After growing up with Rob Reiner‘s movies playing on repeat in his home, Jake Szymanski recently got to explore the beloved filmmaker’s legacy in a unique way. Szymanski — the director of Jury Duty and Netflix’s forthcoming Cameron Diaz-led Bad Day — helmed the buzzy 2025 Super Bowl commercial that reunited Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal at Katz’s Delicatessen for the first time since they filmed their iconic scene in When Harry Met Sally.
“The best part for me was just getting to ask them questions and have them tell stories about making When Harry Met Sally and about Rob,” Szymanski tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He was very collaborative and let comedians do their thing, which I’m a huge believer in, and I don’t think I knew that’s what he was doing until later. Rob was able to make a movie that could only be his, while still letting comedic performers get their voice through.”
Hollywood continues to mourn the legendary figure and process the senseless tragedy of Reiner and wife Michele having been found dead Sunday in their Brentwood home. Loved ones and former colleagues have shared endless praise for the entertainer behind such other indelible favorites as This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Brideand A Few Good Men. But even if they didn’t know him personally, Reiner’s impact endures for the industry’s top creatives through his storytelling and devotion to character.
“Movies like When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride are timeless because they’re built around people, not punchlines,” says Andy Jones, whose writing credits include It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He points out that the dynamic between the When Harry Met Sally leads — a man (Crystal) and woman (Ryan) trying to remain platonic friends despite sexual tension — has continued to impact popular projects in recent years. This includes New Girl, the Fox comedy series that featured the will-they-won’t-they connection between Zooey Deschanel’s Jess and Jake Johnson’s Nick — and also saw Reiner portraying Jess’ father.
Rob Reiner (left) and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Adds Jones, “It was great to see Rob play Jess’ dad on New Girl because Nick and Jess have the same dynamic as Harry and Sally, or Gib and Alison in [Reiner’s 1985 comedy] The Sure Thing. It’s that brand of comedy that’s rooted in awkwardness, sincerity and people slowly realizing they care more than they planned to.”
One film that included direct acknowledgement of the joy from Reiner’s work was What If, the Daniel Radcliffe-Zoe Kazan romantic comedy that premiered at TIFF in 2013 and centers on two friends trying to ignore their romantic feelings. The movie includes references to When Harry Met Sally, and one scene involves the leads spotting each other at a screening of The Princess Bride.
Elan Mastai, who wrote What If, has heard that Reiner was very touched that the film wore its affections for his work on its sleeve. “When Harry Met Sally is my Godfather, and Princess Bride is my Star Wars,” Mastai, who earned an Emmy nomination for his work on This Is Us, admits with a laugh.
“It really strikes me just how rich the characters in these movies are, and you never feel like these are marionettes being put through the paces of a plot just to hit a punchline,” he continues. “These are fully fleshed-out characters, and the choices that they make, while hilarious, come from what makes these people tick — their wounds, their passions, their ambitions, their misguided beliefs. There’s such a deep empathy.”
Zoe Kazan (left) and Daniel Radcliffe attend a screening of The Princess Bride in their film What If.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
While Reiner has been heralded for being somewhat genre-agnostic — given that his work includes thrillers, political comedies and quieter dramas — he will continue to be closely associated with the mockumentary thanks to his first directorial effort, This Is Spinal Tap, an eternal classic that spawned a sequel that hit theaters in September. Among those appreciating the impact of the 1984 original was the team behind American Vandal, the Netflix mockumentary series that satirized true-crime docs.
“In Spinal Tap, you see this idea that every idiot has a story that’s worth telling and worth seeing, and that’s such a lovely way to approach not just characters or comedy, but people in general,” says American Vandal writer Lauren Herstik. “If you talk to anyone who’s making a mockumentary, in the first breath, they’re going to say, ‘Spinal Tap — that’s the guiding light. That’s what we’re going for.’”
Szymanski, who directed Ryan and Crystal in the Super Bowl ad, grew up obsessing over The Princess Bride and Stand by Me but would later come to appreciate Spinal Tap. When he was working with the Lonely Island team on Saturday Night Live shorts and would then direct Andy Samberg in HBO’s sports mockumentaries Tour de Pharmacy and 7 Days in Hell, he found himself hoping to live up to such benchmarks as Reiner’s.
Says Szymanski, “Rob’s one of those filmmakers who — even though I never spent time with him — in a way, I owe a large part of my career to him because of his work on things like Spinal Tap.”
