Victoria's Secret, Pedro Pascal dying, first love and shattered dreams – recapping the seventh episode of 'The Last of Us'.
The seventh episode is not a continuation of Ellie and Joel's story, but a sad memory, a tale of how a gift can be a curse, and the best night of your life can turn into its, life's, end.
Previous recaps:
Warning: spoilers for the 7th episode of 'The Last of Us' follow
The episode begins with shocking content – Pedro Pascal is dying. None of us are prepared for this, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) isn't either – she's confused, scared, and so when Joel tells her to leave, she screams at him but obeys. But at the door, when it seems our favorite duo has split and all hopes are now on Pascal and Baby Yoda in the neighboring broadcast grid, the girl stops and falls into memories.
Ellie is running during a school PE class. She's stopped by a slightly older girl who starts bullying her – Ellie's friend, who used to protect her, has disappeared for weeks – so Ramsey's character seems like an easy target. Which, naturally, isn't the case, and after a fight, Ellie is sent to the principal's office, while the bully is taken to the infirmary for stitches. The moral of the story seems simple – don't mess with Bella Ramsey – but it's a bit more complicated: the teenager has broken rules several times recently and has already been in isolation twice, but she keeps going.
The principal, who sees Ellie as a smart girl, offers her a choice: continue like this or study well so that in the future, after assignment (this is an Agency school, and after it, people don't go to university but to work, wherever they're sent) she can become an Agency official and boss around people like that girl, rather than fighting them. The offer is tempting, and the prospect of institutional violence against people we dislike rarely leaves anyone indifferent, so Ellie agrees to join the local United Russia when she grows up, to maintain order and change the system from within (oh, Ellie).
But the schoolgirl's plans are not to come true – at night, that runaway friend (Storm Reid, brilliant) sneaks into her room (where, by the way, we see a tattered copy of the first volume of No Pun Intended), who, it turns out, has been hiding in the woods and has joined the Fireflies, i.e., joined the revolution against those Ellie decided to join. The girl is offended by the runaway – she left her alone without saying anything, without explaining, in short, acting like a pig. Nevertheless, when Riley (that's the name of the newly converted revolutionary) offers Ellie to run away for the night and spend this time together ('the best night of your life!'), she simply can't refuse.
During their nighttime wanderings, the teenagers discuss whose flashlight is better (the Fireflies' flashlight works without interruption, so 'plus one for the anarchists'), whether it's worth overthrowing even bad authority at the cost of even greater sacrifices, and whether the end justifies the means. Somewhere in the pitch darkness of an abandoned building, they stumble upon a man's body with expensive brandy – the body soon falls through due to a rotten ceiling, but the brandy goes into Ellie's backpack (disclaimer: we do not promote alcohol consumption under 18, and the girls will be punished later, the episode's plot is pedagogical). Soon the girls drink it – Riley grimaces, Ellie holds on – and continue discussing the revolution.
Riley tells how she was recruited (too easily) after she masterfully escaped from Agency soldiers and told a woman named Marlene (our acquaintance) that she doesn't like the current government. Ellie promotes the principal's theory that the system can be reformed from within, the main thing is to study well and obey orders, but everyone understands that the best night of your life can't pass with such dialogues, so the girls head to the mall.
At the mall, which Ellie initially didn't want to go to because there might be infected, Riley, to the song Take on Me, a hit by the band a-ha (the eighties! And music from the 80s on the radio meant bad news, so we're expecting trouble), promises to show her friend four wonders. But there turn out to be five wonders, since Ellie is already ecstatic on the escalator (a moving staircase!).
We waited long and finally got it! The first episode of 'The Last of Us' is out! How did it turn out? Did the creators manage to capture the spirit of the game and bring something new to the narrative? Let's figure it out together
Open material
The mall itself presents a strange picture – clothing and shoe boutiques are looted, but (surprisingly) soap and Victoria's Secret lingerie turned out to be unwanted by anyone. Regarding the latter, the girls have a funny dialogue: Riley says she can't imagine Ellie in something like that, and they laugh. But after taking the blow gracefully, Ramsey's character still lingers briefly at that boutique and, using the window as a mirror, fixes her hair.
So, the wonders: the second (after the escalator) is a children's carousel, on which the happy heroines spin to a softened arrangement of the song Just Like Heaven by the great band The Cure (also 80s, again expecting trouble). But the ride is old and quickly jams, so the slightly drunk teenagers continue discussing the revolution: Riley says the Fireflies have managed to bring order in other cities, Ellie suggests she return to the Agency school and also bring order, just without a revolution. But for Ellie, as a young leader, all roads are open, while her friend has already been assigned somewhere to the sewage services. So, in general, also dealing with crap, but clearly not in the sense Ellie suggests.
