How did The Last of Us change Ellie and Riley from the video game?

How was Riley and Ellie’s flashback different in the game?

The Left Behind game crosscuts between Ellie scouring the mall for supplies to help Joel and her time in the Boston mall with Riley. The TV show mostly did away with this, only returning to the present day storyline near the end of the episode. Instead, we get to see Ellie and Riley’s story in one uninterrupted chunk.

This allows the episode to spend more time developing Ellie, Riley and their relationship. While there are plenty of new parts that were added into the show, mainly revolving around Ellie and Riley debating the ethics of the Fireflies versus FEDRA, many conversations and scenes are lifted directly from the Left Behind expansion. In fact, there are probably more game references in “Left Behind” than any other episode of The Last of Us, such as:

• The Left Behind expansion flashback starts with her asleep in her room and Riley sneaking in and pretending to bite her like an infected (the foreshadowing). Ellie still shoves her to the ground and whips out her switchblade, but a lot of the dialogue here is new, as are the early scenes of Ellie getting into a fight at school and going to see the counselor.
• The FEDRA counselor says that if FEDRA goes down, everyone else in the QZ will starve or murder each other. That’s what happened in Kansas City, and fans of The Last of Us Part II know it’s also very relevant to the Washington Liberation Front.
• Ellie’s bedroom is packed with references. She has a tape from the band A-Ha, whose song “Take On Me” features in both the show and the games. She’s reading Savage Starlight comics. She has a Mortal Kombat II poster on her wall; in the game, she’s a fan of the Mortal Kombat knockoff The Turning, since they probably couldn’t get the rights to the real thing. She even has volume one of Will Livingston’s pun book!
• After Ellie and Riley head out to the mall, there are a couple of times Ellie has to either shake or hit her flashlight to get it working properly. In the game, there’s a mechanic that requires players to shake their controller to fix their flashlight.

• A lot of the set design is uncannily accurate to the game, such as the overgrown, multi-layered platform that Ellie and Riley have to climb down to get into the mall, the carousel, the Halloween store, and even some of the main sections of the mall set.
• One big change is that the show has made Ellie even more of a gun nut than she was in the game. In the episode, Ellie asks if she can hold Riley’s gun, which marks the third or fourth time in the series that she’s done something like that. It’s possible this is setting up a much darker path for Ellie in The Last of Us season 2.
• We mentioned the band A-Ha a second ago; their song “Take On Me” plays while Ellie and Riley are hanging out on an escalator. It also features during a moment in The Last of Us Part II which similarly focuses on Ellie’s love life. Expect to hear it again at some point in the show.
• In the show, Riley plans out what she and Ellie will do for their night out; she intends to show Ellie “the four wonders of the mall,” which is a new thing created for the show. But each of those wonders features in the game, just in a different order.
• There’s a Dawn of the Wolf poster in the mall! This was a fictional movie from the games, with plentiful signage throughout.
• The ambient music that plays in the background when Riley is leading Ellie to the carousel is extremely similar to the game. The music which plays after they realize they’ve been bitten is also straight out of the games.

• Riley giving Ellie the pun book is another great little detail from the game, although some (but not all) of the jokes are different.
• During the scene where Ellie is trying to guess what the gift is, she asks if it’s a dinosaur. This is a wonderful nod to The Last of Us Part II, where Ellie asks Joel that very same question when he’s trying to surprise her on her birthday. Ellie also has a dinosaur drawing in her room.
• When Ellie and Riley are in the photobooth they have to frantically decide which poses to strike together. This is taken directly the game as well. Some of those poses are pretty much exact replicas, like the scary one.
• In the game, Riley and Ellie have a water gun fight. That’s missing from the TV show.
• This brings us to the arcade, which is another setting from the game. In the video game, the arcade machines don’t work. Instead, Riley has Ellie close her eyes and then describes the fight they would have if the thing worked while Ellie pantomimes playing. Riley even relays the complicated button sequence for a Fatality, just like in the show. On the show Riley plays as Mileena instead of the made-up character Angel Knives from fictional game The Turning.

This brings us to the climactic moments of the episode, where Ellie and Riley dance on a lit-up display case and have their first kiss before being attacked by an infected. The masks they wear are straight out of the game. However, the song they’re dancing to (“I Got You Babe” by Etta James), most of the dialogue, and even the camera framing and dance moves are the same as the video games.