The Last of Us deviates from last week’s cliffhanger to give more insight into Ellie’s background in Episode 7, and adapts one of the most emotional stories from the video game.
Let’s recap what happened in The Last of Us episode 7, ‘Left Behind’, and point out a few of the easter eggs that we noticed.
This article contains full spoilers for The Last of Us TV show. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch episodes 1-7 over on Binge now.
The Last of Us episode 7: Plot recap
Last week we were left wondering whether Joel (Pedro Pascal) was going to survive a potentially fatal shiv to the gut he was given outside the university.
When we pick things up in episode 6 we find Ellie (Bella Ramsey) tending to Joel in the basement of a snow-coated suburban house. Things don’t look good. Joel implores Ellie to leave him and go back to Tommy.
Ellie considers this, covers Joel in a jacket and runs up the stairs to leave. As she reaches the door she hesitates.
Entering a flashback we find Ellie running laps with a group of other teenagers at FEDRA school. She’s listening to sombre songs on her Walkman until one of the other girls snatches the headphones from her head. The girl, Bethany, tells Ellie to keep up or they’ll be forced to do drills again. Ellie doesn’t want to fight about it and Bethany scoffs, reminding her that Ellie was never the fighter, she had a friend for that. A friend who isn’t here anymore.
How wrong she is because the next thing Bethany receives is a punch in the face from Ellie.
Ellie is planted in front of Captain Kwong’s desk, bearing a black eye. This isn’t Ellie’s first time here; she’s been in and out of “the hole” three times. Kwong tells her she has two paths ahead of her: she keeps acting like a grunt and she gets the life of a grunt, or she swallows her pride, follows the rules and becomes a FEDRA officer. It’s a leadership role that will allow her to tell the Bethanys of the world where to shove it. Ellie chooses the latter.
That night, after dark, someone sneaks into Ellie’s dorm room. Ellie has a blade at their throat before she realises it’s her best friend Riley (Storm Reid). Ellie is annoyed, Riley’s been gone for three weeks and she thought she was dead. Riley reveals she left to join the Fireflies.
Riley wants Ellie to come with her and have the best night of her life. Ellie says she can’t, she has military drills in the morning where FEDRA teaches them how to kill Fireflies. But eventually, she comes around.
They sneak out into the streets of the Boston quarantine zone. It’s clear the two have been best friends for a while. They rant about Bethany and share memories about a “7-Eleven” incident (more on that later).
Breaking into an abandoned building, they climb to the top and find a dead body, which Riley comments wasn’t there yesterday. The man seemingly killed himself, so Ellie and Riley relieve him of his leftover alcohol and take turns drinking it on the roof. They both find it disgusting.
Ellie questions Riley about the Fireflies. She reveals she snuck out one night but was spotted by a Firefly who was impressed with Riley’s stealth skills. They recruited her and even gave her a gun, which Ellie is very keen to get hands-on with. Riley is clearly against the fascist regime of FEDRA, but Ellie points out they’re responsible for holding society together in the QZ. It’s a sore point. The two best friends fall on opposite sides.
They continue their journey through the QZ, jumping across rooftops until they reach the abandoned mall that is said to be full of infected. But Riley reveals it’s actually cleared out and that there’s a secret way in. It even has power after FEDRA restored electricity to this part of town.
Inside the mall, Riley tells Ellie to go ahead on her own, where her first surprise awaits. As Ellie’s flashlight stutters out, Riley’s surprise kicks in and power returns to the mall. It lights up like a Christmas tree with neon lights.
To the tune of A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’, Riley takes Ellie on a tour of the “four wonders of the mall”.
As we know, Ellie is easily impressed by pre-outbreak things, so you can imagine her reaction when she sees a working escalator. The friends discuss how weird people were before the outbreak. They’d loot a mall to take sneakers rather than useful things like soap.
They arrive at the first wonder of the mall: a carousel. Drinking more of their stolen liquor, the friends are giddy with excitement as they hop on their plastic horses. Riley is soaking in the carousel lights but Ellie only has eyes for her.
Ellie still can’t understand why Riley left. Did she really join the Fireflies because she thought they’d have a chance at liberation? Riley argues the Fireflies have done it in other QZs, but Ellie points out they could change things as well, as the next generation of FEDRA. Riley admits that when she turned 17, Captain Kwong gave her sewage detail as her main assignment. She panicked and ran away.
