The Prestige TV Podcast - 'The Last of Us' Season 1 Finale Deep Dive. Plus, Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann!

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Just like Jo and Mal, the virus loves too. They return for the finale of the first season of 'The Last of Us' to talk about the explosive ending of the hit show (01:46). Later, Joanna sits down with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann for an extended Q&A about the season and the decisions that led to the epic conclusion (78:16). Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin Guests: Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I just, I want you to know that. What do you mean? What else are we supposed to do? Nothing. We just go back to Tommy's. We forget about the whole damn thing. After all, we've been through. Everything I've done. It can't be for nothing. I know you mean well. I know you want to protect me. You have.

And when we're done, we'll go wherever you want. Tommy's Sheep Ranch The moon I'll follow you anywhere you go But there's no halfway with this We finish what we started

Into the Prestige TV podcast feed I'm Joanna Robinson And here to finish what we started It is my last of us Co-watcher and game player Mallory Rubin Hi Mallory Joe

It wasn't time that did it it was podcasting with you. Oh, my God. All right, we are here to talk about the season one finale, episode nine, Look for the Light, directed by Ali Abasi, written by Craig Mason and Neil Druckman, themselves. Speaking of Mason and Druckman, who we have been sort of referencing all season, because we've been huge fans of the official podcast that they've been doing,

they are here today on our little podcast to talk about the Last of Us, the finale, some larger series questions, and a little bit of season two, teeny tiny, teeny, tiny bit. So stay tuned at the end of our conversation and our breakdown at the finale to hear from Craig and Neil themselves. There's a lot going on the prestige feed.

Daisy Jones of the 6, Succession, Van and Charles doing Last of Us breakdowns, and then Yellowjackets soon from Mallory and yours, truly. Buzz, Buzz, baby. So it's a lot of it. It's a lot going on.

The feet is popping. We never leave Cannibal Corner for long, Joe. It's always Cannibal Corner in our hearts. Also over the Ring ofverse Feed, of course, Mallory and Eric covering the Medallorian, as well as Van and Charles are also doing that over there. So just follow the pods is what I would recommend. Follow us on social at Ringiverse, at the Ringer, et cetera, et cetera. What a great idea.

Spoiler warning. Everything from the first season of the last of us. us. So you even watch the finale. What are you doing here? And everything from the first game. But we are not spoiling season two and we are not spoiling the second game because Mallory and I don't know what happens.

Genuinely have no clue. Can't wait to find out. Buy some miracle. Yeah. It's amazing. Are you ready, Mal? Should we start at the beginning? Oh, dive right in.

There's so much to hit. Yeah. All right. We're starting with something that I'm calling Anna and the Mushroom Apocalypse as a reference to a little known but beloved film called Anna and the Apocalypse. Watch it if you haven't. But most crucially here, right at the jump, we meet Anna, who is Ellie's mom. And we meet her sort of like mid-run.

And who is playing Anna in this episode, Mallory Rubin? Ashley Johnson, who is, of course, the person who portrayed Ellie in the games. This is an amazingly cool thing in general across the season. They've done a great job of bringing the actors from the game. universe into the show. And this particular choice to have the performer who brought Ellie into the world for so many fans bring Ellie into the world here when Anna gives birth to her. It was just a really cool and inspired choice. And you could feel how emotional this was for Ashley, for Neil, for everybody who has been a part of this world for so long. Just a really

cool thing. And an incredible character introduction, right? Like we've gotten kind of used to the cold opens on the show. This is a cold open that slides past the opening credit. into the episode, right? It's not quite a contained cold open. But if you're not familiar with the game or familiar with who actually Johnson is, et cetera, you don't necessarily know who you're watching until she calls the baby by her name, right?

And then you're like, aha. But this is an incredible sequence in the action of a fight. Anna gives birth to Ellie. I was really struck by, you know, especially in contrast to what we've seen again and again from Joel, what we learn about Joel in this episode, the extreme amount of fight that's in Anna here to make it through, to survive, to protect Ellie. How did that sit with you, Mo?

Yeah, I loved it. I thought this was the perfect way to open what was an outstanding and, deeply intense finale, the setting, you know, making her way to slouch against this wall in what appears to be a child's room. We get a lot of these moments across the season. We see here, like the traffic signs and cars on the drapes on the windows, like a toy chest in the corner. It made me think of Kathleen talking to Perry in her childhood bedroom in episode five or Ellie speaking to Joel on the window bench in the Jackson Teens room in episode six. Like these jarring mashups time and time again of past and present. It made me think of like an incursion

in the MCU, this colliding of worlds into each other that is just deeply unboring but unlock something for us. And it's not the only key thing that we see right away. We see the knife. We see the switchblade, Ellie's knife. And to understand this origin here in this world, the world of the last of us, this is the thing you pass down. A weapon, like a blade that can help you fend off death for just one more day. I think it's, if anybody follows Craig Mason on Instagram, they'll know that he got this as a tattoo and that that seems like a very intentional choice, this symbol of love and protection, but also of violence, this real, a symbol of this mashup of questions and ideas that the story is so focused on, which was the other thing I loved about this origin and

understanding, like, there's the key plot aspect of learning about Ellie's immunity. But in terms of the thematic wallop of what we witness here. Ellie is born, of course, like any child who's born after 2003 into the Cordyceps Apocalypse, but she's literally born, as you noted, Joe, into, like, mid-attack. She slides into life, this little nugget of hope and love. Underneath, literally, underneath this relentless, vicious, unceasing, and ultimately successful assault of death and horror and grief. She is born as her mother dies.

Like Anna dies hours later. But in essence, she's dead there. The bite is fatal as we know. And so her mother's last act, as we'll see in the subsequent sequence with Marlene, is to save her. So the second that Ellie is born and draws breath, she is blanketed by loss, but she's also a challenge to it. she represents for Anna here for Joel later,

like the one thing that her parental figure would do anything to protect no matter the cost. They both lie to protect her, which we'll get to, of course. And so she's passed, not just like cargo to use that word again from episode four, from person to person,

but like hope from person to person. It's the last of N us here with her and Anna. And then she becomes part of other uses with Riley, with Joel, etc. as they go. It was just the perfect note for the journey we've been on with this character. And I think that what I really love is the way in which Ashley Johnson plays Anna's mingled joy and grief here.

And the connection to me feels so strong to the way that Bella Ramsey plays when Ellie gets bit. And the fact that it's just sort of like at the height of joy of her young teenage life when she experienced this like, kiss, this first love, this is what happened to Ellie, and then she got bit, and she's, like, screaming about it, and we discussed this in that episode, screaming about it of sort of, like, the timing of it. Like, now, like, fucking now is when this happens to me. And I, you know, similarly for Anna, I mean, that there's relief that the baby came, you know, before this happened, but there's also, you know, the greatest joy meeting this baby that you've been caring for nine months through, one must imagine, continuously arduous circumstances. And the pain of knowing that you'll

never get to know her beyond this moment, but operating under that Riley philosophy of like, I will take every second I can with this person. And the fear that you've infected, you know, that you have failed to protect your baby, the uncertainty of that. And then, yeah, I think it's, you know, the yeah, you tell them, you fucking tell them, Ellie, you're so tough. I've got you. It's okay while crying. I mean, like, it's amazing. And what I love. And a mirror to Joel in episode eight. Absolutely. Absolutely. And what I love is the... My heart.

Melting. The twin commentaries that we get from our creators here when Craig Mason says that it was important that this vignette show how much Ellie was loved. And then Neil says, it's important to show that she was born in violence.

And both of those things are true. And that joy and that horror, that violence and that peace are just hand in hand throughout the entire series. it's perfectly captured here. I think it's really interesting that this episode is called Look for the Light.

It's, of course, the bookend of the premiere to fulfill that sort of Firefly mantra or motto. But I think any episode that's called Look for the Light, we as, you know, the way that Mallory and I show something that we love it is we pay attention to it, right? Paying attention is how we show our love. So anyone who likes to pay attention to shows to show their love for them

are going to want to look for the moments of light. a physical light in this episode and how that reflects maybe the more hopeful metaphorical light. And so I love the introduction of the fireflies here because we first see them as these sort of like darting lights in the tree line. They look like literal fireflies

as their flashlight sort of beam through the tree line and Marlene shows up too late. And this happens again and again in the show too late to save her best friend. And how did, I mean, something I found really haunted, I'm curious your take on it, is that we hear Anna singing before Marlene even sees her, she hears her. What did you make of that? I think it's just one more example of what you were just beautifully and painfully noting. It's this little glimpse of life and hope before it's all ripped away. Marlene is like, what am I going to find in this house? Well, I'm trucking over a shattered glass. Something went wrong here. The front door was locked. I hear a song. Maybe it's okay.

And then what does she see when she opens the door? Not just the dead infected on the ground, but her best friend holding her knife to her own neck so that she can be ready to kill herself rather than tear her own newborn baby apart. I mean, the way that the show has leveled up minute after minute on how grim something can be

that it presents to us. And, you know, to that point, You just shared about a drunkman's point about the violence. I was really struck as well by, you know, we'll parse the lie here that Anna tells Marlene. But one of the true things that she says is that she didn't, that Ellie's hungry, that she didn't think she could feed her. She didn't want to feed her. And I was like so struck by that idea of the tainted milk as a symbol because again, like what is what is mother's milk? It's like the nurturing sustenance of life that a parent can provide.

And for that, a parent's way to nurture and help you grow and thrive and be okay, for that to also be a thing that could hurt you or that can inflict harm is what this entire episode and ultimately this entire story is about. And to see how for Ellie, from the moment she came into the world, those things, protection and danger, love and risk or tradeoffs have always been entwined, was just like, really powerful and deeply, deeply sad. When Anna's like, I cut it before, before about the umbilical cord, we know we've seen that that that isn't true. Right. And so when we see that Marlene and we learn that they're like, dear friends pre, pre-p pandemic, pre-cordyceps apocalypse.

