Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’, now streams at Max.
Most of the premiere of season 2 of “The Last of Us” spends his runtime catching viewers how life is for Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) five years after the events of Season 1. They both settled in their lives as part of the Walled Settlement, Wyoming and Wyoming and Wyoming, Wyoming and Wyoming and Wyoming, Wyoming and Wyoming, Wyoming and Wyoming) his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). Joel helps Maria supervise the construction for new living spaces in Jackson for the steady stream of new residents who resort to the apocalypse of the fungus, although Joel believes that Maria let people in too quickly to accommodate. Ellie, now a young adult at the age of 19, learns fighting and shooting skills while working with residents of Tommy and Jackson – including her best friend, Dina (Isabela Merced), and Dina’s incidental boyfriend, Jesse (Young Mazin) – to patrol the wilderness around Jackson.
Since we saw them last, Ellie has been alienated from Joel; She moved in the garage next to their house and the two are hardly talking. Joel is so disturbed by the development that he started to see a therapist, Gail (Catherine O’hara), to find out what he can do to recover Ellie.
“It does not mean that the five years between the events of season 1 and season 2 have all been bad,” says co-maker and executive producer Craig Mazin, who also directed the episode. “In fact, most has actually been good, and we will be able to dig in it as the season progresses. But if we meet them now, they will be back in their corners.”
Mazin, co-maker and executive producer Neil Druckmann, and Ster Bella Ramsey spoke with Variety About the premiere of season 2, the fast -growing relationship between Ellie and Dina, building the Jackson set and why Joel’s therapy session is one of the ‘favorite scenes’ of Mazin.
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Joel in therapy was not a new idea
As Mazzin first told Variety At the beginning of March he came up with a scene for the first time in which Joel undergoes therapy for the first episodes of season 1, before he was on his way from Boston.
“In all closed economies, certain things would be appreciated more than others,” he said. ‘Let’s say you were good at repairing shoes – valuable. Let’s say you have given physics – probably no longer valuable. What if you were a therapist? Extraordinary valuable. Every person has passed a horror. There is no one who can say, “I really had a great time.” I think therapy is a fantastic mirror to say, not just: “Oh, what do you really think?” – I think therapy is best when you find out what people refuse to talk about. ‘
Those scenes were eventually cut for the space before the show ever started production, so Mazin resurrected the idea for season 2. In the premiere, Joel’s therapy session opens Joel who again complains about Ellie who freezes him until Gail cut him off. It is Gail’s birthday, and because it is the first without her husband, Eugene, she has no patience in 41 years for ‘the most boring problem in the world’. She tells Joel that she knows that he is stopping her: “You lie to me and it’s tiring.”
In an attempt to poke the truth of him, she gives him an example of telling the truth. “I’m afraid to say it, that’s why I have to: you shot my husband and killed,” she says. “You killed Eugene. And I hate 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 tried. And I can’t. She pauses; Joel says nothing.
“It is there,” Gail continues. “I said it. I’m ashamed. But it’s in the air and I can’t take it back. And now there might be a chance that I can make up for it. You turn. Say what you are afraid of saying. I can help you. Have you done something with her? Did you hurt her? “
As viewers know, Joel read a team of fireflies at the end of season 1 to prevent them from subjecting Ellie to a fatal operation to discover how she is immune to the fungal bandemie – despite the fact Ellie wanted To sacrifice itself for the cause. Joel Loog against Ellie about what he did, and while Gail encourages him to unleash himself, Joel’s face gets cold while his eyes get up well.
“I saved her,” he tells Gail before he stormed her house.
In his interview for this story, Mazin explains that he wanted this scene to eventually become as ‘an action scene – a fight, a shootout’.
“It’s funny until it’s absolutely not funny,” he says. “I have been in enough therapy sessions to know how things can turn on a dime, from laughs to crying to anger, because things are exposed. I thought it was great to write it. I enjoyed photographing it. I was fun to edit it. It is one of my favorite scenes to see the top of the two of them.”
However, Druckmann quickly points out that what Gail has to say to Joel is not completely brand new. “Their conversation is very similar to the conversation that Joel has with Tommy at the start of game 2, but we have given it to another character to generate a site that is something different emotion,” says Druckmann. “Every time we make a change [from the game]I like to have this algorithm, to say, “Okay, what do we get from 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 earlier. Is it better for this version of the story in this medium? If the answer is yes, we absolutely have to go with it. If the answer is no, why would you change it? “
Gail is also connected to the game through her deceased husband. In “part II”, Eugene is also dead; Ellie and Dina talk about him in the past tense while looking at a picture of him. But the character will appear later in season 2, played by Joe Pantoliano, in a flashback series that promises to further illuminate Joel and Gail’s conversation.
