Ellie and Joel have been traveling west for three months, and it is now deep winter. The episode opens with them taking a hunter's wife hostage in his cabin and interrogating both of them to learn their exact location when he returns. The hunter warns that if they plan to continue west across the river they will find only death, but Joel is resolute to continue and find Tommy. Outside of the cabin, Joel has what appears to be a mild panic attack. Later on that night, they discuss their dreams and their futures over a campfire.
On the far side of the river the two encounter a patrol on horseback who immediately surround and begin questioning them at gunpoint. A dog is then sent to sniff them out for signs of infection. Joel is initially worried that the dog may detect that Ellie is actually infected and that she will be killed on the spot, but the dog does not attack. After a few questions Joel is asked for his name by a woman named Maria. When she hears who he is, she decides to take him and Ellie with them back to their settlement, Jackson. Here Joel is finally reunited with his brother Tommy.
After getting some food at the diner, where Tommy reveals that he and Maria are married, Maria takes them on a tour of the town. The two brothers split off at the stables and head to the bar, where Joel asks Tommy for help finding the Fireflies, and Tommy mentions that had a base at the University of Eastern Colorado. However, Tommy refuses to go with Joel, both because he's reluctant to go back to the brutal survivor lifestyle they had before and because Maria is pregnant, news which triggers another panic attack in Joel.
Meanwhile, Ellie heads over to Maria's house after taking a shower, where she notices a small chalkboard memorial dedicated to two children, Kevin and Sarah. Upon seeing the state of Ellie's hair, Maria offers to trim it for her. During the haircut, Ellie offers her condolences for Maria's late children, but Maria corrects her and tells her that Sarah was Joel's daughter, a fact that Ellie did not know. They then get into a debate about Joel's nature, which ends with Maria warning Ellie to be careful who she trusts.
While Ellie watches a movie, Tommy finds Joel at the cobbler's trying to fix his boots and apologizes for their earlier argument. Joel then reveals the real reason for his journey, namely that Ellie is immune to cordyceps and he's bringing her to the Fireflies in the hopes of creating a vaccine. He confides in Tommy that deep down, he's afraid that his injuries and disabilities will cause his deepest fear to come true: that he will fail Ellie the same way he failed Sarah, and he begs Tommy to go in his stead.
At their house, Ellie and Joel get into an argument after she overheard Joel's conversation with Tommy. Ellie calls Joel out for treating her like Sarah and confesses that she doesn't want to go with anyone else but him because she'd only be more scared. Joel then coldly informs her that they're not father and daughter and that they'll part at dawn. Alone in his room afterwards, Joel wallows in his memories of Sarah before heading to bed.
In the morning, Tommy picks up Ellie and prepares to leave with her, only to find Joel at the stables with a fully saddled-up horse ready to go. He offers Ellie a choice of who to go with, but he doesn't even finish his sentence before Ellie throws her belongings onto his horse. Outside of Jackson, Joel tries to teach Ellie how to use a rifle without success.
A few days later, Joel is explaining the rules of football to Ellie when they finally catch sight of the university and make their way to the campus. They follow a painted Firefly symbol to the biomedical sciences building, but find it abandoned. A note left behind indicates that the Fireflies recently packed up and left. Further investigation reveals nothing but some lab monkeys roaming the labs, as well as a map pointing to Salt Lake City, Utah as a possible destination.
Joel then hears a commotion outside and opens the window to find a small party of raiders roaming the grounds. He and Ellie carefully make their way over to their horse, where Joel is ambushed by one of the raiders. He kills his attacker but was stabbed in the abdomen in the process. Sometime after getting away from the raiders on horseback, Joel passes out from blood loss and falls off the horse, and Ellie grows increasingly despairing when he doesn't respond, uncertain of what to do or what will happen next.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Adaptational Distillation:
- Ellie doesn't run away from Jackson to the ranch where she and Joel have their conversation when she hears about Joel's plan to send her off with Tommy. Instead, the conversation happens at their house in town.
