I'll go back if you want. And I'll keep going if you want. There's no right answer. If I die, it's on me. It won't be your fault. So what do you want to do? Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the official podcast for the HBO original series, The Last of Us. I'm Troy Baker, and I'm joined once again by series showrunners Craig Mason. Well, hello, Troy. And Neil Druckmann. Hi, Troy.
Last week I made a very bold claim and I said that episode 4 of season 2 was my favorite episode. I then quickly followed up by saying I have no doubt that I'm probably going to eat my words. If you could see us, you would see I have set before me a plate, a napkin, a fork, and a spoon, and I am prepared to eat this because
This is my favorite episode, Feel Her Love. It was written by Craig and directed by Stephen Williams. And we're going to find out what these two guys think about it as well. But this is my fair warning to all listeners, as I do before every episode. Watch the show if you haven't seen this episode yet. You cannot complain and say spoilers because here's your warning so
Stop the podcast now. Consider yourself warned. Go watch the show. Come back and join us as we dive into this week's episode, Feel Her Love. The episode starts at a hospital. And we see the woman who conspired with Jeffrey Wright's character in the previous episode walking through a crowd of WLF soldiers. She's played by Alana Ubach. And she is fierce. Very small, but very fierce.
So a little bit like Ben Aller's character from last week, the rookie who's went from a Federal soldier to this WLF soldier. we see that Hanrahan, that's the character's name, went from a citizen who was a revolutionary to a high-ranking officer in a militarized organization. and There is a mystery here. She clearly outranks all these guys, but it's not like they're backing away from her here when she shows up They're sort of looking at her defiantly as if to say yeah
We did the thing that you are upset about. There is a stairwell door that has been welded shut. Not just held by a little, by a lot. And they don't back away from her. They don't back down. She turns around and she heads into a room to have a one-on-one conversation with someone else. He said it's in the air. She wasn't.
And I knew it wasn't an event where we would have all been infected weeks ago. So I scrambled my other team and we locked the only door to be two and we locked the only door to be one. And we did what Leon said. We saw the men. You have said for the last several episodes It's coming. It's coming. And alas, here we are. Talk to me about spores and how they're different from what we saw in the game and what we're seeing.
here the function of the spores in the game uh why we had them in the game is we wanted something to show that ellie is immediately a mutant because once she gets bitten you don't know And how we show it in the show over and over again until the whole night has passed. Hours have passed and the person hasn't turned because that's how long it takes some people to turn. It can take up to two days.
So we need another mechanic, a narrative mechanic, to show with evidence Ellie is breathing this stuff and nothing happens. so there's a scene coming later that's you know from the game that we needed i guess i'll jump ahead with spoilers we needed nora to know immediately that ellie is that girl
And that was the impetus to start the conversation. Well, we really do need spores. How do we do them? How do we almost reinvent them in some way, even from the game? And there's a really cool mechanism there. of how the air gets filled with spores that I love. It's one of those I'm like, oh, goddammit, I wish we did that in the game.
I'll say one other thing which is just like the sometimes you get these happy accidents like we didn't do spores because you know a lot of different reasons that we talked about in the past like not wanting to have our actors constantly in gas masks But now we have this season an escalation of the outbreak because of that. We see the stalker.
We see that they evolve. And now there's this new threat. And it's like this thing is not static. It's constantly fighting back as people feel like I'm becoming complacent. And they feel like, oh, we could live under these conditions. It changes underneath them. In this instance, it's literally underneath them.
The challenge for us was to figure out where the spores would make sense and then also what could we do to make them even more dangerous actually not just a little but a lot or at least more menacing and threatening and What we struck on was the idea of the basement. And we have a hospital with three basement levels. B1, B2, and B3. And we have learned that there was nothing on B1. And we now learn from this conversation. there are spores on B2. This woman sent her son down.
And she had a choice to make because her son says, it's in the air, see you listen. Now that choice is not dissimilar from the choice Joel had. Do I sacrifice my child to save everybody else? Or do I put my child first on the off chance that maybe he'll be okay and put everybody else at risk? And here we see a mother making a very different decision. She doesn't hesitate. She sacrifices her child for everyone else. The way that you chose to do that, you have this entire conversation.
And it's as Hadran leaves, she goes, I'm sorry about your son. And it just cuts away. It's the nastiest thing to do. Thanks. I mean, there are so many ways to do these things. And it's not that we're trying to be intentionally cruel to people, but emotionally, maybe a little bit, I mean, maybe a little, because Because we're being cruel to the characters too. Sure. In the end, what we're trying to do is invite the audience to feel, at least in small part, what this woman must have felt.