Yeah. And she's asking her to make sure that she takes Ellie and finds a home for her. But she's lying to her in that moment because the lie is the thing that ensures that Ellie gets out of that room, that Ellie maybe makes it forward. She doesn't know. Maybe Ellie will turn. And so again, like, that's that theme that another powerful book and a lie at the beginning of Ellie's life, a lie where we leave Ellie and Joel at the end of this episode. Mason said on the HBO pod, your baby matters more than her and that is the theme. We heard them say very similar things about, you know, Henry and Sam back in episode five. This is recurred episode after episode. And this is ultimately the calculus that Joel will make at the end. My person matters more to me than anybody else, no matter the scale or scope of that. And it was effective, even though we'd only just learned the history between Anna and Marlene

here and the sequence, to think about it that way. Well, what tradeoff was she willing to make if little Ellie turns into a cortisette? We saw a cortisette, what about a baby? Presumably, Marlene is like the most important person to her outside of Ellie. know the story of the father in the situation, but like this is her lifelong. Our whole lies we've known each other is what they said. Not like you're my best friend. We met a couple years ago and we're trauma bonded. Like our whole lies we've known each other. We knew each other before there was such a thing as a mushroom zombie. We've made it this far. But I am willing to put

your life at risk. My baby might turn into a little chompy mushroom zombie with yearning tendrils. I'm willing to put that at risk because of this tribal, exactly what you're saying, this tribalism theme that we've been talking about it again and again. And how quickly, and we saw this in the episode where Joel goes and finds Tommy, how quickly an us can shift to a them. Whereas in that episode, we were talked about how Tommy and Joel were in us, but when he gets there, because Tommy is now married and starting his own family, Tommy is now part of a different us, and Joel's on the outside of that. And so presumably Marlene and Anna were in us, and then Ellie answers the picture and immediately

in is like, no, this is my us. And you, Marlene are on the outside of that. And like, I am willing to, I'm willing to a, lean on our connection while at the same time putting you at risk in order to protect this, my child. And in the, like, a lot of the emails

we got from listeners this week have been about the trolley problem, which was made you know, outside of the confines of you know, Academia made known and popular, I think, by the show The Good Place, because they, like, returned to the trolley problem a number of times on that show. This idea of, like, if you can save one person or a group of person, a group of people, what decision do you make if your trolley is barreling forward?

So, like, this continuing interrogation of the one versus the many, save who you can save. What does that mean? Does that mean save one person? test in that instance when she says it, that's one person. But, you know, for Marlene, save what you can save is I can save, can I save everyone? And is that worth it to me? And to your point, I mean, so Anna says, find someone else. She says to Marlene, find someone else who can take care of her, not you take care of her yourself.

And, you know, Ashley Johnson went into some detail about like why she thought on, the official pause this week has Ashley as a guest in addition to the, regular trio that's on that podcast. Ashley's talking about why, you know, Marlene has got a lot to do. She's leading a whole movement. She can't necessarily do this. But I like this idea that like, that means Marlene is not emotionally connected to Ellie in the way she would have been if she had, like, raised her day to day. What do you think about that? Yes. Yeah, I think that that's, it allows us to maybe understand the choice that Marlene makes in a way we couldn't if Ellie had grown up in her home, right? But.

also it allows us to think about that idea. This is something you've been tracking since the very first episode of the, and just talked about a minute ago, of the shifting us and the way that the us changes because the us for Marlene is, is Anna. And so there is still a betrayal of something sacred. There is still a trolley problem and a tradeoff. She has to make the calculus of not following through anymore on the promise she made to Anna here. And so like when we're seeing the depth of their relationship and understanding their history. We feel the cost of the calculus for Anna in the moment. We feel it for Marlene later when she makes the decision to send Ellie into surgery, to

trade her life in pursuit of that brainy cortisps signal sender. I want to talk about two last quick things here in this opener before we move on. Well, actually three. One is that when I wrote down on my notes, when we get the shot of the baby of Ali is a baby and are little like hands and feet sort of moving, they look like yearning tendrils to me, right? The urine of the little digits of the baby hand and the urine of a mushroom tendrils. The fungus loves too, as do babies. And then also there's, you know, because Anna was holding the knife to her own neck, there's a little bit of a cut on her neck through the sequence.

And at the end of the episode, Joel has this, like, very significant cut on his neck from his fight through. So I think they're just like, as you mentioned already, there's just like a bunch, a number of things tying Anna and Joel, these two parental figures for Ellie throughout this episode in this bookend. And last but not least, before we leave, baby Ellie, what do we get, Mallory, that looked a little familiar to you and me? Unsurprisingly, we both had the exact same response to this, which was, holy shit, they did the John Snow. The smash cut from Baby Ellie's face to Teen Ellie. sitting in the bed of the truck as she and Joel are making their way toward the road signs for Salt Lake City was note for note reminiscent of the iconic fabled Winds of Winter, Leanna, a baby to adult John White Wolf cut in Winds of Winter, the season six finale. Of course, Bella Ramsey is in that scene, which adds like an extra layer of richness and just makes it seem even more intentional. But this was just a

just a very, a very cool in charge moment. That John stretches like literally one of my favorite TV moments of all time. So anything that invokes it is going to be a very powerful thing. And you have that mixed with these like moments inside of this universe that just make us think of the time and the journey and the things we've learned when we learn something in the present, when we learned it in the past. Like we see that knife on Ellie's belly. It's wrapped up in the jacket blanket with her. One of the first things she hears in the world is a gunshot, firing a bullet into her mother's head. And you think of John being born into that. Yeah, and the scream, and you think of John being born into the bed of blood and these opening notes and choices that then define the course of your life.

And how much room do you have inside of that to carve your own path if other people's decisions have defined so fully what path you're on? Love it. I loved it. we as you as you mentioned we cut over to this bed of the truck Bella Ramsey teen Ellie is sitting there and it's one of a few moments in this episode where the sound design takes us like inside the head of the character right we hear Joel sort of muffled in the background and that means we're inside Ellie's sort of fugue state that she's in

we know time has passed it's spring it's burgeoning spring here you know there's still snow in the mountains but the snow on the ground level is melt So time has passed. It's not like what happened in last week's episode was yesterday. Some time has passed. Ellie is, of course, given the traumatic level of what happened, still processing, right? And this is actually wilder stuff happens at the end of this episode, but this is my favorite part because of this thing that we've been talking about, this idea of like the things that you carry, right? And so I just love, I am just blown away by the simplicity of, you know,

the roles have been reversed. Ellie is sort of the taciturn withdrawn one, and Joel is trying to sort of jolly and please and tempt and, you know, Cajol and all this sort of stuff like that. And chef boardy comes out. We know that's a call back to an earlier shared meal that they enjoy. Be faroni, 20 years into the apocalypse, who says no? Yeah, honestly. Right?

I say yes right now. I enjoy. More importantly to me, a fan of a board game, boggle. You a big bobble head? I love a boggle. I love a game of boggle, big fan. And it's a game actually best played two people, honestly. Boggle's a really good like two-person games as far as them.

Yeah, Clan of two, Mudhorn. So it pulls out the boggle. It's one of many millions of things that Ellie has no real understanding of because it's from the before times. But what's so important, we've been tracking what these characters put in their bags. Joel puts the boggle. The huge box of boggle makes room for it in the pack. For joy, for games, for laughter, for that, you know. Like, you know, we were talking about how Ellie has these totems.

We got some great emails about it in previous weeks, these totems. She's carrying with her, her joke book, all the stuff that she will lose by the end of this episode. Fucking devastating. And Joel has been the utilitarian one. And the fact that the boggle makes it into the pack is just like this huge but subtle moment of character development and role reverse. that I just absolutely loved. I agree. And also notable is what does he do

as he's packing up and making space? He hands her the rifle. On his part, this is just, this is how we behave. This is the trust we have. And the whole episode is defined by distinctions and behavior for both of them.

And in prior episodes, if Ellie had received that rifle from him, she would have oohed and odd and talked about what a monumental moment it was and looked proud. Here we just feel, again, the way that that spark of longing has completely faded, and it is such a crushing thing. And that moves right into, from the packing up of the joy and the bonding of the boggle, into him talking about the guitar he found. And that one was smashed up. But maybe we'll

find another one in the future. And I was thinking maybe I could teach you. I bet you'd be great. read it, Joel says. And this like shredded me again because of the responses from both of them. Obviously, it takes us back to episode six right on the heels of another massive breakthrough for them when he puts the sheep ranch aside and tells her the truth that he would want to be a singer if they make it through all of this. And for Ellie, when she heard that in episode six, she couldn't wait to hear Joel sing. She begged them. She's like, I'm going to save the world.

You got to give me this. And we get none of that from her here. None of it. It's not until the giraffes, which we'll get to in a few minutes, that we see the rekindling of that spirit a bit. And you felt the absence of that response here so, so agonizingly. And for Joel, when he shared that dream with her in episode six,

it was such a huge breakthrough. You know, it was him taking the step of showing her something really true about himself, right? Which he had been very carefully guarding before that. But he still wouldn't sing to her for her. And now he goes to the step of saying, well, let's do this together. Because it's not just that I want to tell you this. I want to share this with you. I want this to be a thing for both of us. I want us to build this life and this future together. That is such a monumental change from the defense mechanism driven, oh, it's we that he rejoined her with which She greeted her question about what they would do in the future if the cure worked, if they made it beyond the fireflies.

Well, and what we can, you know, perhaps extrapolate from the fact that when the show opens, we see a guitar in Sarah's room and there's, like, music posters all over their house in her room, in his room. She's wearing a band shirt, stuff like that. That, like, yeah, that, like, music is, like, a really important thing in his relationship with Sarah, that he probably taught Sarah how to play guitar, all that sort of stuff. there will be, of course, other comparisons to Sarah by the end of the episode that I found a little not great. Anyway, so let's move on to this next section. You've been talking since the Bill and Frank episode about this metaphor of extending a ladder down a hole. What does it mean to extend a ladder down a hole to someone? We got this great email from listener Patrick.

I won't read it out, but a great email, Patrick. But he was talking about in the gameplay, as mentioned in this episode when Ellie sort of like in a room, Roteway rattles off their approach. In the gameplay, you do a similar thing again and again and again as you walk into a city, right? We've got a thing that we do. And Patrick is saying in his email, like, this idea of like boost up, ladder down, all this sort of stuff is the thing you do it again and again and again. And so the fact that in this moment, Ellie drops the ladder, a break from that routine, really underlines something's off here. something has changed fundamentally in this dynamic.

Absolutely. And the thing I loved about it is you're primed to think it's something terrible. Unless, of course, you have played the game because this is like almost a, almost a shot for shot, note for note rendering of this really iconic sequence from the game. You know, the moment before the latter, I just wanted to quickly note is like when Joel does ask if she's okay. And that struck me for a couple of reasons. one, the passage of time that you noted, he says, you just seem extra quiet today is all. So we do get a sense that maybe not every day has been like this. It's been a journey.

