‘The Last of Us’ Creators Unpack That Huge Season 2 Twist: Timing, Execution and Showing Restraint

Note: The following contains “The Last of Us” Season 2 Episode 2 spoilers.

HBO’s “The Last of Us” left its newest fans stunned on Sunday evening as series protagonist Joel (Pedro Pascal) was brutally murdered by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and her crew of ex-Fireflies, who were seeking revenge for the events of the Season 1 finale.

The scene, which is the inciting incident of the game on which it’s based, “The Last of Us: Part II,” finds Abby telling Joel that her father was the doctor who was set to perform surgery on Ellie to make a vaccine for the Cordyceps infection. And Joel murdered him during his violent rampage at St. Mary’s Hospital.

In addition to introducing that revelation earlier than in the game, the HBO adaptation notably swaps Joel’s patrol partner to Dina (Isabela Merced) instead of Tommy (Gabriel Luna), who stays back to help Jackson fend off a horde of infected in an epic battle.

The decision to kill off Joel in the second episode of the season may come as a shock to viewers, with five more episodes left in the season. During a wide-ranging conversation with executive producers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann about Episode 2, they revealed that they considered moving Joel’s death to later in the season, but “those conversations didn’t last long.”

“I think some people felt that maybe we would start with it out of shock value,” Mazin said. “We’re not interested in shock value. That’s not what we do. And I think some people thought we would put it at the end of the season, because HBO is going to make us keep Pedro Pascal every episode.”

Mazin said they never talked about keeping Joel alive. He was always going to die, just like in the game.

“We love Pedro, but I told him the very first time I ever Zoomed with him, ‘So here’s the thing, you’re playing this guy, Joel. In Season 2, he’s gonna die.’ There was never a question. It was always understood that was built into this,” he said.

Read on for our full conversation with Mazin and Druckmann below.

What prompted the decision in Episode 2 to change up the patrol pairings from the game, swapping out Tommy with Dina as Joel’s partner and putting Ellie and Jesse together?

Druckmann: There’s a bunch of reasons. When you engineer the structure, we have hundreds and hundreds of conversations around these things. One, we wanted to show what’s at stake for Jackson, because that will come into play later in the season as well. And we wanted one of our familiar characters to be [at the battle with the infected horde] and Tommy felt very natural for that. 

Two, we wanted to demonstrate and show more of Dina’s relationship with Joel. We only talk about in the game, here you get to see it and it goes back to Episode 1 and continues through here. And specifically, we wanted to build up to that moment where she is there when he is tortured and eventually killed, because that will come into play later. 

And then the other thing is we’re building Jesse up more than we did in the game. We wanted to show more of his dynamic with Ellie, and the relationship between Ellie and Dina takes a few different turns throughout the whole season. So if you’re familiar with the game, in that weed grow house, that relationship goes somewhere else that has not happened in the show. 

When it came to that specific scene that you mentioned in the game of Ellie and Dina in Eugene’s weed den, what was the decision-making behind scrapping that? Was it just something that you felt didn’t fit pacing-wise?

Mazin: 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. For instance, in Episode 1, Ellie and Dina’s kiss at the dance happens like 90% 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.

Druckmann: One last thing I’ll touch on this is pacing in the game is very different from pacing in the show. There are just different kind of engines that are keeping you engaged and switching things up. And because we don’t have the interactive element, there’s certain other techniques that we have to do to keep the pacing going.

I also want to ask you about Episode 2’s elephant in the room which you touched upon earlier, which is Joel’s death. How did you decide on the scene’s changes, most notably who was in the room in the show versus the game? Also, what was your advice to Kaitlyn and Pedro in terms of how to approach the scene?

Mazin: Some of the smaller changes were scripted because we introduce Abby in a slightly more complete way, because there’s less of a discover-through-gameplay mechanism that we have to work with, which actually leads to a really interesting conversation between the two of them that’s quite intimate and sort of beautiful in its own way. But some of those small things just happen. For instance, Mel is crying and that’s because Ariela [Barer] was crying. I mean it was an upsetting thing to watch and experience and we leave room for those things. Mark Mylod was amazing about giving everybody a chance to feel it, but we really did want, more than anything, to deliver the experience that we all felt when we played the game, which is a difficult one. 

For Kaitlyn and Pedro, I don’t have to tell either one of them anything. And Mark [Mylod] and I would sort of look at each other and other than telling Kaitlyn to look a little bit more to her left just for an eye line or saying ‘let’s just do another take and see what happens,’ you don’t really need to say anything. They got it. They understood it inherently. And it was pretty incredible to watch them have that connection in a strange way, even as she was preparing him for his own death.

Joel’s death is obviously very violent both in the game and the show, but how did you figure out the balance of how much of it to show on screen? Was there ever a feeling that you needed to dial it back or wanted to go farther?

Mazin: Some of the balancing happens in editing. You have choices. Where should I linger and how long should I linger? For me, I didn’t want to necessarily see a fist connecting over and over to Joel’s face because to me that would have been gratuitous and sort of action movie-ish. And the truth is that’s not what’s going on here. What’s going on here is something much, much sadder and reprehensible to the point that you can see how angry Ellie is and how sad Mel is. But when we do show Joel, it’s because Ellie needs to see it, because it’s not enough to lose somebody like that.

