‘The Last of Us’ Introduces the Cannibal Cult Leader From Hell
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THIS POST CONTAINS spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, “When We Are in Need.”
“When We Are in Need” is, for its first half, among the more low-key installments of Last of Us Season One. We are still in Colorado, still with Ellie helping Joel heal from the wound he suffered a few episodes back. No infected appear at all, following several episodes this season where the mushroom people appeared briefly at most. Much of the early conflict just involves characters sitting in the oppressive cold talking about how hungry and otherwise deprived they are. In particular, there’s a lengthy conversation between Ellie and David (played by Scott Shepherd), a former math teacher who claims to have found God only after the apocalypse — “which is either the best time or the worst time to find him,” he acknowledges. He presents as a Mr. Rogers type, albeit one with less warmth given the desperate circumstances in which he and his flock find themselves. But Ellie is suspicious of him and his sidekick James(*) from minute one. Is this guy the gentle man of the cloth he claims to be, or is this, as Ellie describes it, “a weird cult thing?”
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(*) James is played by Troy Baker, who plays Joel in the game.
There is a version of this episode where David could have been the man he said he was, as we get a story about what mostly-good people are forced to do when resources are scarce, or the guilt that Joel and Ellie might feel upon learning about the family left behind by the man whose neck Joel snapped at the university. But this season has gone relatively light on the whole “The real monsters are the human survivors” theme, and it feels past due for one of those. So David turns out to be somehow worse than Ellie’s most paranoid assumptions about him. He is not just a cult leader, who backhands the dead man’s daughter for speaking up to him, and describes himself as her true father. He is also a cannibal — and a fairly unapologetic one when Ellie discovers the truth about the meat he’s been serving his starving followers — and a rapist.
The slow revelation of all the sins David has happily committed in the name of God are followed by a series of brutal sequences in the episode’s second half, featuring both our heroes. Joel recovers enough to torture and/or kill several of David’s would-be soldiers, just to find out what has happened to his surrogate daughter. He is (to quote Ned Flanders) more animal than man, and while we of course want him and Ellie to get out of this situation safely, it’s more than a little unnerving to see how far he will go — especially when he murders people after they’ve told him what he wants to know, and are otherwise no longer a threat.
Ellie, meanwhile, fights back from being David’s prisoner with every weapon at her disposal, including an attempt to use her Cordyceps immunity to trick David into thinking he’s become infected. He sees it as a ruse, simply because of how long he’s been around Ellie without her turning, but it’s enough of a distraction for her to stab James in the neck with a cleaver and make a break for it.
From there, the episode takes the idea of putting Ellie through hell somewhat literally, as David assaults her on the floor of a steakhouse that she has already set on fire. HBO has a long and often unfortunate history of using rape as a dramatic crutch. It works here, though, as both the final symbol of David’s evil and hypocrisy, and because she brutally kills him in the middle of it, hacking him over and over and over again with the cleaver, the flames behind her speaking for her rage at least as much as the primal screams she lets out each time. (In case you hadn’t already noticed, Bella Ramsey is incredible on this show.)
When our protagonists finally find each other, it’s not the reunion either would have wanted. Joel is still not at his physical best, and Ellie is suffering from extreme shock in the aftermath of all that David put her through. It is a very bad place for both of them to find themselves with only one episode left to go in what has been a terribly strong — but, at times like this, terribly harrowing — season.
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