A-

In a bittersweet The Last Of Us, Ellie gets a fleeting taste of normal teen life

Neil Druckmann’s first solo script fills in a lot of emotional backstory

In a bittersweet The Last Of Us, Ellie gets a fleeting taste of normal teen life
Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

“Do you trust me with your life?” If someone asks that in The Last Of Us, as Riley (Storm Reid) does of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), it conveys a double message. It means, I will always protect you and also If you get infected, I will kill you. Both senses were acutely present in “Left Behind.” Not many episodes (or series) would evoke such different cultural touchstones for your humble Gen X recapper: the Richard Peck YA novel Secrets Of The Shopping Mall and George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead (both 1979). In the book, two kids hide out in a shopping center at night, whereas the classic movie depicts zombies swarming a mall.

Being a survival horror story, the Last Of Us resting vibe is fear, anger, and numb perseverance. However, its emotional stealth tactic is taking viewers very, very high in order to plunge them into the depths. Prime example being the arc of romantic joy to heart-rending sorrow that made “Long Long Time” so intense. “Left Behind” showed pre-Joel Ellie getting a fleeting taste of normal teen life—flirting, freedom, games—only to have it torn away by a clicker and the specter of death.

It was an important flashback episode (Neil Druckmann’s first solo script), filling in a lot of emotional backstory for Ellie, despite technical questions that required some suspension of disbelief (see Stray observations). Anchored by smooth chemistry between the sly, vibrant Reid and the cocksure Ramsey, the storytelling followed a familiar but still potent pattern: introduce character, flesh them out, then kill them (eventually).

Framing the tale is Ellie’s heroic attempt to save a gut-stabbed Joel, and his equally valiant command that she leave him. Bella has taken a bleeding Joel to a safe spot, the basement of a house in Eastern Colorado, where she tries to stop the flow from his puncture wound. Their horse chills in the living room, shaking snow off its head. As Ellie applies direct pressure, Joel rasps at her to leave, take the gun, go north to Tommy in Jackson. “Joel, shut the fuck up!” Ellie shouts, then wraps him in his coat and heads upstairs. Is Ellie abandoning her friend and protector? As she touches the doorknob we rewind several months, back to Boston.

The brief portrait of Ellie during her FEDRA schooldays in the Boston QZ establishes a few things we already knew: She has a hair-trigger temper, a violent streak, and little respect for authority. A fellow cadet (Ruby Lybbert) makes a sneering joke about Riley during a run, and Ellie puts the girl in the infirmary with 15 stitches. So it comes as a bit of a surprise when Ellie’s supervisor, Captain Kwong (Terry Chen), says she’s officer material. He seems like one of the saner and kinder people we’ve met in the series. “There’s a leader in you,” Kwong tells Ellie. “And one day it could be your turn.” (Let’s put a pin in that.)

Riley’s sneaky surprise visit to Ellie’s bedroom telegraphs a lot about their friendship: a prank that gets violent, resolved by jokes and a faint but unmistakable current of sexual tension. “I should stab you,” the pissed-off Ellie says (which for TLOU gamers is pure foreshadowing). Riley convinces her friend to skip out for the night. She throws clothes at Ellie to change. Ellie tells her to turn around. Riley, amused, remarks that Ellie’s always weird about that. Soon we learn that Riley ran away from military school and, after meeting Marlene, joined the Fireflies. Ellie is incredulous; they talked of liberating the Boston QZ, but the Fireflies are terrorists.

Riley leads Ellie hopping across Boston rooftops to an abandoned mall that everyone thinks is overrun with infecteds and therefore sealed off. Along the way, the girls rib each other and take tugs off a bottle of whiskey they find on a dead man, probably a suicide. Riley refers to FEDRA as “fascist dickbags” while Ellie calls Riley’s defense of Firefly bombings “propaganda bullshit.”

After descending into the Liberty Gardens mall from a hole in the roof, Riley explains that FEDRA connected the city block to the electrical grid, and the mall was part of that section. “Not that they know,” she adds. Riley guides Ellie to an upper level overlooking the mall concourse, and snaps on the power, revealing the many shops of yesteryear. Riley joins her at the railing and promises Ellie “the Four Wonders of the Mall.” Incredulous and flattered, Ellie asks, “You planned stuff?” Subtext: Is this a date?

The central section is charming as heck and—as we’ve come to expect—a prolonged period of mounting dread. Riley and Ellie explore the half-looted and decaying Liberty Gardens, and along the way we realize: Malls are metaphor machines. They contain everything you need in life, for a price. Food, sex, shelter, culture, and play—in other words, society.

