This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for The Last of Us season 2 Episode 2.
Move over White Walkers, there's a new zombie threat in town. The second episode of The Last of Us season 2 dropped last weekend, and it set a new high benchmark for the series. The main event, of course, was the death of Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), who was brutally beaten to death by newcomer Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in front of his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey). It's a key scene from The Last of Us Part II video game, and the show did it justice and then some.
While Joel's death was an intimate showstopper, the episode's other major event was the exact opposite in terms of scale: a horde of infected descended on the town of Jackson. People manned the walls, the roofs, and the streets, armed with whatever they could carry, ready to fight to the death. If the infected won, they would have wiped out every single person in the town. The stakes were as high as they come.
This sequence doesn't feature at all in the video game, but it was easily the largest set piece the show has yet attempted. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann broke down this sequence on the latest episode of HBO's The Last of Us Podcast, and gave some fascinating insights into how and why they chose to film this massive battle sequence.
In addition to serving as a co-showrunner on the show, Druckmann was also the main creative force behind the video games. That gives him a unique point of view on how to approach this adaptation. "In the game we talk about, things happen to Jackson, there are certain attacks, whether it's infected or it's raiders...but we never get to see it," Druckmann explained. "Here, because we're not playing any one particular character, you can jump between this attack on Jackson and this situation that Joel found himself in. And then again, showing the kind of loss you can experience in this world both on a very personal, intimate level, and on a community level. And that is something that we'll visit again in this season."
Part of what makes the invasion of Jackson so thrilling to watch is that it's not just a bunch of people haphazardly shooting at a swarm of infected outside the town walls. The people of Jackson have an intricate system of defenses and fallback plans for when each of them fails to stop the horde, which means the battle progresses gradually through different phases. How did the showrunners approach shaping the flow of this sequence?
"We began by asking questions, because I'm the pesky question guy," Mazin said. "How do they defend themselves? What do they have other than a wall? What could they have other than a wall? What would their method be? Surely they've sat there and thought, 'Okay, if raiders come we do this, if a horde comes we do this.' So they have a plan, but what is it? And how can it be something that is surprising to us, but also once we get over the surprise we think, 'Oh yeah, of course. That's smart. That's a good idea.' And in that way we created the plan."
"And in that way we created the plan. And the plan almost works...until a bloater shows up. Which is sort of the way life is, right? Everything's going fine until a bloater shows up. And then the madness begins."Craig Mazin
The Last of Us wanted to show "just how bad things could get" with its Jackson battle
Part of the conceit for this battle is that in the first season of The Last of Us, we never truly got to see an infected attack at this kind of scale. Druckmann explained that the series premiere, which showed the very start of the plague, had that sort of scope, but by the time the main series kicks in a decade and a half later down the timeline, the army has all been wiped out and so have many of the opportunities for this sort of large clash.
"You know it could get bad, but we've never seen it really really bad," he said. "And here there was an opportunity to say...when you saw one clicker how dangerous that was in season 1, when you saw one bloater how dangerous that was in season 1...now what happens when you multiply that by some crazy number? And that's what they have to try to defend. And to a large degree they fail, because many, many people die."
"The town remains. At the end, we understand as Maria and Tommy are embracing and sort of emotionally collapsing, the battle is over but at great cost," added Mazin. "There needs to be a reckoning, like Neil is saying, with the reality of the world."
What it took to film the Jackson invasion
Beyond the emotional reality of a zombie attack, the team also had to reckon with the practical aspects of filming such a huge battle scene. Fortunately, all that experience making clickers and bloaters during the first season meant that they were much better equipped to face the challenge of something like Jackson.
"In season 1, let's just talk practically for a second, we were figuring out how to do it all while we were doing it. A little bit like building a plane in the air," Mazin said. "This season we knew more, and we understood a little bit better about how to do it."
It also helps that there was an experienced director at the helm: Mark Mylod, who has directed many projects over the years from Succession to The Menu, but most notably for our purposes, six episodes of Game of Thrones. One of those episodes was the eighth episode of season 6, "No One," which featured Arya Stark's pulse-pounding foot chase through the streets of Braavos. Mylod was a good choice for this key episode of The Last of Us, and he spent a lot of time laying the groundwork for the battle.
"Mark did a kind of amazing job working with Alex Wong our visual effects supervisor to create pre-viz for the entire battle. I mean the whole thing was mapped out very carefully, and then budgeted very, very carefully," Mazin said with a laugh. "It was prepped and shot like its own movie. I can't remember the total number of days, but movie-length days. Movie-length in terms of schedule, the prep was very long."
For the horde of infected, The Last of Us used a combination of real stunt people and CG creatures. The creature effects were done by Wētā, Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based visual effects studio which is one of the best in the business at bringing creatures to life on the big or small screen.
"And now, suddenly, it's there. The dream happens rather late in the process, so you just...you have faith that it's going to work. It's hard work," Mazin said.
Wherever The Last of Us season 2 goes from here, it's going to be hard for it to top the battle of Jackson, at least in terms of scope. But given the sharp artistic eye of the team behind this show, I'm sure there will be plenty of other sequences that blow our mind before Ellie's quest for revenge is through.
The Last of Us premieres new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT on HBO and Max.
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