The fourth and fifth episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us had the difficult task of following the ground-breaking success of episode three. However, the episodes’ focus on what it means for Ellie to “Endure and Survive” more than proves their worth.
*The rest of this article contains spoilers for the above-mentioned episodes and some aspects of the video game.
In episode four, viewers are introduced to a revolutionary group in Kansas City, Missouri, headed by a cunning and ruthless leader named Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey). While Joel and Ellie struggle to escape the group’s complex vengeance, they team up with two ill-fated characters known and loved by players of the game, brothers Henry and Sam (Lamar Johnson and Keivonn Woodard). The deviations in this part of the story between the game and the show are at first glance seemingly unimportant. But, as has been the case with most deviations in this adaptation, they prove to ultimately be incredibly significant.
Revolutionaries and Runaways
More an addition than a deviation, Kansas City leader Kathleen is the first to showcase this. Lynskey perfectly portrays a woman who has suffered a great loss. A woman who has stepped up to the mantle of protector, leader and punisher. A woman who, in the end, turns into the very thing she spent so long fighting against. Kathleen herself acknowledges this. She tells her enforcer that she knows her murdered brother would be ashamed of everything she’s done in his name. Still, she does not care. Her insistence on equating love for her brother with her need for revenge, leads her down a destructive path. Kathleen’s story is a red herring that game players will certainly recognize.
Meanwhile, the biggest changes to Henry and Sam’s story come in the form of survival. In the game, the brothers are similar to Joel and Ellie: passing through the city and avoiding certain death. The show, however, adds depth to the brothers’ history and to their purpose. In this version, Sam is younger, deaf, and recovering from an illness that cost Henry everything to help him survive.
Sam also is an avid reader of the Savage Starlight comics, something, we find out, he and Ellie share.
Endure and Survive
Game Ellie is only introduced to this comic series via an issue she steals from Bill. Throughout the gameplay, Joel finds various other issues of the series and keeps them safe for her. Changing Savage Starlight to instead be a firm and powerful connection between Sam, who eventually becomes infected, and Ellie, who is immune, sets up one of the best deviations thus far in the series.
Though game Sam does still turn, one key difference is that he never tells Ellie about his bite. However, the show makes Sam telling Ellie almost an inevitability by building up how much he idolizes her throughout their short time together. This is where the importance of their connection over the comic comes into play.
The tagline for the heroes of Savage Starlight is “endure and survive”, a phrase Sam teaches Ellie how to sign and which becomes important to both of them. It is easy to see why children born into a post-apocalyptic world might cling to a saying that mimics their reality. Sam and Ellie only know enduring and surviving in an unforgiving life. But what happens when that survival is put into question?
Before Sam shows Ellie his bite, as they are reading the comic, he asks her if there is anything she’s afraid of. Maybe he wants to know how to be brave even in the face of his new reality. Maybe he just wants to know he isn’t alone in his fear. Either way, when he reveals what happened to him, Ellie doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t turn away or scream for help.
Lost in the Darkness
Ellie’s biggest fear, as she tells Sam, is of ending up alone. Having already lost one too many people to the Cordyceps infection, Ellie makes a choice in the show she doesn’t get a chance to make in the game: she tries to save Sam.
Watching Ellie draw her own blood and rub it into Sam’s wound is both hopeful and heart breaking. A child trying to save another child from a fate worse than death is the epitome of what Joel says to Ellie in episode four: “It isn’t fair, someone your age, having to deal with all of this.”
When Ellie’s attempt to save Sam does not work, when she wakes up to him infected anyway, when she and Joel bury the two brothers’ bodies, Ellie realizes, perhaps for the first time, that her immunity is a gift she herself is not capable of giving to others. Her pain at this realization makes me wonder if the Firefly slogan of “when you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light” might hold more resonance with Ellie now than before. Especially when juxtaposed with “endure and survive,” the slogan she shared with a friend whose survival ended all too soon.
Will she wonder what the point of enduring and surviving is if she is only able to ensure her own survival? Will she believe, now more than ever, that the Fireflies could help turn her immunity into a light for others, the way it never really has been for her?
Fans of the story know well: you cannot endure and survive without a light, somewhere, guiding you through the dark.
The Last of Us airs every Sunday at 9pm (EST) / 6pm (PST) on HBO Max.
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