Rob Reiner famously cast his mother in a key scene in his 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally — but he now says he may not have realized how awkward directing it was going to be.
The latter starred Crystal and Ryan as the title characters, and the two had a key scene in the film where Sally and Harry are having lunch at a busy deli. Their conversation consists of Sally trying to convince a dubious Harry that at least one of his past sexual partners has more than likely faked an orgasm with him. Sally fakes the act — loudly, while banging on her table — and brings stares from fellow diners. The scene ends with one of the greatest lines in movie history, uttered by Estelle Reiner: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
But things got really awkward for Reinger when he had to step in and show Ryan how he wanted her to act out the moment.
“First couple of times, she didn’t do it full out,” he said. “And finally, I sat across from Billy. And I acted it for her.… And I’m pounding the table, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ And I’m realizing I’m having an orgasm in front of my mother, you know? There’s my mother over there.”
The movie ends with — spoiler alert! — longtime friends Harry and Sally getting married and talking about their wedding reception. Interestingly, that wasn’t the way things might have ended: As noted on 60 Minutes, Reiner actually changed the ending to a happy one after he met his now-wife Michele, who now serves as a producer on his films, including Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
Reiner — who also reprises his role in that sequel as the director of a documentary about a hapless rock band — says he realizes there was a “high bar” given the reviews on the cult classic original, which was released 41 years ago.
“Are we crazy to do another one?” he said. “It’s crazy. The bar is just way too high.”
Christopher Guest (left) and Rob Reiner in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
“Now it’s 40 years later, we have these rights: Whaddaya do with ’em? And we started throwing out ideas,” Reiner explained.
Both films rely heavily on ad-libbing — or “schnadeling,” as Reiner calls it — from the cast but also from the famous faces who cameo, including Paul McCartney.
The original movie, which is credited with helping launch the mockumentary genre, poked fun at rock bands and took its inspiration from some real-life scenarios.
“Apparently, Van Halen had a rider in their contract: ‘No brown M&Ms,’” Reiner said. “So some roadie had to sit there picking out the brown M&Ms. It’s crazy. So we looked at that, and we said, ‘There’s a scene.’” That inspired a scene wherein Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) complains about the bread being too small.
Michael McKean also reprises his role as David St. Hubbins in the film, which was released in theaters last month and is also available on streaming platforms.
Julia Roberts has starred in her fair share of rom-coms throughout her acting career, but she revealed there’s a beloved film that she passed on.
During an appearance on Thursday’s episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, the Leave the World Behind star was asked by a fan if there were any roles she regrets passing on.
“Well, none that I have regrets about because I feel it’s all kind of destiny,” Roberts responded. “But what have I passed on that went on to be great and wonderful, and I thought it maybe wouldn’t have been as great and wonderful with me? You’ve Got Mail.”
Meg Ryan went on to star opposite Tom Hanks in the 1998 flick. But the Oscar-winning actress explained that not getting roles was part of the job, adding that Ryan “was supposed to be in Steel Magnolias, and she was still filming When Harry Met Sally, and so I got that part.”
Roberts continued, “Cate Blanchett was supposed to be in Closer, but she got pregnant, and so I got that part. I’ve lucked into some good stuff.”
Elsewhere during her conversation with Cohen, the Pretty Woman actress was asked if there was a film from her decades-long career that she would like to see receive a potential sequel.
“I think, maybe, My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Roberts said. “Because there’s so many people in it, and to see what they’re doing and how Kimmy and Michael’s marriage is going and…”
The host proceeded to chime in with a follow-up question: “Who do you think Michael should’ve married in My Best Friend’s Wedding?”
“Well, I mean, of course, Jules,” she responded. “But he married Kimmy.”
The 1997 rom-com follows a woman who realizes she’s in love with her long-time friend who just got engaged, so she sets out to win his heart, only days before the wedding.
With Pretty Woman,Notting Hill, and My Best Friend’s Wedding,Julia Roberts has starred in some of the best romantic comedies of all time. But as fate would have it, she could have added another to her impressive roster: 1998’s You’ve Got Mail.
While promoting her latest film, the psychological thriller Leave the World Behind, on Thursday’s episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Roberts was asked to reflect on any roles she regretted turning down. Instead, the Oscar winner shifted the question to share two movies she passed on that “maybe wouldn’t have been as great and wonderful” with her in them.
