The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is here, and it was a big one. Over the course of an hour, viewers got to know new characters Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), only to say goodbye to them at the eleventh hour. “Endure and Survive” was an important episode in terms of how the show adapts the 2013 video game on which it’s based. We’ve got a lot to talk about.
There will be SPOILERS below for the latest episode of The Last of Us, as well as for Naughty Dog’s video game.
How did The Last of Us change Henry and Sam from the game?
As with the episode preceding it, “Endure and Survive” is an incredibly faithful recreation of Naughty Dog’s beloved video game. It also expands several sections and characters, changing plenty while still keeping the spirit of the story and some of its biggest moments intact.
Many of those changes involve Sam, Henry, and the story of how the Kansas City Quarantine Zone fell to Kathleen’s resistance fighters. Speaking broadly, while Joel and Ellie do meet Henry and Sam in the game and a lot of the things they do together are more or less the same, everything about Henry’s relationship with the resistance, including how he ran afoul of them, is invented for TV.
In the game, Henry and Sam are far more hardened survivors. In that version, the brothers are part of a larger group who are ambushed by raiders known as “hunters” while passing through Pittsburgh (changed to Kansas City, Missouri in the show). Sam and Henry are the only ones who survive, and eventually run into Joel and Ellie while trying to escape the city. In the show, Henry tells us he’s never killed anyone. In the game he’s killed plenty of people; he resembles Joel in both attitude and skillset, whereas on TV they’re quite different from each other.
In the game, Henry scolds Sam for taking a Transformers-style toy from an abandoned store, saying that they only take what they need. Contrast that with how Henry tries to distract Sam in the show with crayons. In this version, the brothers have lived in Kansas City for years and aren’t seasoned veterans of the wastelands.
Was Sam deaf in The Last of Us game?
As with Henry, HBO changes some key things about Sam. The biggest change to Sam’s character is that he’s Deaf (capitalized because he was born with a hearing disability, as opposed to developing one later in life), as is the actor who portrays him, Keivonn Woodard. Sam was not Deaf in the game. He was also a little older — 13, as opposed to 8 years old in the TV show. Finally, on the TV show Sam suffered from leukemia, which is what led to Henry double-crossing the resistance to get meds from FEDRA. In the game, we don’t hear about him dealing with health problems.
Showrunner and The Last of Us game creator Neil Druckmann explained to The Washington Post why he and co-showrunner Craig Maizin made some of these changes. “One of the changes that we made for the TV show is we made Sam deaf,” he said. “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.”
However his character was changed, Sam still has many of the same interactions with Ellie on the show that he does in the game. They still bond over Savage Starlight comics, still play soccer, and still laugh together. Because Ellie doesn’t know ASL, Sam resorts to using a magic slate paper saver in the TV show to write out messages. This makes the minutia of their interactions slightly different, but the spirit and even some of the dialogue is quite faithful to the video game.
A three-way battle on the outskirts of Kansas City
That brings us to the big climax of the episode, where hunters, infected, and our heroes all clash in a chaotic showdown at the edge of the city. Many of the specifics in this scene are informed by all the changes the show made, such as Kathleen and Henry’s complicated relationship, but the overall format of the sequence sticks to the game.
In the video game, the hunters still use vehicles — in this case a humvee fitted with a heavy machine gun — to try and corner our heroes. Joel still has to take out a sniper that’s threatening the group, only to then see that raiders are swarming in behind his friends. He still has to try his best to cover them with sniper fire, shouting for them to run as hunters give chase. And the infected still show up right after, with one biting Sam amidst the chaos.
As with the truck crash in Episode 4, Episode 5 condenses several action scenes from the game down into one big television set piece. Henry and Joel’s relationship is far more complex in the game, with less trust between them. There’s one moment where Henry tries to leave Joel behind, only for Ellie to rush back to Joel’s aid. The two groups are eventually reunited after Ellie and Joel jump off a bridge to escape the hunter humvee and make peace once it becomes clear that it was Henry who fished them out of the river, but the journey to them becoming allies is far rockier than on the show.
Was Kathleen in The Last of Us game?
As we’ve mentioned, Kathleen and her entire story is new. She didn’t appear in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us video games at all, though there were references to the hunters having a new leader. As such, everything dealing with Kathleen and her death in the show is brand new.
The same goes for Kathleen’s right-hand man Perry, although there’s a pretty fun easter egg there: Perry is voiced by Jeffrey Wright, who portrayed Joel’s brother Tommy in the video game. So of course they had to kill him off in particularly gruesome fashion by having the bloater rip off his head. Incidentally, this is more or less how bloaters kill Joel in the game if they catch him; it’s a one-hit kill.
Did Henry and Sam die in The Last of Us game?
Now we come to the most heartbreaking bit. If you’ve just watched “Endure and Survive,” one big question you probably have is whether Sam and Henry suffered the same horrific fate in the video game as in the TV show.
The answer is yes. Sam and Henry die in the exact same manner in both versions of the story. Their death scene is another instance where the show stuck to the game almost verbatim, recreating exact lines of dialogue and shots from one of the most tragic moments.
The main change to Sam and Henry’s death scene is Sam and Ellie’s last conversation. In the game, Sam never reveals to her that he’s been bitten, which means that Ellie never tries to use her blood to heal him or keep his condition secret from Joel and Henry. She doesn’t find out anything is amiss until she goes to wake Sam for breakfast only to find he has turned. Instead of that heartbreaking scene where she tries to reassure and heal him, we got a different one where Ellie reveals she had saved the toy Henry had scolded Sam over earlier, keeping it hidden to give to him once they were out of danger. Rather than act excited, this just makes Sam more upset since he knows his time is limited, and he pushes Ellie away to spend his last night by himself.
It’s a slightly different take, but the gist is the same. Henry is forced to kill his brother Sam before taking his own life.
There are two other changes worth noting. The first is that Henry’s motives are slightly different; in the game, any survivors from his group were supposed to rendezvous at an abandoned radio station so that they could then go meet up with the Fireflies. However, upon arriving at the radio station it becomes clear that no one else is coming, which leads into the death scene. The Fireflies are not a part of Henry’s story at all in the show.
The other change is that, on the show, we actually see Joel and Ellie bury Sam and Henry. The game cuts to black when Henry pulls the trigger, skipping forward to the next segment of Ellie and Joel’s journey; we find out that they buried Sam and Henry as the two talk.
The show also gives us one more tear-jerker moment when Ellie leaves Sam’s magic slate paper saver on his grave with the words “I’m sorry” written on it; in the game, she only reflects later how she wished Joel had let her leave the toy she’d tried to give Sam on his grave.
“Endure and Survive” was an epic episode of The Last of Us, and did a stellar job of honoring this important segment of the game while breathing new life into it. Read our review of it here:
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