‘The Last of Us’ Episode 8 Recap: Looks Like Meat’s Back on the Menu

How much is too much? Never, if you’re the creators of The Last of Us and it’s time to create a new antagonist. The penultimate episode of the show’s first season (Episode 8, “When We Are in Need”) introduces us to David (Scott Shepherd), the fatherly leader of a small, starving religious community fighting for survival. And seemingly every few minutes, some new layer of David’s hidden villainy is peeled back to reveal something even worse. If David were a plate of spaghetti at Olive Garden and his evilness was made out of grated parmesan, writer/co-creator Craig Mazin would simply never say “when.”

It starts off innocuously enough: David is a Christian preacher, of the sort we’ve instinctively learned to fear in post-apocalyptic narratives. (And elsewhere!) Beyond that, though, he seems decent enough — properly concerned about his flock’s well-being, worried about their dire lack of food, hopeful that a sighting of deer a few miles off might deliver they food they need.

Our perception shifts when he and his buddy James (Troy Baker) decide to steal a deer that Ellie had shot and killed but not physically picked up yet. Ellie gets the drop on them and makes a deal at gunpoint: half the carcass in exchange for antibiotics for the gravely ill Joel, who’s hidden in a house nearby. But desperate times call for desperate measures after all, and David is candid and charming with Ellie when they sit by a fire waiting for James’s return, even cracking a little joke at her suggestion that he’s leading a cult: “Oh, well, you sorta got me there.”

But then comes the first real reveal: David has known who Ellie is, more or less, all along. Turns out that the dude Joel killed at that university campus a couple episodes back was one of David’s followers, who left behind a wife and child, and they’ve been on the hunt for a “crazy man” and his teenage girl sidekick ever since. Still, it seems like David is planning to keep up his end of the bargain and give her the meds and freedom anyway — or at least it might have, if the goddamn score hadn’t telegraphed everything by taking a turn for the sinister.

So yeah, David winds up sending men to capture Ellie and kill Joel. Again, you’re like, okay, so killing Joel isn’t ideal, but at least they’re gonna spare the poor kid who wasn’t responsible for the death they’re avenging. But David slugs the dead man’s daughter for demanding Ellie be killed too, so there goes the “David loves kids” theory. Note that he used to be a teacher before finding religion when the apocalypse hit; both aspects of this eventually becomes more sinister than they initially sound.

While Joel, miraculously healed from his septic wound after a couple shots of penicillin and a night’s rest, kills, captures, tortures (in Hollywood there’s nothing more badass and sad-but-necessary for a good guy to do than torture people for information, which of course they always get), and executes the hunting posse in cold blood (joining Kathleen in the war-crime club), Ellie learns the truth from David. To wit:

He’s not really a Christian, he’s just faking it to provide an emotional security blanket to the people! So he’s a phony!

The thing he really “worships” is cordyceps, because it’s fruitful and multiplies, spreading its “love” with violence “if it has to”! So he’s crazy!

Then he makes a pass at Ellie and essentially invites her to be his bride! So he’s not just a child abuser, he’s a child molester!

Then she breaks his finger and he calls her the c-word! So he’s a garden-variety misogynist too!

And oh yeah, the meat his people had been eating ’til they found Ellie’s deer? People! So he’s a phony crazy misogynist pedophile cannibal!

Jesus Christ, he’s evil, we get it already!

Anyway, Ellie manages to kill James and, eventually, David, who tries to rape her until she hacks him to bits with a cleaver just as he’d promised to do to her. Eye for an eye, Old Testament, far out.

Finally she has a heartwarming reunion with Joel, who calls her “babygirl” and repeats “I got you,” finally becoming the father figure both of them had probably long secretly wanted him to be. All it took was for them to both be washed clean in the righteous red waters of redemptive violence!

As you can probably tell, this is, emphatically, not my cup of tea. I’m bored to tears by Mazin’s need to pile villainous trait upon villainous trait until the only possible reason you might have to empathize with this guy is because you remember how good Scott Shepherd was as Cardinal Dussolier on The Young Pope. (He has his moments of charm here too, to be fair — the cult line, the impatient way he tells James that his order to fetch the medicine is not a code for some other secret order — but in the end he’s a grinning supervillain.) Wouldn’t it be more interesting to craft this new antagonist so that we in the audience could, if not condone, at least understand his actions, potentially creating an actual moral dilemma instead of delivering the equivalent of orcs to be killed without hesitation? If nothing else, didn’t what they did with the monstrous Kathleen and her reactionary revolutionaries get this out of their system?

And I’m actively repulsed by Joel’s half of the story, the 40,000th illustration of the necessity and effectiveness of violence that the American culture industry has produced in the past 20 years. In reality torture is ineffective and — this is the important thing — fucking immoral. Creating scenarios in which it’s the only way out for the good guy, and thus the good guy’s goodness makes torture acceptable, is slimy, wormy shit. So is doing the same thing to set up one kill-or-be-killed scenario after another, thus conveying to the audience that wholesale slaughter in the name of your loved ones is the only moral arbiter. The Walking Dead made a whole show out of this low-grade fascist bullshit. Who needs another?

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.