One was 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The other? You’ve Got Mail, in which she would have acted opposite Tom Hanks and played Meg Ryan’s part as hopelessly romantic bookshop owner Kathleen Kelly. Instead of Roberts, who went on to star with Hanks in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War and 2011’s Larry Crowne, Ryan reunited with her Sleepless in Seattle love interest. That same year, Roberts opted to coheadline the domestic tearjerker Stepmom alongside Susan Sarandon.
Nearly a decade prior, it was Ryan who was originally cast as Shelby in 1989’s Steel Magnolias, a part based on screenwriter and playwright Robert Harling’s sister, Susan. “The day after we cast her, she came to us in tears and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I just got offered this film, and I’ll be a leading lady with Billy Crystal…’” Harling recalled last year. “So you know we said, ‘Of course, go make When Harry Met Sally.’”
It was Sally Field, who plays Shelby’s mother, M’Lynn, in the film, who suggested producers meet with Roberts, according to Harling. “Sally said, ‘You know, there’s this girl and she’s been off making some movie about a pizza. She’s Eric Roberts’s sister,’” he told Southern Living, referencing her breakout role in 1988’s Mystic Pizza. “We brought her in, and she was Julia Roberts, so she was magic. She just walked into the room and lit it up, and I thought, That’s my sister.”
On WWHL, Roberts also mentioned the Steel Magnolias switch, which helped earn her the first of four Academy Award nominations. She noted that she also nearly missed out on her earliest project with the late filmmaker Mike Nichols. “Cate Blanchettwas supposed to be in Closer, but she got pregnant, and so then I got that part,” Roberts said of the 2004 romantic thriller costarring Natalie Portman,Jude Law, and Clive Owen. “So I’ve lucked into some good stuff.”
Meg Ryan’s children are clearly disinterested in what she’s having.
Ryan’s iconic orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), which she faked over pastrami at Katz’s Deli in New York City, has been a cherished Hollywood moment for generations. However, her children, Jack Quaid, 31, and Daisy True Ryan, 19, are hilariously mortified by it.
“My daughter was here and everybody was on speaker, and they were like, ‘Mom, this is a very unique embarrassment,’” Ryan continued. “He said, ‘You know you can go into that deli and there’s an arrow pointing down to the table where you shot that scene.’”
Katz’s did indeed mark the table in honor of Rob Reiner’s classic, which explored various relationship hurdles between men and women. The scene in question famously had Ryan’s titular Sally show Billy Crystal’s Harry how easily women can fake an orgasm.
Katz’s has been a New York institution for over 130 years and reportedly opened in 1888. The most coveted table is reportedly denoted for eager tourists with a sign hanging from the ceiling: “Where Harry met Sally… hope you have what she had! Enjoy!”
Ryan shares an adult son with ex-husband Dennis Quaid and adopted a daughter in 2006.
Jordan Strauss/Invision/Associated Press
“I wonder if it’s the right one,” Ryan told Burnett about the table.
While Jack is an actor himself these days, he told InStyle in 2019 that he actively ignored the film for years: “It’s one of those things, where if you really think about it, you don’t want to see your mom having a fake orgasm in a deli when you’re growing up.”
He ultimately did watch the film after being cast in a romantic comedy of his own, Hulu’s “Plus One,” and told In Style he was “unbelievably proud” of his mother and called her “sobbing” — and said “the movie’s so much more than that scene.”
While her kids have now experienced it on their own, it remains unclear how Ryan’s ex-husband feels about the scene. She tied the knot with fellow actor Dennis Quaid on Valentine’s Day 1991 and welcomed Jack the following year. They divorced in 2001.
Meg Ryan built her career on romantic comedies, and luckily, it looks like she’s having a return to form. That return to form comes in the shape of What Happens Later, a romantic comedy where she plays a dreamy, head-in-the-clouds type opposite the catastrophizing, neurotic David Duchovny. The two old flames realize they’re stranded together in an airport when a freak snowstorm hits and ruins their travel plans. Ryan not only appears in the film, she co-wrote and directed the movie as well.
Rather than just sit around and wait for things to clear up, they realize they’re strangely still drawn to each other. They sit down and talk, they speak of their dreams, and what their lives have turned into without each other. Will they end up reunited, or will they realize they might just be better off without one another?