And part of the way is to shock them. Because in my mind, when I watch that sequence, I think, oh, she might be talking about her husband. That's what I feel. That's my instinct. She's talking about her husband. But I would never presume to think she was talking about her son. And that circles back to this notion of motherhood.
how a mother made this choice. It's very mythological. Every culture is mythology. Somewhere in there has a story of sacrifice, and usually the sacrifice of a child, which is the most brutal kind. And to see that there are people who would make that other choice. And we don't condemn her. quite far from it if you understand what spores are you know she made the most selfless of sacrifices there's also an introduction here of a concept And the concept is that there is depth under this building.
And we now know that there are horrors on B2 if we have not yet seen them. We understand that they're there. But note, nobody knows what's on B3. Just leaving that out there. I think some people who play the game might know. They might have a guess. But that's how we start this entire episode after the opening credits. We're back in 2029 Seattle. We're in day two. And Dina explains to Ellie how they're going to get to Lakeview Hospital.
Wait, before we move on, I have a question. I'm going to take over this from you, Troy. Go for it, buddy. Ooh, this is exciting. We're off the rails. Craig, when you were writing that scene, were you channeling Chernobyl? Because I got a very Chernobyl vibe from it. two people in a room smoking a threat underneath you have to go on the ground to like that almost an invisible threat i wasn't conscious of it I think probably it's one of those cases where it's just that I'm the same guy but
The concept of the basement levels is taken, of course, directly from you, from the game. What I do love to talk about, I guess, are the practical. So maybe the most Chernobyl-y part of that is the blueprint. So one of the things that I like to think about is, okay, If someone's going to say, we can't afford to lose this hospital,
You're telling me there's airborne infection. We have to really believe that it's down there and it's okay and it's safe. And so they go through it in a sort of scientific way. No one else has gotten hurt. We know it wasn't an event or else we would have been sick weeks ago. It is contained because I sacrificed my son, because we sealed it in. And then a very human thing, and I guess a very Chernobyl-ish thing, Hanrahan says, I'll tell only those who need to know.
This is how humans go about these things and it is incredibly arrogant. But what can you do? I mean, the bottom line is, once you know it's there, what can you do? It's not like leaving the building is going to help you. If it gets out, it gets out. It's in the air. Everywhere. That's it, Sean. You're making it. Dude, I live for the interruptions. Are you kidding me?
It's funny you ask about these, like, asking questions. That's all I do. I ask. So as we go into our exploration of what's going to come next in season three, Neil, brace yourself. The questioning is about to begin again. I ask so many questions. Not only, okay, well, what does that mean? But why did you do this? Why did you do that? What was the thinking there? What else did you consider? What else did you consider? Was there stuff that went in between that you weren't able to fit in?
And it's part of the way you get to something exciting, I think, is just, as a fan, is getting as much under the hood as you can get. And I'm lucky because I've got the guy by the way the answer is usually here's why it didn't work for us now let's interrogate it maybe it could work in this version in this medium right that's where we kind of just unearth things that again maybe we couldn't make it work but now we have a second chance of doing it I'll ask this
How far down have you gone before where it's like, oh no, this doesn't work? I'm not sure that we ever have gotten that far down like that. Well, once we've gone pretty far, like let's say editing, we might say, hey... I have an idea of what could make it better. I think so then it's more like kind of tweaking. And there's actually something in this episode that we had a lot of conversation about, which is the song Ellie plays.
And that was something that we changed pretty late in editing based on multiple conversations Craig and I had. Let's get into that moment. So you're talking about when Ellie is exploring the auditorium where they've kind of... made their ad hoc base camp, right? The band, what was the name of the band? Sick Habit. Sick Habit. Do you want a story of where that comes from, Sick Habit? Yeah, absolutely. That's the only reason why we're here. There was a moment in time where I wanted to do webcomic.
because that was a thing my website was sickhabit.com because i just had this like i felt like you know this compulsion to create was just a sickness that i just can't get rid of i think every artist kind of feels that way Anyways, years later, we needed a name for a band in the game. I'm like, oh, I got something. Sick Habit. So now it made it into an HBO show.
It's canon. We see the stage set for what would have been, no doubt, this beautiful performance. Frozen in time. Frozen in time. Ellie picks up the guitar. She begins to play Pearl Jam's Future Days. This sound begins to swell as we hear that. that heartbeat begin and we feel the trauma but she stops herself. I want to talk about how you guys decided to create this moment because it's stunning. What we wanted to feel was Ellie aching for Joel there that she had had this night before where
her heart explodes into romance and she has this beautiful morning with Dina. And as she walks away from Dina, even before the scene, Dina's like Ellie and just grins at her and she grins back. It's, it's love. And then. First of all, credit to Neil, because there were a lot of different options here, and I was sort of going down a different path of what...
