Television is an artistic medium, and therefore open to interpretation. What is the “best” or “worst” episode of a TV show? None can say, because that’s up to every individual viewer to decide for themself.
That said, our powers of perception are infallible and our judgment foolproof. In that vein, we have gone over all nine episodes of the first season of HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us and determined to within a minute of degree of scientific certainly which lead the pack, which are at the back, and which in between.
Briefly, The Last of Us is about a pair of people — Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) — trying to make their way decades after a zombie apocalypse collapsed society. Ellie is immune to the cordyceps fungus that turned a lot of people into monsters, and Joel is saddled with getting her to the people who may be able to use her immunity to create a cure. Will they survive the trip? And how do the episodes stack up against each other? We’ll tell you:
9. The worst episode of The Last of Us is Episode 4, “Please Hold to My Hand”
Time for the disclaimers: The first season of The Last of Us is a very good season of TV. I don’t think there was a truly weak episode. At the top, you have moving masterpieces that people will be thinking about for years. And at the bottom, you have solid hours of TV that set up even better ones.
Such is “Please Hold My Hand,” the first episode of the show where we get to spend a good chunk of uninterrupted time with Ellie and Joel on the road. And their banter is the highlight of the hour. From Joel keeping watch while Ellie sleeps to Ellie peppering Joel with terrible puns to Joel giving Ellie a gun after she saves his life, we can see their bond starting to form in earnest. They work well together in the field and enjoy each other’s company in private. This, we think, could be the start of something special.
The episode drags a bit when it sets up the conflicts between the Kansas City revolutionaries. Who is Kathleen and how did she come to have such a powerful hold on her followers? Who are Henry and Sam, and why do they sneak up on Joel and Ellie while they sleep? We don’t get all the answers in this episode, which makes it less satisfying than some of the others. But they’re important questions to ask.
8. Episode 1, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness”
The premiere episode of The Last of Us contains some of the show’s most powerful scenes. In particular, the frantic chase through the streets of Austin is a thrilling action set piece, throwing us into the confusion of a world gone mad after the sudden, unexpected outbreak of a zombie contagion. Joel, his brother Tommy and daughter Sarah are all sympathetic characters we want to root for, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when the story takes a hard left turn into tragedy. Even if you’ve played Naughty Dog’s 2013 The Last of Us video game, the sight of Joel cradling his dead daughter in his arms is a brutal punch to the gut.
The story then skips forward a couple of decades to pick up with Joel going about his lonely life under fascistic rule in the Boston quarantine zone. We meet his new partner Tess, learn about the Fireflies, and are introduced to a young spitfire named Ellie.
This part works, but the energy comes way down from the gritty splendor of the 2003 section, to the point where I wondered if the show had given us all of its best stuff right at the top. We since learned that this premiere was supposed to be two separate episodes, but HBO wanted the producers to mash them together. I can understand why — ending the premiere with Sarah’s death would have been a major downer, and HBO wanted Joel and Ellie to meet before the first episode was over — but I think going with the original plan would have been better.
For my money, I I would have ended the premiere with the image of Joel, 20 years in the future, still wearing the broken watch his daughter gave him, and saved Ellie’s entrance for Episode 2. Here, she feels tacked on to Joel’s story, and she’s too important a character for that. The episode blasts through bits of setup involving Joel and Tess escorting Ellie to a Firefly enclave beyond the walls of the QZ; all of that could use more buildup.
So the premiere has some spectacular scenes, but it encountered some tricky hurdles behind the camera and feels like it.
7. Episode 2, “Infected”
Episode 1 ends with Joel, Ellie and Tess braving their way into a ruined Boston, which the show does a great job of making feel foreboding and alien. The image of a collapsed skyscraper leaning against another is spectacular, as are the craters left by bombs dropped long ago when the government thought they could contain the cordyceps outbreak. Flooded hotel lobbies, crumbling museums…The Last of Us cost a lot to produce and you can see the money onscreen in “Infected.”
“Infected” also better acquaints us with our characters. Ellie stands out, vacillating between the hard-bitten survivor who faces down these two adults who may kill her if she starts twitching like a zombie, and the innocent kid who rings the bell at the hotel desk over and over because it’s just so much fun.
This is also the most time we get to spend with Tess, who sacrifices herself at the end of the episode to ensure that Joel can continue to watch over Ellie. In the end, we don’t know Tess well enough for this moment to feel as powerful as the show wants it to, but there’s no forgetting the sickening kiss an infected gives her right before she blows up the whole building.