Other wonders of the mall await. Ellie and Riley pull faces for a photo booth and then visit an arcade, or, the most beautiful place on Earth, as Ellie refers to it. The friends battle it out in rounds of Mortal Kombat II, where Riley proceeds to annihilate Ellie.
It’s the definition of a perfect night, but all is not well. Cutting away to the creepy doll store, we see an infected man suddenly wakes up.
Riley gives Ellie a gift – Volume 2 of No Pun Intended. They laugh their asses off at some, admittedly very funny, puns. Then Ellie discovers that Riley has been sleeping at the mall. She’s been posted there by the Fireflies to guard their stash of weapons. Ellie suddenly feels threatened. The bombs she’s been building are used on FEDRA soldiers.
Then Riley drops a different kind of bomb: she’s leaving Boston. The Fireflies are posting her in Atlanta and this is her last night in town. She planned this whole adventure so she could say goodbye to Ellie.
Ellie is heartbroken and storms out, but she only gets halfway out of the mall before she turns back.
She finds Riley in a Halloween store – the fourth wonder of the mall. The friends hash it out. Ellie thinks Riley is blindly joining a cause, but Riley reminds her that she misses the feeling of belonging that comes with family, and that’s what the Fireflies are to her. Her mind is made up and Ellie has to accept that.
They decide to finish off their night in style. They put on Halloween masks (a werewolf for Ellie and a clown for Riley), hook Ellie’s walkman up to the sound system and dance on the countertop. It’s a bittersweet moment that is too much for Ellie who removes her mask and begs Riley not to leave. When Riley says “okay,” Ellie kisses her. She quickly apologises and Riley asks “for what?”.
A sound of a door opening interrupts the moment.
A stalker explodes from behind the shelves. Ellie manages to stab it in the gut with her knife and Riley beats it with a baseball bat, but it’s stronger than both of them. After a struggle, Ellie manages to knife it through the brain.
Ellie looks down and finds she was bitten. Then Riley reveals she was too.
Ellie unleashes her anger at their situation, smashing everything in sight. The way Riley sees it they have two options. They take the easy way out (end their own lives) or they don’t give up and instead wait it out together. Crying and terrified, they hug each other.
Cutting back to the present timeline, Ellie stands at the door to the basement, then she makes a decision and begins rummaging through the drawers in the house. She finds a sewing needle and thread and uses them to stitch Joel’s wound. She’s not going to give up on him.
Easter eggs
The Last of Us episode 6 was based entirely on the video game’s DLC Left Behind. This means it was chock full of little easter eggs for fans of the games. Here are some we spotted:
- Ellie’s room in the FEDRA dormitory is filled with references to her character in the games. At first glance, we noticed lots of shout-outs to Ellie’s obsessions including dinosaur drawings, posters of the moon and other space-related items, Savage Starlight comics and a Mortal Kombat II poster. We see Will Livingston’s No Pun Intended Vol 1 and there’s even a picture of a giraffe (which holds a lot of significance for a future episode).
- After years of wondering, we finally get a clue as to how Ellie received that infamous eyebrow scar. Riley refers to a “7-Eleven situation” to which Ellie responds “No thanks, I’d prefer to keep my other eyebrow in one piece.” It’s not a lot to go off but it’s more than we’ve had in the last ten years.
- Ellie’s flashlight stuttering in the mall is a shout-out to a common gameplay element where you need to shake your controller to keep the light on.
- For all the Mortal Kombat II fans, Riley plays as Mileena and Ellie chooses Raiden.
- Episode 6 has another call-out to The Last of Us Part II this week by playing A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’, which is a major song in the second game.
- Everything from the photobooth to the music that plays in the Halloween store is translated exactly as it was from the DLC. But the episode is missing the water gun battle that Ellie and Riley have in the video game.
- This isn’t the only major difference between the show and the DLC. In Left Behind Ellie’s flashbacks to Riley are interspersed with scenes of her in the present timeline searching an abandoned mall for supplies to heal Joel’s wound. The show cuts out the second mall entirely, keeping the present timeline contained to the one house.
The Last of Us episode 7: Verdict
Episode 6 of The Last of Us fills in the blanks of Ellie’s backstory while bringing one of the most emotional and heartbreaking stories from the world of the games to life. The series did true justice to Ellie and Riley’s story, with spot-on performances from Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid, that added dimensionality to their relationship as the duo struggle with their commitment to opposing groups in the quarantine zone and to each other.
Just like the DLC, this is a truly special episode of The Last of Us and a standout of the entire series.
Read our weekly recaps: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5 | Episode 6
Stream The Last of Us on Binge.
Leave a Reply