Time has passed. But I was thinking about how in episode four, when he was trying to do this and he couldn't to the point where he had to say, I'm not good at this. And Ellie had to say, yeah, you aren't. Like, he was still in the state then of resisting the pull. And here he actively, it's not just that he actively wants this and wants to be in this role. I'm the father. You're my daughter. It's that he wants it more than anything and we'll prioritize it above everything. And the ladder dropping, immediately you're like something terrible

is up there. Right. If you're not familiar with the game, because what would cause that disruption in the routine and the predictable pattern like you're saying? And this draft sequence is incredible. It made me think of, we've mentioned a lot throughout the season the way that Mazen used the word activated to describe Ellie's response to seeing Joel Kill Lee, the federal soldier in episode one. This is another activation, but it's not an activation of violence. It's an activation through a glimpse of life and something being restored that you didn't think was possible anymore. And I loved, I'm getting really emotional. I can't believe I haven't cried yet. I'll probably cry later in this pod. But first of all, I love giraffes, Joe. I don't know if you know that.

One of my favorite animals. I don't know. I love this idea. of Ellie just constantly disappearing around the corner before Joel can glimpse her and her mirroring the giraffes, this wild and free element because she hasn't gotten to really live that way. And it's just like that's a part of life and growing up, you know, experiencing those moments.

And then the score in this finale was incredible. There are some very, very dark and somber and haunting stretches later. But the score that kicks in here is like ethereal, right? It's just this like beautiful thing that almost, it heightens this sense that they are looking through a portal into a different universe in that moment. And, you know, I mentioned the kind of juxtaposition of the context in the bedroom when Anna gives birth earlier. This is one of those rare moments where we get the opposite.

Like we have this incursion of the rot of the apocalyptic present. this thing from the past, this thing from a different time. But here it's an injection of life and brightness, not an injection of the horror, just flipping that, even though the two elements are ultimately the same, is this like deft and subtle way of repositioning what is on their minds and what they're thinking of. And if you see something in front of you that you didn't think could be there, then like your instinct is going to be to wonder whether you're the character or the viewer, well, what else might be possible too? And one of the things that we get here, it's not just joy from Ellie. She's giggling. Like there is a childlike, yeah, absolute childlike awe and

wonder. And we get to see her soak up that awe. And then the look on Joel's face as he's watching her, glimpsing something for a second that is just pure. Like on the heels of the they've been through in the brink of the horror to come. Beautiful. Bella Ramsey playing this sort of like a giggling side of Ellie that we've rarely seen. Not even I would say like in the Riley episode, do we see something this like childlike a giddy in the same way? And then Pedro Pascal's face, Joel as he watches her, is just like excruciating. I would not be myself.

You might love giraffes, but I love Jurassic Park. And so I just have to say that, like, this is like a shot for shot for the video game. But the video game is almost definitely referencing the brachiosaurus sequence from Jurassic Park. If you've never seen it, where a laughable concept of me, where Dr. Alan Grant is with two kids in a tree and a brachiosaurus comes up and they feed it some branches. But what I was like, okay, that's the obvious thing. But what I was thinking about is like in that sequence, they're telling these like dumb dinosaur jokes. You know, Dr. Allen Grant is this resistant in the film, not in the book. But in the film, he's like this resistant father figure to these kids.

And they're sort of slowly melting him. And like, Timi and Lex are melting him with dumb jokes. Do you think he saw us? Do you think he saw us Rex? That's like, oh, that's Will Livingston, like, 2-T. Yeah, they got their own pun book, essentially. I was just like, oh, that's so cute. Yeah, they go up more stairs.

I was thinking of you and thinking of Joel's niece. Poor knees. As they go even higher. Ellie makes what's known in the biz is a callback when she says you can't deny that view, right? I love a callback. I love that you can't deny that few callback

because Joe, we also got like a tiny difference, a tiny difference. In episode two when they're looking out over Boston and Joel asks, this is everything you hope for, she says jury's still out. And here she says, it's got its ups and downs. Yeah. And like little things like that

that just allow us to feel how far they've traveled together and what's happened in that time. There's this line that we'll come back to in an earlier episode, episode before, where he says, you haven't seen the world, right? And now Ellie has seen the world and she has seen the horrors of it as she did last week and she's seen the majestic beauty of it as she just did with these giraffes. You know what I mean?

So he can no longer claim that she hasn't been in the world. You know what I mean? Okay, then we get this incredible exchange, right? where Joel's like, hey, what if we forgot about trying to save humanity? And instead, we just went back to Tommy's and we just didn't do this, right? Go back to Tommy's. Forget the whole damn thing. And she says, after all we've been through, after thing I've done, it can't be for nothing.

Right? This is what we heard at the top of this episode of the podcast. And when she says everything I've done, that of course may be think of Tess in episode two when she tells Joel to take care of Ellie and she says, this is your chance. You get her there. You keep her alive and you said everything right. All the shit we did, please say yes, Joel, please. So both Tess and Ellie are doing this larger moral math where they're sort of like, the things I've done, what is the greater good that can sort of tip the balance, erase the red for my ledger, all that sort of thing? And when she, and when she,

says, you know, when we're done, we can go wherever you want, Tommy's, Sheep Branch, the moon, follow you anywhere you go. But there's no halfway with this. We finish what we started, right? And that's going to be our best way to understand what Ellie would have wanted at the end of the episode because Marlene doesn't ask her and Joel doesn't ask her. So, like, this is our best understanding of, like, what she would want to do it. That's the key line. But what I was really struck by, I went back and watched the beginning of, I was actually looking

for a boggle Easter egg. I was like, was there boggle in Joel's house with Sarah? So we went back and watched all the like, Joel and Sarah seem to see if like

there was boggle in the background somewhere. No boggle Easter egg that I could find. But I was, when we were watching those scenes,

I was struck again, something we talked about before, struck again about how Sarah is parenting Joel, right? That Joel is this big,

strong protector figure and we think of him as this like father figure to Ellie and stuff like that. But when we met Sarah and Joel, she's the adult and he is the one over sleeping

his alarm, forgetting to get things, you know, not knowing where Jakarta is, that's fine, whatever. And in this moment, it strikes me that Ellie is, this is Ellie, like, Joel's like, let's just go. Let's just do us and go. And Ellie is forced into the parent role of, like, the moral education of like, this is what we do for the greater good, for the world. As adults, you know, this is, as a community, as the larger us, you know, and, you know,

this is what we do. And Joel's like, no, just the one to us. You meet us. That's the us. You know? What do you think, Mel? I love it, and I think it's one of the reasons that I've been just so captivated by the show and by the game and by the story. It rejects the idea that anything is simple or clean.

Obviously, that will come up in the ending, which we'll get too shortly. But relationships don't just work or move in one direction. And the ones that are rendered most truly to life, show people challenging and teaching each other, no matter what their roles are, or what their ages are, or what their experiences are. And frankly, the fact that they have different experiences

is why they're able to present different points of view and impart things from a different perspective. This is in the moment, you know as you're hearing this, you can feel that this is setting up something seismic. This is, like, absolutely agonizing on a rewatch for the reason that you said. Just here it is the proof that,

Ellie would have wanted to sacrifice herself for the good of man. I'll follow you anywhere you go was like so it just hits so hard and is so beautiful and moving. And again, I think that's why the show is really operating at like a supreme level of competence and emotional impact because we are so sucked in to their relationship. Like we want them to be together. We want them to be okay. And then we have to think at the end about what that meant. and what that cost. I've heard this before from various storytellers,

like, you know, TV writers or fiction authors that, like, one of the coolest narrative tricks you can pull is to give your audience exactly what they've been asking for in a way that they don't want. I don't want it. Not like this, man, you know? Like the look on Joel's face when he hears, I'll follow you anywhere you go.

But even before, like, I was struck by, even before what Ellie is voicing here, we know this to be true about her. Like, if we think back to what she shares with him in episode six about Sam, I tried with Sam. Tried what? I knew he was infected. I rubbed some of my blood into his bite.

I know it was stupid, but I wanted to save him. Like, this has been, we've discussed the idea of purpose a lot throughout the season. And this has been one of Ellie's. Now, it's not her only one. She doesn't want to be alone. That's the other thing that she told Sam there, right?

That's her great fear. She wants to be inside of this life with Joel, too. And there's the tradeoffs and the cost for that for both of them, for everyone who's making that kind of calculus. But we know that this idea of being able to help other people is like a central thing. And so when we're thinking from shifting between their two perspectives here, like I was thinking, I think Bill is very top of mind throughout the entire episode from Joel's perspective. And, you know, we'll chat about his letter a bit later. But what was on my mind here in this exchange was Bill telling Frank,

I was never afraid before you showed up. Because that's actually not true for Joel. He was afraid before with Sarah. And so he knows what that failure felt like. We've heard him weep to Tommy talking about how he doesn't want to fail again. We've seen him look down at that. I'm sorry that Ellie left on Sam's grave. The fear is the defining thing in his life.

And so of course it will be the thing that guides him here. Like no other version of the story would feel true to the character. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptitide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zep bound contains terseptide and should not be used with other terseptide containing products or any GLP1 receptor agonist medicines.

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plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonel urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-99-79 or visit Zepbounds.com. We've so much talked about, so I, like, apologize to our listeners who send in great long emails. I'm probably going to be like sort of summing up and recapping most of them. But we got a great email from Sarah that I love that references another show. We love station 11. But it drills down on this idea that we talked about when we covered station 11 of generations.

Who lived in the before time? Who was born during this either pandemic or mushroom apocalypse? Like who knows what it was like before? who has only known this, who knows what it's like, who has only lived after it's sort of settled down a bit. I mean, we're still in midst apocalypse here in The Last of Us. But how that impacts your worldview, right?

We've heard Joel's cynical take on the world. He's talked to Ellie about this, right? This idea about the world is it worth saving? And this idea of obviously, like, Marlene, it's not exclusive to a younger generation, this idea of like hope. Maybe there can be something different. Maybe we can fix us. Maybe we can change this because like, obviously this is driving Marlene, et cetera.

But it is those different generational views. You really have to think about when you think about Ellie and Joel. It's not just experience of different amount of time on Earth. It's the kind of earth you were born into or the kind of world you were born into. And I can understand why. I mean, there's so much about Joel in this episode that we can understand, even if we don't agree with. And you can understand why if you've seen the entire world collapse. And as he mentions, you know, like, let's just roll into the next section, right?

Like when he starts to talk about how he actually got this scar, this follow-up from the story that he told her in episode three about, you know, this other guy's shooting and I'm missing. And we find out instead that he tried to take his own life the day after Sarah died, right? So all of society collapsed. He lost the thing that mattered to him most, his daughter, and he decided this is a world I don't think is, there's nothing else in this world worth living for. Of course, we're thinking about Bill and Frank. When Frank dies, Bill's like, okay, my time to go too.