The infected in general are a highlight here, especially the clickers, whose designs are grotesque and beautiful all at once. In a way, Joel and Ellie’s journey really begins here.
6. Episode 8, “When We Are in Need”
This Ellie-centric episode comes late in the season. Joel is recovering from a stab wound and must rely on Ellie to keep him alive long enough for him to recover. She fends for the two of them in an abandoned neighborhood in Colorado, where she happens to come across members of a cult who offer her medicine. But the leader, David, has ulterior motives; he wants Ellie to join the cult and serve as, essentially, his right-hand woman. Also they’re eating their own members because they’re running out of food.
“When We Are in Need” is a tense episode and important for Ellie’s growth. She goes through the wringer here; not only does she have to take care of her ailing father figure, but also face down this creepy preacher guy who wants to do…what, exactly? One of the things that put me off a bit about Episode 8 is David, who all but invites Ellie to come rule hell with him. I thought it came a bit out of nowhere. Why is this guy so intent on seducing Ellie over to the dark side of the force, especially when she’s so clearly resistant?
Still, it’s great to see Ellie think on her feet to escape David’s clutches, and very disturbing to watch her brutally kill him later. Ellie is traumatized by this experience. Episode 8 also marks the first episode where Joel fully accepts Ellie as his surrogate daughter, which sets up the endgame.
5. Episode 9, “Look For The Light”
The first season of The Last of Us ends with a morally thorny bloodbath. Joel and Ellie finally find the Fireflies, the resistance fighters who have the equipment and expertise necessary to test Ellie and see if her immunity can be used to create a cure to the cordyceps virus. And good news: they can! But bad news: in order to synthesize a vaccine, they’ll need to perform surgery on Ellie, and the surgery will kill her.
Joel, who by this point considers Ellie a daughter — a replacement of sorts for Sarah, who he lost in the premiere — isn’t willing to let this happen. He mows down all the Fireflies protecting Ellie and absconds with her, choosing his daughter over a new hope for humanity.
Many have talked about whether Joel “did the right thing” in saving Ellie, and it’s cool that the episode inspired those kinds of conversations. More pertinent here is the question of “did the episode work?” And I’d say yes, but I agree with critics who felt that Joel’s rampage didn’t quite have the punch it should. Maybe it’s because we didn’t spend enough time with Joel and Ellie as a surrogate father-daughter pair before they reached this inflection point. We didn’t feel Joel’s desperation to save her as acutely as he did.
But even so, the episode is painfully well made, and Pascal turns in a fantastic performance as the tortured Joel. The final moments between him and Ellie, where he lies to her about what happened (she was unconscious for the whole thing) are full of fascinating texture, although I could have done without ending on Ellie’s uncertain “Okay.” I know that’s how the original video game ended, and it works, but for this new version of the story, I wanted something a little more lyrical heading into the off-season.
Still, “Look for the Light” effectively takes us into the long dark between seasons 1 and 2, and sets up many conflicts to come.
4. Episode 7, “Left Behind”
After Joel’s close encounter with the business end of a shiv in “Kin,” Ellie scrambles to keep him from death’s door. Instead of going right into the events of “When We Are in Need,” the show pumps the breaks for a flashback episode all about the first time Ellie lost someone important to her.
And the flashback is terrific. We see some of Ellie’s time in a FEDRA school, which fills out the margins of this post-apocalyptic society. Why are organizations like the Fireflies so opposed to what remains of the U.S. government? Ellie’s experiences in the facsistic military academy help us understand.
We also meet Riley, Ellie’s childhood best friend. Riley has decided to join the Fireflies, but before she leaves town on a mission for them, she wants to spend one last night with her friend and first crush. The two go to an abandoned mall, and we see the world through Ellie’s eyes: what’s ordinary to us is spectacular to her, something Bella Ramsey sells with equal parts innocence and grit. It really does feel like a magical night.
Things turn tragic when an infected chases the two girls through the mall, biting both of them. We don’t see exactly what happens after, but we understand why this night looms so large in Ellie’s mind, and why she’s determined not to lose anyone she loves ever again.
3. Episode 6, “Kin”
Of all nine episodes of The Last of Us season 1, “Kin” is the one that most feels like a standard episode of TV. The only action scene comes at the very end, and it’s a pretty brief one. Most of the episode is spent in rooms with people talking.
