‘They happen to be girls’: The Last of Us delivers another poignant love story

One of the biggest shows on TV went in an unexpected direction in its latest episode, showing viewers a poignant young romance.

Bella Ramsey as Ellie in episode seven of The Last of Us. Picture: HBO/Binge

WARNING: Spoilers for The Last of Us below

The creators of The Last of Us, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, have repeatedly stressed that it is, at its core, about love.

The show’s post-apocalyptic setting, with fungal monstrosities shambling around the broken remnants of the United States, is just the backdrop. And its plot, which has co-protagonists Ellie and Joel crossing the country in an effort to cure a civilisation-destroying pandemic, should not be mistaken for its story, which interrogates love and the heroic or horrifying lengths to which it can drive us.

It’s in service to that story that The Last of Us stops its plot dead in episode seven, Left Behind, and spends precious time on a near hour-long flashback, showing us the events that led to Ellie being bitten by one of the infected and discovering her mysterious immunity.

This is not the first time Mazin and Druckmann have demonstrated their willingness to put the plot on hold. In the highly acclaimed third episode, Ellie and Joel were sidelined so the show could depict a decades-long romance between two characters we had never met before and would never see again.

In that episode we followed Bill, a grouchy survivalist, and Frank, an extroverted soul who stumbled into Bill’s town and never left. Here we watch Ellie work through her feelings for her best friend, another young woman named Riley.

Ellie and Riley share a moment on an old shopping mall merry-go-round. Picture: HBO/Binge

It can be no coincidence that the two episodes featuring gay love stories are the most emotionally resonant of the series.

“I was really excited for this story, and it meant a lot to me. Partly because I know how much it means to so many other people,” says Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie.

“It is just two people who love each other, and they just happen to be two young girls. But I think that having a magnifying glass on that and getting to see that in a show like this is so cool and so important.

“It meant a great deal to me to be able to play out this storyline and it came very naturally, and it was a lot of fun to do.”

“It’s so cool that I was able to represent a young girl who has feelings for another young girl. It happens all the time,” says Storm Reid, who plays Riley.

“And I think it goes back to just trying to be as representative as possible, and trying to reflect in our art what the real world looks like.”

As a straight man, admittedly ill-equipped to assess such things, the Bill-Frank and Ellie-Riley relationships have been a joy to watch partly because they’ve been presented as appropriately unremarkable.

As Ramsey and Reid put it, Ellie and Riley “happen to be” gay. Two girls liking each other “happens all the time”. This is what “the real world looks like”. In every way that could ever matter, there is no difference between the love Bill and Frank feel for each other, or the love Ellie and Riley feel, and the love of a straight couple.

Bella Ramsey at the Critics Choice Awards in Los Angeles in January. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Storm Reid at the premiere of The Suicide Squad in California. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

Ellie reads from a pun book. Bad puns, of course, are the basis of any healthy relationship. Picture: HBO/Binge

Of course, in the world of The Last of Us, civilisation crumbled in the early 2000s, before much of the recent advancement in same-sex rights. That fact, and the added anxieties it would bring for characters in their universe, did influence Mazin and Druckmann as they wrote the show, and it’s evident in Ramsey and Reid’s performances.

“Ellie’s afraid that Riley will see right through her, that she’ll see all her emotions and be embarrassed. So she has to protect herself from that,” Druckmann told this week’s edition of HBO’s The Last of Us podcast, in which he and Mazin give insights into each episode.

“Because what’s coming is, ‘Woah, we’re friends, but I don’t feel that way about you. Also, actually now that I know you’re one of those, I don’t want to be friends with you at all.’ That is the fear,” Mazin added.

“When I talk to my friends who grew up gay, and they explain those additional levels, that’s the scariest part. If I liked a girl and I asked her out and she said, ‘Actually I’d rather we just be friends,’ maybe she’ll be laughing about me with her friends that night, and that hurts. But there won’t be this crazy rumour mill in the school. No one’s going to stop being friends with me. No one’s going to call me bad names, no one’s going to hit me.

“But that’s not true if you’re gay. Not when you're growing up in the seventies or eighties or nineties, or even the 2000s. I think it’s changed dramatically, at least in some places, not everywhere unfortunately. But that’s a real fear that Ellie has, that it won’t merely be a rejection of romance, but a total rejection of her as a person and a friend.”

About halfway through the episode, as they’re strolling through the abandoned shopping mall, Ellie and Riley come across a lingerie shop.

Riley and Ellie ponder post-apocalyptic lace. Picture: HBO/Binge

“Both of these girls like each other. Really like each other. But they’re too afraid to say anything. Here Riley gets to poke at it and see the reaction, and Ellie has a weird, nervous reaction, because she doesn’t want to reveal how vulnerable she is,” Druckmann said.

“That’s why, after Riley walks away, we get this lingering moment where Ellie is looking at her own reflection, and we see an insecurity.”

“You have these two girls who are uncomfortable with and afraid of their own sexuality, and they’re looking at the most heteronmorative presentation of female sexuality there can be. And neither one of them seems to quite get the allure of it, it’s not their thing,” said Mazin.

“What I love about what Riley does there – and people do this, right? We know they do this. She gets scared of her own feelings for Ellie, and so she basically puts Ellie down to cover up how she’s feeling in this weird moment. And Ellie doesn’t understand that, and it hurts, and she gets defensive.

“And then she gets insecure, and she’s looking at herself in the reflection of this Victoria’s Secret angel, and she is not an angel. She doesn’t like her face, she doesn’t like her hair, she doesn’t like how any of it is, and she’s pretty sure that Riley would never like it either. I cannot think of a more 14-year-old, teenagery thing to think than that.”

We come away from the episode with a deeper understanding of Ellie, her anxieties and what she has been through. We realise that Riley was the first in an increasingly long line of people she has cared about, only to watch them perish. There’s a lingering trauma at the heart of this character, and who knows where it will lead.

New episodes of The Last of Us air on Mondays on Binge