It’s a development that makes sense, given co-creator Craig Mazin‘s interest in exploring elements of the Last of Us universe that his collaborator Neil Druckmann (writer/director of the original video games) hadn’t covered.

What the show adds is an insightful glimpse into Ellie ( Bella Ramsey)’s life prior to her getting infected (without dying) - specifically, we get to see her as a less-than-dutiful student at “FEDRA school.”

The episode takes its title from The Last of Us: Left Behind, a bonus adventure for the first video game which (like the episode) flashes back to Ellie and her best friend Riley exploring a mall together, while in the present Ellie tends to an injured Joel. Yet in Episode 7, “Left Behind,” the series offered up a new perspective on what passes for law and order in the apocalypse. It’s something we see in the very first episode, when a child is efficiently executed by doctors after testing positive for Cordyceps, and also generally come to understand as characters reference the group’s harsh rule over quarantine zones. 20 years after the outbreak, FEDRA is most commonly described by characters as a “fascist” institution, with a zero-tolerance policy towards the infected. government that has survived the collapse of civilization. One under-explored element of The Last of Us this season has been the existence of FEDRA, the remnant of the U.S.

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