When his 18-year-old daughter, Francine, first started losing weight, in the fall of 2018, Kenneth initially thought it was a good thing. Francine had always been artistic but never particularly athletic, which puzzled her father. Kenneth, now 47, is a runner with dozens of half-marathons and even one ultramarathon under his belt.
When Francine started to express an interest in exercising and joining Kenneth’s wife, Tracy, for workouts, Kenneth and Tracy thought it was a positive sign. When Francine announced that she was vegan, they rolled with it.
Then Francine’s hair started to fall out.
It took more than a year of trying different therapists, while Francine got progressively worse, for Kenneth and Tracy to grasp just how sick their daughter was. (I’ve changed the family members’ names to protect their privacy.) Kenneth started to add up exactly what his daughter was eating in a day and realized it wasn’t nearly enough. He also suspected that Francine had learned some of her new eating habits—such as replacing breakfast with bulletproof coffee—from watching him.
Around the same time that Francine began struggling, Kenneth was following his own intense diet while on a quest to improve his running time. When Francine asked about his eating, he explained what he was doing and why. “I think I was probably malnourished myself, and in that place where you can’t help but obsess about food and talk about it constantly,” he says. Kenneth thought that he was modeling healthy eating and exercise habits to his daughter. “I just had no idea that the stuff she was asking me was really her disease asking,” he says.
For decades, researchers trying to understand the role of a child’s family in eating-disorder development looked almost exclusively to mothers. “The literature on fathers’ child feeding practices is scant,” observed the authors of a scientific-review paper on the topic published in 2014. They could find only 20 studies that included fathers in a meaningful way. “The research that has included fathers has focused on fathers who are part of a family in which the mother has an [eating disorder], rather than examining fathers’ unique contributions,” wrote two Yale researchers in their analysis for a 2016 study. More studies on parents and eating habits have been published since that 2014 review, but the gap between research on mothers and research on fathers remains wide.
Scientists and the public alike have long ignored the idea that a father might also struggle with dieting or disordered eating, despite the fact that, according to a 2008 estimate from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), roughly 1 million American men live with eating disorders. Men aren’t supposed to obsess over their weight. Men—especially straight, cisgender, white, thin men—aren’t defined by their appearance to the same degree that women and other marginalized people tend to be. And that might explain why Americans talk much less about how fathers’ eating habits and beliefs around health and weight can influence their children than, say, the motivations of almond moms.
One 2018 study of 658 parents by Yale researchers found that although nearly everyone (93 percent) demonstrated some sort of weight bias, fathers, as well as parents of any gender with the perceived privilege of “healthy weight,” were more likely than mothers to agree with negative statements such as “Severely obese children are unusually untidy” (findings on the differences between mothers’ and fathers’ food parenting vary). Other research concluded that fathers with more education and a higher family income were more likely than other fathers to endorse fat stereotypes. And kids absorb this stigma: Adolescents were more likely to diet and binge eat if their parents talked about weight, according to a 2013 survey published in JAMA Pediatrics of 2,793 kids.
Many experts say that the NIMH’s figure on the number of men living with eating disorders is likely an underestimate: Men don’t tend to disclose their disordered-eating behaviors, and health-care providers don’t think to screen men for symptoms. “Men tell me they don’t have a script for how to talk about diet culture,” Jaclyn Siegel, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, told me in 2020 when I was reporting a story on the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on men’s dieting habits. “But there’s also no script for men to express their own concerns or to seek help, because it isn’t seen as normative for men to develop eating disorders or body-image dissatisfaction.”
What happens instead is a normalization and even a glamorization of men’s relationship with food and exercise. This rests on a common cultural misconception that men not only don’t get eating disorders; they don’t get emotional about food or bodies, period. Many dads go on diets, but far fewer actually call it that. Instead, like Kenneth, dieting dads might get super into long-distance running, or CrossFit, or bodybuilding, or Ironman training. They may become passionate about vegetable gardening; Kenneth and his family used to run an organic farm, and he says his passion for farming led him to preach about “good” and “bad” foods. All of these pursuits can be motivated by an interest in health and wellness—even science, the environment, social justice. But they can also be motivated by a fear of becoming or being perceived as fat, reflecting a broader bias against heavy people. “I used to do a lot of banter about ‘Look at that person; she’s fat,’” Kenneth says. “Or I’d say to the kids, ‘Hey, don’t eat that pizza,’ or ‘Don’t eat too many desserts; that will make you fat.’”
