Who Ambushed Joel and Ellie in ‘The Last of Us’ Episode 4?

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

The first three episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us went out of their way to introduce the audience to a number of the different threats that the show’s bleak, post-apocalyptic world has to offer.

The Last of Us premiere showed us the brutal, uncompromising power of one of the last bastions of government after the world ended, FEDRA. In the second episode, we got up close and personal with hosts afflicted with the cordyceps virus, and were introduced to late stage variants of the infected called ‘clickers.’ 

Finally, third episode ‘Long Long Time’ briefly touched on raiders and scavengers, illustrating the ‘dog eat dog’ prospect of encountering other survivors in the brutal wasteland. Well, this week on The Last of Us, we finally saw Ellie get up close and personal with other people who are not FEDRA soldiers as they drove through the city of Kansas. Who are they, exactly? 

Who attacked Joel and Ellie’s car in The Last of Us?

On their road trip to Wyoming, Joel and Ellie come across a blockade of cars that is preventing them from getting any closer to their destination, so they opt to take a quick detour through Kansas City in order to get back on the beaten path.

Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the pair get lost in the city streets and are happened upon by a group of bandits dead-set on robbing them, or worse. Joel and Ellie escape with their lives while killing off a couple of them, but are now being hunted by their buddies, while the duo hide out wherever they can. 

Who is this mob of scavengers? Well, that’s just it; they don’t have a cool name like FEDRA or The Fireflies, they are simply a large group of survivors who perhaps managed to overthrow the tyrannical FEDRA, threw them out of the Kansas City quarantine zone, and nowrun things their own way, including robbing passers by.

Perhaps you should refrain from reading past this point if you’re Googling away in the middle of The Last of Us episode four, seeing as this wasn’t the only mob that managed to get the drop on Joel and Ellie over the course of the ‘Please Hold My Hand’. Come back later if you’re after more answers.

Who snuck up on Joel and Ellie while they were sleeping?

Episode four of The Last of Us ended on more of a cliffhanger than we are used to, with Joel and Ellie tucked away in their sleeping bags in the middle of a city with glass shard alarms in place, while bandits are hell-bent on finding them. Joel is lulled into a false sense of security by Ellie’s rubbish (but brilliant) puns and drifts off to sleep.

‘Please Hold My Hand’ ends with a rude awakening, with the pair being held up at gunpoint by a pair of survivors. Fans of The Last of Us video game will know what happens next, but those who want to avoid spoilers should bail out on reading the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens next.

The two survivors may have once been affiliated with the Kansas bandits lead by Kathleen, but not anymore. The elder of the pair is Henry (Lamar Johnson) and the younger is Sam (Keivonn Woodard), with the former being the same Henry that Kathleen has been relentlessly hunting prior to Joel and Ellie’s arrival in the city. 

This means that Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam now find themselves with a common enemy. While we may have some tense gunpoint negotiations to start off next week’s episode of The Last of Us, hopefully things will resolve themselves amicably between the two parties, unless of course things wildly deviate from the source material.