What's the point of being here without you? We're thinking of Henry and Sam, right? When Sam's gone, Henry's like, time for me to go to, right? And so this is, this was Joel's reaction to Sarah's death, is that Sarah died, and I couldn't see the point after that, simple as that, right? His Pedro Pascals, like, broken delivery of this, this absolute vulnerability and honesty from Joel after so, like,

after blatantly lying to her earlier, and he'll slip back into that life phase as we find out at the end of the episode. But like, I like the way that, that the big lie that happens at the, the end of this episode stands in contrast to this brutal honesty here. And even more crucially, him not even needing to explain things because Ellie says, she cuts them up, I know why you're telling me this. We are so connected. We are so sympathetic.

We are so our own network of cordyceps that you don't even have to explain it to me. I get you. I understand you. I can receive this. Something you're probably ashamed of, right? or, you know, or at least not wanting to tell them most people. This broke me.

I was a wreck. Yeah. It wasn't time that did it, the line, the idea, the look on his face, the look on Ellie's face, hearing it, realizing, understanding what she means to him. Joel is a character who, in episode three, said,

And there is no greater way to show how much that has changed for him, how much he no longer wants that to be true for him and Ellie, than what he shares with her here, because it is not just this truth about himself and his history. It's him saying to her, you're the one who saved me. We're going to talk a lot about the idea of Ellie as a cure later. But like she has been the cure for Joel, for his heart. you know, for his ability to live. And yeah, of course, like you said,

we're thinking of Henry and Bill. And like, what does Bill say to Frank, though? He says, I'm old. I'm satisfied. Well, that's not the headspace that Joel is in at all. It's the opposite. It's the, and you are my purpose part. That is the full and only driving force.

And so, of course, that is on our minds as we head into this final act, because we know, we know from hearing this definitively, he would be driven to without Ellie. There would be no reason for him. Yeah. He wouldn't be able to find any reason. He wouldn't even have Tommy.

Presumably Tommy was there last time, and, you know, Tommy is moving on to his own thing now, right? We get one last little go with Will Livingston here, some great final pun jokes. Yeah. And then the fireflies show up, right? And once again, we're taken inside the heads of Joel and Ellie as the same. design sort of cuts out their hearing as they're hit by this blast. And as they pull Ellie away from Joel, we get this like shot of the watch, right? Like this very obvious lingering shot of the watch that we keep revisiting. This is where we got a lot of emails to this, to this end.

And I asked Mason and Druckman about it, so you'll get to hear their ideas to why. But I've heard this for many different places that people are saying, like, could we have stood at least one more mushroom zombie attack before we are in the final firefly stretch to help remind us of the mushroom apocalypse stakes of it all? Because it has been a while other than flashbacks. You know, we get Anna at the beginning of this episode, we get Riley, but it has been several episodes since we've even seen the whisper of a mushroom zombie. And so the idea of the, the mushroom apocalypse, this plague as a very real, ever-present, horrifying threat, maybe feels a little more distant in the show at this point than it did in the game

when you are constantly, constantly, constantly grappling with mushroom zombies. What do you think about that, Mel? Hmm. I, it's interesting. I personally don't think I needed it because I think the stakes are pretty clear at this point. And I actually, in a way, kind of like, once again, this, like, constant effort to put us in Joel's head. Not, I think that, like, we probably both feel this way. And Mason and Druckman have said this explicitly.

It's less about whether what he does is right or wrong and more about asking the question of, like, what love drives you to do. And then you, each person can sit with that and think about that and come to their own conclusion. And I think that, like, in a way, maybe letting the audience or Joel off the hook, like, I haven't had to face this in a while is part of the point. Like, you can talk yourself into the thing that you believe to be important and true, even though you understand that it is not the rational thing. Because the only thing that you see is your personal desire, right? Right.

And also your, when your us becomes that narrow, right? So he's saying, let's go back to Jackson to. Tommy, where he knows that there are no mushroom zombies and it is safe and life is good. So he's like in this- I won't be confronted every day with- With my choice that I make here. And like, the responses to Joel's decision at the end of this episode varied. But a lot of people are using the word selfish, and I think that that is a word you can use. And like the definition of selfish is saying, this doesn't affect me, affect me.

so why should I care? Right? And so if that's how you view it, he's saying where I plan to live, they're, you know, nimbie, right? Not in my backyard. There's no, there's no mushroom zombies. So we don't need to worry about it. And we can just go there and be safe and be fine and not worry about it for the rest of our lives, right? And so, yeah, I see that point.

I think that's interesting, that idea that there are no zombies here. So Joel can pretend that he's not making as horrifying a decision as he is. You know what I mean? I would also say, though, that Joel is not a character who believes that and shows us that time and time again, including in this conversation with Elie where he's like there's always been another bad thing waiting for us. And he knows that that's true. Like, I don't think Joel believes that that wall will stand forever or that somebody who was out on a mission wouldn't get infected out in the wild and bring that back to camp. Like, he knows that things can go wrong at any point. and it's that Riley idea of you live in the moment that you want for as long as you can

that is the driving factor for him above any rational acknowledgement. All right. So Joel wakes up after this attack. Yeah. I liked seeing the red and you think it's just like streaming blood before you realize it's that old firefly spray paint. It's kind of fuchsia. I was like, that's some shitty fake blood guys. I was like, oh, it's spray paint.

Got it. Okay. And we get this interesting interaction with Marlene and Joel again. This is like lifted from the game, but Marlene having to, you know, her astonishment that Joel got Ellie there in one piece when she could barely get herself across the country in one piece. This idea of, you know, she both picked the right person for the job and kind of underestimated what he was capable of at the same time. I owe you. We all owe you. We get some cordis up science. I'm not a scientist. I will just say going back to the birth, I'm willing to accept that some cortisept pollen or whatever spores, spores is what it is. Spores got into Elie via the umbilical cord.

Gou, is that the scientific term, I think, medical term? Fluid probably. Before Anna cut the umbilical cord. It was just not that long after she got bit that she cut that core. So I'm just saying that is a fast, fast actinactin of the mushroom spores to get down the umbilical cord. You know, because we know the time of the spread of the cortisps bite. So I'm just saying, it's quick. Quick infection.

How's the science sitting with you here? Yeah, science corner. Brain science. Yeah. You love science. Corticeps grow inside the brain. And so Joel's like, oh, you got her in surgery to cut her brain out. She's not coming back from that.

find someone else. I was thinking about this idea of cordyceps in the brain and maybe think of Ellie in the basement of that convenience store slicing into that zombie under the rubble first just slicing in to see sort of like the feathery

mushrooms that are right under the surface of his skin and then stabbing into his brain this sort of preview of what's come for her as the fireflies intend to cut into her brain. Would it be great if everyone had a few more minutes to talk things out and say any way to get the brain matter out without lobotomizing end or killing Ellie? Like can we at least talk it out?

Anything we could try first? But while this is Science Corner, it isn't Science Corner. And my feeling on it is that the particulars of the science are less important than what the threat to Ellie makes to do. For sure. I'm not. Like that's the. I'm not saying this beggar's belief in a mushroom zombie apocalypse show. No, no, no, I'm not talking about you.

I think that, like, the thing that I was really struck by here, in addition to Joel's desperation when he realizes what's happening and says cortisops grows inside the brain, realizes that Ellie will have to die to save humanity, that that is the trolley problem. Marlene is assessing the desperation with which he says find someone else. but that for all of the things that Marlene will later rightly say to Joel about the choice that he's not giving to Ellie and the choice that Ellie would want to make, Marlene is not giving Ellie a choice here either. And nobody's giving a choice here to Ellie. Everybody is deciding for her. And we feel it with Joel most of all because in episode six before they depart on our dear departed callus, he said, you know, you deserve, you deserve a choice.

And then doesn't give her one here. But again, neither does Marlene, neither do the fireflies. She presents the fact that she doesn't tell Ellie the truth as like a kindness. Right. She'll never know. She went under anesthesia and she'll never know, right? We had so many emails from listeners about Ellie being stripped of her choice here from both sides. And I thought it was really interesting.

But again, I think it's also interesting that the show gave us her answer earlier. in the episode, so we at least know that. I like that the show has added more of the context to the Anna Marlene relationship than the game had, and so it makes Marlene's choice here. Her choice is hard, and she's like, I'm the only one who can understand, right? And again, to what I said earlier, like, she's doing the save what you can save. She believes that she can save all of humanity. But that Charlie problem math takes us back to your favorite quote from Kathleen, right?

I know why you did what you did, but did you ever stop to think that maybe you was supposed to die? He's just a fucking kid. Well, kids die, Henry. They die all the time. You think the whole world revolves around him that he's worth everything? And Joel's like, yeah, you know? Yes. Absolutely, I do.

Exactly. I think that when Marlene says, I have no other choice, and Joel says, I do. Yeah. It is, in those two words, the entire essence of his relationship, his North Star, his, like, his defining worldview, for everyone talking about the game ending, for everybody talking about the show ending, it's this really horrible choice that you would have to make. Oh my God, well, what would you do? What decision would you make? And the thing that I loved about this and thought made this like a really incredibly powerful ending to the story is that we feel that this is an incredibly easy choice for Joel. This is no choice at all. Like there's only one thing for him to do and it's to save Ellie, protect Ellie, build a life with Ellie.

That's it. No matter what the cost is, that is the only thing that Joel can do. There's nothing else in the world for him, right? I love that you called Ellie his North Star, right? Because again, to go back to that look to the letter, idea, when Joel makes his move in the stairwell, the stairwell light is flickering like crazy, right? And so whatever you decide the light means in this moment, it's going out.

And I, oh my God, the phrase that I think Mazen and Druckman and maybe even Troy said about what Joel does, burning his soul to save her is just astonishing. in this whole sequence, the sound design in the sequence, right? The way in which the sound counts out, we're sort of in this fugue state with Joel, and then the score that they use here is just astonishing. And the way you hear, they bump up the audio on the sound of the shells, hitting the floor, the casings, I think of the bullets, right?

It's just brutal. And this to me, and I'll be curious what you think, because you were the one who played through the game, But this to me felt like the most game-like scenario. We're just constantly brutally killing people to get to your goal. And your feelings about the abundance of mushroom zombies are not aside. Again, we talked about this in last week's episode, I think to strip out a lot of that from the season,

a lot of those extended shootout sequences from a game and save it for a moment like this really drives. home the horror of what we're seeing and we, the camera's intentionally lingering on the bodies, on the faces of the bodies as they go down to show us the cost of what Joel's doing here. Yeah, I loved the comp that Druckman and Mason made to Unforgiven and Building and withholding deliberately and building towards something that will be unescapable when you get it. Look, last week we saw Joel. it's not just that he killed three of David's men,

he tortured with relish. There is, again, like, no question that he is going to mow these people down. It is much more compact in the show than in the game. Now, again, this might just be because I'm quite slow and really working my way through in real time. It took me a long time to clear this level and make my way to the doctor,

which we'll talk about more in a second. but I just love that the story is asking you and acknowledging that you will be holding these multiple truths in your head at once. Like, I won't speak on behalf of everybody. I'll just speak for myself. I'm rooting for Joel to get to Ellie when this is happening. And that's like a complicated thing. Because we are also zooming in on the faces of the dead people who are they holding guns at Joel too?

