The Last of Us Reveals Ellie's Tender First Love — and Loss — in Left Behind Flashback Episode: Read Recap - TVLine

For most of the video game of The Last of Us, players play as Joel. But there’s a chunk of gameplay in which the action switches to Ellie’s point of view, and that’s where we land at the start of this week’s episode.

While Joel is down for the count, courtesy of the wound he sustained at the end of Episode 6, the series employs a flashback that’ll be familiar to those who’ve played Left Behind, the downloadable content (aka enhancement game) that serves as a corollary to the video game on which the show is based. We get a peek at Ellie’s time at the FEDRA school. We meet her best friend, Riley, who was referenced at the start of the series. We watch a tender story about love and loss play out against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic teenage dream. And if you’re among the viewers who had a hard time with Episode 3 because Bill and Frank were gay: Ellie is queer. Get over it.

Read on for the highlights of “Left Behind,” then check out what director Liza Johnson had to say about crafting the sweet, sad hour.

‘GO TO TOMMY’ | Ellie drags Joel to an abandoned house and gets him set up on a mattress on the basement floor. He’s awake but doing very badly, burning up with fever and writhing in pain as she presses on his wound to stop the bleeding. He begs her to go north — “Go to Tommy” — and grabs her roughly by the coat to drive home his point. She uses colorful language to tell him she doesn’t agree with his plan. But then pushes at her with what’s left of his might, which sends her toppling backward, and she doesn’t say anything more as she covers him with his coat and then walks upstairs. Joel cries a little as she goes, which at first I interpreted as, “Damn, this hurts and everything is awful and maybe I’m dying?” but I’ve come to see as, “She listened to me and is leaving and I love her and now I’m truly alone (and still probably dying).”

MEET RILEY | The action then swiftly switches to a flashback to Ellie’s time at the FEDRA school. After El beats up a girl who steals her Walkman and teases her about “your friend” who isn’t there anymore, she winds up in Capt. Kwong’s office. He notes that she has been put in solitary confinement three times, but it doesn’t seem to have changed her outlook on following rules. So he calmly outlines two futures for her after school: life as a FEDRA officer, and life as a non-officer. The former is brighter. “There’s a leader in you, and one day, it could be your turn,” he says. She seems surprised by the vote of confidence.

Just before 2 the next morning, someone sneaks into Ellie’s room via the window and puts a hand over her mouth: It’s Riley, Ellie’s best friend (played by Euphoria’s Storm Reid). Riley ran away three weeks before without a word. “I joined the Fireflies,” she announces, proving it by showing Ellie her gun. She invites El to come with her for a few hours “and have the best night of your life.” Ellie protests… but then gets dressed and follows Riley out the window.

LET’S GO TO THE MALL | Their evening brings them to the seventh floor of a building where Riley is surprised to find the corpse of a man who overdosed on pills and alcohol; “This guy wasn’t here yesterday,” she says rather nonchalantly, given the situation. The floor beneath him gives way, dropping him several floors and scaring the stuffing outta me. When the girls recover from the surprise, they grab the bottle and head to the roof to drink the dead man’s booze.

As they swig and chat, we learn that: Riley’s parents are dead, the Fireflies recruited her one night when she’d snuck out of the dorm, and it happened while Ellie was in “the hole” (aka solitary). With Kwong’s comments in her mind, Ellie sticks up for FEDRA, saying that the agency “kind of holds everything together.” But Riley doesn’t want to argue, so she leaps to the next building and announces that they’re on a mission. Riley follows.

They arrive at a shopping center, but Ellie balks, saying that it’s sealed off because it’s full of infected. But Riley explains that it’s not — and it now has electricity again, because FEDRA connected a nearby block and the mall benefitted. “Tonight, I’m going to show you the four wonders of the mall!” Riley proudly announces as Ellie is dazzled by the lit-up storefronts and the suddenly-moving escalators. (Aw, did you see the poster for Dawn of the Wolf: Part II on the movie theater’s marquee?)

Some stores are looted, others not. The Victoria’s Secret, for instance, is still well-stocked. Riley talks about how uncomfortable the bras and such look, and she laughs as she imagines Ellie wearing them. But after Riley walks on, Ellie looks at her reflection in the lingerie shop’s window and fixes her hair a little. Aw, sweet kiddo, your life has been so hard — and it’s about to get harder — and it’s so easy to forget that you’re still a girl. Scenes like this little interlude are good reminders.