The third wonder is a photo booth, where the friends get a bit lost but still take some funny photos and move on to wonder number four, the grand one. Ellie and Riley end up in an arcade hall and play Mortal Kombat II (a poster of this game hangs in Ellie's room) almost until dawn, exploring the greatness of fatality. But while the girls are having fun, the camera smoothly and, it must be said, extremely ominously moves towards poorly lit rooms where at the end of the corridor lies an infected motionless, which, responding to noises, begins to stir.
Meanwhile, Ellie notices it's late and she needs to get back to the dorm, but Riley insists she see something else. And it was certainly worth seeing – the revolutionary leads her friend to her hideout and gives her No Pun Intended. Vol. 2 by Will Livingston (the punchlines from this masterpiece we enjoyed in the fourth episode and a bit in the sixth). Ellie is happy, they laugh together at these great very bad jokes, one of which we simply must quote: 'How does a computer get drunk? – Screenshots.' But the joy doesn't last long; Ellie looks at the closet and realizes that her friend is sitting in this mall to guard explosives. For Ramsey's character, this is unacceptable – she is ready to agree with her friend on the need to overcome authoritarianism but cannot support terrorist methods.
Riley also tells her friend that she is leaving forever for Atlanta on a Firefly mission, and this is their last night together. Ellie can't understand her friend and leaves in anger, but hears screams and runs back, only to find Riley unharmed in a Halloween prank store – the scream came from a toy, and that was the fifth wonder. They make up, dance in Halloween masks (if you wanted to see Ramsey in a scary wolf mask, here's your chance), and Riley tries to explain herself to her friend – she had a family, and she wants to feel again what it's like to be part of something, and the Fireflies, who need her, give her that feeling of being needed and belonging.
Ellie naturally notes that Riley is needed by her too, and certainly no less than by the Fireflies. She asks her friend to stay, and she, of course, agrees. The girls kiss (this is probably 18+, character 1, character 2, you get it, in short). Their idyll is interrupted by the intrusion of an awakened infected, a rather gruesome fight ensues, from which Ellie and Riley emerge victorious. But it's a Pyrrhic victory: the infected is killed, but it has wounded them, and now the girls are doomed to end their lives in agony, turning into zombies, or shoot themselves on the spot.
Knowing they don't have long anyway, Ellie and Riley decide not to speed up the process and spend the remaining time together. There is probably no sadder romantic trope in cinema than waiting for death together, but the creators of 'The Last of Us' do not intend to spare us. Although they do spare us, perhaps, by not showing the terrible fate that awaited Riley and how exactly Ellie, who is immune to the cordyceps infection, survived when her best friend turned into a zombie.
The end of the episode takes us to Ellie standing at the exit of the hut where another, it's no exaggeration to say, her closest person – Joel – is waiting for death. She can't leave, runs back in, frantically searches for thread and, apparently, a first aid kit. And when she finds thread, she begins to stitch up the wound of the suffering Joel. What will come of all this, we'll only find out in the next episode.
Impressions
This is a touching, beautiful, and sentimental episode, in which we see Ellie for the first time without her usual sarcasm and without the pain she carries throughout the series. The main thing the creators managed in this – some would say filler – episode is to show the tragedy of the survivor. Ellie's immunity is her curse; the living are always somewhat guilty before the dead, and this is shown with poignant accuracy.
Yes, at times the episode is overly straightforward and says a lot outright, but for the sheer poetry of the forever abandoned mall, many things can be overlooked. The citadel of late capitalism is abandoned forever, and why wear Victoria's Secret – that's the main secret of the post-apocalyptic era. One pity: in the scene where Riley and Ellie prepare to meet the end, they could have played Where is My Mind? – it's also from the eighties, after all, but that would probably have been too obvious.
The episode's soundtrack, composed of eighties songs, and moreover diegetic (meaning not only the audience but also the characters hear it), shows how people's tastes have changed in post-apocalyptic times: in the absence of new artists, everyone listens to old music, and the kind they personally like. Therefore, Ellie's musical tastes are somewhat chaotic and slightly anachronistic for her age. But perhaps the revival of bands like a-ha and The Cure is one of the few pluses of the apocalypse, as is the fact that in Ellie and Joel's world, there is no singer Shaman. Even, in general, enviable.
And lastly: Bella Ramsey is still a wonderful actress.
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