WARNING: The following post contains massive spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2, “Through the Valley”
Fans of The Last of Us video game franchise have known for years that Joel (Pedro Pascal) was destined to die on the blockbuster television adaptation. However, because of several minor changes to the show’s source material, the circumstances around his brutal death were altered just enough to leave even ardent game players surprised.
For starters, Joel’s death at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) — an act of revenge put into motion when Joel murdered several members of the Fireflies during the Season 1 finale, including Abby’s father — was set against the backdrop of a massive infected attack on the Jackson, Wyo., stronghold Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have called home for the last five years.
“In the game, we talk about that Jackson being threatened by infected or raiders. It was important for us to show that here, structurally, because we could jump back and forth in a way that we can’t in the game, and that could raise the tension,” The Last of Us video game and show co-creator Neil Druckmann said in an interview with Variety published Sunday night. “But also, Jackson is now a character in the story, and it’s a character that people have to take into account going forward. What does that mean? Not only have we lost this beloved character, but we’ve lost a lot of other people, and now the safety of this town is compromised. Where do we go from here? To present that dilemma going forward, it gave us the excuse to make this completely badass siege of Jackson.”
The decision to have a horde of infected penetrate the city and leave several civilians dead was also a way for Druckmann and show co-creator Craig Mazin to show how Joel’s choice at the end of Season 1 had significant unanticipated consequences for everyone, not just Abby, Joel, and Ellie. Joel killed Abby’s father and multiple Fireflies to save Ellie, who is immune to the Cordyceps virus and whose blood was going to be used to find a cure to the plague. Without a cure, Ellie survived, but the infected also survived, and they are now rampaging through Jackson.
“It’s interesting to see how one person who makes a choice is being confronted by that choice, while a whole other bunch of people are feeling the direct and negative impact of that choice — not just one person, not just people that we don’t know or maybe don’t like, but people we love,” Mazin told Vulture in an interview. “There was value in pulling the rug out from under everybody, and to have a feeling at the end of that episode that everything had fallen apart.”
Another major tweak in the story is how The Last of Us paired its fateful patrol groups. In The Last of Us Part II, Joel and his brother, Tommy (played by Gabriel Luna on the show), go out together, and Abby and her friends eventually capture them before Abby kills Joel. Meanwhile, Dina (played by Isabella Merced) and Ellie are out on their own, and they stumble upon Eugene’s abandoned grow house where they have sex for the first time. On the show, it was different: Joel and Dina go together, an effort to further illustrate Joel’s parental bond to young women after the death of his daughter, while Ellie and Jesse (Young Mazino) find Eugene’s old stash.
“We wanted to show more than we did in the game, because in the game, we just talked about Dina’s relationship with Joel. In the years that Joel and Ellie have settled down in Jackson, Dina has gotten close to Joel and became this other — not quite on the level of Ellie — but this other surrogate daughter he could mentor and teach. She’s this other orphan,” Druckmann told Variety.
The tweak did leave some fans upset, having been robbed of the chance to see Ellie and Dina consummate their nascent romance. However, both Druckmann and Mazin said any outrage about that specific change is likely misplaced. “But also, you’ll notice that Ellie and Dina’s relationship is different from the game. When Dina joins Ellie, their relationship goes somewhere else that has not happened here on the show. They are friends that have kissed one time, and Ellie’s unsure what that means. We have more to go with these characters,” Druckmann told Variety.
Speaking to TheWrap, Mazin said that while the Ellie-Dina scene didn’t occur as it does in the video game, the chances of a similar scene taking its place were probably pretty high.
“Maybe we scrapped the location, but we didn’t necessarily scrap the scene. I can see see people getting very angry and saying, ‘Oh, these guys aren’t going to do it.’ If you watch Season 1, we pretty much get around to everything we need to get around to. We just don’t necessarily do it exactly where it was in the game because the experience is different the way we divide episodes up,” Mazin said. “For instance, in Episode 1, Ellie and Dina’s kiss at the dance happens like 90 percent of the way in on the game. So all I’d say to people is Neil made the game, I’m a fan of the game.”
The final major tweak to Joel’s death is in the way he dies and its aftermath. Abby beats him to death in both mediums. However, in the game, she cracks his head open with a golf club, but with his head partially obscured; on the show, Abby stabs Joel in the neck with a broken club, and the audience is shown the moment he dies.
“The intention was very much initially on the page to not see it happen. The decision to change was because it felt coy. It felt like we were ducking out,” Mark Mylod, who directed the episode, told Variety. “So much of the game is about consequences and facing the music. The idea of them blinking and hiding from that felt coy and almost dishonest and disingenuous. That’s why we changed it and did show it.”
After Joel died in the game, Ellie is knocked unconscious. In the show, she’s kicked in the stomach and left behind. She eventually crawls over to Joel and cradles his dead body..
“The shot was just about desolation, absolute finality and loss,” Mylod said of the final moment we see Joel and Ellie together in the episode, a crane shot from above. “We specifically shot the scene in a very unflashy way. It was very much about the humanity, vulnerability, anger, all the emotional elements of the character. It had to be honest and observational and not standing too far back, so there was almost a voyeurism of being uncomfortably close to the action and emotion, to the ferocity of Abby, to the extraordinary pain, both physical in Joel’s and emotional in Ellie’s. That top shot was about breaking out of that camera grammar to a place that was final, judgmental and hopefully heartbreaking to see the desperate need for that final physical contact.”
New episodes of The Last of Us airs Sundays on HBO.
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