‘The Last of Us’ Episode 4 Recap: Rebel Rebel

A group of revolutionaries has overthrown the fascist FEDRA government — but is the cure worse than the disease? Pretend you don’t know anything about how Hollywood tells stories and find out tonight on The Last of Us!!!

It’s certainly disappointing from a moral perspective that our first example of intense human-on-human predation occurs with our heroes Joel and Ellie on one side and the group of regular people who managed to shake off the FEDRA shackles on the other. I can’t say I’m surprised, as writer and co-creator Craig Mazin is on the centrist-conservative side even of Hollywood labor issues, let alone the need to violently destroy networks of oppression. 

But I am disappointed. TLoU’s template-shaking Episode 2 and template-shattering Episode 3 pointed the way forward to a kind of post-apocalyptic storytelling less bogged down by the standard shit the genre has been doing since at least 28 Days Later over two decades ago. This episode effectively chucks all that out the window in favor of your basic survival-thriller misadventure, in which Joel and Ellie are nearly killed by people led by a fanatic named Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey of Heavenly Creatures and, uh, Yellowjackets fame). They’re not FEDRA, they’re not the explicitly revolutionary Fireflies, they’re just folks who shook off the yoke — and that, by the standards of TLoU, makes them dangerous.

It’s tough to know what to say in recapping this comparatively very short episode of the show. (It’s a full half hour shorter than episode three.) Joel and Ellie talk about siphoning gas. They listen to Hank Williams. They joke around about porn and Chef Boyardee. They try to power their way past an urban traffic jam and wind up nearly caught in a trap staged by Kathleen’s people. They kill their way free — this includes Ellie, who shoots a guy, though apparently this isn’t her first time inflicting grievous bodily harm on another human. They hole up in a highrise, and are caught, we assume, by a guy named Henry and his son. Henry, from what we can gather, is viewed by Kathleen the way the regime in 1984 views Emmanuel Goldstein: He’s the scapegoat, the patient zero, the cause of all their problems. Are we to draw any conclusions about ground-up revolution from the fact that this seems totally stupid? Hey, who am I to judge?

Absent the saving graces of Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett, and the pleasures of nearly an hour’s worth of tangential standalone storytelling, this episode reveals many of the weaknesses we’d been observing before Frank and Bill came into our lives. Joel and Ellie remain cardboard cutouts, the former gruff and grumbling but basically decent, the latter glib and sarcastic but, you guessed it, also basically decent. Why it’s almost as if their hardboiled exteriors conceal hidden depths of vulnerability! Can you believe it?!

This perfunctory writing is, again, not helped by the performances of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, who it seems are simply not motivated, whether on their own or by the filmmakers, to dig any deeper into their characters than necessary. It gets to the point where you can predict almost the exact tone and cadence of the lines they deliver to one another (you can hardly count what they do as having an actual conversation). Sample exchange, as they eat Chef Boyardee: “Slow down.” “This is slow.” He’s stern, she’s rambunctious, I’m bored.

I wish I had better things to say about Kathleen. I’ll adore Melanie Lynskey till the day I die thanks to Heavenly Creatures, but between this and Yellowjackets I’m starting to get worried that showrunners see her ability to look worried and simply coast on it rather than making her an interesting or believable human being. Take the way she blows off the discovery of a whole underground sinkhole literally pulsating with unseen fungoid life. Does she bother telling the rest of her people about this? No, of course not, despite how unbelievably stupid this makes her — she’d prefer to continue the hunt for Ellie and Joel, whom she’s irrationally decided are mercenaries hired by her archnemesis Henry, than presumably save the lives of however many hundreds of innocent people. Mazin makes her impossible to root for or even really empathize with, given how much smarter we in the audience are made to feel than she is. (She also kills the ob/gyn who delivered her, but who hasn’t wanted to do that every now and then?)

Even the humanizing details provided about Joel and Ellie are boilerplate. To give her an obnoxious but endearing quirk, the show gives Ellie a book of puns. To give Joel a sense of tragedy, they make it clear he used to jack innocent people. They also point out he’s 56, which I bring up mostly to note he’s canonically older than the three main Golden Girls during Season One of that show. He’d be a great catch for some post-apocalyptic Blance Devereaux, that’s for sure.

The point I suppose I’m trying to convey here is that now that the over-the-top fawning over last week’s perfectly fine episode has, hopefully, subsided, we’re left with exactly what TLoU seemed to be in its first outing: a workmanlike exploration of a genre that desperately needs something more than a workmanlike exploration at this point in time. Are we going to get it from The Last of Us? I wouldn’t hold my spore-infected breath.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.