Some research suggests that dads can affect their kids’ relationship with food as much as or perhaps even more than moms do. Findings vary, underscoring the need for more research, but in a 2014 study of more than 2,700 kids, girls whose fathers reported binge eating were 3.38 times more likely to report binge eating themselves, although there was no correlation with mothers’ eating. (The researchers found no relationship between boys’ bingeing and that of parents.) Even if they don’t actively model disordered-eating habits, fathers may withdraw from family meals altogether—something many men can do more easily than women because of societal gender norms around who prepares food.
The little research we have on how dads influence their kids’ relationship with food and their body suggests that dads might be slightly more prone than moms to engage in what researchers call “pressure-to-eat behaviors”—pushing children to eat (or not eat) certain foods in certain amounts. Kyle Ganson, a clinical social worker at the University of Toronto who studies eating disorders in boys and men, speculates that fathers’ pressures on sons may relate to a desire for them to perform athletically in specific ways. “If the dad is pushing the kid in a certain direction with sports, or if the dad is their coach and heavily influencing their exercise plans, that can lead to disordered eating,” he says.
On the flip side, fathers of kids with eating disorders may resort to exerting pressure because they are confused by a child’s inability to comply. “Anecdotally, the phrase I often hear from male caregivers is ‘Why can’t they just eat?’ They may also be more likely to think their child needs to ‘grow up’ or ‘deal with it,’” Ganson says. “Female caregivers tend to be doing a lot of the emotional processing around the eating disorder, while fathers are much more driven by logistics: ‘How do we move to the next phase of treatment? When do we see results?’” And when progress isn’t evident—as it often isn’t in the circular recovery process of eating disorders—dads are more likely to disconnect. “This isn’t really my territory” is another comment Ganson and his colleagues often hear from dads.
This is not to say that men can’t engage emotionally with a sick child, or that managing treatment logistics isn’t valuable. But helping and connecting with a child in eating-disorder recovery requires dads to be vulnerable and humble, skills that they aren’t always asked to employ or that haven’t been modeled for them. And the conditioning to push away feelings and move toward action mirrors the “No pain, no gain” messaging of much of male-diet culture.
Kenneth is now striving for acceptance as he and Tracy support Francine through her eating-disorder recovery. Soon after Kenneth’s realization of just how sick Francine had become, she was admitted to an inpatient recovery program for nine days. When she came home, Kenneth and Tracy began following a common eating-disorder-treatment protocol known as family-based treatment, where parents take full responsibility for feeding a child who can no longer hear hunger cues or make decisions around food, planning and preparing every single meal and snack and monitoring every bite.
There were many nights when Francine cried at the table. Tracy bore the brunt of making the food and talking Francine through the process of eating. “A lot of nights, I could see, she just could not eat unless Mom was there to support her,” Kenneth says. Those were the days he felt most helpless, just as the eating-disorder literature has so often painted fathers. But he began to look for ways to contribute, getting out board games for the family to play after dinner, when Francine had finished eating but still needed some help and distraction from the eating-disorder voice in her head.
Just being there—without judgment, without trying to fix it—made him reconsider what it meant to be Francine’s dad. “I still believe it’s my job to be the protector of my family,” Kenneth says, “but I’ve had to sort of rethink what that looks like.”
With just one episode to go, we’re nearing the end of Joel and Ellie’s long journey together. This week’s entry, “When We Are in Need,” corresponds with the game’s winter section, though the HBO adaptation isn’t using the same seasonal structure of the game, and here in TV land, it’s been winter for a while.
When I first played The Last of Us ten years ago, in some ways the winter chapter felt to me like overkill, the game leaning hard into desperation and depravity just to be as gritty and bleak as it could, in order to help sell itself as a “mature,” serious game. “Enough, I get it. Humanity is awful and given half a chance, we’ll all do grotesque, morally reprehensible things.” Replaying the game now alongside the show, the purpose of the chapter within the narrative is clearer to me. Of course it’s common for stories to put characters at their most hopeless and desperate points right before the resolution, but the way The Last of Us does it, separating the characters while both are in dire straits, drives home the importance of their bond to each other. It also, importantly, illustrates that while Joel may have started out as Ellie’s protector on this journey, he now needs her at least as much as she needs him. Let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode, and its similarities to the same stretch of the game.
Ellie meets David in the show vs. the game
This chapter has its own villain in the form of David, a preacher and a predator whose flock reside in the resort town of Silver Lake and are suffering through a particularly harsh winter. In terms of dialogue, it’s one of the show’s more faithful episodes. In fact, it’s almost as if writer Craig Mazin’s screenplay for the episode just took this section of the game, cut out most of the combat sequences, and from there, sought to embellish the dialogue and build on what the game reveals to us about David and his congregation. It continues to be interesting to me how, in the game, combat is perhaps prioritized as the most important element, while in adapting the game to a series, it becomes the least important.
