that laugh that Bella Ramsey has, that little squeaky laugh, I love so much. It just filled my heart. It was like, ‘There they are. It’s happened.’"

It’s those little moments that make you really like and root for Joel and Ellie as characters. Let nothing dead or undead tear them apart.

The Last of Us will look even more cinematic going forward

At the end of Episode 3, “Long Long Time,” Joel and Ellie got a car and finally fled Massachusetts, where they’d been struggling for the past three episodes. Episode 4 is set in Kansas City, so the road trip has officially begun.

In the game, Joel and Ellie are traveling the United States countryside, although much of the actual show was filmed in the Canadian province of Alberta. “It was the physical landscape of Alberta that was also so much of the visual experience of the show,” Pascal told SyFy Wire. “In the game, I imagine that there’s so much nature and surprising beauty to the end of civilization, and for nature to win in this way. To be able to use the physical locations of where we were for the whole year, and each of its seasons, was pretty amazing. It may have not been the most comfortable thing, but it was pretty unbelievable to be on this snow capped prairie. Once again, when it wasn’t a built set, we had the mountains, we had the real river, we had the real snow, like very little left to the imagination.”

Expect that visual splendor to only get better as the pair continues to travel. New episodes of The Last of Us drop Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max, although the fifth will be available to stream on HBO Max this Friday, on account of HBO not wanting to compete with the Super Bowl.

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