In a way, this week’s episode of The Last of Us spoiled the end of the game. It took a key scene between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) that originally came at the very end of The Last of Us Part II and moved it into the middle of the story. And, while you’d think a decision that major would’ve been a big challenge, the people behind it claim it was easier than expected.
In this week’s sixth episode of The Last of Us season two, “The Price,” we got to see the key moment where Joel finally tells Ellie the truth about what happened at the end of the first season. He killed an entire hospital of people who probably could’ve created a cure to the apocalyptic viral outbreak, just so Ellie wouldn’t have to die. And then he lied about it. It’s the lie that hangs over the entire story of the second game, and this season of the show—but while that conversation comes at the very end of the video game, we got to see it much earlier on the show. Speaking to Variety, the game’s creator, and episode six director, Neil Druckmann explained that moving the scene up was not a difficult decision to make.
“When we were making the game, I knew that scene should exist. I didn’t know where it goes. That was true for all the flashbacks. Even pretty late in production of the game, we were moving those flashbacks around,” Druckmann said. “In talking about it with Craig [Mazin, series co-creator], it’s the first time I really thought about the time between seasons. So much of writing is set-ups and payoffs, and we would have set certain things up that get paid off years later. That felt too long, especially because this season focuses so much on Ellie’s journey and this emotional truth of what did she know? What didn’t she know? To wait additional years until season three will come out—or maybe even season four, it depends where all the events land and how many seasons we have—I was easily convinced by Craig that that would be too long.”
Yes, let’s acknowledge that Druckmann did just tease that season three of The Last of Us may not be the end. We think it will be, but that is something he said.
Adding more context to the decision, though, Collider spoke to Halley Gross, who co-wrote The Last of Us Part II as well as “The Price.” Gross talked about not just the decision to move Joel and Ellie’s conversation up, but that it erases an entire scene from the game where Ellie travels to Salt Lake City and learns the truth for herself.
“When you’re talking about TV, we have to condense themes. We have to think about sets. We have to think about Ellie and Joel’s progress not in a 24-hour game, but in a 55-minute piece,” Gross said. “There was an opportunity to hit both of those notes at the same time because of this Eugene moment, because Eugene was giving us the confirmation that that hospital beat was originally intended for. So, once Ellie knows in the same way that she knew when she visited St. Mary’s, then it becomes: how are you going to move forward from that information?”
Druckmann confirms that it was the crafting of the scene where Joel kills Eugene, which isn’t in the game, that gave them the okay to skip the extra Salt Lake City trip and make that the moment Ellie knows for sure what Joel did.
“We wanted this episode for Ellie to find out definitively that Joel lied,” Druckmann said. “In the game, we did in a very different way, where she traveled all the way back to the hospital and found documentation. It felt like we would be stretching the reality of the world and how dangerous it is on the show compared to the game. But also, looking at documents and exploring that space, I don’t know if that makes as compelling of a drama for a TV show. The engine for the show is a little different than the engine for an interactive experience. So that ultimately led to the whole Eugene sequence.”
Now though, with The Last of Us season two altering some of the emotional payoffs at the very end of The Last of Us Part II, does that mean Druckmann and Mazin have to rethink exactly how the show is going to end? “That’s right,” he begrudgingly admitted to Variety.
The first six episodes of The Last of Us season two are now on HBO Max. The season finale airs Sunday.
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