[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2 and “The Last of Us Part II” video game]
Anybody who’s performed the “Final of Us” video games — or, to place it in Regina George parlance, been personally victimized by the “Final of Us” video games — may need anticipated seeing Joel (Pedro Pascal) in flashback even after his demise by the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). His completely deliberate journey for Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) sixteenth birthday happens as a flashback at round this level in “The Final of Us Half II,” after the participant has secured the Seattle theater as a base of operations to hunt the younger Washington Liberation Entrance member down.
Our favourite immune survivor/Sally Trip fangirl’s joyful journey to a science museum is roofed with the identical heat glow by cinematographer Ksenia Sereda because it’s rendered within the recreation, and Joel’s pièce de birthday résistance, the area launch recording he helps Ellie expertise within the Apollo 15 capsule, is completed nearly shot for shot within the HBO present by director/co-writer Neil Druckmann because it exists in cutscene type.
However one in every of “The Final of Us” Season 2’s most fascinating decisions but was to transpose a Joel flashback into Episode 6, “The Value,” that doesn’t happen till the very finish of the second recreation.
It’s solely as soon as the participant has gone by the whole thing of Ellie’s (performed within the recreation by Ashley Johnson) story — and Abby’s (Laura Bailey) story, too — that we see Ellie did in truth have a dialog with Joel (Troy Baker) after the dance, the place they spoke about how he killed all these Fireflies to avoid wasting her life again in Salt Lake Metropolis, even at the price of a possible treatment for Cordyceps and in opposition to Ellie’s personal needs. Inserting that scene in this second within the present will naturally create ripple results for all that comes after.
“Neil and I felt that is the place it belonged as a result of we needed to grasp Ellie earlier than we went additional. We would have liked to know what she knew, and we wanted to grasp how she actually left issues with Joel earlier than he died,” showrunner and co-writer Craig Mazin informed IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I feel most individuals in all probability famous that when Ellie was speaking to Gail [Catherine O’Hara] within the hospital, she was mendacity, however we additionally [showed her] stroll by Joel and never discuss to him. So getting up to now was enormously essential for me and for Neil.”
Visually, the scene recreates many of the composition and blocking of the sport cutscene, from the design on Joel’s mug to the timing of when Ellie nervously thumps the porch bannister. What Ellie and Joel find out about one another within the recreation is completely different from their degree of information within the present, nevertheless. So what every of them desires, and fears, from one another on this second of the present can also be just a bit bit completely different.
“Not like Ellie within the recreation, who goes to Salt Lake Metropolis and she or he finds proof, our Ellie doesn’t have proof as a lot as simply this sturdy intuition based mostly on questions which have been bothering her for all these years and the best way Joel lied to her about Eugene [Joe Pantoliano],” Mazin stated.
It’s that affirmation, as a lot as the rest, that the present wanted to determine earlier than the plot in Seattle goes any additional. Getting that affirmation extends Joel and Ellie’s dialog from a roughly four-and-a-half-minute cutscene to nearly an eight-minute scene within the HBO collection. That further materials makes the main target of the dialog much less about how Joel is making an attempt to manage and defend Ellie’s life in Jackson, and extra concerning the selection Joel made in Salt Lake Metropolis.
“There’s a cause we start the season principally with Joel speaking to a therapist. As a result of this can be a story concerning the lies we maintain inside ourselves, and we don’t maintain them there merely out of disgrace. We maintain them there as a result of we’re each ashamed of them and likewise pleased with them on the similar time; Joel would do it once more,” Mazin stated.
As an alternative of simply demanding accountability from Joel for what she already is aware of he’s finished, Ellie forces him to decide on her needs, actively, within the quiet New 12 months’s evening. “Should you misinform me, we’re finished,” she says, and even when Joel can’t convey himself to talk the reality, he chooses to provide the reality to her as greatest he can. As an alternative of merely saying that if he needed to do it a second time, he would make the identical selection, Joel presents an reason why.
“I simply love how arduous it’s for Pedro, how arduous it’s to get it out,” Mazin stated of that second. “He understands he’s going to drive her away. And it’s considerably throughout the context of what we all know now about his personal childhood and his personal father, and to have the ability to specific to her one thing extremely essential, which is that there’s a love dad and mom have for kids that youngsters don’t perceive. Nobody understands that till it occurs to them.”
Pascal’s mingled harm, concern, and love within the scene are gorgeous to behold, framed up by Druckmann simply shut sufficient to see the moist in his eyes. However what’s perhaps extra fascinating is how placing the scene right here impacts Ellie, and the way Ramsey goes by the second with him.
As an epilogue, this second is a lot extra about Ellie and what may need been doable for her if the subsequent day hadn’t gone down the best way it did; what may nonetheless be doable if she will maintain onto the model of herself that had this dialog. You’ll be able to really feel Johnson weave this delicate, susceptible query mark into “I wish to attempt,” prefer it’s as much as Joel. She opens herself as much as probably dropping him for the possibility to construct one thing higher. What’s heartbreaking about that model of the scene is that Joel then says, “I’d like that.” He received’t ever apologize to his adopted daughter for the selection he made, however he is prepared to hearken to her now. There may be the tragic sense that, after Ellie takes a breath and says, “OK. I’ll see you round,” they could have had the possibility to construct a greater relationship collectively.
Placing it right here, as a second of revelation for Ellie, Ramsey’s harm is uncooked, each new and outdated, and as relentless as Ellie is. She wants solutions, it doesn’t matter what, and it’s Joel who has to make the susceptible option to be sincere, even at the price of dropping her. The invoice comes due. Then, miraculously, Ellie pays it. She hears him echo his personal father’s phrases, and it seems she will maintain each explanations for his rampage by the hospital to avoid wasting her — that he’s egocentric and that he loves her in a means she will’t comprehend. The sequence ends merely on the expression on Pascal’s face, receiving the surprising mercy that Ellie may nonetheless give him an opportunity. The tragedy is that Joel received’t have time to take it.
”I go searching in our common non-zombie apocalypse world, and we’re all strolling round with these things, all of us with these items we need to say, however we will’t. This stuff we’ve finished that we’re each ashamed of and pleased with, and I feel that’s why individuals hook up with the present,” Mazin stated. ”Finally, we care about these relationships probably the most.”
If this scene is the final time we see Joel on “The Final of Us” — and there’s nonetheless an 18th birthday cake Seth (Robert John Burke) might or might not have made — it raises fascinating prospects for Ellie. The collection positions us to need the most effective for her and for her to change into the most effective model of herself. We’ve now seen precisely what that appears like. However as Gail reminds us, some individuals simply can’t be saved — at the very least not on their very own. “The Value,” and that scene particularly, is about all of the ways in which Joel and Ellie saved one another. It takes time and love, issues that the world doesn’t all the time deign for us to have.
“I hope that when individuals see that second, they assume, ‘OK, this was the final second earlier than their closing second. These had been the final phrases they stated to one another: ‘I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for this, however I’m prepared to attempt.’ And the query is, if Ellie can forgive that, what else can she forgive? What else can Abby forgive? What can any of us let go in these moments?”
“The Final of Us” is streaming on HBO Max. To be sure you don’t miss Craig Mazin‘s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform.