This summary contains spoilers for episode seven of The last of us.
I hope you think my good editor, Brady, did a good job of recapping last week. The last of us episode while I was with Mario in Super Nintendo World. But am I surprised to learn that I’m gone for a minute and Joel ends up (possibly) dead?! A good cliffhanger, but I refuse to believe that HBO is going to Ned Stark on this show by killing Pedro Pascal.
When we meet up with our favorite duo, Joel is thankfully alive. But he’s fighting for his life in an abandoned basement. I guess everything is pretty much abandoned in this world, right? (Sorry. It’s been a minute since I was in this world of mushrooms, the apocalyptic, not the kingdom of Princess Peach, and I return to my The last of us home to find that Joel is fighting for his life. I’m not okay.) Joel’s injury presents a good opportunity for the series to spend some time telling the story solely from Ellie’s perspective, and that’s exactly what HBO planned for this week. I smell a flashback.
We start with Ellie at the Boston QZ military academy, where the corporal scolds her for misbehaving. She gets into so many fights—and is so defiant!—that even extreme disciplinary action has no effect on her. “I put you in the hole three times and it doesn’t work,” she tells him. Life sucks in pandemic boarding school, and we haven’t even touched on the whole cordyceps outbreak topic. Ellie has a friend, Riley, played by euphoriaIt’s Storm Reid. She left QZ to become one of the Fireflies, and she’s pretty much into it. Riley already cites her ideology as freedom fighters against the fascist “assholes” of PHAEDRA. Ellie and Riley escape in the middle of the night to explore a random building, which feels even less safe since, you know, this world is full of monsters. They find a dead body and steal the liquor. “Is that the first corpse you’ve seen?” Ellie asks. “No, my parents,” Riley replies. Oh! lack of party
Next, Riley wants to pay Ellie a surprise visit: the shuttered mall on the outskirts of town. (AKA Danger Land, USA) Ellie warns him that the building is full of infected, but Riley doesn’t believe her. liza, The last of us. We’ve been here before, and I know you’re about to fool us all. I guess your night of debauchery won’t end until something horrible happens. In a shocking scene, Riley turns on the lights in the mall, creating a romantic, neon-toned atmosphere, to the Bounty hunter either cyberpunk 2077. In fact, it looks like where the Joker and Harley Quinn would hang out in Gotham: experiencing spooky carnival dates and earning messy-looking stuffed animals with all their guts ripped out. There’s even a damaged photo booth and a large carousel that plays a toy-box piano version of The Church’s 1987 hit song “Under the Milky Way.” The last of usThe tendency to select good songs is one of the only things in this series that is alive and well.
Sadly, behind the arcade lurks one of the most fucked up looking mushroom monsters yet. She hits at the perfect time, just as the two girls are arguing about how Riley is leaving town and wants Ellie to come with her. After Ellie kisses her, the infected man appears and is immune to Riley’s gun. He tackles the two, but Ellie stabs him in the head with her knife. Both Ellie and Riley are pleading in the attack, but we know Ellie is immune while Riley presumably isn’t. The flashback ends there, with the audience being left to assume that things don’t end well for Riley. It marks another heartbreaking moment in the series, right at the height of Tess’s death. Henry and Sam! Frank and Bill. Still, it’s refreshing to see a story told entirely from Ellie’s point of view, showing us what her first and only love will be in this messy world.
Returning to Joel, Ellie finds a sewing needle and thread and he allows her to heal his wound. This time, she will save the person closest to her. For our sake, and theirs, I hope it works.
Josh Rosenberg is a Brooklyn-based entertainment writer who maintains a steady diet of one movie a day; Previous work of his can be found on CBR, Spin, Insider and on his personal blog at rosayblog.com.