Ellie runs into the rest of the cannibals that had previously attacked her and Joel.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Adaptational Villainy: David's pedophilic tendencies are more overt here compared to the game. While visiting Ellie in captivity, he strokes her hand in a creepy way. Later, when he has her pinned down at the restaurant, he mentions that "the fighting's the part I love the most," implying he's forced himself on other underage victims before. He's also reaching for his belt/zipper.
- Attempted Rape: David is about to force himself on Ellie before she's able to fight back.
- Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: After shooting down Ellie's horse, James ignores David's orders to catch her alive and points his gun at her, preparing to shoot. A gunshot is heard, then it's revealed that it's actually David firing his gun into the air as a warning to stop James and anyone else from going through with killing Ellie.
- Battle Amongst the Flames: Ellie throws burning wood at David and misses, setting fire to a curtain in the corner of the room where Ellie and David have their final fight. David helps things along by refusing to extinguish the fire before it can spread.
- Blood from the Mouth: The deer that was shot by Ellie is bleeding out of the muzzle when David and James find it.
- Blunt "Yes": When Ellie confronts David about him being a cannibal, he says, "Yes."
- Camera Abuse: The shot of Ellie hacking at David gradually grows more blurry as his blood splatters on the camera lens.
- Cannibal Larder: Joel comes across three human bodies being prepared for butchery (along with their horse and Ellie's deer). All three bodies have been decapitated and strung up upside-down to drain them of blood (presumably to also dehumanize them), with their arms wrapped to their torsos for convenience.
- Caretaker Reversal: Previously it was Joel taking care of Ellie but his stomach wound has rendered him helpless and in need of care that Ellie willingly supplies.
- Cerebus Callback:
- Joel uses the same interrogation technique that he used on the elderly couple on the pair of cannibals. However, this time Ellie's life is at stake and these two are definitely hostile, so he uses more brutal methods to coerce an answer out of them and kills both once he's done.
- A shot of David carrying the unconscious Ellie parallels an earlier shot of Joel holding Sarah.
- Child Eater: David and James are more than happy to make Ellie their latest meal before she stalls them by claiming to be infected.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Joel tortures Ellie's location out of one of the cannibals by beating and stabbing him in the knee, then stabs him to death when he gives an answer. When the other cannibal cries out in protest, Joel beats him to death with a pipe.
- Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: David plays this game with Ellie when he has her trapped in the dining hall.
- Country Matters: David calls Ellie a "little cunt" when she breaks his finger.
- Cry into Chest: An extremely traumatized Ellie breaks down in Joel's arms when he finds her.
- Deadly Euphemism: James tells David that they had "venison, elk, and rabbit" remaining in their food stores. Later, when David tells James to get penicillin David specifically states he's not talking in code. When Joel finally comes through to save Ellie, he finds three headless human bodies hanging in the settlement's meat locker. note
- Extreme Mêlée Revenge: While David has her pinned down, Ellie manages to grab hold of his cleaver and swings it at him to get him off her, then starts furiously hacking at his face all the while crying out in a primal rage.
- Family of Choice: Joel finally accepts his role as Ellie's Parental Substitute when he embraces and comforts her while calling her "baby girl," the nickname he had once used for Sarah.
- Fingore: When David is trying to persuade a captive Ellie to join his group, he places his hand over hers through the bars of her cell. She places her other hand over his, as though considering it... before she promptly breaks one of his fingers.
- Foreshadowing: That the settlement being shown happens to be a cult was heavily implied in the first couple minutes. That they were of the cannibal persuasion was a bit more subtle:
- David lies to Hannah by telling her that the ground is too cold to attempt to bury her father and they will do so when it warms up in the spring. A body sitting around for months will still rot and he never explains where his body is being kept.
- Ellie realizes that the group of four that attacked them in the previous episode were from that settlement. Roaming raiders or bandit parties tend to have a high probability of being cannibals.
- When one of the cooks asks where the meat comes from, the one providing pauses before stating "venison", and since David has yet to return, his pause is all the more suspicious.
- David and his friend victoriously haul a deer carcass into the dining hall as everyone else is already readying for dinner. Awkward silence ensues.
- Shots of meat preparation and meat dishes being devoured linger just a hair too long, enough to make one queasy.
- Gory Discretion Shot: As in the game, the camera faces up at Ellie as she hacks at David's face, and we only see his blood spattering all over her.
