The Last Of Us, ep 7 recap: Flashbacks reveal Ellie's origin story
Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid in The Last of Us.
It’s time for another flashback episode of the Last Of Us. In part three we tracked the love story of Bill and Frank, who found happiness amid the devastation of the cordyceps apocalypse. Now, we delve into the origin story of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), seemingly the only person in the world immune to the zombie fungoid plague.
But first, an update. Joel (Pedro Pascal) has survived the previous week’s encounter with an ambusher’s blade outside the abandoned Firefly lab at the university. Ellie drags him to a basement where he begs her to leave him She walks to the exit. You exhale: will she turn her back on Joel?
Then we rewind to Ellie before the bite that changed her life. She’s back in Boston and the Fedra HQ. Ellie is still Ellie – spitting nails and more than willing to punch back when someone crosses her.
She lashes out at a bully named Bethany who taunts Ellie over the absence of a pal. “You don't fight. Your friend fights,” Bethany jeers. “She's not here anymore, is she?” Bethany ends up in the infirmary requiring 15 stitches. And Ellie is dragged in front of the commanding officer at the Fedra facility.
He is upfront: Ellie has the smarts to make it as an officer. He reminds her, too, that Fedra aren’t the villain, here. “We're the only thing holding all this together,” he says. “If we go down, the people in the zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know.”
Ellie is left to contemplate those words – but not for too long. That night she is visited by her missing friend – a slightly older teen named Riley. To Ellie’s shock, Riley reveals she has joined the Fireflies – insurgents whom Fedra see as unreconstructed terrorists.
That bombshell is still sinking in when Riley invites Ellie to join her on a rooftop walk followed by a visit to an abandoned mall. It is inside the QZ – in theory, it should be free of Infected. What could go wrong?
At first, everything goes right. Ellie and Riley ride a carousel, which – as every carousel should – plays Just Like Heaven by The Cure. They mess about in a photo booth which somehow still worked after 20 years. In an arcade, they played Mortal Kombat. And then, in a Halloween store, they don rubber masks and dance on a counter.
Finally, Ellie takes off her mask. “Don’t go,” she said. Riley removes hers, too. They kiss.
But then a fairytale turns to nightmare. An infected lurches through and attacks Riley and Ellie. They fend him off – only for it to be revealed that both have been bitten. Ellie doesn’t know she is immune – so far as she is concerned it’s a death sentence. It certainly is for Riley.
Ellie is traumatised. Riley, somehow, is philosophical. “It's this way for everyone sooner or later,” she says. “Some of us just get there faster than others. But we don't quit, whether it's two minutes or two days.” They sit together waiting for the end.
Back in the present, Ellie has salvaged a needle and thread. She returns to Joel, who is surprised – but not THAT surprised – that she hasn’t abandoned him. Ellie lost Riley, one of the few people in the world who cared for her. She won’t let the same happen to Joel. We fade to black – and on to the next chapter.
