[This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us season two, episode seven.]
The Last of Us season two ended with a gunshot and a cryptic title card: “Seattle Day One.”
What does it all mean? The Hollywood Reporter first spoke to co-creator Craig Mazin, and Mazin and co-creator Neil Druckmann also took questions from reporters during a finale press conference tackling several burning questions.
The first question, of course, is whether Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is dead from what seemed to be Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) shooting her (with a searing, “I let you live — and you wasted it!”).
If you don’t want to know the answer to that one, skip the rest of this paragraph. Mazin firmly says we haven’t seen the last of Ellie. Also, the show has been extremely faithful in its adaptation of its source material, the PlayStation games The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II. In the game, Ellie survives this encounter with Abby and has a major role to play in the rest of the story.
As for the ending showing Abby being roused from sleeping and a “Seattle Day One” title card, this likely signals another shift in the show’s narrative focus. While the creators declined to explicitly confirm this during interviews, just as the show’s perspective shifted from Joel (Pedro Pascal) to Ellie, season three will likely shift again to tell Abby’s story — assuming the show follows the tracks laid down by the game. This isn’t just a clever narrative device, but part of the theme of the show.
“I don’t think television is supposed to work like this,” Mazin says. “We’re clearly breaking quite a few rules, and I love that. And I love it because that is the point. This is not something we’re doing as a gimmick. The point of this story — and this is looked at from so many different angles in so many different ways — is that the entire concept of protagonist is flawed. The entire concept of villain is flawed. Our way of processing the world through heroes and villains is a mistake. It ends up creating these barriers between people that shouldn’t be there. It ends up giving ourselves justifications and conveniences for bad behavior, and it ends up allowing us to judge others summarily for things that we don’t quite understand the motivation behind it. We know this is a challenging thing to keep track of emotionally. We understand people are going to be provoked. But part of this story is about examining why we’re so comfortable with following one person’s point of view about everything.”
“Abby is the hero of her story,” Mazin added later. “Wherever we go next, we’ll always be centering on somebody, whether it’s Ellie and Dina, or Abby and Owen … [But] everything is under the cloud or sunlight of Joel — what Joel did to Abby and what Abby did to Joel.’”
The finale also saw the death of Jesse (Young Mazino), who was shot by Abby. “It’s an interesting situation because Jesse dies in part because of Ellie, but Ellie doesn’t pull the trigger — Abby does,” Mazin says. “And we understand that Dina had this great relationship with Joel and she has gone in pursuit of Abby out of a sense of justice for that. So now the question is: Who does she blame [for Jesse’s death]? Jesse’s death is going to change things for her.”
Another big moment — and a very different one from the game — was the traumatic death of Abby’s pregnant friend Mel (Ariela Barer).
“In the game, Ellie fights Owen (Spencer Lord), and then fights Mel, and it’s only after Mel dies that her coat opens and Ellie realizes she’s pregnant,” Mazin says. “But for this, Ellie is not really capable of killing Owen — you look at Bella and you look at Spencer Lord, he’s 6’4″ and just incredibly imposing. A physical struggle wasn’t going to go well, and she’s not there to kill them. She just wants to kill Abby. I remember saying to Neil that as fucked up as that moment was in the game, I think it can be more fucked up and not to be a tormentor.”
Continued Mazin: “Not to be a tormentor, but to just reflect reality, Mel is a doctor and understands in that moment as she’s dying that there is a chance to save her child. This is ingrained in our theme — parents doing whatever they can to save their child. And poor Ellie in this circumstance is confronted by the horrible consequences of her pursuit and also a terrible panic. This is like my worst nightmare —somebody telling me how to save their child, and I don’t understand what they’re saying because they’re running out of oxygen and slipping away. Bella sits back understanding the totality of her failure here, and what’s even more heartbreaking is her failure isn’t over yet. She just doesn’t realize it.”
We also asked Mazin if Ellie — given her crushing experience with Mel — would have still killed Abby if Ellie had gotten the drop on her rather than the other way around. “I would say unquestionably,” Mazin says. “It wouldn’t even be about whether she had it in her, it would be about what she doesn’t have in her — which is any ability to restrain herself in the pursuit of that. I think Ellie would’ve crouched down right next to Abby and given a very similar speech to the one Abby gave to Joel.”
As for ending on a cliffhanger, Mazin says they did consider other ways to end the season.
“We considered everything,” Mazin says. “Maybe we should just interlace the stories [of Ellie and Abby]? I just remember saying, ‘Isn’t [switching perspectives] part of the genetics of how this story functions?’ It’s just part of the genetics. Now what it means is we have to take risks as a television show, and HBO is backing us taking risks. But then again, we just did kill Pedro Pascal. Like [HBO] understands that this show is going to be a different show every season, which is a tricky thing to do when you’re a hit show. You keep asking people like, ‘I know you love this, we’re taking it away and giving you this now.’”
Another key question: Will Joel appear in season three? Mazin made it sound like a potential flashback side trip featuring Joel and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) isn’t off the table. “Next season we probably will have a lot more flexibility [to tell side stories],” Mazin says. “Maybe a side trip to do Joel and Tommy terrorizing the countryside, we’ll never know. I wouldn’t have guessed we’d have a short story about Joel’s dad before we wrote the season.” And then later he said: “[Tommy’s] been in war, and we also know that for some time, he and Joel were doing some pretty bad things. So there is the potential of seeing this other side of Tommy, and that is now about him delivering on his understood promise to his brother.”
The duo also teased season three — to some extent, as they didn’t want to give anything crucial away.
“We’re telling you that next season, one, there’s an epic nature to everything that’s about to happen,” Druckmann said. “But this other story is going to be really important coming backing to Joel and Ellie and everything we’ve seen so far.”
Adds Mazin: “All I can say is we haven’t seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever, and we haven’t seen the last of Bella Ramsey, and we haven’t seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven’t even seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story.”
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