THE FUNGUS IN THE FANTASY | Riley has Ellie close her eyes so she can lead her, hand in hand, to the next surprise: the mall’s carousel, which still runs. Ellie is beside herself, and her eyes go even wider when Riley turns the thing on. They climb on side-by-side horses and ride, passing the bottle back and forth, until the carousel grinds to a halt. Riley is about to dismount and fix it when Ellie stops her with a plea: Come back to the FEDRA school and help Ellie make things better from the inside.

Riley won’t do it. She turns 17 in the coming month, which is when you get your post-school assignment; she already knows was put on the sewage detail. “Standing guard while people shovel s–t. That’s what they think of me,” she says ruefully, explaining that she panicked and ran. Ellie is sympathetic, but she makes a point of adding, “I would’ve gotten it back then, too, you know.” Riley earnestly says Ellie is the one thing she misses, then asks if Ellie is ready for the next three wonders. “I’m on a magic horse with a million lights,” she replies. “I don’t know how it’s supposed to get better.”

They take photos in a photo booth, and Riley gives Ellie the strip afterward. Riley blows Ellie’s mind anew with the arcade, which is fully operational, and they play Mortal Kombat II… unaware that a few stores away, a very fungus’d-up person wakes after feeling the vibrations of their movements via tendril. And finally, in a kitchen behind the food court, Riley gives Ellie a gift: No Pun Intended: Volume Too. They giggle at some of the entries, and I write “THIS IS SO PURE” in my notes, but it all comes to an abrupt halt when Ellie sees a pile of pipe bombs in the corner and quickly ascertains that Riley made them “to kill soldiers” — but Riley swears she’d never let the Fireflies use the explosives on Ellie. “And you think they’re going to listen to you?” Ellie spits back incredulously.

The heartache continues. When Ellie makes to leave, Riley runs after her, blurting out that she’s being sent to a post in the Atlanta Quarantine Zone the next day. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” she adds, but Marlene said no. Riley planned the whole evening “because I wanted to see you… and I wanted to say goodbye,” she says, teary. By this point, Ellie is teary, too. Eventually, they wind up in a Halloween store, which Riley softly points out is the last wonder on her list.

Riley tries to explain why she wants to be a Firefly: “They chose me. I matter to them. Ellie looks hurt. “You matter to me first,” she says, but she adds that she forgives Riley and she’ll miss her. With things eased a bit, they both don giant masks and dance to a cover of “I Got You Babe,” but it’s all too much for Ellie. “Don’t go,” she whispers as she takes off her mask. “OK,” Riley responds. Then Ellie kisses her (my heart!) and immediately apologizes. “For what?” Riley wonders, and they both giggle nervously. Ellie wonders what they’ll do next. “We’re gonna figure it out,” Riley whispers back. And um, you might wanna get on that, ladies, because there’s a clicker coming straight for you, and he’s quite clear on his plan.

‘WE DON’T QUIT’ | Riley shoots the infected, which buys them about a second to run. Goodness, that thing is FAST, and it jumps Riley from behind. Then it get Ellie, who stabs it repeatedly, but the cuts don’t seem to slow it down at all. It’s on top of her when Riley, who’s come back to herself after that first attack, hits it with a baseball bat, stunning it for the nanosecond it takes for Ellie to gouge it in the head with her knife. “Holy s—t!” she cries in triumph, but Riley is just looking at her friend’s arm, ashen: Ellie has been bitten. As Ellie screams in horror, Riley quietly cries and holds up her hand: She’s been bitten, too.

Ellie breaks a lot of stuff in anger while Riley sits on the Halloween store’s floor with her back against the sales counter. They decide there are two possible ways to go: kill themselves with the gun, or just wait it out until the Cordyceps takes over. “We don’t quit,” Riley decides. “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.” She takes Ellie’s hand, and they’re both crying as Ellie puts her head on her friend’s shoulder and Riley pulls her in for a tight embrace.

SEW WHAT?! | We don’t witness how the girls’ time together actually ends. We know, of course, that Ellie survives; the bite on her arm is the one we’ve seen, healed-over, several times since the show began. But the next thing we see is Ellie in the present, ransacking the house’s kitchen for anything to help Joel… and she miraculously finds something.

