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HBO’s The Last of Us recently concluded its second season, and fans are eagerly awaiting the show’s return, even though it may not be for a good while. While fans wait, writer and showrunner Craig Mazin has offered new insight into a key sequence from the S2 finale, and explained why the team decided to make a major change. This story contains major spoilers.
In the Season 2 finale, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) has a tense standoff with Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer) as she hunts down Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). Ellie shoots and kills Owen after he draws a gun on her, and she accidentally kills Mel in the process. As Mel is dying, she tells Ellie that she’s pregnant and that she needs her to cut the baby out of her womb. Ellie panics, as she has no medical training, and does not do this.
In the game, Ellie confronts Owen and Mel, but it plays out differently. Ellie brawls with Owen briefly before shooting and killing him. Ellie and Mel fight next, and Ellie ultimately stabs her in the neck with a knife, killing her, only to discover later that she is pregnant.
For the TV show, Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter that Ramsey being so much physically smaller than Lord meant that Ellie and Owen having a hand-to-hand fight might not seem believable to the audience.
“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,” Mazin said.
Mazin said he recalled talking to Neil Druckmann about how the scene, as it plays out in the game, is really heavy and intense, but he had an idea to make it “more f**ked up.”
“Mel is a doctor and understands in that moment as she’s dying that there is a chance to save her child,” Mazin said. “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.”
“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.”
This isn’t the only thing that the team changed for the TV show, as it was decided that Ellie would not kill Alice the dog because the S2 finale already had so much bloodshed.
The Last of Us is coming back for a third season, but it doesn’t have a release date yet. Mazin wants to make a fourth season as well, but after the show concludes, he says he’s done making video game adaptations.