- The university only features a single encounter with the raider gang (and no encounters with infected), and Joel and Ellie immediately ride away after Joel gets stabbed.
- Adaptational Sympathy: In the game, Joel asks Tommy to take Ellie primarily because of his Firefly connections (although it's still implied to be his fear of watching another child die - something Ellie catches up on, it's an implication that's easy to miss). In the show, Joel is terrified that he is too weak and afraid to keep Ellie safe, citing the ambush in Kansas City as an example of his inability to guard her, and he tearfully pleads with Tommy for this last favor.
- Adaptation Expansion:
- Crossing over with Early-Bird Cameo, the show depicts the town of Jackson when Maria brings Ellie and Joel directly there. In the game, only the dam is seen.
- Maria reveals to Ellie that she once had a son named Kevin, who according to a memorial in her house died just two days after Outbreak Day. In both the game and its sequel, very little information on Maria's life prior to meeting Tommy is provided.
- Agonizing Stomach Wound: Joel is stabbed in the stomach by a Raider with a broken baseball bat.
- Bait-and-Switch: The Evil-Detecting Dog seems to sense something in Ellie and starts growling which makes Joel fear the worst. But then he turns around to see Ellie playing with the dog.
- Batter Up!: One of the raiders comes at Joel with a bat, but snaps it at the handle when he swings wide and hits a tree. In the ensuing struggle, however, Joel is stabbed by a jagged piece the raider held onto.
- Big Damn Reunion: After six episodes of build-up and months of separation, Joel and Tommy are finally reunited.
- Binocular Shot: A guard at the settlement watches the oncoming group through a binocular.
- Breather Episode: Subverted. After the danger of the previous episode, this one is mostly set in the relative utopia of Jackson, has multiple scenes of Joel and Ellie bonding, and the stakes are mostly emotional. It ends with Joel seriously injured and Ellie crying over him, alone in the wilderness.
- Call-Back: Dogs, such as the ones used by the Jackson patrol, can sniff out cordyceps infection. This ability was first established back in the series premiere when the Adler family dog, Mercy, was able to smell the infection in Nana.
- Campfire Character Exploration: Ellie and Joel talk about their plans for when the mission is over. Apparently Joel is interested in sheep farming.
- Cat Scare: Hearing a noise from a second story in the university, Joel and Ellie investigate, thinking that it's infected or something else that's dangerous. It turns out to be escaped monkeys from the science labs.
- Changed My Mind, Kid: Due to his own vulnerabilities, Joel is initially afraid of not being able to protect Ellie for the rest of their journey and asks Tommy to take her to the Fireflies in his place. After having a heart-to-heart with Ellie and a night's rest, Joel shows up in the morning waiting for Ellie and Tommy in the stables and asks Ellie one more time to choose who she wants to go with. He doesn't even finish his sentence before Ellie throws her bag into his arms.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Joel getting stabbed by raiders and falling out of his horse as Ellie tries to get him to wake up.
- Dark Reprise: Once again, Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down Again" plays over the ending of the episode and the credits, although this time it's a more haunting acoustic rendition of the song performed by Craig Mazin's daughter.
- Dented Iron: Joel lampshades the fact that all the damage he sustained over the years is catching up to him. He gets tired easier and his partial deafness makes it easier for enemies to sneak up on him. Without Ellie to back him up, he would have died multiple times on the journey.
- Early-Bird Cameo: A few elements of Jackson that originated in the second game make an appearance here:
- Ellie's horse Shimmer briefly appears as a foal. Maria lets her pet Shimmer on its muzzle.
- The Tipsy Bison also makes an early appearance when Joel and Tommy go there for a private discussion.
- A young girl who's strongly implied to be Dina, a major character from the second game, is seen staring at Ellie while she's eating. Then Ellie yells at her. note
- The dining hall bears a resemblance to the dance hall seen in one of the last flashbacks in Part II, where Dina and Ellie share their first kiss.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Jackson uses a dog as a low-tech cordyceps detection system, trained to attack if it senses the infection. Fortunately, while Ellie's infection is detectable to blood scanners, the dog doesn't smell it.