- Heroic BSoD: By the time Ellie stops hacking at David's corpse, her rage has faded and left her in a daze. Notably, even the camera is a little fuzzy from all the blood.
- Hiding Behind Religion: David reveals to Ellie that his preacher image is a facade, something he uses to keep his followers docile.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Ellie ends up finishing David off with his own meat cleaver.
- Hollywood Healing: Joel goes from being virtually comatose with an infected stab wound to vigorously defeating multiple foes in the span of about an hour, and after two shots of penicillin. It's downplayed, though, because he doesn't defeat any of them in straight up fights, but ambushes all three of them. The first he stabs in the neck and keeps from calling for help while he bleeds to death. The other two he clubs from behind and ties up while they're incapacitated. Otherwise, he's shown to be far from fighting shape, struggling to stay upright after punching one of the men he has tied up.
- Idiot Ball:
- David chooses to trade actual antibiotics to Ellie, rather than attempting to trick her with a placebo or simply letting her flee empty-handed once James came back. Even if he assumed Ellie would recognize the proper bottles, she would never be able to accurately identify the substance within at a glance. David's plan to track Ellie back to Joel would have worked the same if he gave her nothing. He not only wasted valuable and irreplaceable antibiotics on a man he intended to kill, he helped the man to recover enough strength to kill his men.
- On a similar note, there's no reason for David to admit he knows who Ellie is and who she's with, other than pure ego. He only succeeded in putting Ellie on guard, and could very well have lost both if Ellie had the means to flee.
- Impromptu Tracheotomy:
- Joel ambushes the first cannibal in the basement and stabs him in the neck.
- James gets one courtesy of Ellie when she grabs David's cleaver and swings it in his direction during her escape.
- In Mysterious Ways: David claims multiple times that "everything happens for a reason;" his first example being that he just happened to stumble on Ellie's deer after Joel killed one of David's men. Throughout the episode, it's suggested that Joel is supposed to die to get Ellie to join David's commune, or that she's supposed to die as well. The overall plot of the episode, on the other hand, would seem to imply that if there was a divine plan, it was to get Joel and Ellie to kill David and the other cannibals.
- Intimate Healing: In one scene, Ellie snugs close to injured Joel to keep him warm.
- Irony:
- Civilisation was brought to its knees by the Cordyceps fungus, but Ellie is able to save Joel's life with a shot of penicillin, which is derived from a mold.
- David had people chopped into "tiny little pieces" and fed them to his followers. In the end, Ellie chops his face into "tiny little pieces."
- I Want Them Alive!: David insists on keeping Ellie alive. At first it seems like his faith leading to him favoring mercy, but it becomes clear that he wants Ellie in particular alive so he can have his way with her.
- Kick the Dog: Our first indication that David is not a good guy is when he slaps a grieving girl for speaking up during his sermon.
- Mutilation Interrogation: When the first cannibal, Timothy, denies knowing about Ellie and where she is, Joel stabs him in the knee. When Timothy doesn't give Joel the location fast enough, he twists the knife and the bones in Timothy's knee can be heard cracking. At that point he breaks and gives the location.
- Mythology Gag:
- While Ellie is out hunting, the camera focuses on a rabbit that runs before Ellie can shoot it. In the game, the opening cutscene of the Winter chapter is Ellie shooting a rabbit with an arrow.
- David mentions having come from the Pittsburgh QZ after it fell to the Fireflies, which is what happened to it in the game.
- Ellie's line when she breaks David's finger comes straight from the game.
- After David slams Ellie into the cage bars for breaking his finger, a shot of Ellie's angry bloodied face giving a Kubrick Stare to the camera bears a resemblance to her appearance on the box cover art for The Last of Us Part II.
- Nightmare Face: The first cannibal Joel kills dies with his eyes and mouth wide open, showing bloody teeth from the stab wound Joel gave him.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: David's community practices cannibalism out of desperation, but he keeps this a secret from all but a select few. However, it's implied that the community knows exactly what they're eating anyway but keep quiet about it to avoid David's wrath and because they're starving.
- "Not So Different" Remark: David considers Ellie a kindred spirit, a natural leader who is ruthless enough to do what's necessary to survive, as opposed to the rest of his group who are sheep and need a shepherd to tell them what to do.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Ellie is disturbed when she realizes David knows who she is.
- Joel is disturbed when he comes across hanging bodies in a shed at the location where he was told Ellie would be.
- Pipe Pain: The second cannibal Joel captured gets his head bashed in with a pipe once Joel is sure the first answered him honestly.
