HBO Wrangles up a New Look at The Last of Us Episode 6

February 15, 2023, 7:05pm

[Warning: This story contains The Last of Us spoilers for season 1.] To quote Joel: “You keep goin’ for family.” After Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) encounter with Kansas City brothers Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard) ended in tragedy, Sunday’s “Kin” reunites brothers Joel and Tommy (Gabriel Luna). “Tommy, those things that you judge me for,” Joel tells Tommy in the trailer for The Last of Us episode 6, “I did those things to keep us alive.” But the younger brother, who headed west to Wyoming, has bad blood: “We did those things,” he says. “And they weren’t ‘things.’ We murdered people.”

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Below, HBO has released a new look at episode 6, marking Luna’s return to the series after appearing in the mostly 2003-set series premiere, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness.”

In episode 4, Joel tells Ellie his younger brother is “what we used to call a ‘joiner’” who had “dreams of becoming a hero.” Long story short, Joel explains, Tommy enlisted in the military out of high school, served in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War, only to find out that the Army “didn’t make him feel much like a hero.”

12 years later, after the Cordyceps infection outbreak of 2003, Tommy convinced Joel to join a group making their way to the Boston QZ. There Joel meets smuggler Tess (Anna Torv),and Tommy meets Marlene (Merle Dandridge), the leader of Boston’s resistance movement, who talks Tommy into joining the Fireflies.

“Same mistake he made when he was 18. Wants to save the world. Pipe dream. Him, Fireflies, all of ’em, delusional,” Joel says. “‘Course, last I heard, he quit the Fireflies, too. So now he’s on his own out there … and I gotta go get him.”

On the official HBO Max podcast, series co-creator and writer Craig Mazin said Joel’s talk about Tommy gives “some context that creates threads that we will be able to pull on and expand on later.”

Mazin continued: “Joel has a certain narcissism that he must go save Tommy. There’s almost a resentment. ‘I gotta go save him again.’ In the first episode, Tommy calls him from jail: ‘I gotta go bail him out.’ There’s this thing of, ‘I’ve got to go do my job and be the guy.’ But Joel loves being the guy. It’s part of his identity. Even as he’s pretending to complain about it, in the way that Bill (Nick Offerman) says to Frank (Murray Bartlett), ‘You are my purpose.’ This is Joel’s purpose. He has to have somebody to save.”