SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major details from Sunday’s episode of HBO‘s The Last of Us.
The second episode of The Last of Us Season 2 is sure to leave audiences reeling as it tackles one of the most heartbreaking and pivotal moments from the video games.
Episode 1 ended on an ominous note with a shot of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and her crew arriving in Wyoming and looming over Jackson five years after she made a promise that she’d go after Joel (Pedro Pascal) for killing the fireflies at the Salt Lake City hospital to save Ellie (Bella Ramsey). In Episode 2, she makes good on that promise after she stumbles upon Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) while she’s trying to escape a horde of Infected on the mountain.
Joel and Dina had been on patrol together, and they were seeking shelter from not only the Infected, but also from an impending snowstorm. Abby offers her crew’s lodge up the mountain and, once they arrive, they drug Dina to give Abby the opportunity to torture Joel.
Meanwhile, Ellie and Jesse (Young Mazino) are on patrol together when they get a radio call that Jackson’s base can’t get ahold of Joel and Dina, prompting them to leave their shelter from the storm to search. Ellie descends upon the lodge first, finding Joel on the brink of death as she’s tackled to the ground and subdued before she can fight back. She watches, helpless, as Abby delivers the final blow.
As if Joel’s death wasn’t anxiety inducing enough, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann took a fairly large departure from the source material in this episode, as the horde of Infected eventually breaches the walls at Jackson, leaving the city in shambles.
It raises questions about what’s to come, now that a traumatized Ellie has vowed to kill Abby and her crew, and Tommy, Maria and the rest of the survivors back in Jackson are attempting to regroup. The episode is relentlessly brutal, which the creators acknowledge.
“This episode is upsetting to me, too. I just want people to know that we are not here snickering. We are with them. This hurts,” Mazin tells Deadline.
In the interview below, Mazin and Druckmann went in depth with Deadline about this feat of an episode, the departures from The Last of Us Part II (the game), and the implications for the rest of the story.
DEADLINE: This is such a pivotal episode, and not only that, but these scenes are not easy. I certainly thought I was prepared, but I was not. Were you nervous about it? Are you still nervous at all about the reaction?
CRAIG MAZIN: I mean, I was terrified. Neil probably wasn’t. Mark Mylod and I were just panicking because we knew the bar was high. I mean, this moment from the game is extraordinary, and we’re doing it almost the same way, but with some interesting differences, and that’s always a little scary. I don’t know, trying to hit that bar, we were incredibly nervous. Were you nervous, Neil?
NEIL DRUCKMANN: I guess I’m nervous anytime there’s an important beat in our story and making sure we get it right, but not necessarily because of the content. I experienced the worst of the negative reaction to it already five years ago. So in that respect, I haven’t been nervous. Although I’ve been getting more nervous lately as the days are turning into hours before this thing airs. I’m very curious what the reaction is going to be.
DEADLINE: Yes, there’s two factions of viewers here. People who played the game and know what’s coming and then people whose only association to The Last of Us is the show, and I am sure this will be shocking to a lot of them. Craig, what was your reaction to this story beat when you first found out about it?
MAZIN: Well, I didn’t find out. That’s the thing about a video game, you’re inside of it, which is particularly terrifying.
DRUCKMANN: I think also the first time Craig and I met at this restaurant by Naughty Dog, former restaurant that doesn’t exist anymore, we talked a lot about The Last of Us, but I was in the middle of making The Last of Us Part II, and Craig asked me what happens in it. I kind of spelled the whole thing off for him. He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense.’
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MAZIN: It does hurt tremendously when it happens. It hurts, of course it does, because we love Joel, and more importantly, because Ellie loves Joel, and we’re experiencing her heartbreak, and we’re all going to grieve the loss of this person that we’ve come to love. But in terms of the narrative, yes, it felt like an inevitability, because this isn’t a show that goes on and on. This is a show that has an ending. We are a show that confronts people dealing with the hardest emotions. Watching Bella in that moment was heart wrenching. It really was. There were a lot of tears that day from all of us. It was tough.
DEADLINE: How long did it take to shoot?
MAZIN: Well, there’s a few scenes before that one. So we block shot everything in that room, in the ski lodge. But I believe we were there for four very long days, and I think two of the days were spent on that, and really we reserved that day for the actual final stuff. So Ellie on the ground and looking at Joel and him looking at her, and then the aftermath. That was one brutal day.
DEADLINE: What were the conversations like in terms of how graphic and violent to make this scene? It’s obviously very graphic in the game, but it honestly felt even more visceral and horrifying in the show.
DRUCKMANN: We did talk about how much violence you’re seeing. It’s interesting that you’re saying it’s more graphic, because it’s actually less. In the game, the lacerations he has on his face and stuff are much more intense. But live action just can hit harder when it comes to violence, so we actually reel it back and it could still feel like more. So I remember those being the conversations. But for the sake of the story, it’s important to see the brutality of this moment, because it motivates so much of what comes after.
DEADLINE: What did Mark bring to the table as the director for this episode?
MAZIN: How much time you have? Mark Mylod is both, I think, the most humble person I have ever worked with in show business and one of the most brilliantly thoughtful directors. He is a dream for the actors. He’s the kind of director who, when he’s working, I’m watching carefully to try and pick up tips, because he’s such a professional, and he’s done it for so long. He’s obviously very good at killing main characters. He was the director on Game of Thrones for Bella Ramsey’s first scene. He was their first television director. Here we were full circle, and he creates this incredible sphere of comfort for everybody, even as he’s masterminding all the angles and getting an enormous amount of coverage and eye lines and all the rest of it. He was just an absolute joy to work with, and I miss him. I know he’s off doing Harry Potter. I miss him, but I can’t imagine anybody better for that. For Kaitlyn, for everybody, he was just the exact right choice.
