HBO’s The Last of Us has finally reached a pivotal moment from the games, but it does things a bit differently.
Season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation released its second episode this week, setting the online fandom ablaze with debates and reactions over its shocking events. It’ll be difficult to discuss the major changes this episode made from The Last of Us Part II without getting into specifics, so let’s just plaster a big ol’ spoiler warning on this before we proceed:
Warning: major spoilers ahead!
Here are all the major changes and Easter eggs we spotted in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 2: Through The Valley.
We start off with a bit of character-swapping
Let’s start with the most obvious changes. The Last of Us Part II began the day after Jackson’s big New Year shindig, with Jesse picking Ellie up from her house to go on patrol. Season 2 does things a little differently here, swapping a few characters around from where they should be. Ellie ends up going on patrol with Jesse, rather than Dina. This is because Dina and Joel went out on patrol together while she was asleep. That marks yet another change, seeing as Joel had gone out on patrol with Tommy in the game.
These changes were clearly made to keep certain characters in key locations for this episode’s most critical events; namely, the invasion of Jackson and (spoiler alert!) Joel’s death. Tommy had to be in Jackson with the addition of the town’s big Infected siege. Dina was likely paired with Joel to give her more reason to journey with Ellie later. Ellie and Jesse almost immediately split up while on patrol, so there were no major changes there–Jesse remained out of sight for both of this episode’s major setpieces.
The invasion of Jackson
As The Last of Us Part II players very well know, Joel’s death arrives fairly quickly in the story. We view most of that incident from Ellie’s perspective (save from one scene, which we see from Abby’s), and the series builds up the tension to his death with the addition of an Infected horde. The TV series ratchets up that tension further with two different plotlines running concurrently, both of which end up feeding into one another at different points.
Abby awakens the Infected horde, just as she did in the game, but it heads towards Jackson after Joel picks her up. Jackson is then laid under siege, which Joel spots from afar, and only follows Abby back to her lodge in order to get help. The entire invasion of Jackson is also original to the series, but it does give us a neat reference to The Last of Us Part I, with Tommy wielding a flamethrower against a Bloater. Unless they had enough shotgun ammo, the flamethrower was often the player’s best bet to kill this humongous zombified giant as Joel.
Jackson was always seen as the shining light at the end of the tunnel in the games; a place of safety, weathered by past attacks but never broken. While the town survived this attack in the series, one wonders if its citizens are even capable of recovering from it.
The golf club incident
The exact events that lead to Joel’s death in the lodge are also a little different. In the game, fans have criticised Joel and Tommy for freely giving out their names in two different instances to Abby and her friends, leading them to the instant discovery that they had found the killer of the Fireflies. Here, Joel doesn’t stop to give Abby his name. The circumstances are different;there’s an invasion in Jackson, and there’s no time for introductions.
Abby learns Joel’s identity more organically in the series, and has Dina put to sleep so she doesn’t have to witness his death. We also get her dream sequences at the Firefly hospital at the start of the episode, rather than later on like it was in the game. These are choices likely made to humanise her further, and make her motivations very clear to the audience early on. In the game, it’s difficult to understand why Abby did what she did until players are actually placed in her shoes. This seven-episode season does not have that kind of time.
While the series has eschewed three members of Abby’s friend group, Jordan, Leah, and Nick, we do see Manny get slashed across the face by Ellie. In the game, Jordan gets cut by Ellie instead, which plays into a future encounter between the two later on. It looks like Manny will have a personal vendetta against Ellie in the series.
The rest of Joel’s death scene plays out without major changes, but Abby doesn’t end up beating him to death with a golf club. She blows his knee out with a shotgun and starts beating his legs with a golf club, but later resorts to using her fists when the golf club snaps off. She also gets a much longer monologue about her reasons for being here, which Joel interrupts, to his detriment. In the end, he is stabbed in the head with the pointy end of a broken golf club.
One more tragic change: when Ellie begs Joel to get up from the other side of the room, we see him visibly attempt to do so, despite being too far gone. When he dies, she crawls across the room and embraces him. In the game, she gets kicked unconscious right after Joel is killed.
A voice cameo from an iconic video game actor
The episode ends with a cover of “Through the Valley” by Shawn James, which is a pretty deep cut reference for The Last of Us fans. The song is perhaps best known for being featured in The Last of Us Part II’s iconic reveal trailer, which saw Joel step through a house filled with dead bodies to find Ellie singing this little ditty on her guitar. The actor who played Ellie in the games, Ashley Johnson, returns to sing this cover–just as she did in the reveal trailer.
That’s it for now! Check out our coverage of The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1: Future Days here, and stay tuned for more Easter eggs and references from upcoming episodes.
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