Ellie would play, but Neil made a great argument that shorter is better because we've already seen Ellie play a full song and it's not like she's playing to anyone here. And that this phrase would have a deeper meaning. And of course, we will see how that develops. And that was absolutely the right call on both sides. But as the camera's moving around and we're looking for a way to imply that the darkness inside of Ellie is re-emerging, that need to punish.
This very strange thing happened in the editing room. So I'm watching this with Tim Good, our editor. And as the camera moves around, there's this low bass rumble that begins. And then it finishes as the camera moves. And I said, Tim, that bass, Rumble that you put in is genius and he turned to me and he said I didn't put a bass rumble in what are you talking about?
That came from two doors down where Emily Mendez was working on editing the seventh episode and happened to have this very bassy thing happen that went through the walls. Shut your mouth. I kid you not. And I was like... What? So we went down the hallway, got the sound, went back, put it in, and then when we went to the mixing stage, we were like, guys,
Hear this sound? This. This is what we're putting in there. It's one of those moments I love being able to not, the only credit I can take is going, I identify the happy accident as happy. Other than that, it was the happiest accident. It speaks to this process, which is like you always have to be open to a new, better idea.
Always, until the very end, until it's taken away from you, you have to keep being open. Can I iterate it? Can I plus it? And that's what we do just over and over again until it's done, is we just keep plusing it and plusing it and plusing it. You dream of moments like that where some little bit of serendipity drops a gift in your hands. Because serendipity, unhappy serendipity, occurs all the time. All the time. You need to sit outside. It's raining.
This was one of those moments where I was just like, oh my God. And it's crucial because we need to understand that Ellie is turning here. Not into zombie turning. Turning into dark Avenger Ellie. It's not all happiness and light. She remembers. She took a break. She enjoyed herself. She saw something positive and beautiful. Break is over. To me, what I saw on display is Oh, I can have this thing that's this wonderful connection and it's this source of...
comfort even. I can pick up a guitar and now I've been able to reclaim that activity with this moment with Dina and I picked up a guitar and played. I'm alone by myself. I can play this. What happens if I start? tiptoeing through the graveyard of that memory and it's the, oh no, I've gone too far and I have to stop immediately. with just those words, if I ever were to lose you. Woof. It clearly landed for me. That auditorium is just, that auditorium is, we did not build.
That is a theater in Vancouver that we found that is so close to the one in the game. A ton of credit to Alex Wong and our VFX team and all of our vendors for... Very subtly aging. There's some subtle aging going on because we couldn't mess their carpets up. We couldn't mess their seats up or their walls. But we also wanted to imply that this was fairly well preserved. This was kind of a tomb that had been left untouched.
um a safe haven for for dina and ellie i will say it's another one of those instances that was scary how close it was to the game walking and onto that So Don McCauley and our art department did make everything else in the theater. So the rooftop that they run onto, the lobby that they walk into, the balcony that they sit on where Dina's explaining how triangulation works.
Even looking at the carpet and it would match the game. Oh yeah, no, we don't screw around. Like that's one area where for me, my feeling is if we're going to make a set. And we're going to put carpet in here. Then we're putting the carpet in from the game. Like, why wouldn't we? That doesn't make any sense. There's no reason to fix the carpet. It's perfect. And that's what I want because I'm a fan.
It matters. You know, if you play the game, there's a certain sense memory. And if you haven't, well, now you have the experience that we all had. But we move out of this beautiful theater, this wonderful location that you guys found in Vancouver, and we find... a pile of dead bodies these are seraphites and there's a wall behind them that says feel her love but spray painted underneath that is Feel this bitch. And this gets a very specific reaction from Ellie.
You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't have come. I shouldn't have dragged you here. Having a fucking baby, what am I doing? Dina, do you want to go back? I'll take you back. You don't need to do this with me. This tableau is inspired by a movie that I have gone back to over and over and over again. It was something that I studied lengthfully with Johann Rank when we made Chernobyl.
It is Come and See, which is a Russian war film. Oh, I can see from your face. You have not seen it, Troy. I've never seen it. It is the greatest war movie that has ever been made. I'm adding a note right now. It's an incredible piece of work. There's a moment that this is very forwardly quoting from the way that these bodies are arranged against that wall, but one thing that I thought was important
was to show that response that this is like, great, you want to tag the wall? We'll tag the wall. We'll tag the wall with your bodies, and then we'll write this. They're leaving each other messages. The Seraphites come to the TV station, hang and disembowel walls, and leave a message on the wall. And then the wolves come here, execute a bunch of these people, leave their bodies, leave a message on the wall. This is the worst kind of communication possible.
In that moment, I think Ellie understands she is taking Dina into a place that is so horrible, so ruthless and violent and dehumanizing. that she's putting Dina and what she now thinks of as their baby at risk. And she doesn't say, let's go home. She says, I'll take you home. Like, we'll go back.
