This interview accommodates spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 premiere, in addition to The Last of Us video games.
The Last of Us HBO made a degree to play with canon in Season 1 of the sequence. They ditched spores for tendrils, and delivered what was most likely the very best episode of tv in 2023 by giving Bill and Frank the story they deserved. While there may be the purist argument that some followers are solely right here to see what they beloved within the sport, sequence creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann inform IGN that when adapting one thing into a distinct medium, it’s crucial to contemplate that medium in addition to the supply materials. As they level out, video games and tv have very completely different types in the case of storytelling.
“If we’re simply making an attempt to repeat it one to at least one, you need to query why are we even doing this?” Druckmann wonders throughout our chat.
It’s the Joel of all of it the place that faithfulness to canon will get tough. In the Season 2 premiere, we see that the connection between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is extra strained than ever. The former simply needs to maintain her secure, whereas the latter is sick and uninterested in being protected and simply needs to be a teen and do teen stuff (learn: being sort of an asshole to her surrogate mum or dad). But it’s the introduction of Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby that spells hassle for Joel.
Players of The Last of Us are greater than acquainted with Joel’s destiny. It’s tough to create surprises in materials that followers know so effectively. How do you’re taking that presumed certainty that Joel is not going to survive and use it to service the present story you’re telling?
“What we attempt to do is protect the points of canon that I might name load-bearing partitions,” Mazin explains. “You should have Ellie in that room say to Joel, ‘I might solely be extra scared.’ You want that. … Does Joel must carry Ellie to that area capsule? Yes. It should occur.”
The factor is, Joel is performed fairly in another way within the sequence than he’s within the sport. The similar necessary beats stay: he slaughtered a hospital of individuals to guard Ellie, and is generally called a proper bastard by anybody not near him. But even the character of the hospital slaughter adjustments while you shift sure points of canon just like the change from spores to tendrils, the Fireflies being illustrated as typically inept past Marlene (Merle Dandridge), and many others.
Those shifts took the tough query of whether or not or not Joel made the appropriate selection to save lots of Ellie extra minimize and dried, with even Druckmann admitting “I consider Joel was proper.” In the sport, it felt just like the incorrect selection however you understood why he did it. In the sequence, that sympathy for his resolution stays however is amplified by the truth that, primarily based on what the tv viewers witnessed, Joel was proper to do what he did. Problem is, proper choices on the finish of the world nonetheless typically imply that you just damage another person. For Joel, that another person is Abby, whose father was the surgeon meant to experiment on Ellie to extract from her mind a remedy for the cordyceps an infection. He took a bullet to the brow for his troubles, and his daughter is, as you’d count on, fairly pissed.
We meet Abby in passing within the Season 2 premiere, however know that along with her introduction comes the very actual likelihood that Joel doesn’t see the tip of the season. In the sport, he’s very definitively murdered, crushed to loss of life by a golf club-wielding Abby.
“We do not get too caught up within the concept of the story as faith,” Mazin says in regard to canon. “We simply attempt to make the very best present, however we do it with, I feel, an unlimited respect for the points of the sport that work so effectively. Otherwise, actually, what the fuck are we doing it for?”
There’s additionally the aforementioned precedent set forth by Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlet), in that you just’re taking part of canon and simply morphing it barely. Mazin goes on to acknowledge that these shifts are fairly necessary to the artistic course of, calling them “reflections of canon,” however as a tv viewer, what’s most necessary to me is his devotion to telling the very best story potential, regardless of the associated fee.
It’s Druckmann who will get to the center of the problem as far as treating the supply materials as gospel, noting “if we [copy the game one to one], it will be a lesser model of the sport, as a result of it doesn’t have interactivity.”
Though it is perhaps straightforward to take a look at one thing you maintain expensive and be involved about main adjustments to it, these adjustments can result in utterly new experiences for followers. I’ll return to the Bill and Frank instance without end, as a result of it’s among the finest episodes of tv within the final decade. Druckmann and Mazin are cognizant of how these adjustments and new additions elevate the work.
“Certain adjustments are important to adapting this. We take a look at the whole lot in entrance of us, and say, is that this higher? Or is that this higher once more for this sort of story?” Druckmann says. “That creates these fantastic surprises that I, generally, get pleasure from essentially the most.”
