After Joel and Ellie leave Bill and Frank's compound, they come across something that is even more deadly than the infected. People. Joel must protect Ellie at all costs.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Actually Pretty Funny: Most of Ellie's puns get little more than a groan out of Joel, but a joke about diarrhea leaves them both cracking up (marking the first genuine smile and laugh from Joel in a very, very long time).Ellie: Did you know that diarrhea is hereditary?
Joel: What?
Ellie: Yeah. It runs in your jeans. - Adaptational Badass: While the Hunters are also quite threatening in the game, the group is shown to be much bigger and better organized here. They operate with actual military tactics and possess fully-automatic firearms and several Humvees, technicals, and military trucks instead of just a single Humvee as in the game. In many ways, they're much more similar to the WLF from the second game than simple bandits.
- Adaptational Expansion: The Hunters that ambushed Joel and Ellie are given additional focus in this episode through the eyes of Kathleen, who's implied to be the leader of the Hunters who have overthrown the FEDRA occupation and taken control of the city and who has a grudge on Henry for seemingly selling her brother out to FEDRA, resulting in his death.
- Adaptational Location Change: In the game, the events with the Hunters took place in Pittsburgh. Here, it's changed to Kansas City.
- Apocalyptic Logistics: The Kansas City Hunters have access to a motorpool that rivals what FEDRA had in Boston. FEDRA at least has the justification of controlling multiple factories in other Quarantine Zones. Eventually it's revealed that the Hunters have only had control of KC for a few weeks at most, so their overuse of resources is justifiable, if indicative of their shortsightedness.
- Armor-Piercing Question: When Ellie asks Joel if he ever killed innocent people, he looks away and urges her to press on.
- Badass in Distress: Joel gets overwhelmed by a hunter and has to be rescued by Ellie.
- Brick Joke: In the previous episode during Bill and Frank's first meeting, Bill brought up Arby's restaurant. In this episode, Joel and Ellie drive past a truck stop with an Arby's on their way to Wyoming - with the camera intentionally focusing on the sign as Joel drives through.
- Change the Uncomfortable Subject: When Joel wants to know what Ellie meant by "it wasn't my first time", she doesn't want to talk about it.
- Chekhov's Gun: Ellie makes use of the gun she found in the previous episode.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Joel and Ellie at the gunpoint of some youngsters who ambushed them in their sleep.
- Derelict Graveyard: A river that Joel and Ellie cross on their way is filled with sunken and half-sunken shipwrecks.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: This is Joel's interpretation of Tommy's actions. Tommy wants to be a hero so he joins groups like the US Army or the Fireflies that are supposed to protect people and make the world a better place. He is then disappointed and starts looking for a new cause to join.
- Full-Circle Revolution: Kathleen has overthrown the murderous and tyrannical FEDRA only to become a murderous tyrant herself.
- Gasoline Lasts Forever: Downplayed. Joel replenishes their gasoline supply by siphoning gas from old vehicles found on the side of the road. He tries to explain that the gasoline has lost more of its potency so a full tank will only last them a few hours. In reality, twenty-year-old gasoline would be completely useless.
- Gilligan Cut: Joel tells Ellie she can feel free to get some more shuteye in the truck, to which she protests that she's not even tired. Immediate cut to her sound asleep with mouth agape.
- Head-Tiltingly Kinky: After finding some filth in the backseat of Bill's car, Ellie does this as she finds a male magazine. Afterwards she questions how someone is capable of walking around with such a thing.
- Heroic BSoD: Ellie understandably goes into shock after she has to shoot a Hunter in the back to save Joel.
- Idiot Ball: When Joel and Ellie get lost, Joel continues driving around in random directions as Ellie struggles to make sense of the map rather than just stopping the car and figuring out where they are. This allows them to stumble into the ambush.
- It Never Gets Any Easier: Joel admits to Ellie that killing is not easy for adults, even while he says children should never have to.
- It's Personal: Kathleen's brother was arrested by FEDRA and then killed in custody. She blames Henry for this and is hunting him and anyone else she deems culpable.
