“The Last Of Us” has some pretty incredible set design, and Ellie’s bedroom is no exception. Nearly every inch of her walls are covered with sketches, posters, magazine cutouts, and bits of paper. As a teen, I covered my own walls – and school folders, and desk, and laptop – with stickers and magazine clippings, trying to stuff as much of my burgeoning personality as I could into the space that trapped me as I endured the painful weirdness of growing up. It’s clear that Ellie does the same here, making her room into a microcosm of found objects and visions of the outside world that might help her feel a little less fenced-in within the Boston QZ.
Lots of the purposefully arranged clutter on Ellie’s walls harkens back to a time before the world ended, and she seems to have chosen it somewhat at random based on what was available to her. A poster for “Mortal Kombat II” sits alongside one for Joe Dante’s 1987 flop “Innerspace.” One flier even advertises The White Stripes’ show at the Orpheum on 4/20/03, a real concert that in the show’s timeline took place months before outbreak day. It’s likely that Ellie, born post-outbreak, hasn’t actually heard these bands or seen these films, but scavenged the posters somewhere because she liked the design. I like to imagine she thinks “Innerspace,” the weird comedy about Martin Short being controlled from within by a tiny pilot played by Dennis Quaid, is actually about space.
