‘The Last of Us’ returns to take one last independent interlude of the general plot before the final stretch of its first season. Now putting the spotlight on Ellie in the seventh episode, titled ‘Left Behind’which offers more insight into the teenager’s traumatic story and offers a dark look at coming-of-age romance within a post-apocalyptic setting.
Another independent story that wants to be more heartbreaking than the acclaimed third episode but fails to achieve organic emotionality, despite Bella Ramsey showing her acting skills. What we have is the classic flashback from the eve of the last act of the season that fails to explain anything that we haven’t intuited and doesn’t bring anything into perspective with respect to the present time line, which is already walking at a leisurely pace in itself.
Mall Adventures
PLOT SPOILERS
With Joel severely injured by scavengers at an abandoned university near Tommy’s Wyoming settlement, Ellie must find supplies to save his life, and as she searches for something she can use to heal him, she is reminded of her past in the Boston Quarantine Zone, especially her close relationship with fellow teen Riley Abel. This is, as the title suggests, ‘Left Behind’ is an adaptation of the 2014 DLC mission of the original video game.
The scale of the episode, however, is much more simple and intimate, something that shows a great difference with respect to other more spectacular ones. If we take into account that the previous one was also a torrent of serious conversations within more or less contained scenarios, One really wonders where HBO’s $15 million per episode budget has gone.Because the art design here is conspicuous by its absence and there isn’t even a noteworthy direction from Liza Johnson. Special mention for the generic music, with some chords with country nuances that seem taken from an archive for post-apocalyptic fiction after ‘The Walking Dead’.
Ramsey has good chemistry with Storm Reid and to some extent they manage to make a post-apocalyptic horror story look like an episode of ‘Euphoria’ (if it was for all audiences). ‘Left Behind’ reiterates the series’ insistence on telling poignant love stories with a sad ending. Repeating the calm before the storm over and over again and characters that always end up marked from a careless bite or scratch to give a bittersweet coda that reminds us week after week how difficult it is to survive in a world of zombies.
Trauma of the week
So much so that it feels like there isn’t too much of an arc and the setting is an excuse for a “case of the week” structure, which if in the ‘X-Files’ it was called “monster of the week”, here it would be “trauma of the week”, because in each episode there is a poetic ambition to tell about survival as a sweet exchange of affections that is always crushed by a violent outburst at the last minute that ends like the rosary of the Aurora and feigned tears on social networks.
The tension of these episodes becomes more of a premonition to wait for, the results are usually predictable, and in this case it becomes even more evident when having prior information about Ellie’s future, much as Ramsey and Reid get to keep the guy. The result is that ‘The Last of Us’ constantly embraces its most tragic aspects but does not consolidate a clear reason for itbeyond a possible ending that continues to announce itself as a narrative consequence of this way of proceeding.
Be that as it may, ‘Left Behind’ is not an episode with great dialogues that justify the time spent on a relationship that is going to a dead end, fails to present itself as something that should be memorable and it ends up being less than what his aspiration for a big dent promises, concretizing the moment in a recreation of the zombie movie classic of visiting a shopping center in montages of laughter and fun, nostalgic winks for gamers to ‘Mortal combat’ and some deliberations on Fedra and the fireflies that at this point are anecdotal.