I'll take you home, then I'll return and handle this myself. But you shouldn't be here in your condition, essentially, is what she's implying. There's also this beautiful addition that says we're having a baby. Right. We're having a baby. I'm gonna be a dad. And in the game, when you travel with Dina, you do get some of the story about her life and her background. And we did...
Hint at it a little bit back in the third episode when Ellie and Dina are on horse and Dina asks who was the first person you killed As Dina points out Ellie never asked who the first person was that Dina killed and here this story comes out Whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn't deserve that. And I think, what if I hadn't snuck out?
What if my mom and sister were beaten to death in front of me? What if that motherfucker made me watch as he did it? Would it make a difference if my family had hurt his people first? Now. No. And if I hadn't killed him. If he had gotten away. I promise you I would have hunted him down forever. It's a little different than the story in the game, but it is a very moving performance from Isabella Merced.
And as it turns out, when she said to me later that she had been practicing and rehearsing and memorizing that speech for like two months. What's nice for me is there's also a lot of... heavy lifting that's happening in the writing that seems also effortless but i know all the mechanics of it because we had a lot of conversations around it
And part of the fun of my job is to get a scene like this from Craig. Because what that scene needs to do is not only eventually Isabella has to sell us that she's She has these convictions. She needs to convince the audience that even though she's pregnant, she has reason to keep going. There's something about this backstory that is like, it's like a trauma that she has. And that's why she knows how Ellie feels because she's been there.
She recognizes, first of all, that Joel was targeted. Yeah. She knows what a raider coming is like. This is something different. She says, whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn't deserve that. And then the next word, I think, is, and if. And if the guy that killed my mother and my sister had gotten away, I would have gone after him and never given up. That if is a big if, because...
We like to think that we can do things in circumstances. We like to think we would have certain feelings. We like to think that. But then circumstances have a way of crashing in and making things actually quite difficult. Moral questions as hypotheses. are safe to ponder. When you have the information, and the information tells you there is no moral victory here. None. But a choice must be made.
That's where the hard stuff happens. So Dina has a kind of privileged position. She gets to imagine the way she would have behaved had she not shot that guy, if he had gotten away. But Ellie doesn't have that privilege. Ellie only has facts. Now, Wendina gets all the facts, if she gets all the facts.
remains to be seen. We'll see if that if changes for her. We move on from this specific part in the city to inside of the building that the wolves don't patrol. And it's... it was eerily quiet probably a good way to put it because it's filled as we find out with infected. Not just any infected. The worst kind. So, little production background, that plant is an abandoned, I guess, no longer used dairy plant in British Columbia.
And I wandered in there with our locations and was like, well, I mean, it smells very bad in here. And we're also shooting in here, for sure. What was kind of funny is every day we would walk through this kind of section that we weren't going to use because it was just sort of a bit bland and warehousing looking and in those bland warehousing looking rooms were Dozens and dozens of enormous crates full of Saved prop. costumes
And stage design stuff from Shogun. What? Yeah, because Shogun had, they gotta store stuff. You know, I think they probably knew like, hey, this show's pretty good. I mean, I bet we got another season of this. We should save some of these boats and swords. But this space was fantastic because we could use its size and its silence.
I love how I've always seen how Ellie and Dina plan. Shooting has to be a last resort. Okay, because if the wolves here get on fire, they'll let the whole army up our ass. Fine. Ellie. What? If it gets bad, then we have to make a choice between shooting or running. We run. Last resort, we got it. Продолжение следует...
Oh, you think that no matter what happens, I'm just gonna start firing? Literally every single time, yes. Don't get angry. You're a little crazy. And that's exciting. That's one of the reasons I love you. But I do want to make it out of here. He'll love me. The dynamic has been from the start and really clearly back when Dina shows up at Ellie's garage and says, here's how we're getting to Seattle. You don't know what you're doing. I do. I'm smart. I plan. Follow me. She's doing it again.
But very quickly, when they realize what's going on, and when we realize what's going on, which is, okay, we dealt with one stalker in the supermarket in episode one. And... Ellie lost. Yeah. Right? If she's not the one immune person in the world, she's dead. Or rather, she's infected. Now there's 11 of them. The dynamic here... changes completely. Planning doesn't matter anymore. Planning's done. Thinking is done.
Dina, you take a backseat. Ellie, you drive. And when Ellie drives, the plan is All. Joel. This is a full Joel moment as far as I'm concerned for Ellie. We see how, like, what did Gail say to Tommy? I think if they were walking the same path, they'd been walking side by side from the very start. This is just what Joel would have done. You get in there. You hide. I die for you. Go. And the confidence and the conviction there is so undeniable that Dina just does it.