- I Want My Mommy!: After Ellie shoots an assailant that nearly strangles Joel, the man is left paralyzed and pleading for his life; he tells them his name and asks them to take him to his mother who isn't far. He even offers up his knife in an attempt to bargain with the two, but it's for naught, with Joel instructing Ellie to hide behind a nearby wall so he can finish the man off. We don't see the act, but instead hear the poor man genuinely crying out for his mother and wishing to get back home as Joel stabs him to death. Ellie is visibly disturbed by this, and Joel even expresses concern about how she's coping with it.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Joel winces at the terrible puns in Ellie's book, though he eventually finds some of them Actually Pretty Funny.
- Mythology Gag:
- Lotte Kestner's cover of New Order's "True Faith" plays over the closing credits. Ashley Johnson's version of the song, sung in-character as Ellie and inspired by Kestner's version, was used in a trailer for The Last of Us Part II.
- Ellie thinks Joel's coffee smells like "burnt shit." In Part II, Dina expressed this opinion about coffee to her while looting an abandoned coffee shop in downtown Seattle.
- The title is a reference to the Hank Williams song that was playing on the truck radio during the equivalent section of the game.
- The Noisy Straw: When Ellie compares Joel's coffee to burned shit, he demonstrates his disapproval by loudly slurping on his Thermos bottle.
- Pants-Positive Safety: Discussed. Joel cautions Ellie not to carry her gun in the side pocket of her jacket but to stash it in her backpack lest she risks shooting her own butt off.
- Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: The heroes encounter a long line of abandoned cars by a gas station as well as in front of a blocked-up underpass.
- Properly Paranoid: When he sees the wounded man yelling for help, Joel suspects an ambush and is immediately proven correct.
- Revenge Before Reason: Kathleen thinks dealing with Henry, and Joel and Ellie, are bigger concerns than dealing with what looks to be a massive clicker infestation within their territory. The same can be said about her decision to execute the doctor suspected of informing; given his medical knowledge, he might be more valuable to her alive.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: If Ellie had better map skills and hadn't made Joel stop in the street to point at the QZ gate, they would not have been subjected to the ambush and be right on track with their mission instead of being stuck in Kansas City without a ride and with hunters on their tail. Expressed in this exchange when she's expecting approval for helping open a door from the inside.Ellie: Where would you be without me, huh?
Joel: By now, Wyoming.
Ellie: Oh, yeah. Walked into that one. - Scavenger World: Fuel production has broken down After the End so Joel is forced to continuously siphon gasoline from other cars along the way.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: In a basement, Kathleen and Perry discover an area of destroyed ground, rumbling as if something is about to break through the earth. Though Kathleen convinces Perry to not tell the other bandits until after Henry and Sam are dealt with, the discovery has clearly shaken her.
- Self-Deprecation: A subtle example. After Joel teaches Ellie how to hold a pistol, she initially puts it in the back of her pants. Joel, who has a proper holster, immediately tells her not to do this, as she might shoot her ass if she does. In the game, this is exactly how Joel stored his pistol when not using it. Even the holster upgrade was for his "secondary" pistol slot.
- Sound-Only Death: We can only see Ellie's disturbed reaction as she listens to the hunter Bryan beg for his life on the other side of the wall before Joel finishes him off.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: After two decades of extensive firearm usage, Joel has gone partially deaf in his right ear (something that Ellie pointed out). Even after teaching Ellie how to use a pistol, Joel advises her to stick to using a knife because of this so she could keep her hearing.
- Too Hungry to Be Polite: At their forest camp, Ellie gulps down her food in such a hasty manner that Joel asks her to slow down.
- Villains Want Mercy: Bryan, after being paralyzed by Ellie, quickly starts begging for his life. Though understandable, it provides quite the contrast from the threats the group was slinging when they had Joel pinned down.
- Walking Armory: Notably averted. In the game, Joe is capable of holding a total of nine guns in his backpack but the series averts this. Like with the Assault Rifle in the previous episode, Joel is only capable of holding one long gun and he chose a hunting rifle since its ammunition is easier to find.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: When they encounter a jackknifed semi blocking an underpass, Joel sizes up his options and then declares to Ellie that they'll simply make a quick detour through the city and get right back on the highway at the nearest on-ramp...Joel: Screw it... We can jog right around this tunnel, take the next ramp, and we're back on the road... Minute, tops.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Defied by Joel, who quickly realizes that the wounded man in the street is part of an ambush.
