This piece contains spoilers for The Last of Us Episode 5. If you're not caught up yet, check out our spoiler-free season 1 review.
One of the pillars of post-apocalyptic storytelling is the brutal truth that no matter the monster around the corner, the violence of humanity is always the most dangerous threat. From the shocking final moments of Night of the Living Dead to the flesh-eaters of The Road all the way to The Walking Dead's many roving gangs of killers, humankind will always find a way to horrify us more than the creatures at our door. In the latest episode of HBO's The Last of Us, the series takes that thread -- adapting the game's violent community known as Hunters -- while adding a morally complex context that asks viewers to consider what lengths they would go to to survive.
The episode begins on the night of Kansas City's fateful uprising. Though we'd seen FEDRA commit atrocities in Boston -- like hanging people who left the QZ -- the violence and joy in enacting it against the government agency in the streets of KC tells us that this FEDRA group was even more brutal and cruel in their "peacekeeping." It's a moment of rowdy and riotous celebration of overcoming oppression and, most crucially, of survival. The people in Kansas City have done what they had to do in order to be free and to live another day, but that's not enough. They want revenge and that's driven by Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey). In a world where most people have lost someone that they love, she's been consumed by FEDRA’s murder of her brother and is happy to burn down the world in order to find the person that she blames.
Lynskey makes the portrayal of Kathleen all the more terrifying as she looks like an average person that any of us could know. She's no muscle-bound Linda Hamilton facing down with the T-1000 and she's far from the people we often see represented as "villains" in these stories. Instead, she's more akin to the pettiest mom at your local bakesale. A woman who puts her family above all else, no matter what the cost. This makes her a frighteningly realistic nightmare, someone you recognize. But like everyone in The Last of Us, she's not a simple villain either.
Stories set after the fall of society often tickle the very specific part of the brain that wonders “what would I do?” Kathleen's quest for vengeance against FEDRA and Henry — the man who handed them her brother — is an appealing one. Who doesn't sometimes feel that feral, innately human anger when we're wronged?
An uprising against a fascist government is a righteous thing. But we've also seen Kathleen's militant side. Within minutes of the episode beginning, we see her sentence an entire room of FEDRA collaborators to death. It's a grim action but, as Kathleen paints it, these people were sentencing their neighbors to death for a few pieces of fresh fruit. Of course, as we learn, the truth is nowhere near that simple,but it suits her to claim that it is. Just like Kathleen and her rebels, there's a spectrum of what people are willing or have to do to survive.
It's revealed that Kathleen's enemy Henry was put in the most horrific of positions. He could inform on the kind, forgiving, and generous man who was leading the rebellion in Kansas City or let his brother Sam die of Leukemia without the aid of medication that only FEDRA had access to. It's the kind of choice that not a single one of us would ever want to make, especially as FEDRA's presence in Kansas City was by all accounts the worst version of the group. They were violent killers, rapists, and generally used the fall of society to create a masochistic power imbalance which allowed them to control all the people under them while living what sounds like a relative life of comfort. Henry did what he had to do to make sure that his brother could survive. It's a stark reflection of Kathleen's loss. She would have done anything to save her brother -- likely including turning collaborator if given the choice -- and yet she can't see the equivalence through her grief.
Henry's love for his brother, the hope he manages to instill in him, and his guilt over what he had to do makes him an incredibly sympathetic portrayal of someone who was, for all intents and purposes, a fascist collaborator. That's to the credit of the series' creators who understand there's no simple good and evil in a world that has fallen to the wayside, where survival is valued over everything else. Henry's choice was the right one for him and Sam, the only person he had left in the world. It's a beautiful story that continues the trend that the series has approached so well, expanding on the psychological complexity of the game by introducing larger, emotionally driven backstories.
Just as Bill was presented as a reflection of Joel in Episode 3, here we're shown that Henry and Kathleen are two sides of the same bloody coin. But whereas Kathleen is on a quest to take a life Henry made an exchange, offering up Kathleen's brother in order to save his own. Kathleen's life is defined by seeking out death but Henry has dedicated his to keeping Sam alive and giving him an existence with at least a glimpse of hope as seen in Sam's love for the comic book superhero Savage Starlight. Even if Henry isn't the hero he thinks Sam deserves, Sam believes in a greater good. In Henry's mind he had to make an unconscionable choice, one that made him "the bad guy" but in Kathleen's perception she's the hero on a righteous quest to make things right. That difference in conscience and self-awareness is what lets us know that Henry has still kept his compassion and empathy even in the face of horrific odds, whereas Kathleen's pain has stripped her of hers.
This is thrown into even starker light when as she's about to kill him, Kathleen reveals that she knows why Henry did what he did and that her brother begged her to forgive him. Those factors are irrelevant to her. Kathleen has lost her ability to forgive others (even if she does pause for a moment before pulling the trigger), whereas when he gave up her brother Henry lost his ability to forgive himself, something that directly leads to his tragic death at the end of the episode.
It all makes "Endure and Survive" the season's bleakest episode yet, while there are moments of kindness and light, especially in the way that Sam and Henry impact Joel and Ellie's lives in the short time together, it's all for nought. In the end Kathleen gets what she wants: Henry and Sam both die in upsetting fashion, but so does Kathleen and all of her followers consumed both metaphorically and literally by their quest for revenge.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/the-last-of-us-episode-5-asks-what-lengths-people-will-go-to-survive