The Cost of Revenge: Breaking Down Episode 5 of ‘The Last of Us’
With Season 1 crossing the halfway point, Joel and Ellie remain trapped in Kansas City
The HBO adaptation of The Last of Us is a study in typecasting. Pedro Pascal plays a gruff, reluctant guardian. Nick Offerman plays a cagey libertarian with a hidden soft side. Anna Torv plays a cool, capable lady I would love to hang out with.
But the show’s most effective casting choice yet may be Melanie Lynskey, whose two-episode arc concludes in “Endure and Survive”—an hour that pushes the first season of The Last of Us past its halfway point. Lynskey’s appearance is, of course, timely; thanks to her incredible, Emmy-nominated work on Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the actress is currently at a career peak. She’s a familiar, welcome face—and a slight reprieve from the show’s bleak, fungus-filled landscape. Like Murray Bartlett’s Frank, who appears in the game only as a lifeless corpse, Lynskey’s role is also new to the show, allowing a more effective use of her persona than channeling a known quantity.
When Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie first arrived in the hollowed-out shell of what was once Kansas City, they were confused by what they found. The local quarantine zone, or QZ, is controlled by neither fascist agency FEDRA nor insurgent group the Fireflies. Instead, Lynskey’s character Kathleen commands what appears to be a civilian army. In “Endure and Survive,” a fugitive named Henry finally gets the interlopers up to speed. Even by FEDRA standards, the Kansas City branch was especially barbaric: instilling a culture of fear, repression, and coerced compliance. Kathleen’s brother Michael was a leader of the homegrown resistance. But when Henry’s younger brother Sam came down with leukemia, he sold Michael out in exchange for life-saving medicine. Now, a vengeful Kathleen is in charge and out for blood.
Lysnkey’s initial appearance took some viewers aback. Kathleen is very much in line with Lynskey’s prior performances: a soft-spoken, underestimated woman capable of surprising violence, conviction, and even twisted humor. (“Haven’t you heard?” Kathleen sneers to a group of terrified prisoners. “Kansas City is free!”) What she’s not in line with is the stereotype of how a military leader looks and acts—unlike, say, Kathleen’s bearded, gun-toting sidekick Perry, the man who dutifully follows her orders. This is, of course, the point. But enough fans missed it that Lynskey herself felt the need to defend her character and the showrunners on Twitter. “I was excited at the idea of playing a woman who had, in a desperate and tragic time, jumped into a role she had never planned on having and nobody else planned on her having,” Lynskey wrote. “The most exciting part of my job is subverting expectations.” Evidently, Lynskey’s detractors hadn’t watched her as Yellowjackets antihero Shauna, who slaughtered a rabbit and served it to her family
Kathleen is not, it ought to be said, an aspirational figure or some sort of feminist icon. Like everyone we meet in The Last of Us, Lynskey’s character is a woman warped by circumstance and ultimately undone by the incentives of her own survival. Kathleen notes, not incorrectly, that taking the high road didn’t do much for her brother. But her single-minded pursuit of Sam and Henry comes at the expense of the change her own brother fought to achieve, not to mention her life. Having tracked Sam and Henry down, along with Joel and Ellie, Kathleen leads a heavily armed force beyond the relative safety of the QZ. Just when she has Henry in her sights, everyone is ambushed by a swarm of Infected. Kathleen gets torn to shreds, and while Joel and Ellie don’t stick around to see what happens next, it seems unlikely her post-FEDRA paradise will survive with its defensive forces wiped out.
Kathleen is hardly a role model for someone like Ellie, still an impressionable kid on the lookout for examples to follow. (Revenge and its price are a major theme of the The Last of Us Part II, the sequel game that stars an adult Ellie.) Yet her downfall is all the more tragic after how close it came to triumph. Kathleen and her allies were able to depose FEDRA, but they weren’t able to unlearn the mentality 20 years of dictatorship instilled in them. The same events that led Kathleen to rise to the occasion also doomed her revolution. In just a few minutes of screen time, Lynskey and The Last of Us gave an indelible illustration of the story’s preexisting themes. Offerman and Bartlett’s widely acclaimed showcase “Long Long Time” was more self-contained and optimistic, a tale of two men finding joy in a joyless world. Lynskey’s arc is integrated into Joel and Ellie’s larger tour of humanity’s wreckage.
Michael and Kathleen also act as foils to another pair of siblings. Unlike their antagonists, Sam and Henry are holdovers from the game. But “Endure and Survive” adds a 15-minute prologue before they ever encounter Joel and Ellie. Along with performances by Lamar Johnson (Henry) and Keivonn Woodard (Sam), the extra time allows the audience to form their own relationship with the brothers, who spend 10 days hiding out in an attic while Kathleen’s troops comb the city. Sam, who is deaf, occupies himself by drawing superheroes on the walls. “Endure and Survive” plays up the moments of innocence and joy kids like Sam manage to make in spite of their situation. When Sam meets Ellie, the two instinctively bond over comic books and silly puns. They giggle in a corner while Henry and Joel strategize their way out. “It’s easier when you’re a kid,” Joel says. “No one else is relying on you. That’s the hard part.”
When Henry explains his backstory to Joel, it’s a point of pride that he’s never killed anyone—at least with his own two hands. That streak ends in the worst possible way when Sam sustains a bite during the ambush. Ellie has been forced to grow up fast; just in the time we’ve known her, she’s already learned to fire a gun. But she’s still naive enough to keep Sam’s injury a secret, and to try and heal him by smearing some of her blood on his wound. (Ellie is immune to infection, which is why Joel has been tasked with taking her to a medical facility.) The next morning, Sam attacks her, and Henry shoots his eight-year-old brother on instinct. Faced with the enormity of what he’s done, Henry then turns the gun on himself.
What connects Henry and Kathleen is a sense of futility. Henry exchanged Michael’s life for Sam’s, only to lose his brother in an even more painful fashion. Kathleen accomplished what Michael could not, only to forfeit their initial shared dream. Apart from isolated detours like “Long Long Time,” The Last of Us flirts with nihilism in its overall outlook. What keeps it from crossing over, at least for now, is the empathy it extends to even minor players. Kathleen and Henry are gone, but the audience won’t forget them.