By now, we have become accustomed to Sundays for HBO’s “The Last of Us” weekly premiere, and four episodes in, we can barely contain our excitement each weekend. This week, HBO has a special surprise for us because the fifth episode will be released on Friday instead of Sunday because of the Sunday Super Bowl. The episode will be titled “Endure and Survive,” based on a comic book that Ellie reads in the game during the car ride. She later says the line after Joel defeats the Hunters in the city of Pittsburgh in the game, and we might hear her say the words in the episode as well. With the episode coming out tomorrow, here’s a detailed breakdown of the trailer, but be prepared to have your mind blown when the episode drops tomorrow.
In the street littered with armed soldiers, armored cars are driving around, and people are cheering and celebrating at night by lighting trashcans on fire. Kathleen tells a group of people inside a caged area that they’ve finally liberated Kansas City. The armored cars might be part of the search party that Kathleen had organized to look for the mercenary who killed the three men in her camp. The ones celebrating at night might be her men, who are free to do as they please because Kansas City has been liberated from the FEDRA rule. With the military rule gone, the Hunters have free reign over everything. The next scene is of a flashback where the Hunters were brutalizing the military by breaking glass on their heads, and Kathleen asks someone about Henry’s location. Henry is seen using sign language with his teenage brother Sam to keep his eyes on his elder brother and not someplace else. Kathleen’s inert rage to chase after the man who got her brother killed has become so relentless that she completely ignores the shifting threat underneath the concrete in Episode 4 and is bent on revenge. We see Henry using sign language, but Sam wasn’t deaf in the games. The brothers had come up with this method to move silently and avoid making noise, or that one of them is deaf.
A shot from the first floor shows four people leaving and then Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam approaching a door with several childish drawings on the walls, and the camera focuses on one with a boy and a girl standing hand-in-hand. In the fifth episode, the two groups finally team up, and they approach the underground area where in the games there was a community living there. The community was mostly made up of children and a few adults who served as their supervisors, with someone named Ish being their leader. It can be assumed that the drawings have been done by the several children who lived in hiding inside the abandoned area.
Joel is seen standing with a somber face, and Sam is seen handing Ellie a frame, while Henry walks towards something with his hands in the air and Joel loads his rifle to shoot. We hear Kathleen’s voiceover saying that she had been asked to forgive, but that there’s no justice in forgiveness according to her. There is a possibility that the four will be planning a major distraction to escape the Hunters and leave Kansas, so they’ll be using all the help they can get. We didn’t get to see much of Ellie and Sam’s bonding in the game, and based on this split-second scene, this might be the night when Henry and Joel finally became friends, having finally outrun the Hunters. If the showrunners keep the brothers’ fate the same as the game, then there’s a chance that the lull of peace won’t linger for long for the four. Joel could be aiming at several things, from Hunters to the infected, but this might be to shoot down the infected chasing the other three as they escape, as we saw in the game. Kathleen might be talking about Henry, and she doesn’t plan on forgiving him for her brother’s death, and it’s this obsession for revenge that might get her killed in the end.
The pace of the action then starts picking up, with a house exploding and Henry pointing a gun at someone. Three figures are seen running, and Ellie turns back to shoot at something off-screen as a vehicle collides with another. In all probability, everything from the explosion to the people running hints at Ellie, Sam, and Henry fleeing the Hunters, and to make matters worse, it’s during the night. However, Henry pointing the gun at Joel could be later in the episode, after they have escaped Kathleen’s men, which means that it’ll be the last episode of the Hunters’ arc. We also see Kathleen pointing a gun at someone, and although we don’t see whom she’s pointing at, we can venture a guess that it’s Henry, given how we see him approaching someone with raised hands earlier. Thus, it’s highly probable that the four use Henry as bait to trick the Hunters while they set off the biggest threat to the city of Kansas—the Bloater.
With a burning building at its back, the massive and nightmarish Bloater makes a primal roar while stomping towards something as Joel screams with immense urgency to start running. The explosion of a house we saw earlier might be the same that Kathleen had asked Pierce to lock down, with the infected and a Bloater underneath. Joel’s team must have set off the explosion that led to the monster being set free, which shall wreak havoc on the Hunters as the group escapes. If the Bloater is set on the Hunters, no amount of bullets will be enough, which will serve as a sufficient distraction for Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam to escape to safety. We’ll finally get to see the monstrosity, and it’ll be interesting to see how the surrogate father-daughter duo manages to win over the scared brothers. However, based on the trailer, the pattern of the episode’s flow can be more-or-less guessed, including the ending, but if you haven’t played the game, there’s a high probability that the conclusion will leave a major mental scar on you.