Are some of them soldiers? Yes, but some of them aren't. he's not just shooting them. He's taking this switchblade, Ellie's knife, and stabbing them. These are people who are a threat to him. They're an obstacle. They're also working to find the cure

to save humanity. And we have to understand that as Joel is killing them, he's not just killing them, the people in front of him. He is damning the entire world to this eternal fate. That is the thing we have to be weighing

beyond what is just happening in the hall here. And like not a lot of stories ask us to do that. I just think that's an amazing thing. There are a lot of neat and tidy endings to seasons or books or shows. I love how messy this is. I love it. This is complicated.

It's ambiguous. You have to wrestle with your feelings. I just want to add this one that we got from a listener, Alana, who says, In a Storm of Swords, ever heard of it, Mallory, one of the Song of My Spire books. Good old Stannis, Barathean, approaches Davos, while he's. locked away to sell to inform him of his plans to sacrifice Robert Barathean's bastard son, Edric Storm, to the Lord of Light. Stannis asks Davos, what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?

And Davos responds, everything. Yes. And we get that in the show with Gendry. Yeah. Great comp. Yeah. Great comp. Let's just hash back.

And then also, let's just rehash really quickly. Bill's letter from episode three, I used to hate the world. And I was happy when everyone died, but I was wrong because there was one person. worth saving. So there's like both that I hate the world and one person can change your perspective on that, right? And then in episode four, again, we already referenced this, but Joel saying to Ellie, you haven't seen the world so you don't know, you keep going for family. That's about it, right? And Ellie's family to him now. So that's what he's going on for. All right, the doctor. Yeah. Huge, huge moment. And this is

is like this is such an interesting gameplay versus TV medium moment, which you know, Mal, because you are a gamer girl now, having crouched and sniped your way through this video game. But I've just been thinking a lot about how interesting it is that as the player of the game, you have no choice here in this moment. there's no other way to finish the game than to kill this doctor. And the way in which that makes you the player complicit. Complicit. Yes.

How did you feel about that, Malaz? You had to do it. So I texted you and Chris, our pal Chris Ryan, about this over the weekend. That I walked into the room. The doctor is in my crosshairs. Adam, who's sitting next to me is shouting, take the headshot. One fact for you there. And I was like panicking.

Yeah. And I was hoping because sometimes in the game, if you get a triangle prompt with an ellipsies, three dots, you can engage the character in further conversation. So I walked closer to the surgeon and a triangle popped up and I'm like, maybe we'll get to talk about this for a minute. But the other thing that the triangle does when you get close to somebody is shivs them in the neck. So I press the triangle. And there wasn't an ellipsies. Like, it's not like the game tricked me. I just wanted to have, I was like, oh, maybe I'll get to do a different thing here.

And stabbed him in the neck and killed him instead of shooting him in the head. Again, like this feels, this is very messy, very complicated. And thus, for that reason, feels like the exact right choice for this story. I think that the subsequently like chatting with Limburg, who wrote a great piece about comparing the ending of the show to the ending of the game on the ringer.com. what a great website. Read it if you haven't. What a great website. What a great website.

And reading some other pieces from like back in 2013 about the response to the ending of the game, that feeling of being complicit from some of the players. I think that's just like such a fascinating and interesting thing. Inside of a moment in the story where like, again, my feeling is that for Joel, I believe that there is no other choice. I believe that that is the only thing the character would do. And so for us to wrestle with that and grapple with it is a purpose. but I think him saying, you know what?

I guess I'll just leave her here and then try to cope with that, like would not have felt right. So I like that the game and that the show is challenging us to once again keep assessing that question of tribalism of where love leaves you. And I don't think it's saying love is purely bad. It's also not saying love is purely good. it's in a pretty, like, profound way asking us to consider how both of those things can be true at once. You know, we're thinking, of course, back to, like, Ellie asking Joel in episode four, did you kill innocent people? And now we consider, like, the way that that's the scope of that and what that might look like. But I was really thinking a lot.

Hashtag Maria was right. Exactly. I was really thinking a lot about Henry and Joel in episode five. Yeah. And Joel saying to Henry, if you were collaborating to take care of him, I shouldn't have said what I said. Like that the thing that changed the way Joel thought about Henry was seeing the way that Henry cared for Sam. And then thinking about Henry, what he says to Joel, which is, am I the bad guy? I don't know what you're waiting on, man.

The answer's easy. I am the bad guy because I did a bad guy thing. What's Joel's response to that? he doesn't agree with that, right? Because he recognizes the complexity of it and we have to confront the complexity of it here too, much like when Tommy and Joel are talking in episode six and Joel's saying like those things I did Tommy,

those things that you judge me for, I did those to keep us alive. That's what he's doing here too. The things that some people are judging him for, he's doing him to keep Ellie and him alive, but what did Tommy say to him? There were other ways. We just weren't any good at them.

And that's Joel. That's Joel. And I'm loath to cite our pal David, right? But David didn't talk to Ellie. God. Violent heart time? Well, I mean, if anyone is a violent heart, I think it's Joel, right? But also, when Ellie justifies what Joel did, like, he was trying to defend himself.

He's no, he's trying to defend you. I think you know that, right? Right. That's what Joel operates. And, like, what I love, I mean, I think one of my favorite conversations we've had around Joel, is his very petulant reaction to finding Tommy perfectly fine and safe and halfily ensconced in Jackson. Because who is he if he is not the big brother? Who is he if he is not the protector?

That he derives his self-worth from his ability to protect. And he needs to be needed in that way. And which is why when Marlene hits him with every parent's fear of someday your child won't need you, She doesn't even say like she's going to find out what you did or whatever. She just says like someday she'll leave you. She'll grow up. You know what I mean? Like that's a thing that you can't stop.

You can't kill your way out of that one. That's just a fact of being an adult. Before we roll on to the parking garage interaction, I do want to read this email from Steven that I think is so interesting about the context of gaming in 2013, right? So he wrote, around 2013, almost every big prestigious game emphasize how your choices mattered. that the consequences of your choices would affect the world. The Mass Effect series sold a whole trilogy on the idea that your choices would ripple through multiple games.

The developer Tell Tell Games, probably best known for The Walking Dead 2012, popularized explicitly showing a, quote, character will remember that notification after forcing you into tragic binary choices. If you look at popular awards for games in this era, they pretty much went towards games that emphasize that a player can play the way that they want to,

like Bioshock, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, etc. One of the reasons the ending of The Last of Us was so impactful in 2013 was that it bucked this trend. Many people were shocked that they did not get to make the final decision between saving Ellie versus the world. In 2013, it was a subversion of the belief that the player was in total control of Joel. He is not just an avatar, but a real character. And there is no universe where that character, to your point, Mallory, where that character

would allow his daughter to be sacrificed. Exactly. Like, exactly. Exactly. It is a shocking thing to see our protagonist do, but it is the only ending that feels true to the Joel that we have just spent a season of TV with or an entire game with. It is the clear place, the clear calculus that the show has been driving. And this is the way in which The Last of Us feels different from, I think, most video games of that time is like in that you are watching something as much as you are playing something or even maybe more so. What do you want to say about this, Marlene, the final Marlene, Joel interaction here? Okay, a lot, but I would be remiss if one of those things wasn't, Marlene, you got to shoot, Joel. What are you doing? Oh, my God. Well, then he would just, like, drop Ellie, right?

I don't know. There really is a reason that the fireflies haven't succeeded. What are we all doing here? I'm glad she didn't, of course, but good Lord. I think that what you said already is exactly right about that. You can't keep her safe forever. And again, it made me think of that Riley line. Of course, that was said to Ellie, not to Joel, but it's in our minds as viewers,

that whether it's two minutes or two days, we don't give that up. I don't want to give that up. it's not like Joel as a rational being doesn't understand the truth behind what Marlene is saying that at some point it won't be exactly the way it is right now between him and Ellie

but anything he can do to delay that he will. I thought that Marlene's saying because she lives in a broken world that you could have saved was like an all time all time cutting, gutting line.

Like that is that says as Razor's her show Bartazelli's switchblade. That was just unbelievable. And of course, particularly cutting for us knowing that Ellie is a character to go back to that episode for a car scene. If you don't think there's hope for the world, why bother going on? Who wants to believe that there is hope and reason to hope more broadly and specifically that she has a hand to play in that hope? So this was just devastating. I loved, and this is the same in the game, the way that it cuts after this initial exchange between the car ride

and the final fateful moments between Joel and Marlene. This is just really clever editing. Yeah, the way it cuts off like one of Joel's sentences, the bam, the shot, right? Yeah. And you feel it's horror in that moment, which is an important thing too, right? It's not like he's smiling. Like, I feel great. This is a terrible thing.

Okay, you tell me if I'm a sociopath, and I might be, but when in this final stretch... I love sentences that start this way. This is going to be great. In this final stretch, both in the car and then at the end of the five-mile hike, we can do that, right? Remember? We'll have a call back. That's what we call on the biz. No.

At the end of the lies that Joel tells Ellie and the clarity with which we can see that Ellie doesn't believe him, that hurt me more than all the bodies that dropped in the hospital. Yeah. I mean, this is this is just utterly wrenching. And like, obviously we get the confrontation at the very end, and that's the note that we leave these characters on, is a lie between them. But in the car, when Ellie is coming to, like, we can tell right away, it's not just that the drugs are fading.

What she is hearing from Joel does not make sense in real time. They were running tests. There's a whole lot more like you. A lot of people who are immune. There are dozens of them, but the doctors couldn't make it work with any of them. They've actually stopped. They've stopped looking for a cure. Like, none of this makes any sense, and he won't answer when she asks if Marlene is okay.

And it builds toward him saying two, like, incredibly intense and emotional things, I'm taking us home, and I'm sorry. And you could be saying, I'm sorry about a lot of. a lot of different things. But I think we both read this as Ellie understanding, even though she can't quite face it, what he is apologizing for. That was my read on it.

And then every interview that, you know, everything that the creators have said and that Bella Ramsey said and Ashley Johnson have said is clear that Ellie does not believe Joel. But to varying shades of she doesn't believe him But she can't allow herself to engage with that. Or she doesn't believe him, but she's just not confronting him about it now. Because Ashley Johnson's interpretation was really interesting of like Ellie's final okay.

She says she interpreted it as we're done. I believed in you that this is the one thing that I would have done that would have mattered. Who am I now? Like that's her read on Ellie at the end of the first game. But it's devastating. Again, giving us what we want, which is Ellie and Joel safe. on the way to the safety of Jackson. Right.

