How did HBO’s The Last of Us change Sam and Henry from the game?
By Daniel Roman
The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is here, and it was a big one. Over the course of an hour, viewers got to know new characters Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), only to say goodbye to them at the eleventh hour. “Endure and Survive” was an important episode in terms of how the show adapts the 2013 video game on which it’s based. We’ve got a lot to talk about.
There will be SPOILERS below for the latest episode of The Last of Us, as well as for Naughty Dog’s video game.
How did The Last of Us change Henry and Sam from the game?
As with the episode preceding it, “Endure and Survive” is an incredibly faithful recreation of Naughty Dog’s beloved video game. It also expands several sections and characters, changing plenty while still keeping the spirit of the story and some of its biggest moments intact.
Many of those changes involve Sam, Henry, and the story of how the Kansas City Quarantine Zone fell to Kathleen’s resistance fighters. Speaking broadly, while Joel and Ellie do meet Henry and Sam in the game and a lot of the things they do together are more or less the same, everything about Henry’s relationship with the resistance, including how he ran afoul of them, is invented for TV.
In the game, Henry and Sam are far more hardened survivors. In that version, the brothers are part of a larger group who are ambushed by raiders known as “hunters” while passing through Pittsburgh (changed to Kansas City, Missouri in the show). Sam and Henry are the only ones who survive, and eventually run into Joel and Ellie while trying to escape the city. In the show, Henry tells us he’s never killed anyone. In the game he’s killed plenty of people; he resembles Joel in both attitude and skillset, whereas on TV they’re quite different from each other.
In the game, Henry scolds Sam for taking a Transformers-style toy from an abandoned store, saying that they only take what they need. Contrast that with how Henry tries to distract Sam in the show with crayons. In this version, the brothers have lived in Kansas City for years and aren’t seasoned veterans of the wastelands.
Was Sam deaf in The Last of Us game?
As with Henry, HBO changes some key things about Sam. The biggest change to Sam’s character is that he’s Deaf (capitalized because he was born with a hearing disability, as opposed to developing one later in life), as is the actor who portrays him, Keivonn Woodard. Sam was not Deaf in the game. He was also a little older — 13, as opposed to 8 years old in the TV show. Finally, on the TV show Sam suffered from leukemia, which is what led to Henry double-crossing the resistance to get meds from FEDRA. In the game, we don’t hear about him dealing with health problems.
Showrunner and The Last of Us game creator Neil Druckmann explained to The Washington Post why he and co-showrunner Craig Maizin made some of these changes. “One of the changes that we made for the TV show is we made Sam deaf,” he said. “And it started from a place of just like talking with Craig [Mazin] and we’re like, ‘What if we could use less dialogue?’ That kind of constraint led to really interesting storytelling decisions that I would say in some ways make that sequence [with Sam and Henry] more impactful than it is in the game.”
However his character was changed, Sam still has many of the same interactions with Ellie on the show that he does in the game. They still bond over Savage Starlight comics, still play soccer, and still laugh together. Because Ellie doesn’t know ASL, Sam resorts to using a magic slate paper saver in the TV show to write out messages. This makes the minutia of their interactions slightly different, but the spirit and even some of the dialogue is quite faithful to the video game.