She returns downstairs, kneels near him and holds his hand; he looks at her intently and then squeezes hers back. (GUYS. This episode has been a LOT, and Angry Dad and Wonder Kid’s bloody hand hug is apparently my tipping point: I’m a mess.) Turns out, Ellie found a needle and thread in a drawer. So while Joel groans in pain, she pulls up his shirt and gets to work sewing up his wound.

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!

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The Last of Us Reveals Ellie's Tender First Love — and Loss — in Left Behind Flashback Episode: Read Recap - TVLine
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Woody Harrelson Spreads COVID Vaccine Conspiracy In 'SNL' Monologue & Twitter Bites Back - msnNOW

© Photo by: Will Heath/NBC Woody Harrelson

Woody Harrelson hosted “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, marking his fifth time as host.

Not only did Harrelson join the show's Five-Timers Club, he also stirred up some controversy with a joke toward the end of his opening monologue.

He recalled reading the "craziest script" recently, and broke down the plot.

"So the movie goes like this: The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes," Harrelson quipped. "And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over."

Then he delivered the punchline. "I threw the script away," Harrelson joked. "I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day."

Viewers were quick to respond to what appeared to be a conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 vaccine; while the COVID-is-a-hoax crowd was thrilled to apparently have Harrelson on side, not everyone on social media was so supportive of his conspiracy theory.

“Saturday Night Live” airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET, 8:30 p.m. PT on Global.

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Actor Gordon Pinsent, the friendly face and roguish heart of Canadian cinema, dead at 92 - The Globe and Mail

Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent is shown in 2012, soon after the release of his memoir Next.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

At a 2007 ceremony to unveil his star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, actor Gordon Pinsent joked that he would have to duck down side streets now lest he be caught by passersby gazing at his own celebrity. “He’ll be calling himself an icon soon,” he imagined contemptuous pedestrians saying. “We got the Mountie and we got the beaver. Those are the only two icons we need.”

His self-deprecating joke lightly brushed aside the obvious truth that the veteran Newfoundland actor had long been lovingly tucked inside the box labelled National Treasures. From an early role as an idealistic MP to a late one as a heartbroken senior, Pinsent had always held a secure place in Canadian hearts that endured the length of a 60-year career in film, television and theatre.

“He creates men of humour, men of dignity, men of strength and men of compassion,” his late wife, the actress Charmion King, once said of his work. “He doesn’t play arrogance. He doesn’t play stupidity. I think Canadians are like who he portrays. And even if they’re not, they see it and they want to be!”

Pinsent died Saturday, his friend actor Mark Critch confirmed. He was 92.

June 9, 2007: Pinsent stands by his star on Canada's Walk of Fame.PETER JONES/Reuters

Gordon Edward Pinsent, improbably nicknamed Porky by his large family, was born on July 12, 1930, in Grand Falls, N.L. – two decades before the province would join Confederation. He was the youngest of eight children, two of whom had died in infancy; his father, Stephen Pinsent, who died when Gordon was only 10, worked in a paper mill until his bad health forced him to reinvent himself as a cobbler. His mother, the former Flossie Cooper, was a servant girl who became a homemaker.

The youngest Pinsent suffered from rickets as a child, didn’t walk until he was five and went to school a year late: in his 2012 autobiography Next, he speculated that the experience of that delay taught him from an early age how to fake it. Later, his artistic career was filled with episodes where he said yes to any proposal – from riding a horse in a 1960s TV version of The Last of the Mohicans to recording the audio book version of Peter C. Newman’s Company of Adventurers – whether he had any previous experience or not.

He loved painting as a boy and was enamoured of the movies, knowing the names of all the Hollywood stars who appeared on the silver screen in Grand Falls. At 15, he left home to live with his married sister in Gander where he took a job as a busboy at a local hotel in the hopes that he would come across real movie stars changing planes on their way across the Atlantic. By 18, he left again, took a ferry to Nova Scotia and talked his way past border guards into the foreign country of Canada. Working his way westward with odd jobs, including sign painting, he made it to Toronto, where he was already calling himself an actor even if no one was giving him work as one. Inspired by an older brother’s wartime service, he decided to join the army instead, and served in the Royal Canadian Regiment for three years. He was discharged in Winnipeg in 1951 and that was where his acting career began.

