How Ellie Gets Bitten In The Last Of Us Show (& How It Differs From The Game)
Warning: This article contains spoilers for "The Last of Us" Episode 7.
As "The Last of Us" heads into its final stretch, Episode 7 gives us an emotional look at Ellie's (Bella Ramsey) life before meeting Joel (Pedro Pascal). The episode functions as an extended flashback that follows the "Left Behind" DLC from the acclaimed video game, which also gives the episode its title.
The episode takes us back to several weeks before Ellie's first encounter with Joel, as she reunites with Riley (guest star Reid Storm), her best friend, for a night out at an abandoned mall. Though the night starts full of promise, with the two getting drunk, discovering the magic of escalators, and getting fatalities in "Mortal Kombat II," it is fated to end in tragedy. After sharing a kiss and convincing Riley not to leave the Boston Quarantine Zone behind, the two dance to music from Ellie's vintage Walkman in an old costume store. There, they are attacked by an Infected, who bites them both.
However, while the episode is mostly faithful to the video game material it draws from, that fateful Infected fight is notably different in one important way.
Ellie fights off a single Infected on the show rather than multiple
In the "Left Behind" DLC from "The Last of Us" video game, the encounter that leaves both Riley and Ellie with nasty Infected bites plays out rather differently than it does in Episode 7 of the HBO series. In the game, the two girls are attacked not by a single Infected but by many, leading them to barricade doors and run through the bowels of the mall while being chased by the horde.
The HBO show handles things quite differently. Only one Infected attacks the two friends, and the fight is contained to a single room. The end result, however, is the same: both girls are left with bites, leading Riley to become Infected and Ellie to discover that she is the only known person with natural immunity to the cordyceps fungus.
The show's choice to pare down the sequence makes sense. In the game, the scene involves lots of gameplay mechanics, such as propping open heavy gates and jumping across platforms. Since all of that is for the sake of the player, it makes sense to cut it out for the noninteractive format of television. Additionally, the show has established that even a single Infected can be a major threat, so it wouldn't be believable for Ellie and Riley to fight off a whole swarm of them.