- Flyaway Shot: The last shot subtly zooms out from the tracks into the air.
- Forbidden Zone: A hunter and his wife tell Joel and Ellie that the entire region west of the river is a death trap from which no one returns. Gets subverted when they encounter a patrol on horseback. The area is actually part of the territory of Jackson, and its defenders leave out the bodies of those who tried to infiltrate or invade it as a warning to others.
- Internal Reveal: Ellie finally finds out about Sarah after finding a memorial dedicated to her and Maria's son at Tommy and Maria's. Ellie initially assumed she was also Maria's child.
- Intimate Haircut: Maria gives Ellie a haircut during which Ellie learns about Joel's daughter.
- Lodged Blade Removal: Joel immediately removes the baseball bat shard impaling him when he notices it, which may have contributed to his bleeding out faster later on.
- Mistaken from Behind: More like wishful thinking. Joel sees a woman at the settlement who looks like Sarah from behind. He observes her until she turns around and reveals herself to be someone else.
- Mortal Wound Reveal: A non-lethal version. Joel manages to kill one of the raiders but is impaled by a broken baseball bat in the process. We first don't see the injury until the camera pans down his body to reveal the broken shaft sticking out of his stomach.
- Mundane Luxury: Ellie is amazed at the quality of food in Jackson after being forced to subsist on decades old canned food.
- Mythology Gag:
- Joel uses his interrogation technique from the games on the elderly couple, although he only holds them at gunpoint and doesn't physically harm them.
- While camping, Joel tells Ellie that he'd one day like to have a farm and raise sheep there, which is exactly what Ellie and Dina do in the second game after returning from Seattle.
- Joel kills one of the raiders with a chokehold similar to his stealth kill animation in the game.
- Neck Snap: Joel pulls one of these on an unlucky raider near the end of the episode.
- No Communities Were Harmed: The Fireflies' lab was located at the fictional "University of Eastern Colorado." Given the location (adjacent to Interstate 25), and the mascot (a Ram), it is clearly a reference to Fort Collins and Colorado State University.
- No Periods, Period: Maria gives Ellie a menstrual cup and instruction manual; Ellie quips "Gross" when she folds it according to the directions.note
- Please Wake Up: After Joel passes out and falls off their horse, Ellie begs him to open his eyes since she can't keep going without him.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: In the game Joel is injured by falling onto a piece of rebar, which demonstrated to players (who were used to being able to heal bullet wounds fairly easily) just how serious and potentially deadly the situation was. In the more grounded reality of the series, the smaller but still incredibly dangerous injury of being impaled with a broken baseball bat was just as effective (and presumably much less difficult to shoot).
- Say My Name: Joel screams Tommy's name when he finds him in Jackson.
- Sentimental Music Cue: The Cliffhanger at the end fades over into a Moody Trailer Cover Song version of "Never Let me Down Again" performed by Jessica Mazin.note
- Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Joel's initial reaction to the Jackson community, which is basically structured like a socialist democracy.
- Terror Hero: The residents of Jackson kill any Infected or Raiders who come into their territory and leave their bodies strewn out around the border area. This has given them an extremely nasty reputation in the surrounding areas with both good and bad people considering that part of the state to be a "death zone".
- Time Skip: Three months have passed since the deaths of Henry and Sam, and it's now winter.
- Wintry Auroral Sky: Early on we see Ellie observing an aurora borealis in the night sky.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Maria is pregnant, but a person who was an assistant district attorney before the outbreak 20 years ago would have to be at least in her late 40s in the present day. It's unlikely that a woman of that age could get pregnant without some advanced fertility treatment.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Joel and Ellie arrive at the Firefly base in Colorado and discover that the Fireflies have moved on, probably to Salt Lake City, Utah.
