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The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us included content from the first game’s Left Behind DLC, where we learn how Ellie was bitten, but also shows us her first understanding of true, inconsolable loss. During this part of the game, Ellie has to fend for herself as Joel recovers from being impaled on broken glass, but also we flash back to her life before Joel and we see a slice of life as a teenager during the end of the world.
Ellie’s best friend and crush Riley, played by Storm Reid in the series, sneak out to an abandoned mall where the two have an evening that’s a quasi-date and get to live as teenagers did before the cordyceps outbreak. Tragically, the two are attacked and bitten by a formerly dormant Clicker. This is where Ellie finds out she is immune but also loses the person she loved most in the world.
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Now Playing: The Last Of Us Episode 7 Breakdown: Ellie And Riley Flashback | Left Behind DLC
Getting a mall built to recreate this moment wasn’t an easy feat, but production designer John Paino was up to the challenge.
“We got to pick and create these stores. It was great to use their logos, and we could play with what they are, the luxury stores, and the codes behind them,” Paino told Variety, as he went through the process of building a mall. “Creating the creepy American Girl store was fun to make.”
Paino was aiming to find an American-style mall in Calgary, Canada, where the show is filmed, but they ended up repurposing a dead mall, Northland Village Mall, which closed in 2021. Paino recollected his time in his youth at his local mall and how it made him feel as a kid.
“I’m a child of the ’70s, and the mall was a temple. The size of 10 football fields. I’d spend a lot of time there and in the video arcade,” explained. “So, we were hoping to find something like that. We found an abandoned mall that was completely stripped and didn’t have a second floor. We built the rooftops and the stores, but what they look from the balcony, it’s all CGI because our mall didn’t have a second floor.”
Recreating the arcade was something Paino and his team wanted to nail as well. They used the name and the font in the original game for Raja’s Arcade. The trick was to make everything look playable, even if it wasn’t. In most cases though, every cabinet was functional.
“We gave it a bit of retro-ness through games like Frogger, Tetris, and Mortal Kombat,” Paino said. He added that the game screens for the older games were made from cathode-ray tubes (CRT). That means when the cameras were rolling, the images were not clear and purposefully out of focus. “We rebuilt them on LED screens.”
As for the carousel, used to recreate the DLC’s maybe most iconic scene (which was even featured in the first full trailer) it was brought in from another mall and Paino had to rent it for the shoot.
“It actually used to be in that mall, but when it went out of business, another mall took it, so we made a deal to rent it,” explained Paino. When they got it back, it had to be repaneled as it had images that were an homage to the Calgary Stampede, a famous rodeo festival in the area. “We put reflective panels around the center that were horrible and uneven to add to the hallucinatory feel because the whole thing is like a fever dream.”
