The Last of Us returned with another ringer this week. “Left Behind” delved into Ellie’s past, revealing how she and her best friend/first love Riley were bitten by an infected during a fateful night at an abandoned mall. Beyond just being an excellent hour of television, “Left Behind” was also an excellent adaptation of the “Left Behind” expansion to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us video game. Let’s break down how.
As always, there will be SPOILERS for the latest episode of The Last of Us ahead, as well as for the games.
Does Ellie save Joel in The Last of Us games?
Unlike most of the series, this episode doesn’t draw directly on 2013’s The Last of Us game, but rather on a standalone expansion called The Last of Us: Left Behind. Left Behind was released after the original game and explores what happens to Ellie immediately after Joel is laid out after taking a grievous wound at the University of Eastern Colorado. Just like in the episode, the bulk of the expansion is taken up by a flashback.
The only parts of the episode lifted right from the main game are the scenes with Joel and Ellie at the start and end. In the game, they hide out in a house just like the one they use in the show; in both version, Joel is confined to a mattress in the basement and their horse stays in the garage. Even the sled track outside the house is lifted from the games. That said, the TV dialogue between Joel and Ellie is all new, since in the game Joel remains unconscious for this section.
In The Last of Us game, the story jumps from Joel falling off the horse and passing out to him and Ellie holing up in a vacant house (though there are a few woodland scenes for Ellie in between). The Left Behind expansion fills in the blanks by adding an extra location before they arrive at the house. In the expansion, Ellie and Joel first take shelter in a mall, which leads to Ellie having flashbacks about her last night with Riley. This also explains how Ellie acquires more weapons and spends a little more time on the raiders who injured Joel, both of which are relevant to the next chapter of the main game.
Instead, the show just has Ellie search for supplies in the house, likely leaving further conflict with the raiders for next week. Ellie stitching up Joel’s wound is one of the final scenes from the Left Behind expansion, just like it’s the final scene in the episode.
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.
Does Riley die in The Last of Us game? (And does Ellie kill Riley?)
In both the game and the show, this beautiful moment leads to tragedy when the loud music Ellie and Riley are dancing to draws infected. In the game they’re attacked by a small group of infected which pursues them through the mall. Just as it seems Ellie and Riley are about to escape, Ellie slips and falls. Riley comes back for her, which leads to both of them being bitten.
In the show, they fight a single infected in the Halloween store. But the slow, belated realization that they’ve both been bitten, and their reaction to it, is pretty much the same in the show as it is in the game. We finally see the crosscutting from the Left Behind show up as the scene flashes back and forth between Ellie smashing things in the past and ransacking the house for supplies in the present.
Ellie and Riley’s final moments together are extremely faithful to the game. Most of that dialogue, including Riley’s iconic line that they could “just be all poetic and shit and lose [their] minds together” are from the game.
In both the game and television series, we don’t see what actually happens to Riley. The last time we see her is when she and Ellie decide to wait out the cordyceps infection rather than take their own lives. We get confirmation later on in the game that Riley eventually succumbed to the infection and turned; meanwhile, Ellie discovered she was immune.
The game never clarifies whether Ellie was forced to take Riley’s life or whether she left her behind as an infected. All we know, from a quote which crops up near the end of the story, is that in Ellie’s mind, Riley is dead. “Her name was Riley and she was the first to die,” Ellie eventually admits to Joel. But how exactly Riley died is one of The Last of Us’ enduring mysteries.
The Last of Us premieres new episodes Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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