She says, I can take bites. I can take a lot of them. Well, but there's also this other quote from season one that's in the back of our minds, which is from Tess to say, You're not immune from getting ripped apart, right? And so I think even though Ellie is saying, I can get bit a lot, you can't. She's just trying to get, because now it's a different parent-child thing, right? Dina's been the parent.
Now Ellie's the parent. And when parents need their kids to do something very quickly, they will lie to them. Now obviously it's true, Ellie can get bit a lot and Dina can't. But really what Ellie knows is she's going to get ripped apart. She just needs Dina to somehow survive in that cage and not get ripped apart. There's something really cool that you do visually.
where the stalker's eyes reflect with the flashlight. We worked really hard on those. There are versions, you know, you get these sort of things back because it's a visual effect that we do, obviously. There are versions where it's like, oh, look, they're ghosts. You just keep pulling it back, pulling it back, pulling back and trying to make it as realistic as possible the way that dogs or sheep or other animals like this at night.
their retinas will reflect back white. And something has happened inside the stalkers to do something similar to their eyes. the barest thing you don't want them to look like Jawas from Star Wars you know so like we really fine-tune that stuff to make sure it's just barely there And that goes back a conversation months prior to when we're concepting the stalkers and talking about how the cordyceps eats away parts of the eye. It's almost like having cataracts.
you see people have certain eye conditions, their eye behaves in that way. So it's going back, it's based in science. Just when you think they're not going to be able to get out of here. We hear that shotgun blast. Here comes Han Solo. And for a moment, and I love the way Steven and Ksenia shot this.
Because then you use something called the Lens Baby, which is basically a device that slightly tilts or distorts the lens as you're shooting to create a blurry, weird kind of... sense of being dazed and so it's this bare hint of lens baby and and then this man shows up with his boots and his stride and his jeans and You can see on Ellie's face. Now she's a child again because she's so traumatized by what's going on and so stunned and confused. Is it him? She almost for a second thinks it's him.
That moment, as you're describing, with the way that you're shooting it, was that intentional? Was that, oh, yeah. It was really just about being in Ellie's mind there, so it was very intentional. It's in the script that she thinks, wait, and we all do. Wait, is that? But we know Joel's dead. So it's clearly not him, right? There is no possibility, but it's that weird moment of is the man who has kept me safe, the one person that makes me feel not afraid. Is he back? And then it's Jesse.
I don't remember the conversation around this part, but it's something we did. We did something similar in the game at a different moment in time where Ellie's really traumatized, a moment that we'll see in episode seven, where in that moment as well, we had... Ellie mistaken a different character for Joel. So this just felt very natural to me of just Ellie's state of mind and that wishful thinking of wanting, wanting something so bad that you start to see it.
Joel coming to rescue her. What I love about that is that Jesse is exactly the kind of person that would come save you. and he is worth looking up to, and he is very strong, and he has this, I guess you'd call it positive paternalism. But boy, he's angry. Jesse! What? How did you find us? The map you left in a theater.
Impressive triangulation, by the way. Thanks, that was old Dina. Trust me, I didn't think it was you. How did you find the theater? Do I look like I want to fucking talk to you right now? You came alone? No. Me and Tommy. We split up when we got to the city. Covered more ground. I can't believe they sent you after us. They didn't. But you two were gonna die out here. So we snuck out the next night. That's a good thing we did. You know what? We're doing pretty fucking good. Up until what? Jesse.
has been very patient with Ellie. He's been patient with her while he was training her to fight. He was patient with her about the town council meeting. He's patient with her about her weird stuff with Joel and not wanting to go on a patrol with him. But here... It's an interesting thing to rescue somebody. and so clearly be angry with them.
Yeah, and he's rescuing her with one other person that also has a lot of those same qualities, which is Tommy. That's why we find out Tommy is also in Seattle, also looking for them. And they've disobeyed orders back in Jackson to come out here. And this touches on a very big difference between the show and the game. In the game, Tommy goes out on his own. to avenge Joel on behalf of Ellie.
He does it in the game in hopes that Ellie will not go. To let her know, I've gone, so you stay. He's trying to keep her safe. He knows she would go. He decides to go first. to take care of it to keep her out of trouble. Here, he doesn't get to make that choice. Because of the way we structured things and how much time has gone by and also a very important thing I think we talked about it
When we were discussing our third episode, that Neil made a great point about Tommy and Joel, and that Tommy understood that Joel wouldn't want to go do this. That was not in Joel's nature, and Tommy, in his own way, was kind of trying to honor that. Here, Tommy and Jesse have to sneak out of Jackson, and Tommy has a wife and a little boy.
to go save them. Now, we don't know what Tommy's state of mind is, but we do know what Jesse's state of mind is. And what Jesse's state of mind is, what is wrong with the two? What is wrong with you? This is in violation of our community. We had a meeting. We had a vote. This is not the right thing to do. And Ellie, oh boy, did she push back. We were doing fine until what?
