‘The Last of Us' Co-Creator Craig Mazin Dissects That Feared Final Moment of Season Two

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The Last of Us' eagerly anticipated second season — retracing the footsteps of the video game's designers before it — gave fans a moment they'd long feared and flipped the script on what show audiences would be watching moving forward. Spoiler alert: The second episode of season two — in which Pedro Pascal's Joel is brutally murdered as Bella Ramsey's Ellie has to watch — sparks a new trajectory for Ramsey's character as co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann dive deeper into the connection and trauma that drives her.
Craig Mazin talks often about adapting the story and grounding it as close to the real world, with real people, as possible. The Last of Us characters aren't invincible; everything doesn't always work out. 'It's important to give a character like Ellie that feeling because plot armor is real,' Mazin says. 'They go through these horrible situations, and if you or I were in any of them, it'd be like, there's no way out of this. But they get out of it all the time. So it's really important to have that realization of, 'There is nothing I can do. My hero and my father is incapacitated on the edge of death, and all I have left is begging.' '
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Season two introduces show audiences to Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever, who enters the story as a force. Mazin explains that in the game, Abby is a brolic presence to delineate a stark difference when playing as her versus playing as Ellie. In this scene in the show, Dever taps into Abby's ferocity and the similarities that drive her. 'So much of this story is about who is real to us and who is not,' Mazin says. 'Who is family, who is 'us,' and who is discardable 'them.' For Abby, her father was a PC [playable character]. Joel is an NPC [non-playable character], he's a bad guy to kill. For Ellie, it's the opposite.'
'I will repeatedly put dialogue and action in italics that is meant to be kind of an unspoken conversation … so there is this conversation that happens between Ellie and Joel that is so heartfelt and so emotional,' says Mazin. 'It's beyond words. It's just eyes. He doesn't need to speak. And he can't. But I wanted Bella to know why she was saying this, and I wanted Pedro to know what he was thinking there. He's not just doing it because somebody's yelling at him. He's doing it because he would do anything for her. It's just sort of magical.'
'I'm so obsessed with the relationship, that they had a final moment. And in their final moment, they were who they were in the way we loved them the most,' says Mazin. 'Ellie, who has been this kind of angry, increasingly independent teenager. Joel, who is this sullen man with this horrible secret, this thing that he did, this lie that he told. All of that goes away here. Here, Ellie is a little girl, and Joel is a father.'
In some respects, The Last of Us in season two had to convince audiences that Ellie is more than competent when it comes to inflicting the kind of violence required to survive in the world of the show, but 'Ellie's not a killing machine,' Mazin says. 'Ellie has killed very few people. One of the main differences between our show and the game is, killing is part of gameplay. There's no reason they should think this sobbing, crying, tantrumy child is going to be a problem for them. And they fucked up because they don't know what we know. If they had seen her with David [the antagonist from season one], they would kill her right now.'
The writers think a lot about how to demonstrate the violence that happens in the game onscreen in a way that makes sense. 'Here's a slight twist because in the game, she kills him just by once again bringing the golf club down on his head,' Mazin says. In the video game, Abby hits Joel multiple times in the head with the club, which they couldn't reasonably do onscreen. 'There's things that you can do in video games that you just can't do as human beings,' he adds. 'And we try to keep it as grounded as possible. We try to make those violent moments as realistic as possible.'
'We talked a lot about this with Bella,' says Mazin. 'Ellie has one simple want: Get up. That's it — just get up. We'll deal with the next step once you get up. Once Abby takes that sharpened thing up off the ground, Ellie's want changes instantly. She's not even talking to Joel anymore. Now her want is, please don't do this. She's talking directly to Abby.'
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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