‘The Last of Us’ Co-Creator Unpacks That Agonizing Death: “All Relationships Break”

This interview contains major spoilers for HBO‘s The Last of Us season two, episode two, “Through the Valley.”

So do not read further until you have watched…

Joel, arguably, had it coming.

But that didn’t make his brutal murder at the hands of Abby any less horrifying and heartbreaking to witness.

HBO’s The Last of Us wasted no time staging the most notorious scene from the PlayStation game series upon which its based.

Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann put one of their tale’s biggest twists into season two’s second episode (where viewers might least expect it, as most TV dramas tend to put their “big” episodes near the end of a season).

In the sequence, Joel (Pedro Pascal) is beaten to death by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) for having killed her father — the surgeon who wanted to operate on Ellie (Bella Ramsey) at the end of season one (a procedure which would have killed her, but might have also resulted in a cure to theparasitic Cordyceps plague). Ellie, held hostage, is forced to watch her surrogate father figure’s gruesome demise, while her friend Dina (Isabela Merced) lays sedated on the floor.

Below, Mazin discusses the game-changing move which shakes up the entire dynamic of the series. He also reveals what it was like behind the scenes, why a major change was made from the game, how Pascal and Ramsey reacted to the scene, and what this means for the future of the series.

So what was your personal reaction to Joel being killed in the PlayStation game version?

We were planning the show and Naughty Dog was putting the finishing touches on the second game. I got to play an early release. So I experienced that as I was still building season one, and it made [the first season] harder and more beautiful to me, in a way. What [The Last of Us Part II game writers Druckmann and Halley Gross] did I think was the most confident thing — which is to begin to end a story by breaking the things they have built.

This is how things end. We break all relationships, all the great loves of our life. The connections we have with our parents, our children — they break. And how we deal with that is the most specific of human suffering. I just thought it was so profound to take this girl — who had been literally born in blood, who had been an orphan — who was then handed off to this guy and give her a chance at this [experience]. It takes what’s maybe the most beautiful connection — the great bond between a parent and a child — and then breaks it. What does that do to her? And that is, to me, why it was important to do. It’s not because it’s going to upset people. It’s important to do it because that’s why we make these stories. In a somewhat safe environment, we explore the things we are all going to feel and experience, and then question how we deal with those things.

One thing that frustrated was how Joel — not that it would have necessarily mattered — doesn’t even try to defend or explain himself to Abby. As the audience, as we’re watching, we so want him to at least try.

When Abby tells him, “I’m going to kill you, because there are some things we all agree are just fucking wrong,” there is this slight moment of agreement. Joel know what he did is capital-W Wrong. But he also had no choice [but the kill the Fireflies last season], as far as he saw it. He did what he needed to do. So we already know that he has some guilt about it from the therapy scene in episode one.

It’s also one of the reasons we made a change from the game to have Joel in that room with Dina, as opposed to Tommy (Gabriel Luna), who’s a big, tough guy. Abby is basically saying, “Make one mistake and we’re going to kill her.” And if there’s one thing we know about Joel, it’s that he’s sort of the ultimate dad. We know he cares very much about Dina and that he would never let her suffer in any way, shape or form, to defend himself.

It wasn’t as brutal as I feared, but it was also, I suspect, more brutal than many viewers would have liked.

Well, that’s something that [director Mark Mylod] and I talked about. We had to do quite a bit of planning about how graphic we wanted things to be, because we have a lot of prosthetics [on Pascal’s face]. We felt that the point we needed to get across was that Abby was not in control of herself. That despite her reasoned, carefully articulated point to Joel, that this is not rational. She’s going too far. There is a rage in her that I think we should understand is not the kind of anger that goes away simply because you killed someone. That’s the irony, or, I guess, the tragedy really of being consumed by something like this — there is no way to fix it except to somehow make your peace with it and let it go. Killing Joel isn’t going to fix this for her. She’s doing something wrong. And we needed to show how lost she was and we needed to show that other people in the room are horrified by this.

But if those things that pushed us towards showing more brutality, the thing that restrained us is a concern that we would be somehow glorifying or celebrating this violence against somebody that we love. We care deeply about Joel and if you dwell on [the violence] too much, then it is gratuitous. Still, we needed Ellie to see him like that for several reasons.

I remember playing the game, there’s a moment when the gates outside closed behind Joel, not knowing what was going to happen, and feeling this tightness in my stomach. It reminded me a bit of the feeling of dread at the start of The Red Wedding, which has since loomed over all as probably the most traumatic death sequence ever put to TV. As a Game of Thrones fan, and friend of that production, did that comparison come to mind as well?

Weirdly, I never thought about The Red Wedding because what was so incredible about that was how much of a shock that it was to everybody. The conspiracy happened away from the audience and away from the [main characters]. Everybody got surprised — like, “Wait, what the fuck is happening?” This is not that. From the first scene of our season — which is different than in the game — we know exactly what the story is.

