SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.
Most of the Season 2 premiere of “The Last of Us” spends its runtime catching viewers up on what life is like for Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) five years after the events of Season 1. They’ve both settled into their lives as part of the walled settlement in Jackson, Wyoming overseen by Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). Joel helps Maria oversee construction for new living quarters in Jackson for the steady stream of new residents seeking refuge from the fungal apocalypse, even though Joel believes Maria is letting in people too fast to house. Ellie, now a young adult at 19 years old, is learning combat and marksmanship as she works with Tommy and Jackson residents — including her best friend, Dina (Isabela Merced), and Dina’s occasional boyfriend, Jesse (Young Mazino) — to patrol the wilderness around Jackson for infected.
Since we last saw them, Ellie has become estranged from Joel; she’s moved in to the garage next to their house, and the two are barely on speaking terms. Joel is so troubled by the development that he’s started seeing a therapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara), to sort out what he can do to win Ellie back.
“It’s not to say that the five years in between the events of Season 1 and Season 2 have been all bad,” says co-creator and executive producer Craig Mazin, who also directed the episode. “In fact, most of it’s actually been good, and we’ll be able to dig into that as the season goes on. But when we meet them now, they’re back in their corners.”
Mazin, co-creator and executive producer Neil Druckmann, and star Bella Ramsey spoke with Variety about the Season 2 premiere, the burgeoning relationship between Ellie and Dina, building out the Jackson set and why Joel’s therapy session is one of Mazin’s “favorite scenes.”
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Joel in Therapy Wasn’t a New Idea
As Mazin first told Variety in early March, he first conceived of a scene in which Joel undergoes therapy for the first episodes of Season 1, before he set off from Boston.
“In all closed economies, certain things would be valued more than others,” he said. “Let’s say you were good at fixing shoes — valuable. Let’s say you taught physics — probably not valuable anymore. What if you were a therapist? Extraordinarily valuable. Every single person has gone through a horror. There is no one who can say, ‘I’ve actually had a great time.’ I think that therapy is a fantastic mirror to say, not just, ‘Oh, what are you really thinking?’ — I think therapy is best when you find out what people are refusing to talk about.”
Those scenes were ultimately cut for space before the show ever started production, so Mazin resurrected the idea for Season 2. In the premiere, Joel’s therapy session opens with Joel complaining once again about Ellie freezing him out, until Gail cuts him off. It’s Gail’s birthday, and since it’s the first one without her husband, Eugene, in 41 years, she has no patience for “the most boring problem in the world.” She tells Joel she knows he’s holding something back from her: “You’re lying to me, and it’s exhausting.”
In an attempt to prod the truth from him, she gives him an example of telling the truth. “I’m scared to say it, which is why I have to: You shot and killed my husband,” she says. “You killed Eugene. And I resent you for it. No, maybe a little more than that. I hate you for it. I hate you for it! And yes, I know you had no choice! I know that! I know I should forgive you. Well, I’ve tried. And I can’t. Because of how you did it. And looking at your face in our home makes me so fucking angry.” She pauses; Joel says nothing.
“There it is,” Gail continues. “I’ve said it. I’m ashamed. But it’s in the air, and I can’t take it back. And now maybe there’s a chance I can make it right with you. Your turn. Say the thing you’re afraid to say. I can help you. Did you do something to her? Did you hurt her?”
As viewers know, at the end of Season 1, Joel massacred a team of Fireflies to prevent them from subjecting Ellie to a fatal operation to discover how she’s immune to the fungal pandemic — despite the fact Ellie wanted to sacrifice herself for the cause. Joel lied to Ellie about what he did, and as Gail pushes him to unburden himself, Joel’s face goes cold as his eyes well up.
“I saved her,” he says to Gail, before storming out of her house.
In his interview for this story, Mazin explains that he wanted this scene to ultimately become like “an action sequence — a fight, a shootout.”
“It’s funny until it is absolutely not funny at all,” he says. “I’ve sat in enough therapy sessions to know how things can turn on a dime, from laughing to crying to anger, because things are being exposed. I loved writing it. I loved shooting it. I loved editing it. It’s one of my favorite scenes so far among both seasons, in no small part, because I got to watch these two legends at the top of their game talk.”
Druckmann is quick to point out, though, that what Gail has to say to Joel isn’t entirely brand new. “Their conversation is very similar to the conversation Joel has with Tommy at the beginning of game 2, but we gave it to a different character to elicit a site that’s slightly different emotion,” Druckmann says. “Every time we make a change [from the game], I like having this algorithm, to say, ‘OK, what do we get out of this change?’ I like to play it through the whole story of what this change would mean, and then look at it compared to where we were before. Is it better for this version of the story in this medium? If the answer is yes, we should absolutely go with it. If the answer is no, then why change it?”
