‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 8 Recap: There But for the Grace

Season 1, Episode 8: ‘When We Are in Need’

You know that old saying about how history is written by the victors? Something similar could be said about fiction. The heroes of any story are the people the author wants us to follow; and the villains are anyone standing in their way. But another storyteller with another focus might have flipped that perspective on the same story.

Two episodes ago in “The Last of Us,” Joel and Ellie were startled by what they assumed was a roving band of raiders on the fictional University of Eastern Colorado campus. One of these men ran at them while they were trying to mount their house and gallop away. Joel wrestled with him and broke the man’s neck, after taking a puncture wound in the gut.

This is a clear-cut case of right and wrong, right? Some rogue tried to kill the good guys and suffered the proper consequences.

This week though, we get a different angle on what happened. In a small, struggling community of survivors in Colorado’s former Silver Lake resort, the residents are mourning the loss of Alec, the man Joel killed. They considered him to be a hunter, who was out looking for food for his starving people when he was viciously murdered. When they find out Joel and Ellie are hiding out in a house just a few miles away, the group turns to their leader, David (Scott Shepherd), for justice — which, from their perspective, is wholly justified.

This episode — this season’s next to last — is at once the show’s simplest to date and also the one that digs deepest into the larger themes. On one level, the story this week is one of pure suspense, set in just a few locations, and with not a lot of action in comparison to what we have seen before. It’s about a recuperating Joel and a terrified Ellie trying to fend off the Silver Lakers, whose intentions remain suspicious no matter how gracious David appears to be. (Give a lot of credit to Shepherd’s perfectly pitched performance, which makes David seem at once kindly and creepy.)

Ellie first meets David out in the woods with his right-hand man, James (Troy Baker), where they are all chasing the same deer — which Ellie ends up killing. She gets the drop on the men and makes a deal at gunpoint. They can share the meat if James brings her some penicillin to treat Joel’s gut wound, which is red and swollen with infection. And while Ellie waits, David talks.

The story he tells about where he came from seems credible. David is a religious man now, but he used to be a nonbeliever, before the plague. He and his flock left the Pittsburgh Quarantine Zone when the Fireflies toppled FEDRA in 2017; and they gradually made their way west, losing some people to raiders but gaining others.

David firmly believes everything happens for a reason, as he has expressed on a banner hung in the Silver Lake steakhouse where his group gathers: “When we are in need, He shall provide.” He thinks God delivered Ellie to their settlement to be a potential leader and provider. (Ellie: “You inviting me to your hunger club? Thanks.”)

But while David insists that what Ellie calls “some weird cult thing” is actually “pretty standard Bible stuff,” there are indications that something is amiss. For starters, David seems strangely hesitant when Alec’s daughter asks when they are going to bury her father. Even stranger: Though their pantry had only about a week’s supply of meat before the excursion to the Eastern Colorado campus, everyone at dinner gets a bowl of “venison” in tomato sauce. (Some of the savvier Silver Lakers seem hesitant to eat it, though they eventually do tuck in.)

Then there is the question of whether David honestly wants Ellie to be part of his team. (“I’m a shepherd surrounded by sheep and all I want is an equal,” he says to her at one point.) James certainly seems eager to kill Ellie outright whenever David is not around. “If we bring her back she’s just another mouth to feed,” he grumbles. When David warns that if they leave her on her own she will likely die, James suggests, “Maybe that’s God’s will.”

This debate over who gets saved and who gets culled — or eaten — raises some uncomfortable questions, making this episode especially provocative.

Consider Joel again. All season long, we have heard about the terrible things he has done to survive, though we have seen only brief flashes of what he is willing to do when necessary. This week, though, we see him at his most merciless. When the Silver Lakers are closing in on the house where Joel is convalescing, Ellie leaves him with a knife and jumps on the horse to try and misdirect the hunters. She ultimately is captured; but it does not matter. Even a weakened Joel is strong enough to choke one man, tie up two others, torture his prisoners to get information on Ellie’s whereabouts and then viciously kill them. He behaves like the enemy they believe him to be.

In the end, this episode comes down on Joel and Ellie’s side — and not just because they are the show’s main characters. David’s turn to cannibalism crosses too many lines. Once you start seeing everyone as either friend or food, you have lost the moral high ground.

Even worse, it is strongly implied that David is just a sicko, through and through — and that he has been since before the end times. After his people cage Ellie, David’s low-key, rational-sounding conversations turn into fervid rants. He talks about how human beings are animals. He says Ellie has “a violent heart,” adding, “and I should know.” He praises cordyceps because “it secures its future with violence, if it must.” When Ellie escapes by breaking his finger, burns down the steakhouse (banner and all), and stabs him in the gut, David appears to be excited by her aggression. Later, as David pins her to the ground, his voice turns dark. “I thought you already knew,” he says. “The fighting is the part I like the most.” (Yikes!)

The episode concludes with one horror after another. Joel arrives in Silver Lake, where he is appalled to find his horse dead in a cold storage facility where three headless human corpses have been cleaned, dressed, and hung on hooks. Back in the burning steakhouse, David seems to be on the verge of sexually assaulting her before she gets her hands on a meat cleaver. She practically turns feral as she hacks him to death.

Yet even during such a grim and bloody day, there are glimmers of hope. The original sin of “The Last of Us” — in Joel’s eyes, anyway — is that he failed to save his daughter when the plague started raging. On this day, Ellie has already saved herself by the time he arrives; but at least he gets to give her the reassuring hug he never gave Sarah. This, in itself, is a kind of heroism. As a traumatized Ellie sobs, Joel holds onto her, tightly. “It’s OK, baby girl,” he says. “I got you.”

Side Quests

• The actor who plays James in this episode played Joel in the video game. Although Baker did not act opposite Bella Ramsey in the original “The Last of Us,” it still must have been strange for him to play a character so hostile to Ellie’s existence.

• I appreciated the realism of seeing Ellie bring the penicillin back to the unconscious Joel and having no idea how to give it to him. (Just injecting it straight into the wound seemed to work OK.)

• On the one hand, a world overrun by mushroom monsters seems pretty bad. On the other hand, the survivors get to live out their lives in swanky resorts. Maybe worth it?