The Last of Us: Left Behind   Show Only 
February 27, 2023 5:02 AM - Season 1, Episode 7 - Subscribe

As Joel fights to survive, Ellie looks back on the night that changed everything.
posted by ellieBOA (41 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Last of Us Recap: The Best Night of Your Life [Vulture / Archive]
The Last of Us’s Storm Reid on Riley and Ellie’s ‘Unconditional and Sacrificial’ Love [Vulture / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 5:09 AM on February 27, 2023


So glad Joel was still with us in this episode! And my gaydar had been pinged in the episode where Tess asked Ellie if she’d been to the mall with a boyfriend so I loved this flashback!
posted by ellieBOA at 5:11 AM on February 27, 2023


I loved the tension in this episode. The attack had to happen at some point, and Riley had to die, and they were doing so many very noisy things that I was almost surprised it was only a single infected that got them.
It will be for the best to have Riley's demise offscreen, and I'm guessing it will be the Firefly who comes to check on her who does the deed, not Ellie. But the moment where said Firefly realizes Ellie's been bitten should be tense. I trust this show to make that scene.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:24 AM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]


The naivety and innocence of Ellie lingering over the Victoria's Secret display was gorgeous - it captured that teenage feeling of "Is that 'sexy'? Would I be 'sexy' if I wore that? Would the person I like think I was 'sexy'? Is that how it works? What does it feel like?"*

Frankly, Bella Ramsey is astonishing in this, and as tragic as it ended up being I'm glad those little moments of baby-queer awakening are in the world because of this show.

*That's a pretty unsophisticated word, I know, but when you're a teen your thinking about sex, love, and relationships isn't exactly nuanced. As my diary, aged 14, would attest...
posted by prismatic7 at 7:34 AM on February 27, 2023 [23 favorites]


It will be for the best to have Riley's demise offscreen, and I'm guessing it will be the Firefly who comes to check on her who does the deed, not Ellie.

My suspicion is that her early comment about having had to hurt someone before, and perhaps being more familiar with holding a gun than she initially seemed, is that she is the one who had to pull the trigger. I imagine there will be a future flashback confirming one way or the other, but it will probably be indirect, as is often the case in this show when a human kills another human.
posted by asnider at 8:12 AM on February 27, 2023 [7 favorites]


And, I hit publish too soon...

I also thought the attack of a single, lone mushroom man was odd: not so much that there was only one, but the fact that Riley had been at the mall previously and was even camping out there, but had not previous woken the thing up nor even realized it was there. It seems to me, if you're alone in an abandoned mall and have recently been recruited to a illegal, underground paramilitary organization, you'd check the whole place out as much as possible even just to stave off the boredom of being there all by yourself.

The tension was great, and having it happen any other way would probably have been less effective, but it still struck me as slightly implausible (albeit only for a moment and not enough to ruin my enjoyment).
posted by asnider at 8:17 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


I'm still trying to figure out my feelings about this one. The episode was sort of a distant cousin to that sequence in S3 (I think) of Stranger Things, where Sam takes Eleven to the shopping mall for the first time... but the unmitigated joy wasn't there, and couldn't be, of course, because we know how this had to end -- that the "best night of your life" was going to be the last best night of their lives.

And yet... knowing that this joy had an expiration date made it more beautiful, more poignant, for that very reason. Yet you as the viewer couldn't abandon yourself to the moment the way that Ellie and Riley did.

Don't get me wrong; it was yet another great hour or so of television. I loved it, but also hated it, knowing what would happen. Like I said, still trying to come to terms.
posted by martin q blank at 8:30 AM on February 27, 2023 [8 favorites]


My suspicion is that her early comment about having had to hurt someone before, and perhaps being more familiar with holding a gun than she initially seemed, is that she is the one who had to pull the trigger.

It also explains Ellie's behavior in the first episode — Marlene was coming for Riley in the morning and Ellie is wearing the same clothes as she was when Marlene had her chained-up to a radiator. I'm assuming that Marlene found Riley dead with a bullet wound to her forehead and Ellie with a fresh bite, but otherwise physically unharmed.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:39 AM on February 27, 2023 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure I need to see what happened after we leave Ellie & Riley in the mall this episode - I think the audience can fill in the blanks of what happens in the hours between where this ends and where we saw Ellie at the beginning of the show.