But we don't want it like this, right? And the profoundly broken nature of this relationship that we have been rooting for, we have been polling for. And it's like, how do you come back from this, you know? You know, to track the idea of sorry through the season. Yes. Like Joel saying in episode three, I don't want your sorries. Right. That's like where these characters started with each other.

And then you build in episode four to Joel saying, I mean, it was my fault. You shouldn't have had to, and I'm sorry. And like what shifts from resistance to guilt into this like blinding love. And of course, like you think of the I'm sorry that Ellie left on Sam's grave and the way that these sorries have been markers

along their journey and then like the heft of this one here. The moment before Ellie's swear to me challenge at the end, though, where they're on the hike, the five-hour callback, and Joel is talking about Sarah. You know, we had the moment earlier in the episode where Ellie asked

inside of the Army medical camp if he had been there with Sarah and he answers her. And that felt new because, of course, in episode six, it's like, we will not speak of this ever. But then on this hike here, he is just freely,

freely sharing all of these things about Sarah and her life and making these comparisons. says to Ellie and saying, you know why I think she'd like you because you're funny. I think you would have made her laugh. I bet you would have liked her back. And it's like, and then of course, also Ellie inside of the swear to me challenge and moment on the cliff looking out over Jackson, shares with him something about Riley. So they're both opening up in this way that they haven't. And there's this like, I think unbelievably agonizing like not in our stomachs as viewers. We're like,

this is kind of the exact thing, to your point, that we've been waiting for, them telling each other about their past, about their lives, about the people that they've loved and that they've lost. And it's just, we could feel how wrong it feels for Ellie in that moment and how she is just pained by this weight, this thing that is eating away at her, that she knows that he isn't telling her the truth. And she knows why, like, to save her. Exactly. And to go back to her, you don't have to tell me why. You don't have to tell me why you're telling me that way she cuts him off earlier. So we know, she knows. She knows exactly how his brain works. So she knows what he would have done to get her out of there. She knows what happened. You know what I mean? I found the comparisons to Sarah here so disturbing because as we discussed on that lone wolf and cub episode that we did so long ago, one of these tropes in the lone wolf and cub arena is the idea of the, replacement goldfish, right? You lose a child, a pet, a spouse, or whatever, and you find one that that reminds you of it, and that's the thing you latch on to. And that's been hanging over

this whole season, but for him to just sort of be chatting away, comparing and contrasting, you know, especially in the arena of like smiling and girlishness and height and all this. I don't know, it was just sort of like it also felt like at the same time he was negging. Ellie to a certain degree. Like, it will not intentionally, but it's just sort of like, you know, Ellie's like, yeah, I'm not girlish. But I don't know. It was just, it all, it all hit in a sour way for me.

Interesting. I thought there was like, I, I hear that. I was kind of like swept up in the way that Joel wanted it to be so sweet. And like, again, how that's like a thing we've been like craving. But he's so disconnected from her and what she's going through in that moment. So then it just like reads as like, creepy and delusional to me, you know what I mean? So, I just want everyone to be happy. This is so heartbreaking. The fear on his face when he, when she says, like, wait a minute, you know,

and he can feel what's about to happen and what's coming and like, but again, it struck me as like childlike, like a child who was lied and someone is about to call you in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you double down because like what other choice do you think you have at that point, right? And like, then what would it mean if you said the truth out loud? And I think that like Ellie, it felt to me, again, we're clearly on the same page that we know. She does not believe Joel, but like you feel that she wants to because like what does it mean to admit that this thing happened and that he's lying to her about it and that she doesn't get to hold on to that defining purpose and the chance to save people and help people, but also that like the person who. she just said she'd follow anywhere and has built this life with is doing this. And like, I think that like facing, for Ellie, too, facing the reality of life without Joel,

you know, again, we go back to knowing that she said the things she feared the most was ending up alone. She doesn't want to face life without Joel either, I don't think. And so, like, everybody's making a compromise with themselves and everybody's making a compromise with the world. And that's what the story is about. And that's like a very challenging and painful thing that I thought made for a great finale in an incredible season of TV. I want to end with one last listener email that we got from Amelia that I absolutely loved. And Amelia wrote, the LA we see at the end of the season has no backpack, no joke book, possibly a shade of things to come after Joel's decision. All she has left now is her knife.

Very the things we carry. At the end of the season, Joel has learned that love heals. Ellie has learned that love breaks. And as we've been saying, both can be true. Both are true in this world that we've created in The Last of Us. Anything else, and like to the final Last of Us, like, is this the last of Joel and Ellie as an us? We don't know. Stay tuned for next season.

Melor, anything else you want to say before we go to our interview with Craig and Neil? Love to talking about the show with you. Can't wait for season two. Excellent. Let's go now to that interview. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

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The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Thank you both so much for doing this. You know, everyone has so many questions about the game. I want to start with a really quick question,

which is to ask you, are you both getting what I'm getting, which is a constant barrage of people tagging you and emailing you about every creepy mushroom science article that is out there because it is nonstop for me. Are you guys seeing these? Yeah. For me, it's a continuation from 2013 when that started happening. And I used to retweet them and have like some clever remark about the last. I'm like, oh, this is kind of serious. Maybe I should not be joking about this stuff. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Anywhere a mushroom pops up, anywhere I get someone texting me. Oh my God. People will text me pictures of mushrooms as they're walking. I don't, I don't care.

I also get pictures of the supermarket where there's like some quartercepts on sale. Like, look at this. They're selling it. Yes. Every powdered quartered cordycep product I have been sent a link to. Yeah. Okay. So speaking of the quartersteps and the mushrooms, I wanted to start by asking you, the show starts a little bit more infected heavy than it ends.

And, you know, in the game, we are constantly fighting the infected. But we have large sections of the story here. were no infected appear at all. Can you talk about your decision on how to parcel out and pace out the sort of, I know you guys don't like the Z word, but the sort of zombie-esque interactions

that you get in the show. Maybe starting with Craig. Maybe you should talk about how Craig banned the Z word on set. Which I did not do, and I call them zombies all the time. I don't know what Evan was talking about. Now, we call them zombies all the time

because it's funny. So obviously, we had part of the adaptation process is trying to figure out how to take source material that was built around gameplay and ported over to a medium that is passive. And

a lot of the gameplay centered on NPCs that you have to get around either avoid or stealth kill or just confront head on. That's sort of your choices when you're playing. And the NPCs were either raiders or

cannibals. or Fedra or they were the infected. And so there's a lot of fighting. I mean, I don't know what your ultimate kill count is in a typical run of The Last of Us, but, you know, it's in the triple digits for sure. Depend on your play style, but on it. True. I mean, you could.

It's much higher than we would want for the show. Yeah. So we did at times have choices to make about how we wanted to present the infected. I will say that we don't look, even though we were, you know, greenlit for a season of television, Neil and I felt like we can't just make a season of television without considering what would come after. There is more of the last of us to come.

And I think the balance is not always just about within an episode or even episode to episode, but season to season. it's quite possible that there will be a lot more infected later and perhaps different kinds. But within the episodes that we were concentrating on, I think ultimately we generally stressed the power of relationships and trying to find significance within moments of action. And so there may be less action than some people wanted because we couldn't necessarily find significance for quite a bit of it. or a concern that it would be repetitive. After all, you're not playing it, you're watching it. And although a lot of people do like to watch gameplay,

it needs to be, I think, a little bit more focused and purposeful when we're putting it on TV. Yeah, just to echo what Craig is saying, which is like we took a very high-level approach and looked at just the action across the board, and every piece of action, if you look at the show, has to move character in some way. If it doesn't move character,

and it was only there for spectacle, then it was an easy cut for us. I wanted to ask you, as a rabid consumer of all of your interviews and your podcasts and everything that you guys have been saying around the show, something you've been sort of warning or priming audiences with throughout the season is this idea of the danger of love, how it can be not always a healthy, wholesome thing. Were you sort of trying to soft launch the ending of this season? Can you talk about that concept?

and how it applies to what Joel does at the end of the finale here. Yeah, you're right. That was the concept for the story, both for the game and the show, which is, it started with for the game, was how can we make the player feel the unconditional love of parents feels for the child and this worry and fear and love and joy that can come with it. But then sometimes, you know, when you love something unconditionally, you logic goes out the window. and you will do really horrible things to protect the ones you love. And there's a lot of examples worldwide of this happening all the time.

So for us was just like, okay, here are all the different pieces that we have, the tools that we have within this story, how can we with each episode thematically touch on that in some way? Again, both the beautiful and the joy that can come out of a story like Bill and Frank and a fate worse than death when a man has to kill his own brother because he's turned. But ultimately, the greater and greater sacrifices

that Joel has to make for Ellie and likewise what she's going through to protect him. I like that unconditional love is we give that way too much credit like it's the highest form of love. Unconditional means literally no conditions, none, including conditions

whereby you really ought to be doing something that is not within the best interests of the person you love. at least according to some sort of moral code or a standard of ethics. And I'm not suggesting that I have a hard opinion about how things go at the end. I don't. I'm confused about it morally. I think it's a difficult choice.

I go back and forth. And I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it. But you are right to at least suggest that when, even if we weren't necessarily soft launching anything is a great term, we are aware of things as we built this season around the story of the first game that Neil and Nottie Dog

weren't aware of when they told that story the first time around. There are certain little moments and things that we put in there. Ultimately, I don't think there's anything this season that contradicts what was already there in essence

or explicitly in the game itself. I want to ask you something to pick up on something Neil just said and actually something Neil and I were talking about a little bit before we started this official Q&A is this idea of like when you're playing the game as a gamer, especially with this final decision that Joel makes to shoot the doctor. You have to make that active decision or as Neil put it earlier or at least complicit in that active decision that Joel makes. I've heard from gamers that they tried to get past that scene without shooting the doctor and you look. literally can't. So you have to make that decision with Joel, right? And so I'm wondering how you try to capture that deep investment that someone has when they're playing the game in the way that you decided to depict it in the show. I didn't feel that differently about it myself.

