Warning: the following article contains spoilers for ‘The Last of Us’ episode six, ‘Kin’.
Boy, oh boy. Music has established itself as a pivotal driver of the emotions we’ve collectively been feeling for the last six weeks of watching HBO’s The Last of Us, but we don’t think anything could have possibly hit us as hard as the conclusion to this week’s episode.
If you recall, and of course you do, episode one closed with Joel, Ellie, and Tess (RIP) departing the Boston Quarantine Zone, to the tune of ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ by Depeche Mode. In the show’s official companion podcast, showrunner Craig Mazin teased that we’d be hearing this song once again, in a very different context.
Well, this week we discovered that context, and it was soul crushing. After Joel finds himself in a scuffle at the university which is a supposed Firefly base, he ends up with a stab wound. While he and Ellie manage to make their escape, our leading man loses too much blood and falls from his horse.
Ellie desperately tries to wake him, all the while her most crippling fear of being left alone to fend for herself sets in. The camera pans and zooms away, and we hear Depeche Mode’s lyrics once more – albeit in a much more somber fashion. This is after Bill and Frank, and Henry and Sam, all of whom hit hard in their own way. Remind us why we’re torturing ourselves with this show again?
To make matters all the more bittersweet, Mazin revealed in the episode six companion episode of the podcast that it was in fact his daughter, Jessica Mazin, who sung the haunting rendition. Here’s hoping we can get an official release so we can ugly cry while worrying about Joel’s fate.
We’ll have all the answers when The Last of Us returns for a new episode next Sunday on HBO Max.