There's a moment in the latest episode of The Last of Us, "Feel Her Love," where Ellie (Bella Ramsey) picks up a guitar in an empty theater, and plays a song that her father Joel taught her, before he died. It's a wistful moment of remembrance that left everyone on set “damp eyed," as director Stephen Williams told Variety.
At the end of the episode, things are very different. Ellie tracks down Nora, one of the group who came to Jackson earlier in the season and killed Joel. Nora didn't do the deed herself; that would be Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), whom Ellie is still looking for. But Nora was complicit, which is enough for Ellie. Her eyes dead and blank, Ellie takes a metal rod and brutally beats Nora as the episode ends.
“She just loses all sense of logic and rationality and just has this single focus,” Ramsey said of Ellie in an interview that aired after the episode. “She remembers her face and remembers that day in the lodge with Joel, and I think she’s overpowered by her emotion and her anger. She knows that this is wrong, and she’s still choosing to engage.”
Mostly what I remember from the scene are Ellie's eyes, cold and empty. It's an extraordinary bit of acting from Bella Ramsey. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, co-creator Craig Mazin said he and editor Tim Good took to calling Ramsey "baby shark" on account of her eyes looking "dark and dead. There’s this ferocity there that Bella can create. This is so far from what we saw just an episode earlier with her and Dina celebrating love and new life.”
It feels like Ellie crosses a line here. Before, she could claim that she's just out to get justice for Joel. But what she does to Nora goes beyond justice into something like sadism. “Just as Abby started to slip away from her stated reasons, we can see Ellie slipping away from her stated reasons,” Mazin said. “This is no longer rational. She’s so far from that fake speech she delivered at the [Jackson town council] meeting. ‘Oh, this isn’t about vengeance, it’s about us and community.’ Absolutely not. This is going right back to what has always been there in Ellie, which is a rage that I don’t even think she fully understands herself.”
Ellie will slip further into darkness
Even Tati Gabrielle, who played Nora, felt "scared" of Bella Ramsey in that moment, even if they reverted to being their normal friendly self in between takes. "Seeing the look in Bella’s eyes of that conviction really did help me as Nora to be affected by the resolve that Ellie had," Gabrielle told Variety. "Knowing that Bella is so the opposite of that normally, it very much helped me find the place that I needed to be."
There are people trying to pull Ellie back from this edge. Dina (Isabela Merced) is definitely one of them. Just last episode, Dina and Ellie started a new romance, a very precious thing in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. And in the latest episode, their friend Jesse arrives from Jackson ready to bring them back. “He’s really pissed off that they’re there to begin with,” Young Mazino, who plays Jesse, told The Los Angeles Times. “He knows the stakes. He knows how serious it can get. There’s a lot of s— on his mind but … for him, it’s about getting everyone to safety, surviving and then the emotions come later. Then we can hash it out.”
But at this point, it's unclear whether anything can coax Ellie off the ledge. “She does turn away from Jesse and Dina," Craig Mazin said. "She does this horrible thing — the look on her face and the way she transforms in that scene. I was scared of her, and I didn’t like her, and I didn’t want her to do what she’s doing."
And it sounds like there are even darker days to come. “This is not the last time the season that Ellie is going to do something where we feel like, ‘We can’t go on that walk with you kid,” Mazin sad.
New episodes of The Last of Us air Sunday nights on HBO and Max.
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h/t GoldDerby