In the penultimate episode of The Last of Us season 2, flashbacks reveal how Joel and Ellie's relationship broke down (you can read our full recap of "The Price" here). We also saw the moment they reconciled, a scene players don't witness until the end of The Last of Us Part II.
The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann directed this latest instalment of the HBO series, and while certain moments from the game were faithfully adapted, others went through some pretty big changes.
Chief among them was learning this soon that, shortly before he was killed by Abby, Joel managed to make things right with Ellie. It's still a gut-punch of a moment, albeit one that arrived in the story much sooner than expected.
Talking to Variety (via GameFragger.com), Druckmann was asked about taking the final scene from the game—the conversation between Joel and Ellie on the porch—and bringing it forward to the penultimate episode.
"When we were making the game, I knew that scene should exist. I didn’t know where it goes. That was true for all the flashbacks. Even pretty late in production of the game, we were moving those flashbacks around," he explained. "That felt too long, especially because this season focuses so much on Ellie’s journey and this emotional truth of what did she know? What didn’t she know?"
"To wait additional years until Season 3 will come out — or maybe even Season 4, it depends where all the events land and how many seasons we have — I was easily convinced by Craig that that would be too long."
Asked if that's changed how the series will end, Druckmann confirmed, "That's right."
In a separate conversation with Deadline, the writer said the flashbacks were confined to one episode because by stretching them out through the course of the season, "You might not be missing Joel enough."
He added, "We felt like for the show, we would get a lot more impact if we brought them all together and you could see them side by side and feel the deterioration of that relationship. I also had concerns that the episodes would turn into a bit of a template. It’d be like, "Okay, what’s the Joel flashback this week?'"
Druckmann also acknowledged that Ellie's journey is now playing out very differently from The Last of Us Part II. "In the game, it was important to me for Ellie to get into this really dark headspace and be unable to kind of get out of it for a while, because...you have to commit a lot more violence than you do in the show."
"Whereas in the game, by the time she gets to Nora, she would have already killed a bunch of people, including some of the people responsible for Joel’s death, really, in the show, the first one is Nora," he explained. "So, she’s on this journey, and I don’t know if she really understands what this journey means, until this point now, when she gets to Nora and this is a moment where she’s trying to be like Joel."
HBO has also shared a promo for next Sunday's The Last of Us season 2 finale. In that, we see things intensify in Seattle as Ellie comes face-to-face with the Scars and takes one step closer to tracking down Abby. You can watch the sneak peek below.