Warning: spoilers ahead for The Last of Us episode 5.
When preparing to watch The Last of Us, viewers across the globe – even those unfamiliar with the video game franchise on which it’s based – would have known to be ready for scares and tears aplenty.
However, nothing could have prepared them for the horror that came in episode 5, when Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard) met their deaths in a truly unfathomable way after surviving threat after threat for years in a post-apocalyptic, barren world.
In the latest instalment of the series, Henry and Sam, along with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), manage to escape an attack from revolutionary leader Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), her armoured forces and a surge of infected, including a powerful Bloater.
They make it out of the near-impossible situation by the skin of their teeth, before Sam secretly reveals to Ellie that he was actually bitten, and she tries – and fails – to cure him.
What comes next is far more traumatising than the idea of monstrous creatures roaming the planet… a moment that anyone who has people in their lives that they hold dear would feel horrified to even imagine.
After discovering his brother has been infected, in a split-second decision, Henry shoots him dead, before realising the gravity of what he’s done and turning the gun on himself.
The past five episodes of The Last of Us have made it clear that the drama is far more than a show solely about the impact that monstrous, ever-spreading creatures can have on the Earth.
It highlights the power of human connection to a greater degree than many of us may have anticipated before watching it, from Joel and Ellie’s growing bond to Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) literally finding love in a hopeless place for 16 years, before dying peacefully in each other’s arms.
Before viewers met Henry and Sam, the elder sibling had already been doing everything in his power to save his brother’s life, including becoming a collaborator with the fascist FEDRA regime in order to obtain medical treatment after his younger sibling’s leukaemia diagnosis.
Henry’s love for Sam is so palpable, that he was willing to make an enemy of an entire city’s population, forever placing a target on their backs. So to watch him shoot his own brother dead is stomach-churning beyond belief.
‘What did I do?’
Lamar’s delivery of that line after Henry pulls the trigger and watches the blood spill out onto the floor is utterly heart-shattering. So quiet, so shaky, yet so powerful and memorable. His eyes glazed over moments after the gunshot, struggling to fathom what’s just happened.
As he points the gun at himself, it’s as though he’s being controlled by an external force, like his soul left his body at the exact same moment that his brother’s left his.
At one point, it appeared as though the most scary element of the episode would be the epic battle, when the ground collapsed in on itself only to reveal a swarm of infected hiding underneath the surface, ready to pounce.
The truth is that there are terrors in the real world and in fiction that are far more dreadful than blood-curdling monsters.
While episode three delivered an unexpectedly heartwarming turn of events, a love story to remind viewers that there can still hope when the rest of the world seems like it’s on fire, episode five was a poignant reminder that horrors can also be lurking in unlikely places.
It’s unfathomable to think what could have been going through Henry’s mind when he realised that he’d killed his own brother. No one with any loved ones, whether friends or family, would wish for anything less than to place themselves in his shoes.
It’s an atrocity that no one should ever have to endure, and a devastating one to witness, even when told through the lens of a fictional story.
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The Last of Us is available to watch on Sky and NOW, with new episodes released on Mondays.
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