And you see her kind of crumble there. There's a shame that's starting to wash over. The realization is like, now I've put Jesse and Tommy's life in danger as well. The cost keeps going up. And I wasn't enough. to keep Dina alive. There's this moment where Ellie's not so much worried that she's going to die, but when she looks over and sees the stalkers ripping that cage open, she knows she failed.
And this is something that we talked about a lot in season one, that Joel would fail actually all the time. And Ellie is reliving Joel's experience. Ellie is understanding now. viscerally what Joel felt she doesn't maybe know that this is what Joel felt but we know it is that You have one purpose, as Bill said, to keep this person alive and God help any motherfucker who stands in your way. And Joel kept failing, and Ellie is failing. And it is a very small feeling to know that you weren't a nut.
There's this feeling, I remember we thought about this a lot when we made the game, we talked about this when we made the show, when you're a teenage... specifically at teenage years, you feel invincible. You think whatever is killing and hurting anybody else is not going to happen to me. And then as you get older, you start realizing it could happen to me and it's happening to people close to me. And I think this is that wake-up moment for Ellie, which is like...
Yeah, if Jesse shows up five minutes later, they're both dead. Now Jesse is in the equation. There's, of course, the truth that he doesn't know yet that Dean is pregnant with his child. He does save them from one threat, but they quickly move from one threat into another. I remember, and I draw on these feelings all the time, the feeling of being in the game and wandering into this fully overgrown jungle-like park in Seattle and hearing that whistle. What the fuck is that?
It was the whistle for me. It was also as you're taking cover, as they were taking cover in... the foliage, and just seeing the torches pass by. I was like, I mean, I am right there again. I'm right in it. You're in it. I just want to touch on the whistling because it talks about our process. I have to give credit to Magid and the rest of our audio team here at Naughty Dog that, you know, we had this idea in the writing that the scars, the seraphites should communicate through whistles.
Then they developed a whole language of like those whistles have specific meaning almost like Morse code that the Seraphites can communicate with themselves. So then the audio team on the show got together with the audio team of the game and they explained it to them. They sent them all the assets that we needed to be recorded for certain rights and stuff.
But that's why it's so close to the game. And again, I have to say this over and over again, the people making the show love the source material. And this is just one more example of that. Now, in full disclosure to people that do speak, Sarah Fight Whistle. There are some times where I think we probably erred on the side of sonic impact in a moment as opposed to
the verbal clarity. But it's important because unlike the game, you know, in the game you need to start paying attention to those whistles and they tell you how to play it. Right. Here, emotional truth is more important than that. Right. But we wanted them to be exact.
And the idea that there's a call and answer to those things is important. So again, it's why that scene with the father and the daughter is so important in the third episode. Because we hear some whistles and then he turns to me and says, okay. And she says, got it, let me. translate. We understand the whistles do have specific meanings and I remember
creeping up and watching them lynching that soldier and disemboweling him. I love that you incorporated this. We've seen the after effects, but we've never actually seen it happen here, and this is what you choose to show. It's one of those moments where I feel like Generally speaking, Neil and I aren't about grossing people out. We know that some of the things we show will be horrifying and disgusting, but we're not there to do it because it's fun for us. You do it because it's going to impact.
The audience and the characters usually in a very deep way we're trying to stress how serious something is and we're not shying away from it. And every time I watch that scene, I think it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. I mean, when somebody is that helpless and somebody is just walking to them that slowly with a sickle, you just think, well.
Something will make this stop. We just saw a scene where something made something stop. Jesse showed up, saved Ellie and Dina. But nothing makes this stop. It just happens. And that's when you know... These seraphites are not just not victims. They are extraordinarily scary. And should any of our characters end up on the wrong side of a rope with these guys?
it's going to be very, very bad. There's something else that's very chilling about this revelation that, you know, when we're watching Ellie and Dina at the TV station and you see the aftermath of what the Seraphites are capable of. And you're like, to Craig's point, these people are scary. And then to see them and to see how cold they are when they commit these acts, there's no anger. There's almost a celebration. It's a ritual for them.
to me that is the most chilling part to see someone commit violence and to it's not even pre-calculated it's just like ingrained into their daily life And again, the degree that they've dehumanized the WLF. It's just staggering. And again, this is what Ellie, Dina, Jesse, and Tommy, and this unborn child have now been put into the middle of. They're in the middle of this situation where you've got a young man who is saying,
Scar got what he deserved. Fucking animal. And they don't even call them by their names, they make up a new name for them, Scar. And here, the seraphite. are acting like they're doing this guy a favor. Yes. He's nested with sin. Free him that he may know her love. And then they disembowel him. And in this very kind of matter of fact, well, I guess that's over. The priest says, now he is free.