The intimacy is all an illusion, of course; the Jackson set cost more in one episode than most shows could hope to spend in a season, but still, “Kin” is pretty low-key. And I think the show needed at least one episode like this. Sometimes the audience needs a minute to breath so it can realize how far the characters have come, and how much they’re rooting for them. By this point we already knew we liked Joel and Ellie. It wasn’t until “Kin,” when it looks like they may go their separate ways, that I realized just how much.
“Kin” has the best character work in the show. Seeing Joel speak with his brother Tommy for the first time since the premiere brings out a whole new, world-weary side to him. Seeing Ellie talk with Tommy’s wife Maria is great, too; putting Joel and Ellie in different contexts really helps round them out as characters.
“Kin” switches up the tone of the show. Things had been pretty bleak and desperate for a couple episodes leading into this, so starting the episode off with the funniest scene of the season — where Joel and Ellie talk with a kindly old couple blissfully unplugged from the wider post-apocalyptic world — was a welcome change. The entirety of Jackson — a healthy, happy community where Joel and Ellie could easily settle down — is a breath of fresh air.
But of course, we have that ending action scene, and then we’re back to bleak and desperate. And because we had the chance to relax for an hour, we’re ready again.
2. Episode 5, “Endure and Survive”
When you hear “zombie TV drama,” you’re probably expecting episodes like “Endure and Survive.” Joel and Ellie are stuck inside Kansas City, hunted by survivors who want their blood. They meet up with another pair of survivors, Henry and his younger brother Sam, and must work together to make it out alive.
The episode has everything. We get tender moments as the foursome gets to know each other, with the innocence of Ellie and Sam reminding the older characters what they’re fighting for even as the situation turns increasingly dire. We have a great villain in the ruthless Kathleen, who thinks Henry wronged her and won’t stop until he’s dead. We have a huge action set piece with tons of infected, the biggest such scene we get all season. We even have some humor at the top as Joel tries and fails to be welcoming to Sam and Henry. “That’s just the way he sounds, he has an asshole voice.”
So “Endure and Survive” is a well-rounded episode of TV. What really kicks it into overdrive is the ending, where Ellie sees that Sam has been infected and tries to cure him using her blood — an act so purehearted it’s almost saccharine — only for him to turn the next morning. Henry shoots his own brother and then shoots himself while Joel and Ellie watch.
The Last of Us is all about love; between siblings, friends, lovers, parents and children, and more. Love is important — we need it in our lives, or we’ll shrivel and die — but it also makes us vulnerable, and can lead us down very dark paths. Sam and Henry love each other, but their story ends in tragedy. And it won’t be the last time.
1. The best episode of The Last of Us is Episode 3, “Long, Long Time”
The Last of Us gave us its best stuff fairly early on. In Episode 3, after Tess has died and Joel and Ellie have escaped the post-apocalyptic streets of Boston, they make for Bill and Frank’s house. Bill and Frank are a pair of survivors who live together in the small town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. But instead of sticking with Joel and Ellie, the episode takes us back in time to right after the outbreak, when the survivalist Bill had the entire town to himself.
What we have here is essentially a short film about two characters we hadn’t seen before and won’t see again. The episode takes us through a years-long romance between Frank and Bill, who meet unexpectedly when Frank falls into one of Bill’s zombie traps. Although they only have one episode to establish themselves, both Bill and Frank emerge as complex individuals with rich inner lives. Bill in particular stands out: he’s a conspiracy nut who’d grown bitter at the world and welcomed the apocalypse, only to finally get in touch with his humanity when Frank comes into his life.
Although there are difficulties along the path, Bill and Frank manage to carve out some happiness for themselves in the bleakest of circumstances. The episode is full of achingly romantic moments, from Bill’s solo at the piano to Frank growing strawberries to the final moments of the episode where Bill decides to join his lover in death rather than face old age without him. The episode stands apart from the rest of the show, but in and of itself that’s a great strength, because we get to follow one story from beginning to heartbreaking end in the space of a sitting.
And even though Bill and Frank don’t reappear, their story hangs over Joel and Ellie for the rest of the season. Remember: the show is about love, the good and bad. Joel and Ellie’s story could end in tragedy like Henry and Sam’s did. Or they could find happiness like Bill and Frank. Even that is fleeting, but it’s possible, and it’s worth fighting for.
Praise has to go to Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett for inhabiting Bill and Frank. Even the parts of the episode not about these two are great, such as the scene where Ellie cuts up a zombie, hinting at darker impulses beneath.
“Long, Long Time” is a wonderful episode of TV, and I’d be surprised if it’s not counted among the best episodes of the years when we look back.
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