But while these scenes in Left Behind are played for laughs as Ellie and Riley fumble their way through merchandise from a time long, long ago, there’s a tragic undercurrent the main game can’t capture for long, as Joel swoops in with an explanation. It’s something we see throughout the main game, as Joel has to fill Ellie in on things like college and football because he was alive and well when those were cultural touchstones. There’s a scene where Ellie and Riley try on masks in a Halloween store and have zero context for why anyone would have bought these silly little costumes. There’s also something tragic about watching these two young girls who were born after the apocalypse rummage through relics of pre-apocalypse life without a frame of reference for what culture was like before. It has a lot of the same themes of loss and human connection during the end of days, but the tone is dramatically different by focusing on teenage girls. The writing of Ellie and Riley’s relationship is decidedly youthful, flirtatious, and heartfelt after coming off a game where the primary relationship was between an old man and a kid who don’t see eye-to-eye until about halfway through its dozen or so hour runtime. But on top of one of the biggest games of the time putting a lesbian protagonist front and centre, Left Behind remains one of the best experiences in The Last of Us’ expanded media. At the time, there was some criticism surrounding this reveal being relegated to DLC, but Ellie’s relationship with Dina in The Last of Us Part II proved this wasn’t some bullet point on a character sheet for her, and that her identity as a queer woman was central to her story. It confirmed Ellie was a lesbian, which was a huge revelation in 2014. While Ellie’s infection is the big story moment of Left Behind, her relationship with Riley was significant for a few reasons. Why was Left Behind so important to Ellie and The Last of Us as a whole? Given that the show seems open to condensing the more gameplay-centric segments like this past week’s episode shortening the University of Eastern Colorado section into a few concluding scenes, rather than giving it a whole episode, the present day mall looting might be much less prevalent. What remains to be seen is if the present day segments where we see Ellie looking for medical supplies for Joel after the events of episode six will also be part of Sunday’s episode. But based on what we already know about how Ellie got infected (she mentions she was exploring the mall at the Boston QZ in episode two), Ellie mentioning that she’s had to hurt people before, and that Riley is referred to in the past-tense in episode one, it sounds like the show is going to lead to the same conclusion. Riley becomes part of the Firefly revolutionary group, and knows she won’t be able to stay in Boston with Ellie. That friend is Riley, who sneaks back into the school to take Ellie out for a trip to the mall.Īll that being said, Ellie and Riley’s relationship is a pretty conflicted one, as you can see in the preview for the episode. The preview shows Ellie taking part in a gym class, getting into a fight, and her bully referencing “her friend” as the one who usually gets into fights. That seems to be the core concept of HBO’s adaptation, as well, though it looks like we’ll get a deeper dive into Ellie’s life as a student in the QZ. The two spend a few hours going through various stores and talking about the time they’ve spent apart after Riley disappeared from their boarding school. In the DLC, Riley takes Ellie to an abandoned mall and is able to restore the power to the building. In the show, Riley is portrayed by Euphoria actor Storm Reid, and the preview for the episode makes it seem like it’s going to be pretty similar to the source material. It also centres around her relationship with Riley, a friend who was part of the Boston quarantine zone with her. The flashback segments show her life before she was bitten and realised she was immune to the cordyceps fungus that has leveled the rest of the world. Unlike the main game, the player plays as Ellie the entire time rather than for smaller segments of the experience. It tells a dueling story of flashback and present day set before the game’s winter section. The Left Behind DLC came out in 2014 a little under a year after The Last of Us launched in 2013.
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