There were a few things that stood out as weird to me - mainly, the set dressers did a good job showing how beat up house exteriors had become, yet every fence seemed in really good shape; I'm also not sure the mall power would work that way - with everything lighting up. I'm also not sure that the arcade games would all be in working order after 20 years of dust and neglect. Also, why would they be so excited over Mortal Kombat II? How would they have known about it? Maybe there was a reference in an earlier episode I don't recall.

Outside of that, a nice little episode to give us Ellie's backstory, and they did a nice job of keeping me guessing on when the infected would show up.
posted by nubs at 9:02 AM on February 27, 2023 [5 favorites]


Over in the game included thread I mentioned that I told my wife (and got an eyeroll for it) - Do you know how hard it is to keep an arcade game working :)

Mortal Kombat II was at least a poster on Ellie's wall. My assumption is they read magazines, etc and learned about it that way.

I enjoyed the episode even if I spent the whole running time waiting for the other shoe to drop. Also glad that it wasn't a heroic last stand sort of "we're being attacked by a horde" situation and more what I imagine would happen - a small singular fuckup that changes everything.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:27 AM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]


Also, why would they be so excited over Mortal Kombat II? How would they have known about it?

How do kids know anything? It's unreal, man. When we were young it was all about the scary movies we weren't supposed to see; now it's all about the scary games they're not supposed to play, like FNAF and Poppy Playtime. So long as somebody somewhere has something that Totally Rules, some kids are going to catch on.

Anyway, this was an incredibly sweet and moving episode. prismatic7: you're absolutely right about that. I remember being her age and actually acquiring some lingerie, being sort of baffled at its relationship to my personal body. It doesn't make sense at all, and I think kids today are more likely to come to that conclusion.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:27 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]


There's a scene with Ellie and Joel in the gas station near the start of episode 3 where Ellie sees a broken Mortal Kombat game and gets all excited - "I had a friend who knew everything about this game" and lovingly describes a game character with monster teeth who eats you whole and barfs out your bones.

I guess the friend was Riley.
posted by mediareport at 4:18 PM on February 27, 2023 [9 favorites]


re:the lone mushroom

There was a shot earlier of a solitary dormant/ fallow mushroom. I assume the rest of the infected previously woke up and were dispatched, this is a bit like evolution where this individual is harder to awaken, but can still do, maybe only in response to greater stimuli or were more dormant from other reasons.
posted by porpoise at 4:44 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


Big echoes here of Dawn of the Dead; even more poignant because of how much is new to Ellie. Before she sees the carousel, the escalator is the most amazing thing that she's ever seen.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:19 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]


On the off chance that any of you were wondering if my stupid crush on Terry Chen has at all lessened in the years since I first saw him as Prax on The Expanse, this episode confirms for me that it has not.

Good golly, it has not.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:15 PM on February 27, 2023 [15 favorites]


prismatic7: such a great description of that scene, especially with the perspective of Ellie as a butch-of-center queer kid, where there’s probably a scoop of “I’m sure as shit never wearing that, but you talking about it has me feeling some kinda way”.
posted by Iteki at 10:38 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


Sneaker stores were a prime target for rioters in the 2011 London riots too - and that's without a zombie apocalypse.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:30 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Last of Us Director Liza Johnson on Crafting the Perfect Post-Apocalyptic Teen Mall Date in Episode 7 [TV Line]
posted by ellieBOA at 2:24 AM on February 28, 2023


The Last of Us Designer Cynthia Summers on Costumes for the End of the World [GQ]
posted by box at 6:03 AM on February 28, 2023


On the off chance that any of you were wondering if my stupid crush on Terry Chen has at all lessened in the years since I first saw him as Prax on The Expanse, this episode confirms for me that it has not.