When not making a living as a ballroom dance instructor and a sign painter, he began to perform with the small, semi-amateur companies of the day and got some work doing radio drama at the CBC. Eventually, he met up with John Hirsch, the founding director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and began performing in his more ambitious productions. In 1955, CBC Winnipeg gave him a part in an early television drama and he soon moved to Toronto to chase more work in television – leaving behind a whole family.

At 21, he had married Irene Reid, the sister of a friend, and fathered two children, Barry and Beverly, but it was clear from the start he wasn’t ready to settle down and support them. According to his own account of his divorce, it was a judge who ruled he should never see the children, then aged five and three, so as to give Irene a fresh start. He would not meet Barry and Beverly again until both were adults and reintroduced themselves to a father they had only ever seen on television.

In Toronto, he worked both for the CBC and on the theatre scene, where he met his second wife, actress Charmion King, playing the title role in The Mad Woman of Chaillot at the Crest Theatre in 1961. One scene required her to whistle, which she couldn’t do, and Pinsent came to her aid, whistling from the wings every night of the run. She, in exchange, gave him rides home in her car. They married a year later.

Pinsent's late wife, Charmion King.

Both on screen and on stage, he was getting larger and more significant parts, including roles in the 1962 season at the Stratford Festival. His breakthrough came when the CBC cast him as the title character in a new television drama about an idealistic politician in Ottawa. Running from 1965-69, Quentin Durgens, M.P. marked the first time Canadians had seen a dramatization of their own government on screen and it turned Pinsent into a national figure. Each week, his character tackled another issue or came to the aid of another constituent, and the actor soon found that, when he travelled, Canadians would approach him with requests to fix their local problems.

His work on the show also caught the eye of an American producer who thought Pinsent had a Kennedyesque look and asked him to play a fictional U.S. president in Colussus: The Forbin Project, a futuristic political drama about the dangers of computers. Pinsent and King stayed in Hollywood for six years as he made guest appearances on TV shows and auditioned for work in feature films. It was an exciting period – Pinsent was walking the backlots where the stars of his youth has once worked and his Hollywood memories include hiking expeditions with the friend of a friend, Marlon Brando, trying to get in shape for his role in The Godfather – but Pinsent himself never got the leading roles he was hoping for, while the CBC kept calling with offers.

Eventually, he returned to Canada to pursue his own work. Frustrated with the lack of roles, he had written a script for himself, the story of a joyful hard-drinking and skirt-chasing Newfoundlander who brings sorrow to those around him. He described the disruptive character of The Rowdyman as an alter ego, the person he might have become if he had never left home. Uncertain that Hollywood could do justice to the story, he eventually spurned offers to make it there, and produced the movie himself, shooting it in Newfoundland. The 1972 comedy and a book version, which Pinsent also wrote, did well in Canada, winning him best actor at the Canadian Film Awards. Then in 1974, he published another Newfoundland novel, John and the Missus, about an unemployed miner who tries to save his town and, after six years in Hollywood, moved back to Toronto for good.

A scene from 1972's The Rowdyman, a movie Pinsent wrote and starred in about a hard-living Newfoundland mill worker.

He began working on a musical version of The Rowdyman for the Charlottetown Festival and took various assignments from the CBC: increasingly recognized as a writer as well as an actor, Pinsent was soon commissioned to write a Christmas special that would offer him the role that came to personify his public image. Set around 1900, A Gift to Last introduced the character of North West Mounted Police Sgt. Edgar Sturgess, the ne’er-do-well soldiering member of a staid WASP family in small-town Ontario.

A Gift to Last was spun into a series that lasted until 1979 and Pinsent became closely identified with the lovable and colourful Sgt. Sturgess, a raconteur, bon vivant and scapegrace, but also a decent, sensitive and loving soul. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Pinsent remained a Canadian favourite – he played the notorious title character in The Life and Times of Edwin Alonzo Boyd, the bank robber who escaped from Toronto’s Don Jail not once but twice; he turned John and the Missus into a movie in which he co-starred with Jackie Burroughs; he voiced the King of the Elephants himself in the animated series Babar; he starred on Street Legal and The Red Green Show. He was always in demand and always feted, winning about a dozen of Canada’s various film and television awards and named to the Order of Canada in 1980. Yet in Next, he described himself as an anxious person, someone who suffered from that common fear of being exposed as an impostor. He had no formal training as an actor, just the conviction that he was one, and describes his restless urge to work as a continual drive to prove he wasn’t as useless as he’d felt as a kid.