- Precision F-Strike:Ellie: Tell them Ellie is the little girl that broke your FUCKING FINGER!
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner:Marco: I ain't telling you shit!
Joel: (picking up a length of pipe) It's okay... I believe him. - Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: David gets creepier as the episode progresses and it reaches its peak when the audience realizes that his interest in Ellie is sexual and that he will not take no for an answer. We then realize that he has raped children before and will continue unless he is stopped. Luckily for Ellie, there was a cleaver within arm's reach...
- Remake Cameo: Troy Baker - the voice of Joel in the game - plays David's right-hand man, James.
- Revenge Before Reason: Or maybe pedophilia before reason. David is so intent on hunting Ellie after she kills James that when she throws a firebrand at him and misses, setting alight a curtain in the lodge, he just looks at it for a moment then keeps hunting her. He doesn't think to tear the curtain down to prevent it from doing what it does next: set the whole lodge on fire, endangering his "community".
- Revenge Myopia: The entire community swears vengeance on Joel for killing one of their members two episodes ago—a man who attacked Joel without warning or provocation. David's comments also make it clear that this encounter was reported accurately by the survivors; he knows Joel was just defending himself. While he might have lied to the rest of the community, the hunters at least know the truth and are still out for vengeance.
- Rewatch Bonus: At first viewing the eagerness of James and the others to kill Ellie rather than take her alive as per David’s orders seems like a mix of revenge and unwillingness to add another mouth to their community, but once you know about David’s other tendencies it’s equally likely they were being merciful in order to spare her from what he was really planning.
- Rule of Symbolism: Consider a story: "A man was traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was beaten, robbed, stripped, and left half dead. A priest saw him and passed by on the other side of the road, and a Levite did the same. However, a Samaritan, despised of the Jews, walked down the road and cared for the man, tending his wounds and seeing him safe." David and his community want justice for Joel killing their man, Alec, but Joel was the traveler set upon by robbers and left half dead. David is the priest and James is his Levite. Ellie is the Good Samaritan.
- Say My Name: Ellie gets one, which also manages to become quite the Badass Boast.Ellie: Ellie!
David: What?
Ellie: Tell them that Ellie is the name of the little girl who broke your fucking FINGER! - The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Human meat is passed off as venison to the people of Silver Lake. Judging how dubiously many of them treat the meat, it's something of an open secret.
- Thousand-Yard Stare: Ellie is left with one at end following her traumatizing ordeal with David. Only Joel's arrival is able to partially crack her out of it.
- Torture Always Works: Justified by Joel's line of questioning, relying on a second victim to corroborate the information. The torture serves to get them talking, and the threat of worse torture if caught in a lie keeps them honest.
- Trail of Blood:
- Ellie tracks down the deer she shot by following its blood trail in the snow.
- Joel follows the blood trail from Ellie's horse, which leads him to a shed with human bodies.
- We Can Rule Together: David sees Ellie as a kindred spirit due to her intelligence, loyalty and propensity for violence, and offers her a chance to lead the group with him. A few scenes later, one realizes this was just a ruse for him to get her trust while pursuing an ulterior motive.
- Wham Episode: The violence exerted by both protagonists in this episode stands in stark contrast to what we have seen of them so far, leaving the audience in shock.
- Wham Line: Like in the game, this reveals that David is part of the group that attacked Joel and Ellie at the university by virtue of David revealing who they encountered.David: I sent four of our people to a nearby town to scavenge what they could. And only three of'em came back. And the one that didn't was a father. He had a daughter just like you. And her dad was taken from her. Turns out, he was murdered by this crazy man. And get this. That crazy man was travelling with a little girl.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Unlike in the game, Joel here does not rampage through the cannibals when trying to save Ellie; the fate of the rest of most of the community (including the women and children) is left unknown.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: The raider that Joel killed turns out to have been a member of David's settlement, and David had to comfort his grieving wife and daughter during his sermon. The cannibals whom Joel captures and interrogates are named as well.
- Within Arm's Reach: Ellie is able to free herself from David who pinned her to the ground by attacking him with a butcher knife that's lying on the ground in close vicinity.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Joel kills both cannibals once he's done interrogating them.
- You Monster!: Ellie calls David an "animal" after he admits to being a cannibal. He says that applies to all of them.
- You Remind Me of X: David tells Ellie that her cleverness, leadership, loyalty and violence reminded him of himself.