That was my next question, or rather, my next observation. I marveled at how you literally tell the audience what Abby is going to do in the season’s first scene. But the audience who didn’t play the game, I assume, doesn’t actually believe that’s what’s going to happen.

The audience should question everything. Just because somebody says “I’m going to do something,” doesn’t mean they are. A lot of times people say, “I’m going to kill that person,” and then they end up going, “I’m not going to kill that person.” And if that is the right choice, that can be amazing. But what was important here was that when Joel ends up in that room with Abby and her friends, that we are not shocked. We are, in fact, in a state of dread because it’s happening. We keep thinking there’s got to be a way out of this until the very end.

And it was important, that beautiful moment where Ellie says, “Joel, please get up” — that’s us. And he tried that finger movement. It’s just heartbreaking. Mark and I spent so much time just talking about where everybody would be. We spent the day on the floor, trying different positions, finding that perfect place of connection and where everybody else would be. It was so much about making sure that Bella and Pedro and Kaitlyn were able to do this maximally upsetting thing. And Kaitlyn, let me just talk about her for a second…

I read somewhere that Kaitlyn received death threats from crazed Pedro fans when she was cast, was that true?

No. That was bullshit. Thankfully. Everyone’s been awesome. Well, most everybody’s been awesome. But no. The tragedy was that Kaitlyn lost her mom very shortly before the start of shooting. And it was very upsetting. And Mark and I were just like, “How are we going to do this to her?” Because when she came back, that was the next sequence and the nature of our schedule was such that we couldn’t really move pieces around. Pedro had other obligations. Isabella was working on [James Gunn’s upcoming] Superman. So we were stuck. I spoke with Kaitlyn and she was like, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll be fine, I won’t be fine, but…”

So I have to say the professionalism and dedication that Kaitlyn showed was, honestly, I don’t know how she did it. I would never say anything so vulgar as to say she was using these emotions that she had. This is different. But she showed up and went right into it and did it. There’s this moment — and I don’t know how this happens — when Kaitlyn is looking at Joel. She turns her head, sees the golf clubs across the room, turns back to him, and a tear just drips out of her eye. “How did you time this?” But they’re in the moment, they’re feeling something, and that’s a choice in that moment. And just the way Mark kept them all safe and connected to create what I think is the most upsetting … well, I take it back. There’s another moment in this season. It’s more upsetting.

More upsetting than this?

It’s up there. I don’t want people to think, “Oh, we love this. We love making you cry, making you miserable, sad.” But there is this price we pay for the connection.

How did Pedro react during all this?

He had been looking forward to the moment because it had been hanging over everything for so long. But I know that also for him and for Bella, it was hard because they have become so beautifully entwined with each other. They have the most lovely, wholesome, supportive relationship, and they both felt a sense like they were saying goodbye. There are emotions there, I think, that transcend the acting. They love each other.

Also, there’s quite a bit of stuff that goes on [in the sequence] and I think we were in there for, I want to say, four days. I talked about how I love showing two people talking to each other. One of the beautiful things about two people talking to each other is that it’s easy to shoot. So for the therapy scene, I’ve got my wide profile, and my closer profile over the shoulder. It’s not complicated. You have eight people standing in a room with all those eye-lines, it’s like calculus just to make sure it all connects and cuts together.

Pedro’s a hugely popular part of the show and a big part of the marketing campaign. On a pragmatic level, is there a part of you that worries if the show will still be as big after this? I mean, character deaths often get the online reaction of “I’m done, I’m never watching again” — which people said about Thrones all the time, and its ratings kept going up. But this is a little different as the show has been billed as a two-hander and you just lost one of those hands.

No. People quit shows and I have gone through it myself. I’m an audience member too. I watched Ned Stark’s head get lopped off and I’m like, “What the fuck is this shit? Why would you do that to me? What am I doing now?” Then you go, “Well, what about all the characters who are dealing with the same emotions I have? I need to find out what they do.” And, sure enough, there I was, two seasons later and I’m like, “What the fuck is this Red Wedding?”

Look, if the emotional response is not intense, then we fucked up. This is not to say, “Great job us.” It’s important that people be upset but also that they now connect to the characters in the show who are just as upset, if not more so, than they are. What do they do? Also, characters that we think are gone are not always gone. But I’m not concerned that ratings will fall off the edge of a cliff, I don’t think that’s how it works. I also know how powerful the rest of this story is and also how invested we are in these other relationships. But Joel will always be there. I remember saying to Nico Parker (who plays Joel’s daughter Sarah in the series premiere): “Nico, you are in the show for about 25 minutes, but you never go away.” And Joel will never go away.