The Last of Us Episode 7 Review: An Overwhelming Episode, Capable of Mixing Sweetness With Pain
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Storm Reid
Director: Liza Johnson
Streaming Platform: HBO Max
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
The Last of Us Episode 7 finally landed on the HBO max streaming platform, here is our review of episode 7. The last part of the season of The Last of Us reached the screens last week, presenting further central elements for the narrative and entire segments useful for understanding the current state of the protagonists after the various vicissitudes experienced. Opening with a considerable time jump, a more evident bond, and completely unexpected perspectives, the sixth episode of the HBO series has opened a new phase in the journey of Joel and Ellie: if in that case, it was possible to carefully observe Joel in trouble, as specified in our review of The Last of Us Episode 6, the seventh episode comes at the ideal time to offer a closer look at Ellie’s fears which have emerged more clearly in this new context.
With the idea of constantly questioning the relationship between the two protagonists, the show exclusively on HBO Max directs the couple towards new difficulties and further threats. In allowing the viewer to get closer and closer to the characters, the authors seize the opportunity to tell the viewer about Ellie’s past with a wealth of details that only the DLC of the video game, Left Behind, had so far been able to offer. In this way, the work guarantees more context and offers a faithful and heartfelt transposition of what is told in the expansion. By carefully alternating tense scenarios with other purely narrative ones, the seventh episode of The Last of Us is configured as one of the best both from an interpretative point of view and from an exquisitely qualitative point of view.
The Last of Us Episode 7 Review: The Story Plot
Picking up the narrative from the cliffhanger of the last episode, the series returns to a terrified Ellie (Bella Ramsey), dealing with a dying Joel (Pedro Pascal) and a gang of individuals ready to track them down. Between attempts at treatment and improvised solutions, the focus on the young protagonist is evident: while that terror makes its way back to re-emerge, Mazin and his associates allow the viewer to retrace the events that indelibly marked the fate of Ellie and her best friend, Riley (Storm Reid). Faced with the prospects of a promise to keep and a night that would change the life of the young protagonist, the show fearlessly lingers on Ellie’s past, showing details of her personality and a past context that made her what she is today. Thus, tracing the speech made to Joel in the last episode, the trauma finds the right representation and allows the viewer to understand how much the girl has expressed so far about her greatest fears.
Meanwhile, Ellie busy helping Joel is forced to adopt drastic solutions to survive and not be found by the men who are hunting them. In the alternation between two very different situations, Ellie’s sensations are almost similar and allow us to notice particular common elements in the sense of the affections and the importance given to them by the girl. Not only that: with a well-groomed and airy story, Riley’s character gets enough space to detach himself from mere extras and acts as the engine for most of the backstories. The seventh episode of The Last of Us, therefore, finds space beyond the sphere of naked and raw action, sipping the spectacular where necessary to allow the characters to shine free from any distraction. Monologues and dialogues are the main elements of an episode that intends to act on the psyche of the observer without the need for very particular tricks, telling their own story while letting the events bring out the emotions of those directly involved in a visually suggestive context.
It is from here that Left Behind takes us into the past, to a few weeks before Ellie and Marlene meet. Ellie is a young cadet at the ZQ military academy in Boston, where she grew up without parents: for a few weeks things have not seemed to go the right way, Riley (Storm Reid), her best friend and companion room ran away, leaving her completely alone. One night, however, Riley suddenly reappears, telling Ellie that she had joined her Lights, and asking her to follow her for a few hours of adventure. Riley takes Ellie to an abandoned mall, where the two, once the lights are turned on, have fun exploring and doing all those things that, as children of a post-apocalyptic world, have always been closed to them: taking pictures together, playing video games and dancing in Halloween masks. The laughter of the two friends, however, ends up awakening an infected hidden not far away…
The Last of Us Episode 7 Review and Analysis
The episode directed by Liza Johnson leaves no room for doubt and is made clear right from the title: to tell the past of Ellie and Left Behind in the most congenial moment to the anthropocentric narration of The Last of Us. In perhaps the most difficult moments of the whole story of Joel and Ellie told so far, the young protagonist finds herself at the center of a cathartic crossroads between past and future with the same fears of the past. The focus on Bella Ramsey, extraordinary in conveying every facet of this inner conflict, allows you to closely scrutinize the various levels of exploration of a character’s psyche. The character study carried out on the multifaceted Ellie, typically driven by the emotional storm of the present and the stormy turmoil of the past, allows bitterness and melancholy to merge with a touching underlying sweetness that will only make fans happy of the videogame saga.