Meg Ryan spoke with Entertainment Weekly about her new outing, which she’ll also be directing. She explains the influence of director Nora Ephron, who worked on Ryan classics like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve got Mail…
It has a relationship to movies from the ’40s, like Bringing Up Baby, in terms of the banter and the rhythm of things and a lot of that era of filmmaking. Nora Ephron used to say about rom-coms that they were really a secretly incredible delivery system to comment on the times, and we do that in this movie.
What Happens Later is scheduled to open in theaters on October 13. You can see the first images from the film at EW.com.
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“Shall we?” Tom Hanks’s Sam asks Meg Ryan’s Annie, lifting his hand toward hers as a slight breeze blows and the music swells. The Seattle widower and Baltimore journalist finally meet—where else—atop the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, as Sam’s son, Jonah (Ross Malinger), looks on adoringly. This is only the start of their romance, but it’s the end of Sleepless in Seattle, released 30 years ago and now remembered as one of the best romantic comedies of all time.
Unfolding during the typically dreary period between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Annie and Sam’s cross-country meet-cute begins with a Delilah-style radio show, which Jonah calls into with one request: find a new wife for his father. At one point, Sam gets roped into joining the call. Once on the line, he heartbreakingly describes the moment he fell in love with Jonah’s mother. “I knew it the very first time I touched her,” he says. “It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known.” Thousands of miles away, Annie is one of many listeners entranced by the story, maybe by the mere sound of Sam’s voice. A journey to meet him ensues.
“You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie,” Annie’s best friend, Becky (Rosie O’Donnell), says—both a warning to the character and summary of why Sleepless in Seattle, directed by Nora Ephron from a screenplay by Ephron, David S. Ward, and Jeff Arch, endures three decades later.
Nominated for two Academy Awards and one of the highest-grossing films of 1993,Sleepless is the kind of movie that both comforts and confounds. “What if someone you never met, someone you never saw, someone you never knew was the only someone for you?” its tagline reads, a premise as fitting of a horror film as a romance. Repeat viewings lay bare the movie’s small pleasures—a kid-aged Gaby Hoffmann booking Jonah’s flight to New York, Rob Reiner explaining new-fangled ’90s dating to a stupified Sam—but can also leave the viewer stupified. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “Sleepless in Seattle is as ephemeral as a talk show, as contrived as the late show, and yet so warm and gentle I smiled the whole way through.”
Writer-director Nora Ephron, who sandwiched Sleepless in between 1989’s When Harry Met Sally and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, understood the mix of sour and sweet required to get one love-drunk. According to film producer Gary Foster, Ephron was hired as “a slightly cynical New Yorker who was looking to put a little edge in the fairy tale.” As Ephron told Rolling Stone in 1993, she was merely “looking for a cash infusion.” But she had her directive in mind, once declaring of the film: “Our dream was to make a movie about how movies screw up your brain about love, and then if we did a good job, we would become one of the movies that would screw up people’s brains about love forever.”
In Ephron’s hands, the script was infused with her biting East Coast wit, including a pre-Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” reference. (At one point, Annie enters her office at The Baltimore Sun to hear the tail-end of a coworker’s pitch: “he’s the meanest guy in the world, but he makes the best soup you’ve ever eaten.”) There’s also the following interoffice exchange:
Coworker: It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of 40.
Annie: That’s not true.
Becky: But it feels true.
(Sidenote: there’s a very similar riff on this joke in 2006’s The Holiday, made by Nancy Meyers, the Pepsi to Ephron’s Coke.)
But it also retained the genre’s unabashedly romantic DNA. By the time Ephron, the film’s fourth attached writer, got to the script, 1957’s An Affair to Remember had already become a character in the movie, much to Ephron’s chagrin. When she first watched the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr–led romance, “I was a hopeless teenage girl awash in salt water,” Ephron told Rolling Stone. As an adult, she continued, “I now look at this movie and say, ‘What was I thinking?’” She got downright disdainful about it in another interview, calling Affair a “weepy” film that appeals to “one’s deepest masochistic core…. It’s really kind of hooking into those pathetic female fantasies.”
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.
NEW YORK — An urgency in the ringing guitar and thunderous drums that opened the 1985 album “Scarecrow” was the first hint that this was something different for the artist then billed as John “Cougar” Mellencamp.
The disc, which is getting the deluxe reissue treatment this week, stands as a rare reputation-changing work. It elevated Mellencamp from a generic heartland rocker to a serious artist with something to say, helping spark Farm Aid, a movement that lives on.