Screenshot: HBO
The winter chapter immediately distinguishes itself from the rest of the game by having you play as Ellie for the first time. (Today, playing through the story in order, you’d play the Left Behind DLC before this, but when the game came out in 2013, this was a surprising shift in perspective.) Desperate for food, Ellie hunts a deer she spots in the woods with her bow and arrows. Nicked and bleeding from multiple arrows, the deer runs, ultimately collapsing, but when Ellie finds it, two others, David and James, have seen it too. Just as in the game, David (voiced here by Nolan North, who plays Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games) makes a deal with Ellie: penicillin for some of the deer meat.
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Screenshot: Naughty Dog
What’s unique to the game is that while waiting for James to return with the medicine, you have a multi-stage combat encounter fighting alongside David, involving a few standoffs against multiple waves of infected and a climactic battle with a bloater. Through it all, you might think that David is actually a new friend. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and fighting alongside someone can be an experience that develops trust. Naughty Dog knows how to use combat as a tool for relationship-building, and here, they build up your trust in David a bit just to pull out the rug from under you and remind you that, in this world, the trust between Joel and Ellie is a rare and precious thing.
In the show, by the time Ellie first encounters David (played here by actor Scott Shepherd), we already have our reasons to be suspicious of him. The episode begins with him reading scripture to his flock, in the old steakhouse he’s converted into a church and town hall of sorts, a place where the abundant food of the pre-cordyceps past is sharply contrasted with the desperate circumstances of the present. (It’s an important location in the game as well, one you come to later, and the sign reading WHEN WE ARE IN NEED HE SHALL PROVIDE is a detail straight from the game.) The faces of the congregation’s members are lean and hardened, telling us much at a glance about what a difficult winter they’re having. A grieving daughter asks when her father can be buried and David says that it’s too cold to do so now, they’ll have to wait until spring. And outside after the service, David chides James (played by Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the games) for his “doubt,” giving off the sense of a man who very much wants to maintain control.
Screenshot: HBO
Notably, in the show, Ellie hunts the deer not with a bow and arrows but with the sniper rifle, recalling in our memories the moment toward the end of episode six when Joel tried to teach her how to use it. When she takes a moment to focus with the deer in her sights, we can sense her recalling Joel’s words and trying to draw on what he taught her.
Both the game and the show have Ellie talking tough when she sees David and James near the deer she killed, with her calling James “buddy boy” and saying that if David tries anything, she’ll “put one right between your eyes.” The show, however, foregrounds David’s role as a preacher in their first conversation far more than the game does. In fact, perhaps the only real hint David gives off in the game that he has certain rigid moral standards might come when, after Ellie swears, he absurdly says, in the midst of a life-and-death battle against waves of infected, that she should watch her language. We definitely pick up on the fact that he’s a preacher eventually, but there’s no real character development done around it.
In the show, however, Ellie asks if David’s “hunger club” is some sort of cult, and he turns on the folksy charm, saying “Well, you sorta kinda got me there,” but saying that what he preaches is “pretty standard Bible stuff.” When Ellie wonders how he can still “believe that stuff” after everything that’s happened, he tells her it was actually after the world ended that he started to believe. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says in both the show and the game, and it’s here that whatever sense of trust you might have felt for David while fighting alongside him likely evaporates. His seeming friendliness reveals itself to be a guise for something more threatening, and he tells her that a “crazy man” killed someone in their flock recently at the university. A crazy man who just happens to be traveling with a “little girl.”
Ellie now understands that David is a threat if she didn’t before, but David lets her ride off with the medicine, telling her that there’s room for her in his group, that he can protect her. It’s almost as if he has some gross designs of his own for her.
Dinnertime at the steakhouse
One of the luxuries of HBO’s adaptation has always been that it can leave the perspective of Joel and Ellie behind entirely when it wants to, and here, we get more development of David’s congregation. In the kitchen, members of the flock lament their dwindling food supplies, and when a man brings in some fresh meat, one of them asks, “What is it?” “Venison,” he replies hesitantly, in a way that may have you asking, “Is it though?” Nonetheless, they put it into the evening’s soup.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David and James haul the deer Ellie killed into the restaurant, but the room still seems quiet. Sensing what the tension is about, David tells them that yes, it’s true, “we found the girl who was with the man who took Alec from us.” Come morning, he says, they’ll track her trail, and “bring that man to justice.” The grieving girl from the opening scene raises her voice, saying they should kill both of them. David walks over and, in a moment that shows us just what kind of congregation leader he is, backhands her across the face. Things get worse still a moment later when he tells her that although she may think she doesn’t have a father anymore, “the truth is, Hannah, you always have a father. And you will show him respect when he’s speaking.” Kenneth is not wrong when he saysthe show makes David even more disturbing than he already was.