And they mean it. And they believe it. That's their belief. They believe they've done him a favor. You know, we talk a lot about love. Love is not inherently good or bad. It's powerful and can lead you to all sorts of Faith is very similar. Yes. It's not inherently good or bad. It's powerful. And in the wrong hands and in the wrong leadership can lead to atrocity. It's going to take us some time as a television show to fully explore.
who the seraphites are. We still don't know who this prophet is or how this all began. To show someone being disemboweled and to make that visceral is very challenging. But to go from that, now we have to, you've peaked, right? How do I make an arrow to the knee have any impact whatsoever? And you immediately do. And you do it off camera and you do it silently.
which is what's great it's just the pan over to look and looking down and there's the arrow but this moment where dina gets shot was also it's also a change from the game and the game Dina has to back away because her morning sickness is really bad. She's just laid out. She can't go anywhere. She has to stay back at the theater. And it's Ellie who gets shot in the leg. Now because of our more hyper-realistic medium,
If Ellie gets shot in the leg, she's not going anywhere. So we thought this was an interesting way to achieve the same thing, which was to separate Dina from Ellie. to put Dina back in the background for a bit to expose Ellie to be on her own and also to make Ellie's decision to move forward to the hospital. a dangerous one in terms of what we know she knows.
She's supposed to go back to that theater. She's supposed to just get out of there and meet up with them. That's what she says she's going to do. Bring her back. I'll draw them away. Just you go and I'll meet you back. She sees the hospital and she turns her back on Dina and turns her back on Jesse who just came to rescue her and turns her back on Tommy who's somewhere out there looking for her. and pursues Nora because she can't.
help herself. When we were working on the game there was a conversation Hallie and I would have often and it came over to the show which is in many ways Ellie is like an addict. That this is a relapse. That this thing that she wants so badly, that's, again, the way she's programmed. She must pursue it. And like an addict, she's neglecting the people that love her. We see this addiction take hold of her as she's snuck back into the hospital and here she is face to face with Nora. you I'm sorry.
I'm sorry happen. No one should ever have to see something like this. Sometimes at night, I still hear his screams. It was a terrible thing, the way he died. Yeah. If that little bitch got what he deserved.
It's one of my favorite scenes. So Tati Gabriella plays Nora. We've just gotten, you know, little bits of her. We got a little tiny bit in the first episode. We get a little tiny bit of her part as this person in this larger group. But obviously in the second episode, so much of that is about Abby. And here we have this beautiful moment, and it is, I would say, probably 85% from the game. And then there's this little extra 15%.
around where you think she's connecting with Ellie. And then we go right back to what she says in the game. Little bitch got what he deserved. And so you see here, in Nora, Something that I think if you are watching carefully you suspect isn't even true for Abby and that is a moral certainty. For Nora, this is clean. What they did there was clean.
And what's interesting about people that are on the same side is they all push towards one goal, but they don't always agree about how righteous their cause is. And Nora is somebody that clearly agrees. But Nora also knows something. In the back of her head, it was Nora all the way back in episode one, very first scene, who said, I heard rumors about a girl. So Nora works in medicine. We don't know if she's a doctor or a medic. It doesn't matter.
We can imagine that she had connection to the doctors and the nurses who were working in the hospital in Salt Lake City. And we can imagine that she heard a rumor that there was an immune girl. And that's just this added bit of anger that could be there underneath. You're talking about the moral certainty, and that's based on the fact that Joel made this. unforgivable sin by sacrificing humanity. to save essentially himself. But she does the same thing.
because she sees an opportunity to escape and save her own life. And what does she do? She breaks through the door to go down to B2. Yeah, and she says, shoot her. The thing about moral certainty is it blinds you. so much about what the second game meant for me. was not just the higher moral value of empathy, but how essential it is. If we don't have it, if we cannot figure out how to be invested in the other person winning, then we are all going to lose.
And Nora is missing empathy here. And you're absolutely right. She's missing it. And in her attempt to escape, there's this interesting thing, she looks at the elevator and it's slightly ajar. And there's a look on her face. I suspect that this elevator will come back perhaps in another season. But she ends up on the dreaded B2. To repeat, we do not know what is on B3. And Ellie follows her down into what I think is one of the best sequences We've put on TV.
Man, I got to say, when we come around the corner and we see these things aspirating and there's this symbiosis between the host. and the parasite that is working in concert together to achieve a goal. It is fighting to stay alive. It's gorgeous. The team did such an amazing job of building this set. And there's this concept in horror that in the big scheme of things, death is not that scary. You need a fate worse than death.