In that first song, “Rain on the Scarecrow,” Mellencamp described the financial crisis that was swallowing family farms in the Midwest. The Indiana-bred singer embraced his roots in the anthem “Small Town.” At age 34, his writing in “Minutes to Memories” showed a new maturity about life.
A high standard is maintained through the closer, “R.O.C.K. in the USA,” which neatly summarized the musical approach — even if Mellencamp had to be talked into putting it on the album.
Ask him now, at age 71, whether “Scarecrow” represented an elevated standard, and you’ll discover the chip that remains on his shoulder. He’ll remind you of hit songs that predated the album.
“I didn’t know,” he said, “because I didn’t know I had to change my game.”
Still, the singer professionally christened “Johnny Cougar” against his will at age 21 admits he made five albums before making a good one. “Scarecrow” was No. 7, excepting one shelved when his first record company dropped him.
“I think John really found his voice on this album,” said veteran music writer Anthony DeCurtis, who contributed liner notes to the reissue.
“There were certainly signs of it before, like on ‘Jack and Diane’ and ‘Pink Houses,’” he said. “But the sense of him looking at the world, taking his personality as someone who grew up in Seymour, Indiana, and making a wider statement about it, that was all a big deal for him. It raised him to the level of someone who was an important musical voice in the culture.”
As someone who didn’t think much about songwriting until he had a record deal, Mellencamp saw others around him setting a high benchmark and thought, “I better step up my game.” He mentioned Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell.
As two chart-topping rockers aware of comparisons made between them, Springsteen and Mellencamp circled each other warily in the 1980s but are good friends today.
You can see, in “Scarecrow,” Mellencamp creating a musical world from what he knew growing up in the Midwest, much like Springsteen did for the Jersey Shore. Mellencamp’s “Lonely Ol’ Night” is a thematic cousin to Springsteen’s 1984 hit “Dancing in the Dark” in the narrators’ late-night search for a connection.
“What I learned from him was to be a good observer of life,” Mellencamp said. “You don’t have to be the person. You can watch. I’ve had people say to me, ‘John, have you ever had writer’s block?’ And I would say no, all you’ve got to do is look out the window.”
He remembers a long conversation with his late friend and songwriting partner, George Green, wondering why so many of the small towns they knew were fading away. From those talks, they wrote “Rain on the Scarecrow.”
The album’s cover features a serious-looking Mellencamp on a farm, a fuzzy scarecrow and tractor in the background. He dedicates it to his grandfather, Speck, who died at the end of 1983.
After he made the record, he recalls another conversation with someone who was making some of their music videos, “who looked at me and said, ‘you know, this is a really special record for these times.’
“I said, ‘You think so?’ he said. ”That was the first time I had ever given it any thought that it was much different than anything else I’d done.”
With the spirit of Live Aid and the themes of “Scarecrow” in the air, Mellencamp helped organize the initial Farm Aid concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. To date, the organization says it has raised $64 million for family farming; Nelson and Mellencamp both appeared at its most recent show, in September in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Mellencamp and his band were tight from years on the road in the mid-1980s, but he still gave them an assignment prior to making the new album: learn to play dozens of rock hits from the 1960s, a sound their leader wanted to recreate.
They included several from artists name-checked in “R.O.C.K. in the USA.” Mellencamp didn’t want the song on “Scarecrow,” figuring it sounded “cartoonish” compared to the rest of the material. To his gratitude now, he listened to the pleas of record company executives to change his mind.
Versions of songs from the band’s assignment, like James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and “Shama Lama Ding Dong” from Otis Day & the Knights, make it on the “Scarecrow” reissue.
“I don’t mean to sound arrogant,” he said, “but I was not surprised that people liked that record. I’m not surprised that ‘Small Town’ stuck around for as long as it has. I don’t listen to the radio anymore, but when I do, I always hear that song.”
Through the 1980s, Mellencamp built a formidable jukebox worth of his own hits. But his time at the top coincided with his unhappiest time personally, and he stepped off.
“I had a girlfriend over who was a real famous actress,” Mellencamp said (He didn’t drop names, but a good guess is Meg Ryan, who he dated for several years in the 2010s). “She looked at me one night and said, ‘You know, John, we’ve both been to the moon and we both know we don’t want to go back there.’ She was right.”
He has a new album, “Orpheus Descending,” due out in February and a lengthy concert tour booked from February to May. Theaters, not arenas.
