[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for Episode 7 of “The Last of Season” Season 2]
It may only be small comfort, with likely a two year wait to return to that theater in Seattle, but let it be some comfort to all viewers that “The Last of Us” was renewed well before Season 2 ends with Ellie (Bella Ramsey) held at gunpoint by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and with a shot ringing out over one of the HBO series’ most brutal cuts to black.
A cliffhanger of this magnitude is as close as series creators and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann can get to replicating how “The Last of Us Part 2” game abruptly transitions the player from controlling Ellie as she hunts for vengeance in Seattle to controlling Abby over the same three-day period. While Season 2 ends on maybe the game’s most infamous act break, stopping the action of the series there wasn’t necessarily a given for the creative team.
“Part of the job of adaptation is figuring out how to impart the same feeling — of a kind of uneasy empathy with somebody we do not like, and how to introduce people in ways that make sense for the audience when they’re not playing as the person. A lot of story math went into that,” Mazin told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
Where to begin in Jackson, where to end in Seattle, what to show or not show, who to introduce or add or change, all of it was on the table. But Mazin thinks that the configuration that “The Last of Us” Season 2 ended up with is the right one, because it stays true to the way in which the show has always tried to re-examine its characters through the lens of different relationships.
“I like the fact that we keep presenting a new world with different ways of tracking the story,” Mazin said. “Season 1 was the Joel [Pedro Pascal] and Ellie tale. Season 2 is very much the Ellie and Dina [Isabella Merced] story. And Season 3 is going to really get into the world of Abby.”
The young Washington Liberation Front operative only shows up at the edges, or else the seven-episode season would probably be a lot shorter. So much of what we know about her is based around her desire to hunt down and kill Joel for murdering her own father back in Salt Lake City, in his quest to save Ellie from the Fireflies. It is easy for the audience, just as much as Ellie, to have a very simplified sense of Abby and her crew, even if similarities or telling little details hint that the two survivors might not be so different.
Mazin points in particular to the ways that both Ellie and Abby swing an object down on a person when they are at their most brutal. “ It’s quite remarkable to me how similar they are in their brutality and in their loss of self in that moment,” Mazin said. “Now with Abby, that’s mostly what we’ve seen [but] with Ellie, we’ve seen so many other sides of her.”
The juxtaposition that ends Episode 5 after Ellie has beaten information out of Abby’s friend Nora (Tati Gabrielle) — of Ellie, dead-eyed in demonic red light, seemingly lost to herself, with a flashback to Ellie and Joel at their most loving and safe — isn’t just about the angst of that comparison. It is the point that “The Last of Us” wants to make about everyone who is still a human in this world. People are both kind and cruel; they can be led to both those places by the love they have for others.
“We are so wrapped up in Ellie and Joel when Joel dies and [when] we see Ellie’s heart break, our hearts break, because we know them. We were there when Joel first encountered Ellie, pointed a gun at her face, and kicked the knife away. She called him an asshole and then he was stuck with her and called her cargo. And we went from that to [Joel saying] ‘It wasn’t time that did it,’” Mazin said. “We are part of them.”
The shift that awaits us in Season 3, whether we like it or not, is to spend more time with Abby and become more a part of her story. “Let me quote Jeffrey Wright’s story about pans. I’ve got a Kaitlyn Dever. If you’ve got a Kaitlyn Dever, you use Kaitlyn Dever. I’m so excited to unleash her and to show the audience the full 360-degree view of that character,” Mazin said.
For as intense a transition as it is on a character level, Mazin anticipates some narrative and technical smoothness for Season 3 in comparison to Season 2, which had to thread dynamics in Jackson with yet another road trip across the Northwest with establishing all the geographic hotspots in Seattle and conflict dynamics there, too. Plus smarter zombies. It’s a lot for any television show to manage, especially when the episode count of individual seasons get shaved down to the bone.
Hopefully no shorter than the seven episodes that preceded it, Season 3 will get to build on that already established narrative work and deepen its visual worldbuilding in a way that “The Last of Us” really has not gotten to do yet over the course of its run. “We do have this weird tendency to build things and then blow them up, set them on fire, walk away from them,” Mazin said. “But it is a different vibe to be camped out in a place [and] I think Season 3, production-wise, will probably be smoother.”
Mazin is perhaps more excited for the ways that Season 3 will be aiming for the same emotional target. At its core, “The Last of Us” is about impossible choices that characters make to survive, based on how they are connected to each other. Abby Anderson will have no shortage of those choices to make; and Season 3 may also be smoother because the final choice is the one we’ve already just seen — or at least, Ellie’s side of it.
“If we do our job right, when this is all over – or at least, when Season 3 is over — we should be confused morally and conflicted morally, and hoping that somehow these two unstoppable forces that are aimed at each other figure out a way to not kill each other. Because we’ll end up loving them both and we’ll end up also fearing them both.”
“The Last of Us” is streaming on HBO Max. To hear Craig Mazin‘s episode of Filmmaker Toolkit and other great filmmaker conversations, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