That reminds me that I need to continue watching The Expanse. (I know Chen from Jessica Jones, in which he played a rather unlikeable character that was cut from the show sans explanation.) I also recognized Storm Reid from James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, where she played Bloodsport's daughter.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:45 AM on February 28, 2023


Archive link for the GQ article.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:12 AM on February 28, 2023


And linked in the article, which is worth a read: Here's Where to Buy Pedro Pascal's The Last Of Us Denim Shirt [GQ / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 8:20 AM on February 28, 2023


Here's where to buy his boots (though some of the most common sizes are sold out).
posted by box at 10:01 AM on February 28, 2023


There was a shot earlier of a solitary dormant/ fallow mushroom. I assume the rest of the infected previously woke up and were dispatched, this is a bit like evolution where this individual is harder to awaken, but can still do, maybe only in response to greater stimuli or were more dormant from other reasons.

That's a fair point, since the one that was stuck to the wall and woke up was presumably NOT the one that attacked. But still, it seems weird that they wouldn't have found the sleeper and made sure it was good and dead.
posted by asnider at 1:06 PM on February 28, 2023


Another episode where a character I just met has me all up in my feelings by the end of the episode.

One of Riley's last lines of dialogue was "Let's just keep going," which felt to me sort of like a shout out to the ending of Thelma and Louise from the writers.

I so want to ride a carousel with that version of Just Like Heaven playing right now.
posted by lord_wolf at 5:30 PM on February 28, 2023 [9 favorites]


Storm Reid plays Zendaya's sister in another HBO show, Euphoria. She doesn't have a lot of her own storylines in that show but she has quite a few super intense interactions with Zendaya's chaotic character. It looks and feels super scary on screen with so many emotions and pain. Storm holds her own with aplomb.
posted by mmascolino at 7:22 PM on February 28, 2023


Storm Reid plays Zendaya's sister in another HBO show, Euphoria.

Great casting because I thought Storm looked like Zendaya when I was watching this ep of TLOU.
posted by crossoverman at 7:58 PM on February 28, 2023


Fascinating details from the arcade cabinet wranglers about how they did the video-sync for filming (OLED screen in a custom cabinet with fake CRT effects) and why certain games are included (Ms Pacman wasn't available for license and other post-2000 games costs too much to secure the rights). They also added an important disclaimer that "No arcade games were harmed in the making of this show".

One of them also made the "studio cameras" for the 1960s opening. Again video sync would be too hard, so the large camera bodies have modern DSLR inside to match the FOV and focal length, with HDMI output to a picoprojector that is projecting on a curved piece of glass to look like a 60s CRT.
posted by autopilot at 5:47 AM on March 1, 2023 [10 favorites]


I kept hoping they'd turn around and put some quarters in that Joust cabinet that was right behind them but they never did.
posted by mittens at 11:51 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]


Also, why would they be so excited over Mortal Kombat II? How would they have known about it?

In the scene in Ellie's bedroom, there's a Mortal Kombat II poster above the desk, so they not only recognized the logo, but had also spent some time just sitting there discussing what it was.
posted by mikelieman at 3:31 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]


So here's the thing. When Marlene told Ellie that she had placed Ellie in the FEDRA school I assumed she was placed post bite. This episode shows me that Ellie was a FEDRA student pre-bite. That' means something. We haven't seen any method Marlene had to guess that Ellie was immune. Add to that FEDRA just happens to recruit her girl friend because "she's good at sneaking around" which doesn't make a lot of sense. The only value that young and green a recruit would be as a plant inside FEDRA but the Fireflies give her access to the mall and tell her they're sending her away to Atlanta. The only way I see to read this is if Marlene set the whole scenario up to screen for immune subjects. Ellie's naive but she's going to figure that out sooner or later. Why in the world Marlene run her mouth?
posted by rdr at 8:09 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]


That bothered me too, rdr, although I had assumed that she put Ellie in there as a very young child or even a baby. Either way, it still seems like a huge risk if M knows (or suspects) that Ellie is immune - if there's an accident and Ellie gets bit while being watched by FEDRA, then M has delivered a huge asset to the enemy. Here's my alternate: Marlene doesn't know that immunity is even a possibility, but she *did* know Ellie's mother, and promised to take care of Ellie if anything happened to her. Which it did, and Marlene had to find somewhere relatively safe to stash Ellie, which much as Marlene hated it, FEDRA was her least-bad option (Marlene has no idea that Tommy's town or similar exists).