Maybe because it wasn't a choice. I play a lot of video games. So I know the difference between choosing and not choosing. There's a fantastic sequence. in Bioshock that goes right to the heart of just exactly how much choice do you think you have as a game player. I mean, you become very aware how much you are on rails in any game when, say, I mean, I was playing God of War Ragnarok, and this is a guy that is capable of throwing boulders and killing gods, but he can't get through a bush because you have to stay on this path. They didn't code the stuff over there. So there is a sense of like, you have choice, but when we give you choice. And in those moments when I played the game, what I felt was I was being told a story

and I was part of the story. I was invested in the story and it was around me. And to the extent that we can make people feel like the rest of the world goes away as they watch the televised version of the story, I think we're arriving in the same place, which is you're experiencing the story that Neil wrote initially as the game and that we wrote as the chef. It's an interesting thing that we haven't figured out quite hard to articulate it, but there is something that happens when you're playing a character that you immediately empathize with them. There's almost a shortcut compared to other medium. And the greatest example of this is when we were watching people play The Last of Us, when it was all strung together for the first time, and they get to the winter section, and all of a sudden you think Joel might be dead because he's so incapacitated. And the camera's just on Ellie.

and then the UI comes up and every player, almost like instinctively says, oh my God, I'm Ellie. And they start playing it very, very differently than how they were playing a Joel, even though the mechanics are not that different. And that's something, you know, at the end, the other thing that was interesting is to hear some players talk about it. They would come into this operating room, play through it, and then rescue Ellie and run out.

And then they would say, man, I can't believe you made me kill the doctor and those nurses. I'm like, didn't make you kill those nurses. That was, you chose to, you went in that operating room, guns blazing. So it's just like an interesting thought process that happened there.

Like even if you kind of like try to resist what's happening, at least in your mind you're starting to say, what would I do? What do I want to do versus what the game wants me to do? And the character wants me to do. So for us, it just, it was an interesting conversation to say,

how do we put you in that same mindset of like you've been, I think for the most part, viewers have been in alignment with Joel as far as what he's trying to do and protect Ellie that's such like a noble cause that he has. And then how do we show this really sad thing that's sad more than anything else to see the darkness he's capable of?

And so then it's about, okay, how do we frame it with music? How do we shoot it? What are all the other kind of tools we have to make you feel something very similar? I wanted to ask you a question about a very important character we meet in the finale here, which is Anna, Ellie's mom. We don't really meet her in the game. So this is like additional information that the gamers are getting inside the context of the show. And there's also some added information potentially here about why Ellie is immune, given the circumstances of her birth.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about adding that layer of the mythology to the story, why this was the time to do that. And also, I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about the decision to cast Ashley Johnson, who portrayed Ellie in the game in the role of Anna here. Yeah, the short story of the origin of that little sequence is when we're wrapping up the game, there's these opportunities to do other pieces of art or storytelling to help promote the game. So we did this comic book called American Dreams, and that's where we developed Riley, which later turned into the left behind additional chapter. And there was an opportunity to do an animated short. So trying to come up with a story, I wrote this short script about Ellie's mom and how she gave birth to

Ellie was bitten at the same time, wasn't sure if she was infected during that birth. And it just became this little character drama that felt like spoke to the same themes of parental love for their child and how much you're willing to do even when you're on death's doors. That deal fell apart. Then we're talking to another game company to potentially do it as a whole other game. That deal fell apart to tell that story. Then I was just, I became interested in live action. So I'm like, oh, we actually do this short.

And I was talking to Ashley Johnson about her starring it. And then we both got busy, so that fell apart. And I just kind of forgot about it until Mr. Mason over here, we started meeting to talk about the show. And we like, what do you have that we haven't seen? Or like, what is Ellie's backstory? And I would just tell him all this stuff. I'm like, oh, right, there's this other story about Ellie's mom and blah, blah, blah. And I just kind of told him about it.

It's like, oh, my God, that has to go in the show. And then we talked about, okay, well, how would it fit? what does it make sense to put it? Now, it does hint at and gives some theories of why Ellie's immune, even though we don't answer that conclusively. But I think more importantly than that is it builds the relationship between Marlene and Anna so that when you get to the ending and you put, we put Marlene against Joel,

and they have these kind of like their own opposite philosophical terms of like how to approach of the ends justify the means. knowing how close she was with Anna and that Anna's dying wish was like, take care of my kid, I think gives more weight and maybe more tragedy to Marlene's, the sacrifice she's trying to make for the betterment of mankind. Yeah, and it was, you know, one of those moments, well, you know, when I would ask Neil questions and you would tell me things and I was like, but then to, we both kind of simultaneously came to like, well, wait, Ashley.

And that, to me, is one of the most fulfilling moments of the production and the show, because I'm a fan of the game and I'm a fan of Ashley's. And as I often say, like, Troy Baker disappears into a thousand roles. I can't believe he has all the different characters he plays. But Ashley sounds like Ellie, and Ellie sounds like Ashley. So she's already this quasi-mythological creature to me. And to see her giving birth to herself in a sense and to create that genetic connection between her performance as Ellie

and the origin story of Bella as Ellie was just profound. I think everybody just felt something beautiful about it. And it goes to something that I think is important, which is that Neil has these very deeply connected relationships with the people who have played these parts, whether it's Troy or Ashley or Jeffrey Pierce or Meryl Dandridge. You feel these things. And that carrying through those relationships carrying through to the show and giving me space to make relationships with them too, it's just like you feel like, there was a family and the family has grown. And man, it doesn't always work like that in this business. It really doesn't.

It's honestly like it's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. And I'm so proud of what Ashley did in that episode. No, Ashley's incredible. And I had no doubt that she would be incredible because I've worked with her for so many years. And, you know, this is one of the first time she did anything last of us that I wasn't directing. So before that shoot, she called me. She was all nervous.

She's like, I don't know how to do this. I wish you were here. And I think I told her, which I wasn't lying, I felt totally confident saying this. I'm like, Craig is there. Trust Greg. He's been my co-parent now for like all these months. And I felt comfortable leaving the set for months at a time because I saw the love he had for the material. And I think that kind of gave her some ease to say, okay, someone else is watching me, someone else that really loves and cares about these characters. And I told her, just do what you do, which is collaborate. because working with Ashley was such a collaboration that I had one understanding of who Elie is when I was writing those scripts.

And in working with her, I had a very different understanding. And when we're making the game, I was writing it live. There was an outline that we were adhering to. But again, after shooting those first few scenes with Ashley, she helped shape that character in so many ways. And that's why she metaphorically gave birth to that character and have to have her like to literally do it in this. scene just felt incredibly poetic and beautiful despite how sad that that scene is. Was there any moment or detail in the show, which may have looked simple or insignificant on screen, but actually took a great deal of work?

What a good question. You think about that one. I mean, all of Lincoln, all of Billstown, that was erected out of nothing. That was a lot. CG took over the rest of it. Like those houses had no rooftops and there weren't as dirty as we wanted them to be. Yeah, well, that also that, I'll tell you, going you a little deeper onto Bill's town, one of the things about the town was we start in 2003 when things are roughly fine and then some years go by.

Bill takes care of his own house, neglects everybody else's house. Frank shows up. A little more time goes by. Frank says, I want to take care of other people's houses. Now things get better. Now more time goes by and they're old and Frank isn't doing well and things have kind of gone back again. There was this constant like changing of foliage and weeds and grass and paint. But there were also little things that were done with VFX that were really difficult to pull off but necessary that blend in with moments where it was prosthetic work.

And you wouldn't tell. You can't tell where the handover is. You can't tell where it goes. but so many people work so hard to make it so that you couldn't tell. But, you know, the thing is, if you don't make movies and television, it's hard to explain other than everything is hard. Bella Ramsey crawling on the ground over and over and over. Pedro Pascal walking through snow blasting in his face from a large Ritter fan over and over and over.

He's going to yell at me so much because it's only like three seconds, and he's going to be so cranky. It was like, it looks awesome. And, you know, everything, as it turns out, is way harder than people know, which is why anytime, if you are critics,

if any of you are also critics, please I'm begging you, no matter how much you don't like something, never accuse the people making it of being lazy. There's nothing lazy about making any of this stuff. Speaking of battering Peter Pascal over and over again with a wind slash snow machine. Looking at the season two,

is there anything that you would like to do differently as you approach the second season? Or in other words, what are some of the biggest lessons learned in making this season of television that you're going to take in as you go forward? I'm not letting Neil come anywhere near this show anymore. He's a dick.

Fired. Finally, it took you two years to learn that. Oh, man. I mean, well, you know, one of the things Neil and I have been talking about over and over is to not change the process, at least our process. Our process works. Our process of kicking the tires on everything. Our process of agreeing that no matter how much we disagree, we will find a way to agree. There's no veto power here.

There's no, you know, one gets his way. It's just we will figure it out. And to keep the writing process roughly what it was, which is pretty, you know, solitary and monk-like. These things are important to us. Production-wise, I think, I don't know about Neil, I learned so much because this was the biggest production I've ever. I've been involved in some big production. I knew zero percent about making TV shows. Now I know five percent.

He's up to five. I'm up to 12. So we're doing great. Thanks, HBO. No, look, I have, going into the show, I had the benefit of 25 years or so of experience making stuff. But scale is its own challenge, and I learned a lot about scale. And I think we will be a little more efficient in our process, which means we'll have more time to do some more complicated things. But what I'm really excited about is the fact that for so many of us, whether it's crew or cast,

we will be returning sophomores. We know where everything is. We don't get lost figuring out how to get to math class anymore. And that's a comfort level that you have to earn. And so I'm excited to feel that. Okay, so certainly as you've made this game and as you've seen the reactions come in to the game, and then as you've made the show and seen those reactions come in, surely you've had some opportunity to reflect on our society,

its current ills, all of that. So metaphorically speaking, what do you think the world is infected with? And what is the cure? So Neil and Craig on a Zoom on a Tuesday morning, can you cure the, tell us, identify the world's ills. Awesome. Neil, I'm sure you have the perfect answer to this. I got this, ready?

Here we go. Here we go. The world is infected with. tribalism this is going to be so earnest I'm so sorry and the cure is more empathy more seeing things from other perspectives and maybe being less selfish with just our little tribe that's an I agree I'll give one other thing I think the world is infected with and it's a bit ironic I think the world is infected with narrative I think as a storyteller, what I see around me is that the people who are supposed to be telling the truth

are in fact telling stories. Everybody, politicians, journalists, everybody seems to be organizing their points of view into stories that they can sell you. So it's all become like commercials, which are stories about things that aren't stories like, you know, soda and clothes. and by narrativeizing everything, we are losing touch with the simple, unvarnished, modest truth of things. And to the extent that I wish we could get back to that and get away from everything as a story, I wish we could. But at least I sleep well at night knowing that the story that we're telling here

is proudly and loudly labeled as fiction. So it's just good old-fashioned drama like the Greeks, you know, taught us about. And that's, you know, that's okay. But everybody else, facts first would be best. Great answer. We did it. We did it. We did it.

We did it. We did it. On a Tuesday. Yeah. On a Tuesday. Okay. The end credits for the finale list, Laura Bailey, as one of the nurses in the operating room with Ellie in the final shoot out there.

