‘The Last of Us’ Craig Mazin Dissects Joel’s Final Moment of Season Two

The Final of Us‘ eagerly anticipated second season — retracing the footsteps of the online game’s designers earlier than it — gave followers a second they’d lengthy feared and flipped the script on what present audiences could be watching shifting ahead. Spoiler alert: The second episode of season two — during which Pedro Pascal’s Joel is brutally murdered as Bella Ramsey’s Ellie has to observe — sparks a brand 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 usually about adapting the story and grounding it as near the actual world, with actual individuals, as potential. The Final of Us characters aren’t invincible; the whole lot doesn’t all the time work out. “It’s necessary to provide a personality like Ellie that feeling as a result of plot armor is actual,” Mazin says. “They undergo these horrible conditions, and should you or I had been in any of them, it’d be like, there’s no manner out of this. However they get out of it on a regular basis. So it’s actually necessary to have that realization of, ‘There may be nothing I can do. My hero and my father is incapacitated on the sting of dying, and all I’ve left is begging.’ ”

Season two introduces present audiences to Abby, performed by Kaitlyn Dever, who enters the story as a pressure. Mazin explains that within the recreation, Abby is a brolic presence to delineate a stark distinction when taking part in as her versus taking part in as Ellie. On this scene within the present, Dever faucets into Abby’s ferocity and the similarities that drive her. “A lot of this story is about who’s actual to us and who shouldn’t be,” Mazin says. “Who’s household, who’s ‘us,’ and who’s discardable ‘them.’ For Abby, her father was a PC [playable character]. Joel is an NPC [non-playable character], he’s a foul man to kill. For Ellie, it’s the alternative.”

“I’ll repeatedly put dialogue and motion in italics that’s meant to be type of an unstated dialog … so there’s this dialog that occurs between Ellie and Joel that’s so heartfelt and so emotional,” says Mazin. “It’s past phrases. It’s simply eyes. He doesn’t want to talk. And he can’t. However I needed Bella to know why she was saying this, and I needed Pedro to know what he was pondering there. He’s not simply doing it as a result of any person’s yelling at him. He’s doing it as a result of he would do something for her. It’s simply form of magical.”

“I’m so obsessive about the connection, that that they had a closing second. And of their closing second, they had been who they had been in the way in which we liked them probably the most,” says Mazin. “Ellie, who has been this type of indignant, more and more impartial teenager. Joel, who is that this sullen man with this horrible secret, this factor that he did, this lie that he advised. All of that goes away right here. Right here, Ellie is slightly lady, and Joel is a father.”

In some respects, The Final of Us in season two needed to persuade audiences that Ellie is greater than competent on the subject of inflicting the type of violence required to outlive on this planet of the present, however “Ellie’s not a killing machine,” Mazin says. “Ellie has killed only a few individuals. One of many fundamental variations between our present and the sport is, killing is a part of gameplay. There’s no cause they need to assume this sobbing, crying, tantrumy little one goes to be an issue for them. And so they fucked up as a result of they don’t know what we all know. If that they had seen her with David [the antagonist from season one], they’d kill her proper now.”

The writers assume lots about the way to reveal the violence that occurs within the recreation onscreen in a manner that is sensible. “Right here’s a slight twist as a result of within the recreation, she kills him simply by as soon as once more bringing the golf membership down on his head,” Mazin says. Within the online game, Abby hits Joel a number of occasions within the head with the membership, which they couldn’t moderately do onscreen. “There’s issues that you are able to do in video video games that you just simply can’t do as human beings,” he provides. “And we attempt to hold it as grounded as potential. We attempt to make these violent moments as life like as potential.”

“We talked lots about this with Bella,” says Mazin. “Ellie has one easy need: Stand up. That’s it — simply rise up. We’ll cope with the subsequent step when you rise up. As soon as Abby takes that sharpened factor up off the bottom, Ellie’s need modifications immediately. She’s not even speaking to Joel anymore. Now her need is, please don’t do that. She’s speaking on to Abby.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click here to subscribe.