Does Riley die in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’?

Warning: the following article contains spoilers for ‘The Last of Us’ episode seven, ‘Left Behind’.

The Last of Us episode seven, ‘Left Behind’, has finally arrived. The entire episode consists mostly of a flashback sequence following Ellie (Bella Ramsey) during her days as a FEDRA military student in the Boston Quarantine Zone, and introduces her best friend Riley, played by series newcomer Storm Reid.

Ellie and Riley sneak into an abandoned shopping mall to spend some time together before the latter is shipped off to another Firefly outpost. They ride a carousel, play some arcade games, and run amok in a Halloween store. Things take a turn for the worse before the pair are ambushed by an infected who manages to bite both girls before it is dispatched.

The episode ends on a rather open-ended and bleak note, with Ellie and Riley deciding to spend their final moments together before the infection takes hold. Over the course of the series, we learned that Ellie is immune – but she wasn’t privy to this information during the events of ‘Left Behind’, but she probably worked it quickly and tragically shortly thereafter.

We know for a fact that Ellie survived – but what about Riley? Here’s everything we know, from the context of the show. 

‘The Last of Us’ episode seven ending, explained

Ellie and Riley opt to spend their final few precious moments together rather than taking the easy way out, at which point the episode cuts back to present day as Ellie frantically searches a house to find something to stitch Joel up with. 

While it’s left on a little bit of an ambiguous note, the implication is that Riley eventually succumbed to the cordyceps infection, while Ellie lived on. The most damning evidence of this is of course the fact that Riley was nowhere to be seen after the events of ‘Left Behind’, and the fact that Ellie is the only known person with immunity to the infection. 

This open-ended conclusion may also answer a question as to who Ellie has killed in the past, per her revelation to Joel back in episode four. It’s likely that Ellie and Riley wouldn’t have risked exposing the general public to their infection – rather, they would have spent their final hours or days in the mall. 

An immune Ellie was probably faced with the undesirable task of putting her best friend down, only to be found by Marlene a little later (seeing as Riley was guarding a Firefly stash), and kicking off the events of The Last of Us episode one, ‘When You’re Lost in the Darkness’.