The scene ends with shots of these hungry people eating their dinners, the thought lingering in our minds that it may be Alec they’re eating.
Hungry…for vengeance!
The next morning, David’s men do indeed come a-huntin’. In both the show and the game, Ellie does the only thing she can think to do: try leading the men away from Joel, who she’s injected with penicillin but who is still hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the show, she presses a knife into his hands and tells him to kill anyone who comes into the house, though he doesn’t even look like he has the strength to sit up.
The show gives us another brief exchange between David and James, as David insists that Ellie be brought in alive. James says he doesn’t mean to question David’s “sense of mercy” but the girl would just be another mouth to feed, and that yes, she may die if left alone out here, but perhaps that’s God’s will. David simply gives him a withering look, but it’s abundantly clear that David’s interest in keeping Ellie alive has nothing to do with mercy.
Ellie rides through the neighborhood on her horse—the neighborhood which, in the game, has a small army of David’s men on the streets—and eventually, her horse is shot out from under her. In the show, it’s James who does this, and David has to stop him and some other men from killing Ellie. Carrying her off himself and ordering a few men to haul the horse carcass, he tells the remainder of his men to go door to door hunting Joel. “You’re so hungry for vengeance? Deliver it.”
In the game, however, another extended combat sequence begins, as Ellie must sneak by or kill a number of David’s men. What we get here that we don’t get so much in the show is a lot of deep dissatisfaction among the flock with David’s leadership, with many men expressing doubt in David and suggesting that soon, his role as leader be put to a vote. Despite your best efforts, though, David does eventually capture and subdue Ellie, while his own delusions of grandeur about his own benevolence continue to manifest. “I’m keeping you alive here,” he says, as he jokes the consciousness out of her.
Ellie left Joel behind
In both the show and the game, Joel finally comes back to life, as if awakened by the cosmos just in Ellie’s hour of need. The Police have a song about that called “Synchronicity I,” but I digress. In the show, some poor bearded sap enters the house where Joel is stashed in the basement. Ellie was smart and hid the door to the basement behind an old piece of furniture, but the poor bastard rolls well on his perception check and notices something’s up. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t.
As he comes down the stairs, spotting the bloody mattress Ellie’s had Joel on for days, we know Joel has finally regained awareness, and is hiding down there somewhere. Yes, it turns out Joel has regained the strength not only to move, but to stab and choke the life out of a man. That’s the Joel we know and love!
Meanwhile, Ellie wakes up in a cage—in the game, to the sight of a man butchering a human body right in front of her, though in the show, it’s just David sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. In the show, which continues working to make David more overtly disturbing than he is in the game, he tells her that she’s in a cage because “you’re a dangerous person, you’ve certainly proven that,” and there’s an unmistakable hint of amusement and even admiration to his comment.
Screenshot: HBO
Joel’s back in action
Joel, desperate to find Ellie, tortures two of David’s men to get her whereabouts. It’s a startling juxtaposition with an exchange between Ellie and David in the game. When Ellie calls David an animal, he protests that she and Joel have killed a great many people too. “They didn’t give us a choice, it’s a video game,” she says. (Well, okay, she doesn’t say that second part.) “And you think we have a choice, is that it?” David says. “You kill to survive. So do we. We have to take care of our own, by any means necessary.”
I don’t really subscribe to that logic, but his words do on some level indict Joel, I think. Some may feel that Joel and David are points of contrast, one’s violence rooted in hate and delusion, the other’s in love and necessity. I certainly don’t think Joel and David are the same, but I also don’t think there’s anything innocent or acceptable about what Joel does here. And I’m fine with that. I want characters in my media who sometimes do awful things. What’s always troubled me about the reaction to Joel, though, is just how many people who played the game seem to think that everything he does is totally justified, while recognizing that the actions of others in the world aren’t. It’s as if we don’t want to closely interrogate the actions of the person we play as, the one we most closely identify with.