Gail is also connected to the game through her late husband. In “Part II,” Eugene is also dead; Ellie and Dina talk about him in the past tense while looking at a photograph of him. But the character will appear later in Season 2, played by Joe Pantoliano, in a flashback sequence that promises to further illuminate Joel and Gail’s conversation.
“Without getting too much into the spoiler territory, I’m particularly fond of picking out these little things from the game that stuck in my brain that maybe weren’t fully fleshed out,” Mazin says. “We talked a little bit about how Eugene could connect back to a brand new character, but more importantly, the way that their story directly impacts Joel and Ellie’s story. That’s the part that got exciting to us. We really try, when we do things like this, to not simply go, ‘Oh, here’s an Easter egg to the fans.’ No, let’s integrate this and use it to our advantage.”
The Infected Are Getting Smarter
When Ellie and Dina are out on patrol, Ellie falls inside an abandoned supermarket and encounters an infected who stalks her strategically, rather than race after her with mindless, brute force.
“In the game, by increasing the challenges that you face, you feel the same adrenaline rush that the characters are feeling,” Druckmann says. “We didn’t want you to fight the same infected over and over again. We created different classes, one of which was the clicker, was a stalker that doesn’t run at you at a straight line. They hide, they hunt. That makes them a lot scarier.”
Players of the game experience this shift as the customary elevation of difficulty that occurs as a game unfolds, but that’s not necessarily a given for a scripted drama. “We thought it was important to show that there was an evolution and to narrow it down to one encounter where one of them is behaving in a way that is deeply, deeply unexpected,” Mazin says. “Neil and I talked quite a bit about how there are other things that go along with that, including a sense of almost emotion and sadness inside of them. It’s like they know there are still people in there that can’t help to do what they do.”
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They Built Jackson for Real
Asked how much of Jackson was built by the production for real, Mazin laughs. “Way more than anybody else would have let us build,” he says. “The first design was enormous. Then the budget people said, ‘You’re not allowed to actually build an entire freaking city, dude.’ So it becomes a little bit more movie magic-ish, but we wanted at least the parts that mattered the most to be as real as possible.”
The town was built out in a small Canadian community called Minaty Bay north of Vancouver. “It was my favorite set,” Ramsey says. “The level of detail is remarkable. All of the storefronts, behind each of them there was a full shop, like a Starbucks that had been converted into a workshop. Our green rooms on set would be in these converted stores that were all built by the set and construction team. It was incredibly immersive, like we were in a little village.”
The realism especially made an impact on anyone who’d worked on “Part II” with Druckmann. “I knew those layouts back to front,” says co-executive producer Halley Gross, who co-wrote both the game and the final two episodes of Season 2. “You walk in and it is Joel’s house. There’s Joel’s jacket hanging in Joel’s closet. There is that particular cup he uses. It was this surreal moment where I’m like, Oh, I’m in the simulation. I think my brain kind of had a little black hole moment for a second.”
Everyone Wanted to Ensure Ellie and Dina’s First Kiss Was Perfect
Toward the end of the episode, the citizens of Jackson congregate at the local church for a New Year’s Eve party, where Dina and Ellie dance and share their first kiss. It’s a scene straight out of “Part II.”
“There are things from the game that I know I want to just layer on one on one [into the show], because I love them, and because I also think they will translate perfectly one on one,” Mazin says. “There’s one shot in particular inside the church where we see Ellie from behind and these beautiful lights and people dancing. It’s pretty darn close to what’s there in the game.”
Ramsey isn’t a gamer, but they did watch walkthroughs of the game posted to YouTube. “I remember walking on set being like, whoa,” Ramsey says. “This really feels like I’m in the game, even though I hadn’t actually played it.” As with Jackson, the show’s production design team had full access to the reams of concept art and visual schematics from the game’s developer, Naughty Dog, which is headed by Druckmann.
“I’m constantly connecting them with whoever were the people that worked on their original thing, so they could get to the source of it,” he says.
The attention to detail allowed Ramsey to immerse themself into the complicated thoughts racing through Ellie’s head as Dina begins making her feelings about Ellie crystal clear.
“Ellie thinks that Dina is straight, and in a relationship with Jesse,” Ramsey says. “She’s so afraid of the feelings that she has for Dina and ruining a friendship that means a lot to her. There’s definitely a self-protection thing of needing to know how Dina felt before she could make any sort of a move. She’s still confused by it, even when Dina does start making a move on Ellie in that dance and leans into kiss her. I think Ellie is still like, ‘Is this actually happening?’”
For Ellie, and Ramsey, it was also a rare moment of quiet camaraderie. “There are not a lot of times in the show where there’s a group of people together enjoying themselves,” Ramsey says with a big smile. “It felt really nice, to have that many people in the room having a good time on the set of ‘The Last of Us.’”