Laura Bailey, of course, was a central actor in Last of Us Part 2, the game. How'd you land her in this capacity? The last one we received her. What do you think? How did we land her? She was like, come on, let me do it.

Let me be in the show. We were like, we love you, of course. It was like, it was kind of laid along. And Merle was back to play Marlene because she had been, you know, obviously in the first episode, and here she was back in the end. And Laura and we're all are great friends.

And yeah, we're like, I mean, you want to be a nurse? Yeah. It was like, it was just this fun thing. We were all hanging out in a bar and a fairfield suites or whatever it was in Grand Prairie. And I will say like I took Laura on a tour of the halls of this hospital. We were up there because they have a hospital that essentially is abandoned at this point. It's going to be torn down. And it was, you know, it was interesting.

It was she cried. She cried just looking at it. It was very, and it was the same thing that happened with Merle. The first time Merle put the Marlene wig on, she cried. It's a common thing that the people that had come from Neil's game world felt like they were stepping into this impossible, like the most amazing VR adaptation of The Last of Us Ever. And that was just... By the way, I had the same reaction when I first off, she said.

Yeah. Yeah. Laura's awesome. She's great. I won't tell you which one she is. By the way, the two nurses, like, very similar. We'll tell you which one she is. What's, uh, so for those that I don't know,

Laura played, uh, Abby in the second game, this kind of very pivotal character for that story. Uh, but, um, you know, people say, you know, Merle is the only, uh, actor that played the same role in both the game and the show, which is not entirely true because Laura Bailey also played the nurse in the operating room, uh, for the first game. Um, and now she plays that nurse again. I just felt kind of, like, we're like,

okay, we got to get you in there somewhere in this season. Maybe we'll do something else with her in the next season. Well, yeah, I mean, she's got a mask on so we can make her anything we want in the next season. But she sent me, I want to add, whatever. She sent me this very, very funny picture that she took the day that they shot that scene because, again, she, for those that know who she plays in the next story, it's very much related to that operating room. So maybe when the season's over, I'll tweet that picture up for her.

Okay, obviously, we're not speaking a lot of. of specifics about the part two of the game. I haven't played it. We're not spoiling anything. But I have heard, you know, there's like general chatter from the gaming community. They're asking this question about a time jump between part one and part two. And does that mean, you know, someone like Bella Ramsey is going to have to be aged up significantly between the two seasons? Like, what are you, what's your answer to this common, internet query. Yeah, we're exposed to

read. Let's put this this thing to the rest. Please. Go ahead, Craig. Yeah, so she's in a very experimental process to accelerate her age. Corticeps are involved, right? Yeah, she's smoking six packs of

cigarettes a day on a pure whiskey and tainted beef diet. She'll be, yeah, no, by the time we get there, she'll be great. So, you know, one of the things about the casting process that's tough is that we invite people to join us on this process, and we know everything. And nobody else knows anything except what they know, which is the game. We know what we're going to do.

We know what we're going to do in terms of costume and makeup and hair. But more importantly, we also know the spirit and soul of the actor. and it's tough as a kind of a parent of an actor, you know, because you become kind of a surrogate father on set, especially to someone when she joined us. She was 17. She's only 19 now, which, by the way, is the age of Ellie in The Last West Part 2. You know, people were like, she doesn't look like the cat.

I'm like, I don't, it doesn't matter. Watch. Just watch what happens. Just watch. And now they know. And I think there is still this anxiety. Like there's this constant drumbeat of anxiety. And all I can say to people is, I have so much anxiety myself about doing a good job on this.

Just know, I am also very anxious. If you're anxious about something, I'm probably anxious about it, which means we're talking about it and thinking about it. And we will present things, but it will be different. It will be different. just as this season was different. Sometimes it will be different radically, and sometimes it will be fairly different at all. But it's going to be different, and it will be its own thing.

It won't be exactly like the game. It will be the show that Neil and I want to make. We are making it with Bella. I don't know what. I'll add to that, which is like, you know, when we made the game, I felt we were incredibly lucky. It was like lightning in the bottle that we found Ashley Johnson. and I can't imagine that version of Ellie being anybody else.

And then somehow we got lightning in the bottle again with Bella. And we are extremely lucky to have Bella and the stuff you saw throughout this entire season. And the only way we would ever, ever consider recasting Bella is if she said, I don't want to work with you guys anymore. And even then, we're not sure we would grant her that. We might still force her to come back to season. Yeah. you know, Belle and I have said, like, we're good just doing, this is good, we'll do this now,

forever if we could. Just to clarify, because I know how the internet works now. And I said, they don't know anything and we know everything. I'm not talking about anything other than the secrets of the production, please, for the love of God, journalists, help me. I don't mean that they don't know anything. We actually, we're as dumb as everybody. Trust me. We're just trying really hard. Like some ways, a lot dumber. Dumber. Craig Mays and Cullen, they don't know anything. We know what.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I can see it. It's just like, yeah, pixels don't mean as much as bit. I'm like, oh, that's not, the context. There's a really interesting phenomenon that I noticed in people's responses to episodes as they rolled out of The Last of Us. Oftentimes, people would say some version of was amazing tonight, and it's just mind-blowing how it's almost a one-to-one reproduction of the game. And it would be on an episode where I'm like,

literally almost nothing in that episode was even in the game exactly. It was like, but it's the, they're talking about the soul, whether they realize it or not, that's why they think that. Because they have a memory of playing it. It made them feel things. And we are,

through adaptation, bringing up those same feelings. That's the point. Like, you think about what is the intention of a piece of art and video games are art. and how did it the intention land? How do we recreate that? And that means it will be different,

and yet you will have the same kind of response, that you cannot adapt video games from a place of cynicism, commercialism, pure numbers. Some of the most popular video games in the world have nothing to offer in terms of character, really. You have to invent character. You have to create character. And that's really hard to do.

There are a lot of characters that I love playing, but they don't have, say, like, flaws. Do you know what I mean? That's not how it functions. Right. And so finding the things that feel adaptable and then loving them and then recreating that essence. That's how you get people saying, oh, my God, it's just like the game. It's not. But it is.

That makes you feel like you're playing game. Yeah, I love that. circling back to Ellie's birth here when you decided to put Anna in the show, was there any inclination to put her father or identify her biological father in putting this together? Or are we going for some kind of, since Ellie is a sort of Messiah figure in this mushroom apocalypse, are we going for a sort of Virgin Mary, let's not talk about paternity? birth scene here. I will say there was some stuff written

or the mom and the dad. Again, when we were talking to this other game studio to potentially do an Anna, like a whole Anna game, the climax of which was this scene. So I'm reluctant to say anything about it because as I now found out

several times, stories that I think are failures and we'll never see the light of they sometimes see the light of they. So all say is like in our calculation and our engineering and the decisions we made of why we picked what we picked, how we placed it, that kind of religious iconography for Ellie wasn't in our calculus. Like that wasn't a great conversation for us.

Well, I mean, it wasn't, I would say directly, although there were moments like even in the description, I think, as you may even say it in the script of when Marlene arrives to find Anna with Ellie and there's blood and a dead infected and Anna's holding a knife to her and she's infected and we said it was like the most you know fucked up you know mother and child pieta you've ever

seen. So you certainly you know you can make kind of superficial connections there but I actually never had my own curiosity about Ellie's father in a way it's almost

better if, in my mind at least, Joel's daughter exists and then he meets Ellie and the whole process is about how difficult it is to let somebody else in when you've closed that door off and nailed it shut forever. But Ellie doesn't have any, that door is open. That room has never been occupied and Joel just gets in there almost immediately. And I do like that. I do like that. I like the idea that the room is open and empty, and even we don't know anything about it. That's kind of interesting. As we've covered your show, Mallory and I have spent a lot of time talking about some of the other sort of post-apocalyptic or, you know, people on a road, sort of stories that we love. You know, the stand exists.

The leftovers, Station 11, like all this sort of stuff. And so I'm wondering, like, how much of those various stories, how much of those various stories, have an impact on you in telling this story? And in general, what can this kind of stories or teach us about human nature? For sure, the road and children of men and a bunch of world events that we probably shouldn't get into because then someone will accuse this interview of being political. I think what I love about this genre and the stories, especially when it's more character-driven, is The best stories for me is taking really interesting characters that we could find ourselves within and apply as much pressure as you can, and that's what the genre does, and see the kind of interesting choices that they make.

And for us, it's another flavor of that, but with a focus on the love between these characters. And often we draw different conclusions than some of these other stories. Wrote to Perdition is another one, where it's like some of many of those stories were like about protecting the. innocence of the child all the way to the bitter end. And for me, and I think Craig is the same way. For us, it's like that felt like, okay, there's a poetry to that story, but it's not quite as realistic as I or we see the world, which was like there is a corruption that happens to anyone that survives here. So sometimes that love is about teaching this very innocent being, this child of how to kill and how to do terrible things so they could.

survive. And that's part of like protecting the cub, as you so often say in your podcast, the wolf and cub that becomes wolf and wolf. Wolf and wolf. Yeah,

certainly we are all soaking in post-apocalyptic culture. Corby Gupark-Parthie is an interesting example because he is the most literate of illiterate. And so the road is absolutely gorgeous.

I remember reading it and thinking, wow, he's really nailed the cadence of a boy asking questions of his father endlessly. And the answer is getting shorter and shorter and shorter because children can be exhausting in that way. I think that what Kormac McCarthy stressed in the road, which is correct. is there are all these circumstances, but what matters is relationship above all else. That's what matters, not plot. And the plot that occurs occurs to stress the relationship, to put it under stress, to put it under strain,

and to see what happens of it. And that is just a general philosophy of storytelling that I think is correct. And that is why Cory McCarthy can come up with, you know, no country, right? It's like his source material is adaptable in so many different ways. And so too is the apocalyptic thing. I have said many times, it's nothing new.

I'm not a huge fan of the zombie genre. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that I was never like, oh, my God, the latest zombie movies out. And I also, I'm not like, oh, my God, I've got to get to the latest, you know, apocalyptic film. But children of men blew my mind and reading the road blew my mind and playing The Last of us blew my mind. And all three of those center on one relationship at the core.

One. And I love that. Have a great Tuesday. Don't eat any mushrooms. And remember, the fungus loves too. All right. Thank you, Joanna. All right. That does it. For our coverage of the last, I can't believe it's already over. We'll be back, obviously, talk about yellow jackets very soon, Succession, etc.

The Prestige Podcast, TV Feed, never sleeps. So we'll be back. Thanks all season to Carlos Sierboga for his work. Thanks on this episode to our buddy boy himself. Steve Allman stepped in for Carlos. So thank you, Steve, for a heroic turnaround on this episode. Remember, as always, the fungus loves to. And paying attention to things is how we

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