This may be a conversation for next week’s finale, but it seems clear to me that the game, and the show, at least want us to think about the lengths Joel goes to here, lengths that include brutally murdering one man after he tells Joel what he wanted to know, and then killing the other, too. When the second man declares that he won’t tell Joel anything, both the game and the show give us the chilling and memorable line in which Joel, referring to the man he just killed, says “That’s okay, I believe him.”
Cordyceps showed David the light
The show expands significantly on David’s conversation with Ellie, and makes it much more unsettling. He speaks to her—a 14-year-old girl—as if he sees her as some kind of equal, a kindred spirit, because they both have “a violent heart.” He fought to restrain his violent heart for a long time, he says, before he was shown the light, not by God, but by cordyceps. “What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.” I appreciate the expansion of David’s ideas here, because I think the notion that love and violence can overlap is at the core of The Last of Us, and while David is clearly deranged, the debate over whether Joel’s violence is a manifestation of love rages on.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David, plainly a man who is used to having people respond to his charisma, makes the mistake of thinking that Ellie might be seduced by him as well, when, in both the game and the show, he puts his hand on the bars of the cage and makes it clearer still that his ideas about her are, to put it mildly, inappropriate. It’s a deeply sad moment to me, the realization that even in this world where society as we know it has collapsed, Ellie, like most women in our world at one time or another, in one way or another, still has to deal with the threat and the supreme bullshit of predatory men. Both versions punish David for his arrogance and delusion, as Ellie, briefly playing along, takes his hand and then snaps something in it before finally telling David her name. Tell the others, she says, that “Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger!”
Here the game begins to employ the effective device of having us switch back and forth between Joel and Ellie at intervals, as Joel heads into town to find her, killing plenty of David’s men along the way while a blizzard gathers strength, raising the sense of drama and letting you pick off your prey in the low visibility. Yes, of course he’s doing it for her sake, to protect her, to help her, but by now, it also feels very much like he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what he would do without her. Of course historically, games once relied too often on putting underdeveloped women in peril and just focusing on the men who had to rescue them, but The Last of Us earns this setup by humanizing them both, by developing their connection, and by presenting their relationship as one of mutual care and benefit. By now, Ellie has taken care of Joel and saved his life about as much as he’s done for her.
The show also now switches back to Joel’s perspective, showing him heading into town and finding Ellie’s stuff, not to mention human bodies strung up on meathooks. Better hurry, Joel.
The trick up Ellie’s sleeve
In both versions, David (with James’ help, in the show) hauls Ellie out of the cage to cut her up into “little pieces,” since she didn’t take him up on his excellent offer. Just as they’re about to start cleaving, however, she announces that she’s infected, prompting David to roll up her sleeve and reveal the wound on her arm. David says it can’t be real, James says it looks pretty fucking real to him, and that’s the last thing he’ll ever say, as Ellie takes advantage of their moment of hesitation to sink a meat cleaver into James’ neck and dash out of the room.
Screenshot: HBO
Here, the game becomes a kind of boss fight, as Ellie must sneak around the restaurant and stealthily attack David while a fire begins to spread. In the show, his ego more evidently implodes as the restaurant, his church, burns down around him. It’s a breakdown on multiple levels, with this deluded, awful, terrifying man shouting “You don’t know how good I am!” In both cases, it’s up to Ellie to protect herself, to defeat this supremely shitty, predatory man, whose intentions to inflict sexual violence on Ellie, implied but still clear in the game, are made much more explicit in the show. And in both cases, it’s immensely cathartic and satisfying to see her finally kill him, and not just kill him but stab him again and again until she herself is a blood-spattered survivor, a horror movie final girl. But part of what gives the final girl trope its awful potency is that the kinds of sexualized violence these women so often fight against can’t be killed by killing just one bad man. It’s a threat we all face, all the time. Ellie survives, of course, but the stare she gives in the wake of it, the way she reacts at first when Joel approaches her, suggests that she’s forever changed by the experience. Ellie is all of us.
It’s okay, baby girl
Joel shows up just after her fight is won, and as subtle a detail as it is, the fact that in the show, just like in the game, he calls her “baby girl” in the wake of the horror she’s just endured is tender and very meaningful. It tells us that there’s no longer any pretense of division or obligation between them, of Joel doing this just as a job, of her just being cargo.
By putting both characters in such desperate circumstances, and then having them finally come back together in the end, this episode and this stretch of the game are the cementing of the connection between Joel and Ellie that the story needs before it heads into its final chapter. That’s next week, when we’ll finally settle the discourse about whether or not Joel’s actions are justified once and for all. See you then.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
