11 details you may have missed on Sunday's episode of 'The Last of Us'

As they're siphoning gas from old cars, Ellie decides to pass some of the time by reading from a joke book she carries in her knapsack.

It's identical to one she carries in the game and pulls out periodically to tell Joel pun-related jokes.

Every joke Ellie tells Joel on Sunday's episode is featured in the game: 

"It doesn't matter how much you push the envelope. It'll still be stationary."
"What did the mermaid wear to her math class? An algae-bra."
"I stayed up all night wondering where the sun went and then it dawned on me."

"Alone and Forsaken" by Hank Williams plays.

In the game, Ellie also gives Joel a Hank Williams cassette tape to play. However, the first song to play in the truck is, fittingly, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." "Alone and Forsaken" is the second song to play in the car and can also be heard in the background as Joel is fighting off some raiders after crashing the truck a few moments later in the game.

The tape is from a three-cassette collection of Hank Williams' singles. Though both tracks appear on cassette three, those two tracks don't play back-to-back.

On the show, Ellie finds one of Bill and Frank's magazines in the truck. When she discovers some pages stuck together, implying a sexual act, Ellie asks Joel why the pages won't come apart.

After making Joel uncomfortable, Ellie tells Joel she's just messing around. She's old enough to know the answer.

The magazine seen on Sunday's episode is the exact same one from the game.

Ellie's remarks about Bill's magazine are also present in the game. Personally, after such a touching episode reclaiming Bill and Frank's relationship on the TV series, I was hoping the show cut this part from the game out of the show. In the game, the lewd joke was meant as a subtle hint toward Bill's sexuality, which the game never directly stated.

Since it was addressed respectfully on episode three, this same commentary seemed unnecessary.

This was a near shot-for-shot recreation of the scene in the game.

Some fans may have recognized that the family sign belongs to Love's, a family-owned chain of truck stops across the United States. It seemed purposeful that the camera focused on a sign that once read "Love's" decayed almost past recognition as Hank Williams' voice is heard singing "Alone and Forsaken," a song about a love that has ran its course.

We hear the lyrics:

"The darkness is falling, the sky has turned gray. A hound in the distance is starting to bey I wonder, I wonder what she's thinking of. Forsaken, forgotten without any love."

The song ends on the words "without any love."

The weathered sign may suggest that love is rare and tough to find 20 years into the apocalypse. A few minutes later, Joel tells Ellie they won't light a campfire for the evening because there's a chance they could run into people with intentions worse than simply robbing them.

It's a reminder of how special Bill and Frank's love story was on last week's episode.

Joel says his brother's in Cody, Wyoming.

On Sunday's episode, Ellie and Joel get ambushed in Kansas City, which is located on the border of Kansas and Missouri. In the game, the pair lose Bill's truck in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

On HBO's "TLOU" podcast, coshowrunner Craig Mazin said they chose Kansas City because the location of Pittsburgh wasn't necessarily important to the story and it would've been tougher to create that city given the area where they were filming.

"We had certain environments we knew we could shoot in, because we were shooting in Alberta, largely around Calgary, a little bit in Edmonton, and it literally looked closer to Kansas City," Mazin said. "It literally, I think, came down to that. It was just harder to manufacture Pittsburgh in that place."

Coshowrunner Neil Druckmann said Kansas City was also a logistical decision due to its distance from Tommy and where they wanted Ellie and Joel to be on their journey at a certain time of the year.

"What city you're in is not important," Druckmann said, referring to this as a "superficial change." "What happened to the characters, and the choices they make in that city, that's what's really important."

According to Google maps, at the end of Sunday's episode, Ellie and Joel are 975 miles (or about a 13-day walk) southeast of their destination.

On the show, Joel and Ellie have a cinder block dropped on their truck and run over spikes before crashing through a storefront. Ellie climbs through a hole in a wall and Joel kills two people.

In the game, a bus rolls down a hill and causes the truck to crash into the store. A man then pulls Ellie violently out of a truck as another one holds Joel's neck above broken glass. Joel, who has more superhuman strength in the game, kills a total of nine people.

Ellie gets more agency on the show by helping Joel when a man pins him down by shooting the man in the back. A similar scene plays out later in the game when Ellie shoots a man in the head to save Joel from drowning.

On the show, Kathleen leads a group of survivors who have overtaken the military group FEDRA, or Federal Disaster Response Agency, in Kansas City.

On the show, Pierce plays Kathleen's right-hand man, Perry.

On the show, Joel simply refuses to respond, creating a quiet moment where Ellie appears to momentarily consider how dangerous he may be before continuing to follow him up a flight of stairs.

In the game, Joel, unsure how to respond, grunts, "Hmm." Ellie, more playful in the game, eagerly says, "I'll take that as a yes."

Joel tells her to take that however she wants.

Though Joel's the series' protagonist, we're never supposed to necessarily think he's a good guy.

Since the show's premiere, he's presented himself as selfish. He's someone who will look out for himself and his own before others. He refused to help people on the side of the road in Texas and, minutes later, encouraged his brother to drive through innocent people just so they could flee town alive. That's something viewers should remember as we move through season one.

—Lotte Kestner (@lottekestner) February 5, 2023

Singer and songwriter Lotte Kestner's acoustic cover of New Order's "True Faith" can be heard over the credits to episode four. 

A trailer for the game's sequel, "The Last of Us Part II," featured its own cover of "True Faith" that sounded very similar to Kestner's. 

When Kestner pointed out the similarities on Twitter in a now-deleted tweet, Druckmann said their version of "True Faith" was inspired by Kestner's "haunting cover" of the song.

"Due to an oversight on our end, she wasn't credited as intended. Our deep apologies -- we are rectifying this ASAP," Druckmann tweeted at the time.

It seems like the series wanted to find a way to further acknowledge Kestner by including her in the live-action adaptation of the series.