'The Last of Us' Showrunners on Whether Joel Made the Right Decision in Finale

'The Last of Us' Showrunners on Whether Joel Made the Right Decision in Finale,Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman weigh in on some of the HBO drama first season finale's burning questions

‘The Last of Us’ Showrunners on Whether Joel Made the Right Decision in Finale

Pedro Pascal in ‘The Last of Us’

Logo text[This story contains major spoilers for The Last of Us season one finale, “Look for the Light.”]

The Last of Us showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann tackled some of the burning questions raised by the first season finale of their acclaimed HBO drama series, “Look for the Light,” which they co-wrote and Ali Abbasi directed. The co-creators also teased some of their thinking about season two, when speaking during an embargoed press conference with reporters last week:

— On Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) decision to execute the Fireflies who wanted to use Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to make a potential pandemic cure, a procedure he learned would kill her in the process: “When you love something unconditionally, logic goes out the window and you will do really horrible things to protect the ones you love,” Mazin says. “And there’s a lot of examples worldwide of this happening all the time. So for us it was just like, ‘Here are all the different pieces that we have, the tools we have within this story. How can we, with each episode, thematically, touch on that in some way?’ Both the beautiful joy that can come out of like 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. [There’s] greater and greater sacrifices Joel has to make for Ellie, and likewise what she’s going through to protect him. I’m confused about it morally. I think it’s a difficult choice. I go back and forth. I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it.”

— On the reveal that Ellie likely received her immunity because her mother, Anna, was bitten by a Clicker while giving birth (read THR’s interview with Ashley Johnson for more): “It does hint at and give some theories as to why Ellie is immune, even though we don’t answer that conclusively,” Druckmann says. “But I think more importantly than that, is it builds the relationship between Marlene (Merle Dandridge) and Anna, so that when you get to the end and we put Marlene against Joel, they have their own opposite philosophical terms on how to approach the ends justify the means, knowing how close she was with Anna. And that Anna’s dying wish was ‘take care of my kid,’ I think gives more weight and maybe more tragedy to Marlene’s sacrifice that she’s trying to make for the betterment of mankind.”

— On the identity of Ellie’s father: “I’ve never actually never had my own curiosity about Ellie’s father,” Mazin says. “It’s better if in my mind that 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 for Ellie, that room has never been occupied and Joel just gets in there almost immediately.”

— On sneaking another voice actor from the game, The Last of Us Part II’s Laura Bailey (Abby), as one of the nurses (spotted by Nick Romano at EW): “Laura and Neil are great friends and we’re like, ‘Want to be a nurse?'” Mazin recalls. “I took Laura on a tour of the halls of this hospital and she cried just looking at it … It’s a common thing that the people that had come from Neil’s game world felt like they were stepping into this impossible, amazing VR adaptation.”

— On their creative process approaching season two: “Our process works,” Mazin says. “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. No one gets his way, it’s ‘we will figure it out.’ And to keep the writing process roughly what it was, which is pretty solitary and monk-like … 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.”

— On aging up Ellie for season two, which takes place after a multi-year time jump: “We know what we’re going to do in terms of her costume and makeup and hair,” Mazin says. “But more importantly, we know the spirit and soul of the actor. She’s 19 now, which is the same age as Ellie in The Last of Us Part II … it will be different. It will be different just as this season was different. Sometimes it will be different radically … It won’t be exactly like the game. It will be the show that Neil and I want to make.”

— On how fans should please stop sending links about mushrooms to the creators: Druckmann, in particular, has been getting this from friends and fans since 2013. “Anywhere a mushroom pops up, I get someone texting me,” Mazin says. “People will text me pictures of mushrooms as they’re walking. I’m like, ‘I don’t care!’ Every powdered cordyceps product, I have been sent a link to.”

— On how the world is already “infected”: “The world is inspected with tribalism,” Druckmann says. “The cure is more empathy, more seeing things from other perspectives and being less selfish with our little tribes.” Added Mazin: “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. And by narrativizing everything, we are losing touch with the simple, unvarnished, modest truth of things. And to the extent, I wish we could get back to that and get away from everything as a story. But I at least sleep well at night knowing the story that we’re telling here is proudly and loudly labeled as fiction.”