HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ may have just left out the game’s most horrifying moment

Warning: The following article contains spoiler warnings for ‘The Last of Us’ episode four, ‘Please Hold My Hand’.

The fourth episode of The Last of Us, ‘Please Hold My Hand’, saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) continue on their cross-country journey in earnest. The pair have finally started to bond, but they have found themselves in a spot of bother in Kansas City.

While fans of the original game were treated to the road trip scene featuring Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken” playing out pretty much exactly as it did in the 2013 Naughty Dog title, there is a little bit of disappointment floating around regarding the absence of a scene which should have happened by this point in the show’s narrative.

It is, of course, the dreaded, and intense bloater pursuit sequence (with plenty of clickers to boot) in the basement of the hotel in Pittsburgh, after Joel falls down an elevator shaft and needs to start up a generator to find his way out. 

There are a few things to unpack here – for starters, the scene in which Joel and Ellie happen upon a swanky hotel already happened in episode two, ‘Infected’. Secondly, the game sequence in question happens before Joel and Ellie meet their captors at the end of this week’s episode. This seems to point toward the showrunners opting to skip over this side story. 

However, there could also be a reasonable explanation for the absence of the game’s most (perhaps out of place?) tense and harrowing sequence. After all, the show’s trailer revealed that we’ll be coming face to face with a bloater one way or another.

Perhaps the most likely explanation is that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann opted to sideline a bloater encounter until a more fitting moment in the series, seeing as this week’s episode gave a lot of focus to building the foundations of Joel and Ellie’s relationship. Thinking of things in TV terms, Joel running around in a dank basement with a Bloater for five to ten minutes would’ve been a bit of an odd sideshow. 

Still, hope is wearing thin after seeing all of the ingredients for the game’s most horrifying set piece combined – an elevator shaft, a wet basement, a generator, hordes of clickers, and a bloater. Perhaps the network thought it was just a bit too scary an inclusion for what is mostly a drama series. 

We’ll just have to wait and find out when The Last of Us returns to HBO Max this Friday, in a special time slot to dodge the Super Bowl.