The latest episode of The Last of Us, "The Price," revived the dearly departed Joel (Pedro Pascal) for a series of flashbacks. We see how he raised his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in the town of Jackson, Wyoming, where they're as safe from the roving zombies outside as it's possible to be.
If only they could fend off their inner demons. Over a period of years, Joel and Ellie's relationship deteriorates as Ellie slowly puts together the truth about what Joel did in Salt Lake City in the season 1 finale. It all climaxes in an intimate conversation they share on the porch outside Joel's house, something we only glimpsed in the season premiere. Here, we see them finally hash things out.
In The Last of Us video games, we don't see this conversation until much later in the story. Why did creator and episode director Neil Druckmann decide to move it up? "When we were making the game, I knew that scene should exist," Druckmann told Variety. "I didn’t know where it goes. That was true for all the flashbacks. Even pretty late in production of the game, we were moving those flashbacks around. In talking about it with [co-showrunner Craig Mazin], it’s the first time I really thought about the time between seasons. So much of writing is set ups and payoffs, and we would have set certain things up that get paid off years later. That felt too long, especially because this season focuses so much on Ellie’s journey and this emotional truth of what did she know? What didn’t she know? To wait additional years until Season 3 will come out — or maybe even Season 4, it depends where all the events land and how many seasons we have — I was easily convinced by Craig that that would be too long."
I certainly don't like hearing Druckmann talk about needing to wait "additional years" between seasons — c'mon, HBO, greenlight this stuff ahead of time — but his answer makes some sense.
Another change is that, in the game, Ellie travels all the way back to Salt Lake City to learn the truth of what happened. On the show, she pieces it all together in Jackson; the final straw is when Joel lies to her about an incident involving a new character named Eugene (Joe Pantoliano), convincing her he's capable of lying about anything.
"We wanted this episode for Ellie to find out definitively that Joel lied," Druckmann said. "In the game, we did in a very different way, where she traveled all the way back to the hospital and found documentation. It felt like we would be stretching the reality of the world and how dangerous it is on the show compared to the game. But also, looking at documents and exploring that space, I don’t know if that makes as compelling of a drama for a TV show. The engine for the show is a little different than the engine for an interactive experience. So that ultimately led to the whole Eugene sequence."
That was only one of the flashbacks in the episode. In the first one, Joel plays a song for Ellie on his guitar, a song she starts to play again years later: "Future Days" by Pearl Jam.
This moment is drawn straight from the game, as you can see above, but there's a hitch. In our world, "Future Days" came out in 2013. In the games, that's the same year the zombie apocalypse started, so it makes sense that Joel could have heard it and known it. But in the show, the zombie apocalypse started in 2003, so the song technically shouldn't exist.
Druckmann was aware of this, but decided to go ahead anyway. "Initially, when we were making this episode, there would have been a different song. As we were exploring it, just felt like we were prioritizing the wrong thing, this timeline of events and when things would be available," he said. "Clearly, we’re not in the same timeline as our universe, so we have some leeway. And that song felt so important. Because it was in the game, because it has so much association, not only for fans, but even for myself, we changed course. The thing that we thought we cared about, we ultimately didn’t care about, and the emotional truth of the song was more important than the timeline truth of the world that we live in."
So maybe alternate universe Pearl Jam released the song earlier; use your imaginations.
The Last of Us set brought Neil Druckmann to tears
In another flashback, Joel takes young Ellie to tour an abandoned museum, a thrilling experience for her. This flashback was also pulled directly from the game, and Druckman found it "surreal" to walk around the set.
On that day, Druckmann toured with the set with two other people who had worked with him on the video game. "I’m like, come with me, and we walk through this dark hallway with stars, and we got to the space capsule, and I’m like, 'Look at this.' I’m emotional, but I’ve been seeing it as it’s been built. I look at them, and they both have tears in their eyes. This thing that we worked so hard to perfect in digital forms with pixels on a flat screen, now you could stand in it, you could go into it, you could touch it. All the buttons are working. The seats are real. They creak when you sit in them. It felt like we went into the game. It’s this really wonderful feeling to know that this incredible crew that I worked with treated the source material with such reverence. It literally moved us to tears."
The season 2 finale of The Last of Us will air this Sunday night on HBO and Max.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.