The Last of Us delves ever deeper into the idea of family in this episode. We continue on the theme of brothers, and also get back into parents & children with a heart-wrenching scene taken straight from the game. And that's before we get to the cliffhanger ending.

We open 3 months after episode 5 ended, with Joel and Ellie coming across the cabin of an elderly couple: Marlon (Graham Greene) and Florence (Elaine Miles). This was a quiet reunion of two notable actors from beloved 90's series “Northern Exposure.” Honestly, this double cameo is inspired casting and nothing short of delightful. We could happily watch them in a spinoff, but here they serve to tell Joel where he is and warn him about the danger of crossing the “River of Death”. (cue ominous music)

And what was at the“River of Death”? A full-on posse, complete with horses and an Infected-sniffing (and destroying) dog. It made for a very tense scene: would the dog sense that Ellie had been bitten? Joel can't even bear to look. Just having the tension break with Ellie's giggles as the dog starts licking her was a welcome moment.

A couple asides about the town/fort of Jackson:

• Maria (Rutina Wesley) quietly leaves Ellie a DivaCup. Aside from a tiny bit of product placement, this is the second time in the series that we see a nod to how menstruation is dealt with in the post-apocalyptic world. It's good to at least acknowledge this fact of life, which is usually ignored or treated as something disgusting in media.

• I got curious and dug around about the movie they're watching. It was “The Goodbye Girl,” which won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar for Best Actor. It's technically a Rom-Com, but it was likely chosen here because it's also about a man and a teenage girl who come to regard each other as father and daughter.

Joel and Tommy are finally reunited! More importantly, this time did get Joel to open up again a bit more. After initially lying to Tommy about Tess and Ellie, Joel finally tells him what's really going on. He's not only worried that he's becoming slower to respond as he ages; he's now having full-on debilitating panic attacks. Terrified that he'll be the cause of Ellie's death – and clearly still blaming himself for not being able to prevent Sarah's – Joel begs Tommy to take Ellie to the Firefly lab in his stead. This leads to a confrontation between Joel and Ellie that is pulled directly from a cut-scene in the game. This is a case where everyone felt that it needed to be more exactly from the game. Most of it actually was. Only smaller changes were brought in because Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay are not Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. But the lines, shots, and background were as exact to the game as they could get.

Okay, for once I'm genuinely talking about the game. This episode gave me a form of confirmation about possible endings. I don't assume to know where things are going. But with the introduction of Jackson the biggest piece for the end of the game is in place. Just where someone goes. I'm not going to say much more. Joel's injury is also changed. In-game he's injured on rebar after a fall. The location's the same and it definitely would do very comparable damage. In both cases, Joel collapses from the horse well after he and Ellie are presumably safe. But the situation remains the same. There is as much a threat of the wound directly killing Joel as anything that results from it. It does set things up for the next present day part, but first we'll be looking into what was Left Behind.