The reconstruction of the atmospheres, as well as the characterization of the characters, maintains very high levels of fidelity for the medium and brings the general qualitative level towards new goals. The delicate and enveloping photography of the episode tells without overdoing it and allows you to admire moments of pure beauty in which to get lost while the surrounding time almost seems to stop. The joint direction of the episode, combined with the care of Mazin and Druckmann in the writing phase, follows what is known of the DLC, offering its congenial imprint to the original, reasoning by subtraction without the fear of not overdoing it.
Some additions and some variations, now usual in the adaptation phase, give further impetus to the plot by providing hitherto unknown context and motivations, while the two protagonists steal the show by dominating each sequence. Storm Reid does his duty very well in bringing a character full of light to the screen, albeit gripped by different shadows. In the meantime, the present situation allows us to trace already known events without too much effort with a whole new attention to dynamics and context. The opportunity to scrutinize with a much more attentive eye the dynamics of a love that becomes addictive, between two individuals who can no longer imagine themselves disunited, slams the reality of a bond capable of bringing joy and terror in equal measure to the spectator. eyes of the observer – but also to those directly involved.
If the idea showed up now from Joel’s point of view is that to love means to be afraid, now it is possible to observe the other side of the coin, which confirms with perfect dramatic tension what is supported by this thesis. The prevailing humanity of The Last of Us does not cease to amaze even in the face of particularly traumatic events. The authors perfectly dose drama and love, building glimmers of hope and then destroying them and putting them back together as the narrative progresses. Telling love in this style makes the work extremely different from the competition, regardless of the characters involved. The care and passion put into the field leaves you speechless and do justice to much-loved work. Free from any creative restraints or impositions, HBO’s adaptation fears nothing.
If the narrative power of The Last of Us manages to hit the mark, it is because emotions form the glue between the various dynamics of man. For this reason, even if their consequences are predictable, events strike with the same disruption as an unexpected blow. The empathy of Mazin and Druckmann proves to be the weapon point after point in more than one work that does not deal exclusively with introspective ideas or well-chosen stratagems. Left Behind confirms that the solid structure built by Naughty Dog could not find a better transposer than Craig Mazin, a lashing pen that is succeeding where others would inevitably fail.
In fact, at the center of this episode, we find the trauma that has marked Ellie’s recent past, even if it is not shown to us directly, we can get a very precise idea of what happened to her and her friend. In our opinion, leaving the most terrible facts to the viewer’s imagination makes the final sequences of the episode even more powerful and impressive, especially when viewed from the perspective of what we know will happen to Ellie next. Even her bond with Joel takes on a completely different value, now that we’ve been told what she’s gone through, the idea of being left by someone else – or of being the one to abandon someone herself – can’t even be contemplated.
With this seventh episode, it is confirmed once again how The Last of Us can tell a world populated by “zombies” making them a more often marginal element, without however affecting the enjoyment of the story and the involvement of the viewer. The paths taken by the narrative are truly unexpected, especially for a series of this kind, but the viewing experience becomes more and more exciting and enthralling week after week. We are two episodes away from the grand finale and we can’t wait to find out if Joel and Ellie will be able to complete their mission.
The Last of Us Episode 7 Review: The Last Words
The Last of Us Episode 7 focuses all its attention on the character of Ellie, alternating the story of her origins with far more current terrors. Bella Ramsey finds her consecration as the story relentlessly progresses toward its final stages. With careful direction and writing able to find the right balance between dispassionate fidelity and dutiful innovation, the HBO series prepares for the grand finale with a crescendo destined to remain etched in the minds of viewers throughout the television season. The seventh episode of The Last of Us takes us into Ellie’s past, telling us what happened before she met Marlene and Joel. Left Behind is one of the most touching and best-constructed episodes of those aired so far, also thanks to the excellent performances of the two protagonists Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid.
