Every episode on HBO The last of us has had something emotionally devastating (some good and bad) to sit down, but episode seven, “Abandoned,” will probably be one of the hardest to tackle a series of nine episodes. That’s because, as the title suggests, it looks like we’ll be experiencing the adaptation version of the first game Left behind DLC, and boy, is it going to be rough.
Spoilers for Left behind and will likely be followed by a seventh episode of the HBO series
What was Left behind regarding?
The Left behind DLC came out in 2014, a little less than a year after that The last of us launched in 2013. It tells two-sidedly a flashback and present story set before the winter part of the game. Unlike the majority of main game, you I play like Eli all the time. Flashback segments show her life before she was bitten and realized she was immune to the cordyceps fungus that had destroyed the rest of the world. It centers around her relationship with Riley, a friend who, like her, lives in Boston Quarantine Zone. In the show, Riley is represented by Euphoria actor Storm Reid, and the preview for the episode makes it look like it will be quite similar to the source material.
In the DLC, Riley takes Eli to an abandoned mall and manages to restore power to the building. The two spend a few hours going around various stores and talking about the time they’ve spent apart since Riley’s disappearance from boarding school. That seems to be the basic concept of the HBO adaptation too, though it looks like we’ll be diving deeper into Ellie’s life as a QZ student. The preview shows Ellie participating in a gym class getting into a fight and her bully mentioning “her friend” as the one who usually gets into fights. That friend is Riley, who sneaks back to school to take Ellie on a trip to the mall.
All of that being said, Ellie and Riley’s relationship is pretty conflicted, as you can see in the episode preview. Riley becomes part of the revolutionary group Firefly and knows she won’t be able to stay in Boston with Ellie. But based on what we already know about how Ellie got infected (she mentions checking out the mall in Boston QZ in episode 2), Ellie mentions that she’s had to hurt people before and that Riley is mentioned in past the first episode, it seemed like the show would lead to the same conclusion.
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What remains to be seen is whether the present-daily DLC segments where we see Ellie looking for medical supplies for Joel after the events of episode six, will also be part of Sunday’s episode. Given that the show seems open to condensing the more gameplay-oriented segments (like last week’s episode cutting the University of Eastern Colorado section short in a few closing scenes)the present-everyday mall robberies may be much less common.
Why was it Left behind so important to Eli and The last of us generally?
While Ellie’s infection is the big story of Left behind, her relationship with Riley was important for several reasons. It confirmed that Ellie is a lesbian, which was a huge revelation in 2014. At the time, there was some criticism about this reveal being moved to DLC, but Ellie’s relationship with Dina in The Last of Us Part II proved that this isn’t some character bucket list item for her, and that her identity as a queer woman is central to her story. But on top of one of the biggest games of its time, putting a lesbian protagonist front and center, Left behind remains one of the best experiences in The last of us‘ extended media. The writing of Eli and Riley’s relationship is decidedly youthful, flirtatious and sincere, marked contrast after a game in which the main relationship was between an old man and a child who did not see eye to eye until about their mid-dozen-or-so-performance hour. It has many of the same themes of loss and human connection at the end of days, but the tone is dramatically different because focus on teenage girls.
There’s also something tragic about watching these two young girls, born after the apocalypse, rummage through relics of life before the apocalypse without a frame of reference for what the culture was like before. There’s a scene where Ellie and Riley try on masks at a Halloween store and have zero context as to why anyone would buy these silly little costumes. This is something we see throughout the main game as Joel has to introduce Ellie to things like college and football because he was alive and well when those were cultural criteria. But while these scenes in Left behind are played for laughs as Ellie and Riley make their way through merchandise from long, long ago, there’s a tragic undercurrent that the main game can’t capture for long until Joel bursts in with an explanation.
These ideas are reviewed in The Last of Us Part II as Ellie takes center stage again and is often paired with characters like Dinah and Jesse who are also young enough to have no context for things like Pride flag or why a children’s bookstore would do well to use mushrooms as decoration in a world that will one day be overrun by an infectious fungus. It will be interesting to see how the show handles these ideas in the future episodes.
Left behind it was also one of the earliest industry-wide shifts to include slower surveys in largebudget action games after the success of the so-called ” since 2013.walking simulator, Gone Home. While Naughty Dog had contemplative moments in previous titles—many players of Uncharted 2 you were blown away by a quiet stretch where you’re just exploring a Tibetan village –these types of gameplay segments didn’t become a defining aspect of how they characterized characters until around this time. When Uncharted 4 They’ve come around, Naughty Dog has been open about that influence.
“We have not fulfilled 100 percent Gone Home,” said Josh Sher of Naughty Dog, after admitting this Uncharted as the series had overdone the action scenes. “And it’s much harder for us to do things like that. But when we can, we like people to just be able to walk around, look at things, just take in their environment — without being shot.”
Really, Left behind was one of the earliest examples of how The last of us excels most whenis Ellie’s story, not Joel’s. The further we get from this original game, the more I realize it feels like a prologue to something deeper, like Part II examines thThe events of the original game to explore themes of grief and forgiveness through the eyes of someone who has been deeply wronged by someone they love. It’s messed up, but Left behind really leans into those feelings of grief from the point of view of the character who has the most to lose in the end, and that’s part of the reason why it feels like such an essential part of The last of useven though it’s optional DLC.