“Without getting too much in the spoiler area, I love choosing these little things from the game that remained in my brain that may not have been completely worked out,” says Minzin. “We talked a bit about how Eugene could make contact with a brand new character, but more importantly, the way their story directly affects the story of Joel and Ellie. That is the part that has become exciting. We really try, if we do things,” Oh, here is an Easter egg for the fans. ” No, let’s integrate this and use it to our advantage.
The infected become smarter
When Ellie and Dina are on patrol, Ellie falls into an abandoned supermarket and meets an infected person who is strategically haunting her behind her with brutal, brutal strength.
“In the game, by increasing the challenges with which you are confronted, you feel the same adrenaline soot that the characters feel,” says Druckmann. “We did not want you to fight against the same infected over and over again. We created different classes, one of which was the clicker, was a stalker who did not walk to you on a straight line. They hide, they hunt. That makes them a lot narrower.”
Players of the game experience this shift as the usual difficulty increase that occurs when a game unfolds, but that is not necessarily a fact for a script drama. “We thought it was important to show that there was an evolution and to limit it to one encounter in which one of them behaves in a way that is deep, deeply unexpected,” says Mazin. “Neil and I spoke a lot about how there are other things that go with it, including a feeling of almost emotion and sorrow in them. It is as if they know that there are still people who cannot help do what they do.”
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They really built Jackson
Asked how much Jackson was built by the production for Real, laughs Mazzin. “Much more than anyone else would have had us built,” he says. “The first design was huge. Then the budget people said:” You can’t actually build a whole freaking city, dude. “So it will be a little more film magic-like, but at least we wanted the parts that matter the most as real as possible.”
The city was built in a small Canadian community called Minaty Bay north of Vancouver. “It was my favorite set,” says Ramsey. “The detailed level is remarkable. All shop fronts, behind each of them there was a full store, such as a Starbucks that had been converted into a workshop. Our green rooms on the set would be in these converted stores that were all built by the set and construction team. It was incredibly compelling, as we were in a small village.”
Realism mainly made an impact on everyone who had worked on “part II” with Druckmann. “I knew those layouts back forward” is Joel’s house. There is Joel’s Jacket in Joel’s Kast. There is the specific cup that he uses. It was this surreal moment when I am, oh, I am in The simulation. I think my brain had a little black hole. ‘
Everyone wanted to make sure that the first kiss of Ellie and Dina was perfect
Towards the end of the episode, the Jackson citizens come together in the local church for a New Year’s Eve party, where Dina and Ellie dance and share their first kiss. It is a scene directly from “part II.”
“There are things from the game that I know I only want to lay one on one [into the show]Because I love them, and because I also think they will perfectly translate one on one, “says Mazin.” In particular, there is one shot in the church where we see Ellie from behind and these beautiful lights and people dance. It is quite damn in the vicinity of what is in the game. “
Ramsey is not a gamer, but they did look at walkthroughs of the game placed on YouTube. “I remember walking on set like, whoa,” says Ramsey. “This really feels like I’m in the game, even though I didn’t really play it.” As with Jackson, the production team of the show had full access to the belts of concept art and visual schemes of the developer of the game, Naughty Dog, led by Druckmann.
“I constantly connect them to the people who were the people who worked on their original thing so that they could reach the source of it,” he says.
Thanks to the attention to detail, Ramsey was able to immerse himself in the complicated thoughts that race through Ellie’s head while Dina starts making her feelings about Ellie Crystal Clear.
“Ellie thinks Dina is straight and in a relationship with Jesse,” says Ramsey. “She is so afraid of the feelings she has for Dina and to ruin a friendship that means a lot to her. There is absolutely a self -protection that should know how Dina felt before she could make a kind of movement. She is still confused, even when Dina starts to make a movement in Ellie in that dance and leans in kiss her.
For Ellie and Ramsey it was also a rare moment of quiet companionship. “There are not often in the show where a group of people enjoy together,” says Ramsey with a big smile. “It felt very nice to have so many people in the room a good time on the set of ‘The Last of Us’.”