How those flashbacks in The Last Of Us have become the show’s secret weapon

[Editor’s note: The following includes spoilers from the first season of The Last Of Us, up to and including episode seven.]

The most recent episode of The Last Of Us took us back in time to explore a defining moment in Ellie’s past. She found love, lost her best friend, and discovered she was immune to infection (although we didn’t get to see that part), all in one bittersweet night. It’s not the first time the show has delivered an emotional gut punch by playing with the timeline. Actually, the way it uses nonlinear storytelling to boost its main narrative is one of the most clever aspects of the HBO adaptation.

The series set up this recurring trend in the first half of the premiere, giving us two key flashbacks before moving into the Boston QZ in the show’s present day. The first, which was written for the show and doesn’t appear in the game, is a clip from a 1968 talk show that sets up the entire premise of the series. In the brief segment, a scientist, played by John Hannah, warns of the danger that a fungus could evolve to live inside human bodies and infect billions. The theory is based on real science, and when combined with an adaptation to a warming planet, it’s enough to make any viewer look at mushrooms with newfound suspicion. These first few minutes are stylistically different from everything else we’ll see in the show, and effectively knock the audience off balance before we even meet any of the show’s regular characters.

Immediately after that we fast-forward to Sarah, Joel, and Tommy on the day of the outbreak. The events that unfold here come directly from the game, and much of it happens in a similar way (almost shot for shot, in some instances). Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who co-created and directed the game) expanded on it significantly, though. They gave us Sarah’s normal daytime routine before everything went to hell, with a creeping sense of doom and a terrifying old lady as our first introduction to the infected. We’re meant to identify with Sarah, and then with Joel when she’s cruelly ripped away from him. This flashback is his defining moment—one that will affect every single relationship he has from this point on—so even though it’s a traumatic scene (the first of many to come), it’s important that we got to experience it along with him.

The well-crafted, standalone flashback in the second episode is another opportunity to reinforce the seriousness of the outbreak, and to signal that there’s no coming back from it. The opening of the episode takes us to Jakarta and introduces mycologist Ibu Ratna, a character we instantly connect with though we’ll likely never see her again. We tag along as she becomes the first to fully process the realization that humanity is doomed. We can tell by the rattling of her teacup—not to mention the fact that she tells her military escort to bomb the city—how dire the situation is. And when she says there’s no vaccine or cure, we’re inclined to believe her. It also highlights what makes Ellie and her immunity so special.

“Time washes clean love’s wounds unseen”

The above lyric, in case you didn’t recognize it, comes from the Linda Ronstadt song that inspired the title of episode three, “Long, Long Time.” The wounds in this instance are seen, as this episode brings us the love story of Bill and Frank. We get brief, bookended glimpses of Joel and Ellie, but most of the runtime is devoted to portraying Bill and Frank’s relationship through the years. The bridge between the two narratives is actually a ditch—it was (or will be, depending on your perspective) a dumping ground for the bodies of refugees lured from their homes by false promises of safety in the QZ. The transition from the remains of a rainbow-patterned blanket to that same blanket back when it was new and wrapped around a baby in its mother’s arms is frighteningly seamless.

There’s already been a lot written about Bill and Frank and the ways in which their relationship reflects Joel and Tess, and later on Joel and Ellie, so we won’t go into all of that here. What’s most notable is that it was the first indication of how far Mazin and Druckmann were willing to go off script from the source material, not just exploring new facets but drastically changing the fates of popular characters. The episode invokes the common zombie-story trope (and this is a zombie story, no matter what they want to call it) of depicting humans as the real threat in an apocalyptic world, but in Bill and Frank’s case, the greater adversary is time. By taking the time to show their full arc (something that couldn’t have been done in the game), the creators gave us a self-contained narrative that also told us something about the main characters we returned to at the end.

Informing the present through the past

We didn’t get any flashbacks in episode four, but the following one (which felt like the second of a two-parter) showed the end of the Kansas City resistance’s struggle to take back the QZ from FEDRA. We got to know Henry and Sam before they witnessed Joel and Ellie’s chaotic arrival in the city. Those little moments of the brothers surviving together deepen our connection to them, and makes what happens to them later on even more devastating. Their fate is similar in the game, but it hits harder in the show after we’ve spent more time getting to know them.

The flashbacks in episode six are more subtle, and echo something the show did in the first episode. They both put us inside Joel’s head as he recalls memories of Sarah, but the two memories are vastly different and allow us to chart his emotional progress through the season. In the premiere, he’s thrust back to the night of Sarah’s death when he, Tess, and Ellie are confronted by a FEDRA soldier as they’re leaving the Boston QZ. Months later in Jackson, Joel is once again reminded of her when he sees a girl with similar hair in the street, but this time we see his memories of happy Christmas before the outbreak. We know that Joel is still thinking about her (she’s never far from his mind), but he’s no longer focusing on the tragic parts of their story. He’s almost ready to open up again to a certain other person who’s fast becoming a daughter figure in his life.

Which brings us to “Left Behind” and the show’s most important flashback so far. Ellie’s heartbreaking final night with Riley, as adapted directly from the Last Of Us DLC also titled Left Behind, tells us so much about who she is and why she won’t leave Joel behind. Riley’s words about fighting for every second together have stuck with her all this time. Ellie is going to fight. Like all of the flashbacks in The Last Of Us so far, it gives us insights and new ways of thinking about the people in this world we wouldn’t otherwise have.

As TV fans know, the use of flashbacks in this way isn’t anything new. Shows like Lost, Orange Is The New Black, Arrow, This Is Us, and Person Of Interest regularly used flashbacks to great effect. The difference is that those shows were designed with a parallel structure from the start; it was always part of their DNA. Mazin and Druckmann could have taken the easy route and adapted The Last Of Us in a linear way—in keeping with the game’s structure—but they made the conscious choice to give us these snippets of the past to pull us further into the story than the game ever could. In TV you don’t have to worry about giving a player something to shoot every five minutes; you can take your time with the story, set things up, and break our hearts into even more pieces. We’re not sure whether we should be thanking or cursing the writers for that, but it sure is effective.