There is barely one chapter left for the first season of The Last of Us series to come to an end. HBO has so far brought us eight emotionally packed episodes about the joel and ellie trip. However, there was a really special chapter in which we delved deeper into the protagonist’s past.
ATTENTION SPOILERS: from this moment on the plot of the series and that of the video games will be discussed without any filter.
As we well know, the seventh episode shows us the relationship between Ellie and Riley and how they both end up being infected in a Boston mall. They both think they’re going to be turned by cordcyeps in a matter of hours, so Riley decides “we could get poetic and lose our minds together.” A sad ending that could have been much more graphic.
And it is that Ellie is immune to the infection, so she had to see how Riley finally did transform into an infected, only to discover at the same time that she herself was not affected. Nothing beyond Riley’s final phrase is ever shown, neither in the series nor in the DLC of the video game, but Bella Ramsey has revealed to ComicBook that she considered a more explicit scene:
“There were conversations that happened around that actually, and I think we agreed on… I don’t know whether to say it because really, I think it depends on people’s imagination. But from our point of view, I think Ellie You probably had to make a very difficult decision, and do something you really didn’t want to do, and experience a great loss. I don’t know if we ever came to an explicit agreement, and I think it’s more powerful if it’s left unsaid and left to itself. people’s imagination. Because I think imagination can often be darker than reality.”
During the fourth episode, after Ellie saves Joel by killing a man, she says that this is not the first time she has killed someone. She does not explain who she is referring to, but it can be intuited from these statements and from the events shown that, finally, Ellie had to kill Riley to keep her from wandering around as an infected. Obviously, that is something we will never see.