Don’t go to the museum or hang out on the porch if you haven’t watched “The Price,” the penultimate episode of season 2 of “The Last of Us.” Major spoilers lie ahead.
In “The Price,” the second-to-last episode of the sophomore season of “The Last of Us,” we see a familiar face: Joel Miller, the previous series protagonist played by Pedro Pascal. When you consider the fact that Joel dies an incredibly brutal death in episode 2, “Through the Valley,” thanks to Kaitlyn Dever’s vengeful Abby Anderson, this might seem jarring … but the episode is told in flashback, chronicling the highs and lows of Joel’s relationship with his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey). In an interview with Neil Druckmann, who created 2013’s video game “The Last of Us” for Naughty Dog and its 2020 sequel “The Last of Us Part II” — and shares showrunner duties with Craig Mazin and directed “The Price” — Druckmann spoke to the way they changed the structure of the game, which disperses its flashbacks sporadically. Instead, we get all of the unseen Joel and Ellie content in “The Price.” As Druckmann told The Hollywood Reporter, this was a necessary part of the adaptation, and he also didn’t want the audience to get too used to Joel’s presence again.
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“Yeah, let me talk to you about our thought process,” Druckmann said after interviewer James Hibberd asked about the similarities and differences between the video game and the HBO adaptation. “You’re right that in the game, these scenes are spaced out, sometimes hours apart. If we spaced out these scenes and planted them throughout the season, I believe they wouldn’t land as powerfully because they’re short moments and work better when they’re next to each other and you can just see the comparison — it’s like their relationship is slowly deteriorating. If we put one in an episode, and then you have to wait a week to see the next, you have to remember what the last one was, and then wait another week again. I think the show would start feeling like it has a template — ‘What’s the Joel flashback this week?'”
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Neil Druckmann knew the audience needs to ‘miss’ Joel after his gutting death in episode 2
Continuing his thought, Neil Druckmann said that he and Craig Mazin need Joel’s presence to be sorely missed on “The Last of Us,” which makes sense; his death is shocking and heartbreaking in both the game and the show. “It was important that the audience, like the characters, miss Joel,” Druckmann went on. “So we would kill him early in the season, we decided not to show him back until close to the end of the season. Then it became a question of where should it land. It felt appropriate to land after Ellie has just committed the darkest, most violent act she’s ever committed in her life — torturing an unarmed woman to try to get information about where Joel’s killer is hiding. There’s a contrast of ‘look how far this character has come.’ They’re almost unrecognizable in that scene. Here’s our reminder of who they were, and what they’re fighting for — the memory of this person.”
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Ellie’s “darkest, most violent act” happens in the previous episode, “Feel Her Love,” when she tortures one of Abby’s cohorts, Nora (Tati Gabrielle), for Abby’s whereabouts. Even though Nora is infected by spores and is about to become a zombie, a relentless, vengeful Ellie beats the woman with a pipe for information. This moment is even harder to bear, as is Joel’s death, after you watch “The Price.” Yes, by the time the episode ends, we’re fully caught up on the massive rift between Joel and Ellie, culminating in their talk on Joel’s porch (more on that in a second) shortly before Joel’s death. Before that, though, we see a handful of birthdays that Ellie and Joel celebrated together and see some of their sweetest moments, like when Joel takes Ellie to an abandoned air and space museum or when he soothes her after she severely burns her arm (the one with the telltale infected bite that marks her as immune). As for that porch scene, though, it’s likely the final moment we’ll ever see between Joel and Ellie, and watching it play out in the series is astoundingly emotional, thanks in no small part to Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal’s unbelievable performances.
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The porch scene between Joel and Ellie had to happen before the series finale, according to Neil Druckmann
Elsewhere in the THR interview, James Hibberd focuses on the porch scene between Joel and Ellie and asks why Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin didn’t save this deeply important moment for the season 2 finale. Druckmann said he wasn’t tempted to do that. “No, but let’s assume we could shoot it and hold it and reveal it later,” he mused. “Craig brought this up to me and I bought into it immediately: He [pointed out] that when you buy the game, you have the entire story. You could play for the whole thing in two days. We have to take into account that the story is being delivered week by week, season by season, with more story coming potentially years later. There would be a high risk of the porch scene not landing if he held onto it.”
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After Hibberd pointed out that some online critiques have noted that Abby not only took away Ellie’s father figure, but a chance for Ellie to forgive Joel — specifically, for saving her life at the end of season 1 and potentially preventing a cure for the cordyceps virus — Druckmann was on board. “I agree with that interpretation, because we get to see that Joel hurt Ellie maybe the worst way possible — by taking the choice away from her to honor the people that died on her journey to be delivered to the Fireflies,” Druckmann said. “Ellie’s so angry, and she means it when she says, ‘I don’t know if I could ever forgive you for that, but I would like to try.’ She wanted to move towards that forgiveness, because I think she understood that — as much as Joel hurt her — his motivation was unconditional love, and she shares that unconditional love for him. Now she can never get the chance.”
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Ultimately, the porch scene does provide some closure. Joel tearfully tells Ellie that he would make the same choice at the Firefly hospital a thousand times because of how much he loves her, and Ellie does, as Druckmann says, lean towards forgiveness. Still, nothing is ever tidy or clean on “The Last of Us,” which Druckmann makes quite clear: “It’s bittersweet because he was finally honest with her and they confessed their love to each other on in that scene, but they never moved back to when we saw them at their happiest at that Space Museum.”
The season 2 finale of “The Last of Us” drops on HBO Max and HBO proper on Sunday, May 25 at 9 P.M.