There is heartbreak and loss, but there’s anger and humiliation, and she’s looking at a humiliated man who’s been brought low. And watching Bella go from tears and begging him to get up to then ‘I’m gonna kill you all. You’re all gonna f–king die,’ that rage needs to be motivated by more than just death. It is a humiliation. And when Ellie says it, I believe her.

Druckmann: The entire premise of the story, even going back to the game, is this further exploration of love. If you watched someone experience this, a random stranger, you would be disgusted. You would be angry at whoever committed this act. Now, imagine it’s done to the person you love the most. What happens to you and what choices you make after that? That is the story.

You guys chose to put Joel’s death in Episode 2. How did you land on that decision as opposed to killing him off in episode 1 or later in the season?

Druckmann: We interrogate everything. So I can’t remember the exact conversation, but I know there were conversations of what happens if we push it all the way down? And those conversations didn’t last very long, because then we’re just lingering in act one for a really long time.

This is the act one break, the incident that then carries the rest of the season that we needed to move it as early as possible. And as early as possible turned out to be Episode 2, because we needed to reestablish Jackson and our characters, set up some of the relationships and dynamics that now are all interrupted and thrown into disarray because of what Abby did to Joel.

Mazin: The decision making process came down to ‘OK, where does this belong narratively to us? What was our instinct? How will this impact the story in the best possible way?’ Even though it is a horrible, horrible thing where does it belong?’ I think some people felt that maybe we would start with it out of shock value. We’re not interested in shock value. That’s not what we do. And I think some people thought we would put it at the end of the season, because HBO is going to make us keep Pedro Pascal every episode.

We love Pedro, but I told him the very first time I ever Zoomed with him, ‘So here’s the thing, you’re playing this guy, Joel. In Season 2, he’s gonna die.’ There was never a question. It was always understood that was built into this. And we didn’t want to torment people necessarily. There’s a sense that maybe you’re just burning time and dangling this fate that a lot of people are aware is inherent to the storyline, and the people who aren’t aware will become aware, and it will start to feel like we’re toying with everybody in a way.

Even though I think [Joel’s death is] exactly where it belongs narratively, it feels early, because you don’t want it to happen. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s too soon, because he has gone too soon.

I know you both have been previously asked about Joel’s decision at the end of Season 1 and whether you would do the same as him if put in his shoes. If you were put in Abby’s situation where Joel has killed her father, would you have reacted similarly?

Mazin: No, this is a different thing. Joel committed a pretty massive crime, but he did it out of love to save somebody. Abby is torturing and murdering somebody out of anger and a sense of justice. And I believe in civil society. This argument, by the way, this debate will occur on the show, because it is a debate. Neil and I love these unresolved things, because I think Neil can make a pretty good argument, maybe on behalf of Abby. But I think what’s interesting to me is when Abby walks away from this at the end of the episode, we can’t necessarily know what’s in her mind. All we know is she’s not happy. She thought it was going to happen and it didn’t happen.

Druckmann: Yeah, Craig is right in that this is kind of a conversation of does the punishment fit the crime? And it’s like the worse the crime is the worse the punishment needs to be so it goes back to the biblical eye for an eye concept. So while I don’t agree with Abby, I understand that mindset that I think is pretty universal for many of us. It wouldn’t take much to tip us into that mindset and you could look around the world right now and see how people react in the same way, or worse, to each other, because they feel just.

Mazin: And that brings me to an interesting point, which is, when we meet Abby for the first time, this is something that we did that was different in the game. What we’re seeing is somebody that is good. She’s not a bad person. She’s grieving the loss of her father and her friends and her life and she’s heartbroken. She’s angry, but she’s heartbroken. This is not somebody who murders people regularly.

When good people do bad things, it is fascinating to see what it does to them, and I’m way more interested in that than watching bad people do bad things. Abby is a good person who’s done a bad thing. Joel was a good person who did a bad thing. Ellie is a good person and what she says to them is, ‘you’re all going to f–king die.’ So good people are promising each other to do very bad things. And the big question is, how will this all end?

Lastly, I want to ask you about the massive battle scene between the people of Jackson and the infected horde. Talk to me about the challenges of filming that sequence because it’s clear there were a lot of people involved.

Mazin: One of the things that we really try and do is create as much in camera as we can. We know that we’re going to expand things with visual effects. And in this instance, both WETA and ILP, two fantastic visual effects companies, did an extraordinary job. But when you look at the screen, you will often, I think almost always, not know. Sometimes people are like, ‘Is that digital or is that a person?’ 

We do put a lot of people in there, which means Barry Gower, our prosthetics wizard and his team have to put a lot of people in prosthetics. We are lighting people on fire. We are exploding things. We have people shooting a gazillion blanks from guns. We have people falling off of roofs. The amount of stunt people that we were using and to get it all done in a way that would mesh fluidly with post production and not have any accidents, not have anybody get hurt. That was a massive undertaking that required an enormous amount of planning by our production team, Jack Lesco and Cecil O’Connor led this army of people to do this and Mark Mylod ultimately was the best possible field commander we could have asked for.

Druckmann: It was just important to show what happened to Jackson. It’s important to show what’s at stake. It’s important to now raise this dilemma of what do you do. These people got away with worse than murder, a fate worse than death, to one of the most important people in Jackson and Jackson is in ruins. Where do you go from here?

New episodes of “The Last of Us” air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and stream on Max.

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