As Ellie realizes towards the episode’s close, David is a full-on cannibal, and he’s tricking an entire town into being cannibals right along with him. In the game, the cannibals, along with David himself, are a bit more simplified than they are in the show; David never mentions his past, and we don’t see him interacting with the community and acting as a sort of preacher and teacher to the people he seems to lead. David and Ellie do bond over a fight with some infected Clickers in the game, which has the effect of making him seem more like an ally than he really is, but really, the largest differences arise from building David’s world just a bit more.

This means that some details are brought into sharper focus in the show than they were in the game. A perfect example is introduced — albeit indirectly — right at the beginning of the episode, when a young girl asks David when they can bury her late father (who, it turns out, Joel killed in a previous episode). When he tells her the ground is too cold and they’ll have to wait until spring, this explanation seems perfectly reasonable at face value… until you realize later that David used the girl’s father as meat, and probably just fed the man to his own grieving family. There’s a lot of horrifying behavior in “The Last of Us,” but even within this universe, David’s actions are deeply upsetting.

The Season 1 finale of “The Last of Us” airs at 9 p.m. EST on March 12, 2023.