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DRUCKMANN: I mean, we’re also talking about ‘the event’ as articles are referring to it, but there’s so much more in this episode that, again, just from just a technical, logistical standpoint of pulling that off, it’s such a feat. I remember when I talked to Mark before he started directing, when he was in prep, I was really curious about how he’s going to handle the attack on Jackson, all the intricacies of it. He told me, ‘Neil, as scary as that is, I’m way more scared for getting Joel’s death right.’ I, personally, appreciate that. That’s where his mind was at. That was his top priority.
Kaitlyn Dever as Abby in ‘The Last of Us’
DEADLINE: I really want to talk about the attack on Jackson, too. As you say, there is a lot in this episode and Joel’s death is so monumental already. What made you decide to incorporate this horde of Infected descending on Jackson?
MAZIN: Well, one of the things we talked about was the idea of breaking everything. When you feel like you’ve finally reached stability, sometimes everything falls apart. All the things that made you safe are gone. Joel made Ellie feel safe. He’s gone. That impenetrable wall made Jackson feel safe, and it got broken. Creating that threat from inside and out at the same time, we just felt that it was the right way to show how dangerous the world is and how fragile everything is and how precious everything is. So the relationships going forward have to be taken very seriously, and the decisions that we make have to be taken very seriously, because there is no safety.
DEADLINE: I am curious about why you chose to have Dina on patrol with Joel, instead of Tommy. How is that going to impact these character dynamics? What might that do to Ellie and Dina’s relationship?
DRUCKMANN: This was part of conversations we had very, very early on of showing the relationship between Dina and Joel that you’ve seen in Episode 1, and this is the extension of that decision that we’ve made…which will have a big impact going forward as well. It’s something that in the game, we talk about Dina having a relationship with Joel. You never get to see it. Here, we felt like this was a good choice for this show to see that and to have her specifically be present at that moment of confrontation.
MAZIN: It certainly makes their voyage forward — should that occur, you understand Dina’s motivations, because there is a mechanical benefit to Dina in the game. We don’t have that mechanical benefit. So the question really was, how do we connect Dina to this tragedy in a way that is deeper than just ‘I’m Ellie’s friend.’
DEADLINE: In the first episode, there’s a moment in the supermarket where Ellie picks up a bottle. It felt so much like the gameplay. Then in this episode, Tommy fighting the Bloater felt so much like a boss fight you’d encounter in the game. How do you pinpoint moments like that to pay homage to the actual mechanics and gameplay?
MAZIN: I’m looking to incorporate it all the time. The question is, where will it fit? Right? Because there have been a lot of video game adaptations that have gone astray, because they tried to duplicate gameplay. The problem is, a lot of gameplay doesn’t work in this medium. It doesn’t work as a sort of passive experience. But in those moments where I go ‘Actually, this would be really useful to have Ellie throw something to get a Clicker’s attention. It should be a brick or a bottle.’ Then the debate is brick or bottle, which is a great debate [that will] rage on forever. For Tommy, that moment was, to me, all about fear, because I experienced a certain kind of fear using a flamethrower on a Bloater, and the Bloater keeps coming, and the gas burns so quickly on those things. That fear actually did feel very portable to the television medium. So I’m always looking for ways to, never cram things in, but to weave them in, I guess.
DEADLINE: You’ve already addressed the reasoning for bringing Abby’s backstory and motivations to the beginning of the story, but you’ve had to dance around it a little to avoid the spoiler of Joel’s death. Now that it’s all out in the open, can you speak a bit more in depth about it? I will say, I was surprised at how angry I still felt for Ellie in that moment — even having played the game and seeing Abby’s own pain in the show as she explains herself to Joel.
DRUCKMANN: I guess for us, one we’re not as precious about spoilers, maybe, as I was in the game initially, but I like this trade off that we’ve made, which is, we traded surprise for suspense. If you see the structure of the first episode, we kind of reveal what Abby’s about so that we could have this final shot where she’s arrived at Jackson. As a viewer, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, something’s about to go down.’ I’ve been reading every reaction I could find, just because I love that stuff, and it’s interesting that a lot of the people that are bumping against it, they’re saying, ‘Oh, I wish the audience that didn’t know would still be surprised.’
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But then you read people that have no idea, and they have no clue what’s coming, because how many times have you seen in a show or a story where some threat that’s coming towards our hero, you’re like, ‘Well, our hero is going to deal with it.’ Joel’s dealt with threats before. They still don’t know what’s coming. It’s just the audience from the game that is intimately familiar with it, I think, that is questioning it in a way that I think will be resolved by the time they finish watching this episode.
MAZIN: If you watch that scene, what you see, because I get angry too, but so does Owen. Mel is crying. [Abby’s] gone too far. It is clear. Owen’s the person who loves her the most, and he’s angry, and he’s asking her, and then he commands her, to end it. When Abby walks away, when this is all said and done — I thought Mark did a beautiful job there, and Kaitlin did such a beautiful job — you don’t know if she’s regretful or if she’s in some state of, I don’t know, existential confusion. All you know is, she is unsatisfied. Whatever she thought she was going to get from this, she didn’t get it. So now what?
The Last of Us Season 2 airs Sundays on HBO at 9 p.m. ET/PT and is available to stream on Max at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET.
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