His decision to never retire was amply rewarded in the 2000s when Sarah Polley made her directorial debut with Away from Her, the Oscar-nominated film in which Pinsent plays a husband who must commit his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife to a nursing home where he loses her to another man. The quiet suffering and repressed jealousy that he portrayed there won him many accolades; the film earned two Oscar nominations and swept the 2008 Genies (as Canada’s film awards were known at the time)including Best Actor for Pinsent.

March 3, 2008: Gordon Pinsent and Sarah Polley hold their Genie awards for Away from Her.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press

But by then he had lost his real-life wife: King had succumbed to emphysema early in 2007, right in the midst of Away From Her’s triumph. Pinsent called her the love of his life, a continually wise and stabilizing influence, but in Next he also described a combative marriage with dinner-table arguments that would send the couple’s young daughter Leah running from the room. He also discretely admitted there and in interviews, that his “flirtations” had caused King much pain. Her death, meanwhile, dealt him a blow it took him several years to recover from; he said that as an actor he was lost without having her around to show off to.

He credited his daughter Leah, also an actress, and her husband, the actor Peter Keleghan, for keeping him going and encouraging him to get back to work. In his 80s, he did more Babar; he appeared on Republic of Doyle; he took a lead role in the The Grand Seduction; he voiced the bear in Two Lovers and a Bear and he did a skit on 22 Minutes gently mocking pop star Justin Bieber that went viral on YouTube.

“No, no Lear for me …” he wrote in 2012, rejecting the traditional last role for many a great actor and arguing he was unlikely to bring anything new to it. “On the other hand, if a great new stage role comes along tomorrow, something glorious, something that makes me believe that my life will be unfulfilled and incomplete if I don’t do it, I will do what I always do. I will say Yes …. I won’t be stopping voluntarily. It’s just too great a love.”

With a report from The Canadian Press

Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

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Harvey Weinstein accuser explains decision to testify - The A.V. Club

Harvey Weinstein

Photo: Etienne Laurent-Pool (Getty Images)

Though Harvey Weinstein’s recent criminal trial in Los Angeles dealt with accusations from multiple women, the disgraced producer was only convicted in connection to the assault of one woman in particular. Known throughout the trial as “Jane Doe 1,” the survivor, Evgeniya Chernyshova, revealed her identity in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m tired of hiding,” she told the outlet. “I want my life back. I’m Evgeniya, I’ve been raped. This is my story.”

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Chernyshova shared with the outlet her memory of the assault, which occurred while attending the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival. Afterward, she felt “depressed” and blamed herself for years. Only when her own daughter came to her, saying she had been assaulted as a sophomore in high school, did Chernyshova finally consider coming forward with her own experience. “I told her that there was only one condition that I was gonna be able to [report my case], and that’s if she also came forward with her case,” the former model explained.

Even then she was hesitant, but the exposés about Weinstein’s crimes in 2017 gave her the courage to go to the police. The road to the Los Angeles trial was slow going, and when it finally happened in 2022 Chernyshova described it as “the worst experience of my life.” She said, “The defense lawyers’ techniques, how they harass and humiliate you, it is brutal.”

Chernyshova, who has since filed a civil suit against Weinstein, remained anonymous during this period “because I was ashamed and humiliated,” she explained. “I thought it was a good decision to protect my kids. But it was a horrible decision for myself because I’ve been cut off from everyone. It isn’t right to go through this hell alone.” While she is the sole survivor among those who testified in Los Angeles to receive the court’s justice, “I believe all of the victims who testified,” she stated. “All of them. And I want to say this—this is not only my victory, this is our victory.”

Indeed, Jane Doe #3 released her own statement to that effect. “Today, justice prevailed for survivors. No woman has to fear Harvey Weinstein again as he will never leave prison,” she said in a press release from her team of lawyers at Katz Banks Kumin. “I testified against Harvey Weinstein, staring that monster in the eyes for three days in a brutal trial during which Weinstein’s lawyers tried to smear me and all of his accusers, claiming that Harvey was the victim of the #MeToo movement. Today, the court rejected this notion and gave Harvey what he deserved—the maximum sentence possible.”

As for Chernyshova, she said of the sentencing, “I feel free, and a heavy weight and burden has been lifted off my chest. I am looking forward to a good night’s sleep.” You can read her full interview here.

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