And this idea that it will not only capture you and put you here and then put you to work until there's nothing left of you just to spew out these spores. This is a new concept that... craig came up with and i loved but the horror of it of again this person and now we know who this person is it's the sun that's now frozen here until there's nothing left of him he's just an engine to spew spores
This is the cruelest thing, but it is a very animal thing. We exploit other animals to sustain ourselves. We don't think about it that way, but that's what we do. and animals do it to each other In our civilized society we're so protected from how cruel nature can be. The amount of suffering that animals experience, it's staggering in its volume. And here is the saddest thing because we understand now the full scope.
of Park's sacrifice. Officer Raymond in the beginning who talked about sending Leon down there to B2. Because she didn't sacrifice her son to death. She doesn't know this, but what she sacrificed him to was this kind of endless torment. and There is this beauty to it, which is undeniable. It's very important to us that the cordyceps be beautiful, even as it is horrifying. Because that is the glory and terror of nature. But Ellie can move through this. And does. And turns the red light on.
Boy, when you add in just that one color palette, it just changes everything. It says something to Bella's face that we were obsessed with. Her eyes turn black. And this scene is largely as it is in the game, with one major exception. Because of the way we address the timeline of things and what we learn and when, there's a mystery that is mostly answered here. And the mystery has been there since the first episode. What does Ellie know? What does she know?
And we don't know. Joel doesn't know. Joel's terrified that Ellie's figured it out. And here... I just love the way Tati looks at her when she realizes you're the immune girl. You're real. I remember Steven and I sitting there with her and saying, This is sort of like if you were raised Christian. And you mostly believed, but sort of believed in a certain way. And then you saw Jesus.
for real. You saw an angel for real. You saw the face of God. You realize this thing that could save all of us is real and then tells Ellie the truth. Don't you know what he did? I don't care. You don't care. He killed. Everyone in that hospital. Including the only fucking person alive that can make a cure from you. That was Abby's father. インチョコ Joel shot him in the head. That's what he did. Now if people feel deeply uncomfortable with that They should.
And of course, if people feel deeply uncomfortable with what Ellie does next. They definitely should. It takes a certain ball power to do what Ellie does at this moment. And Ellie would like to believe she is like Joel. Because Joel is another one of those people that we saw in season one can torture people. to meet some kind of ends and for jolly was to save ellie for ellie it's to find out where abby is
But is Ellie like Joel? Can she like commit this act and just be okay? This is one of the questions that we ask ourselves when we're working on the game and now the show is like, is there ever coming back from doing something like this? Or does it change you forever?
We're going to explore that. I mean, Ellie isn't aware of this, but I'm aware of it. That when Abby, in our show, sort of the execution of Joel goes a bit differently than it does in the game, just a bit. And one of the differences is... Abby uses the golf club to hit Joel on the leg where she shot him. Not in the head, not to kill him, to hurt him.
so the first blow that abby delivers is to the leg and here ellie picks up a pipe and the first blow she delivers is to the leg And once again, you can't help but wonder how it is that these two people who are almost identical are on this horrible path, this horrible collision path, and what... is so horrifying and gorgeous in this moment is the way Bella... says that final where is she it is so savage and so disconnected from being a human
It is so brutal. Just one other thing, which is that we talked about You know, there's this contradiction in Nora and how she thinks she has the moral ground, how she's just and justifies doing this horrible thing to Joel. And yet, she's doing her best to not give up her friends. Because that's her tribe. That's her community. And We cut away from this brutality to something that is perhaps the most shocking thing to show in contrast to what we're looking at because we've forgotten.
We've all forgotten that just a few years earlier, Ellie was a little girl. And Ellie wakes up in her bed in Jackson, safe and sound, looks up. sees the person she loves more than anything in the world, and perfectly performed by Bella Ramsey, says, Hi. It is the most innocent, sweet thing. And you can't help but feel heartbreak that something has gone so wrong that that little kid... is in that red hallway doing what she's doing. But it's also important to note that, you know, episode one,
We see this tension between Joel and Ellie. You never see them happy like this. And yet here they are. So what happened? What is the story that went down in those five years between swear to me? and Troll staff. I guess we'll have to wait a week and find out. But hey, Pedro Pascal's back, everybody. You almost stuck the landing. I told you. I told you. I promise. Couldn't have done it better myself. This has been the official podcast for the HBO original series, The Last of Us.
Our senior producer is Emmanuel Hapsis, our producer is Elliot Adler, and Darby Maloney is the editor. This episode was mixed by Raj Maki-Jah. Our executive producers are Gabrielle Lewis and Barry Finkel. Special thanks to Becky Rowe, Alison Cohen, Aaron Kelly, and Kenya Reyes from the Max podcast team. Production music is courtesy of HBO, and you can watch episodes of The Last of Us on Max.
Make sure to join us next week, as Craig said, as we talk through Season 2, Episode 6. Until then, Endurance Survive.