THEN when Marlene comes into the mall to find out where Riley had got to, and saw that Ellie was a) there and b) bit, that promise to Ellie's mom bought Ellie the precious few seconds that she needed to tell Marlene that she was okay. I'm assuming Ellie doesn't know she's immune until Marlene tells her, but Ellie *does* know that she should be dead by now and she isn't. Marlene, who've we've already established is a decisive leader, figures out what she has and moves immediately to safeguard it.

(the whole "light up the mall!" bit was Riley being extra. If she'd known about it, Marlene would have run power to *one* and only one videogame and hung blackout curtains around it)
posted by Mogur at 4:05 AM on March 2, 2023 [2 favorites]


I haven't had much to say about this episode and have been wondering why. It was a decent episode and the look back at Eli was good. Bella Ramsay is obviously a good actress and it's a joy to see her on screen..

That said, it all seemed a bit too tropey. We leave the episode much as we entered, with Joel still injured and little movement on that important front.. Plus it felt like cordyceps of the week, with only one lone hunter coming after them. Shouldn't it be a horde or something more than one, what with how it can communicate vast distances?

These are minor notes, made noticeable by how little the plot moved forward. This has been the least interesting episode for me so far, because so little happened that wasn't expected. There were no surprises, but the some groundwork was laid for Eli's character that will pay off later.

Afterall, how did Riley's last few hours go, was Eli with her? Did she kill Riley or did she leave her? Answers for a later time, which will probably give more depth to her decision to stay with Joel.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:26 AM on March 2, 2023 [1 favorite]


I never would have guessed that a dumb video game would turn into excellent thoughtful TV with not one, but two compelling queer stories. I loved all the characterization of Ellie and Riley, their friendship, their goofy joy at the Five Wonders of the Mall, their awkward teenage crush backed with some much deeper emotional connection. Just a real heart-aching story.
posted by Nelson at 8:29 PM on March 2, 2023 [4 favorites]


Nelson, this tweet by a friend of mine is relevant to your interests!
posted by ellieBOA at 5:15 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]


Well, I mean without getting into game territory, it's really not a dumb video game, it's a strikingly good video game. But that gets into the question of whether video games can be art/literature which I firmly believe they can. Most are not, but the characterisation in this one (more than the story per se) and the performances from the original cast are top notch. I could well imagine having a thread of "game only" about each of the games when the season is finished.
posted by Iteki at 7:52 AM on March 3, 2023


But that gets into the question of whether video games can be art/literature which I firmly believe they can. Most are not...

True, but the same goes for any other form of entertainment, be it a book, a movie, a TV show or whatever. Only the best of the best in any medium rises to the condition of art/literature, so it's no disrespect to video games to say they seldom achieve it either. I've no doubt the best games are capable of it, though, and for all I know a few have already cleared that bar.
posted by Paul Slade at 9:13 AM on March 3, 2023


I admit my lazy crack about "dumb video game" isnt really appropriate to The Last of Us. It's widely scene as a landmark in storytelling in an FPS game with excellent writing and acting. (And ironically not very good gameplay, at least IMHO). They've done a great job turning it into a TV show. But the details of that are a discussion for the books-included threads.
posted by Nelson at 1:27 PM on March 3, 2023


Took me a moment to realize y'all weren't talking about Mortal Kombat 2.
posted by kokaku at 4:00 PM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]


Nice callback with Joel telling Ellie "Go to Tommy", like Bill told Frank "Go to Joel" when he got shot.
posted by Etrigan at 8:34 PM on March 4, 2023 [2 favorites]


Some background but not much plot advancement. A couple things irked me. Lighting up the mall, did she not look up when they were on the upper level? It’s got a huge glass skylight.

And sorry Ellie, a gaping, penetrating wound will not miraculously heal if you sew it up with a needle and thread. Well in regular tv land it might, but a show that has acknowledged expired gasoline and exhausted photo developer should do better.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:19 PM on January 12


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