Riley and Ellie’s activities resonate (joyfully and ominously) with the course their lives are taking. They laughingly ogle the Victoria’s Secret mannequins, ride the carousel, get their pictures taken in a photo booth, and battle with avatars in a video game. They are falling in love and indulging in a fantasy of escape. Little gestures like holding hands and lingering looks mark “Left Behind” as the YA counterpart of “Long Long Time.” Instead of two middle-aged men over years, it’s young, female, and brief.

At Raja’s Arcade the gals are basically in teenager heaven: an empty arcade with unlimited quarters. As they yell and laugh playing Mortal Kombat II, the camera dollies back away from them and (oh, no) into the concourse. We enter an American Girl doll store (bit heavy-handed) and finally come to rest on a clicker (Ian Rozylo) splayed on the floor. The noise wakes it up.

After the arcade, Riley brings Ellie to her camp in the back of a taco restaurant and presents her with a gift: No Pun Intended: Volume Too (which made its first appearance in the third episode to Joel’s horror). Ellie then finds some IEDs that Riley has been guarding for the Fireflies, and suddenly whipsaws to a feeling of betrayal. (Never underestimate how confused a teen struggling with their sexuality can be.)

Riley next drops a (metaphorical) bomb: “They’re sending me to a post in the Atlanta QZ. I asked if you could join.” Tonight is her last night in Boston. An enraged Ellie turns on her heel and leaves. She doesn’t get far before, crying, she turns to go back. The sound of a scream makes Ellie break into a run. But it’s only an automated pop-up scare in a Halloween novelty store. That was the Fifth Wonder of the Mall, Riley admits sheepishly. Ellie retrieves her pun book and plops down next to Riley.

“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of sudden, you’re alive. You give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever.” Thusly Ellie recaps their situation (and a good deal of Romeo And Juliet).

You might expect Ellie to impulsively agree to defect to the Fireflies—but she doesn’t. She’s been promised an officer’s stripes. Riley left because they had her guarding sewage cleaners. You could say their respective political stances are not yet fully formed or grounded in a set or moral values, just extensions of their youthful egos.

At any rate, girls, as the song goes, just wanna have fun. They put on Halloween masks (big bad wolf for Ellie, killer clown for Riley) and dance on the display cases to a funky cover of “I Got You, Babe.” (Riley really really planned this out to the lyrics, “And when I’m sad, you’re a clown / And if I get scared, you’re always around.”) Breathless and sweaty under their masks, they pull them off. “Don’t go,” Ellie begs in a quivering voice. Riley agrees. And they kiss.

This ain’t Friday The 13th, where teens are punished for their desires, but tropes gonna trope. The clicker hears its cue and barges in. The fight sequence that follows (bravo, director Liza Johnson) is the best close-combat, human-versus-infected sequences we’ve had: messy, down and dirty, with Ellie finally sinking her knife in the fungal baddie’s brain. Her jubilation turns to horror as she sees a bite on her arm. Riley shows the bite on her hand. They agree to wait it out, unwilling to do Bill-and-Frank murder-suicide thing. It really would be Romeo And Juliet—if we didn’t know Ellie is immune. The best night of her life turned into the worst.

Cut back to Joel shivering on the mattress. The flashback “happened” as Ellie’s hand was on the doorknob. She makes her decision. Ransacking the house for anything that could help Joel, she finds a needle and spool of thread. When Joel sees that she’s returned, he lets her take over. Ellie begins sewing up Joel’s wound. He passes out from the pain.

Stray observations

  • FEDRA has batteries, like the ones in Ellie’s Walkman. But would they still work? Energizer says Energizer® Ultimate Lithium™ lasts up to 20 years in storage.
  • An even more important power question: If FEDRA is hooking up parts of the Boston grid, wouldn’t they notice a massive surge in usage when Riley switched on the mall?
  • Ellie drinks from the dead guy’s bottle and jokes to Riley, “it’s great.” In “Kin,” Ellie got a nip from Joel’s flask and confirmed that booze tastes “gross.”
  • Items in Ellie’s bedroom: cassette tapes of A-ha’s greatest hits and Etta James; movie posters for Mortal Kombat II and Innerspace; Will Livingston’s No Pun Intended and a Savage Starlight comic.
  • Also from the Department of Suspended Disbelief: Surely the film in the photo booth would be completely useless, not simply faded?
  • Ramsey is giddily awestruck as, to “Take On Me,” she experiences “electric stairs.”
  • Captain Kwong provides the series’ first defense of FEDRA: Without them, civilians will murder and loot. After seeing the chaos in Kansas City, some might agree. But the KC FEDRA was notoriously violent and oppressive.
  • Movie playing in Liberty Gardens cinema: Dawn Of The Wolf, Part 2. An allusion to Ellie’s mask? To Dawn of the Dead? Also: handwritten sign in the box-office window has understatement of the century: “Back in 5 Min.”

 
Join the discussion...