♪ (SOUND WAVE) ♪ ELLIE: (GROANS) Come on.
You gotta help me. Come on. JOEL: Leave. Leave. -ELLIE: Shut up, Joel.
-JOEL: Take the gun. ELLIE: Joel, shut the fuck up! JOEL: Go. You go. You go North.
You go to Tommy. You go. ♪ ("LAST OF US"
SOUNDTRACK TUNE PLAYS) ♪ TROY BAKER:
Welcome back, everybody, to HBO's
The Last of Us Podcast. I am your host, Troy Baker. I had the wonderful
opportunity to play Joel in the video game,
and now I get to sit down with the show runners,
Craig Mazin... CRAIG MAZIN: I'm back! TROY: And Neil Druckmann. -NEIL DRUCKMANN: What up, Troy?
-(ALL LAUGH) TROY: I love how
comfortable we've gotten. We're now seven episodes in. CRAIG: That does prompt me, before we dive
into this episode, to just thank people who
are listening to us now for staying with us. I mean we're at a place now
where we're pretty deep in. We're starting to approach
our final descent. NEIL: We love all 50 of you. (ALL LAUGHING) CRAIG: I'm pleased that
people are still with us, and hopefully they're feeling
rewarded as we go. TROY: Today, we're talking
about episode seven, titled, "Left Behind." And this episode does
a bit of a time jump to tell the story of Ellie's
relationship with Riley. Neil, you originally
wrote this story not in the original game, but in a companion
comic book in the DLC. Which we can say is shorthand
for downloadable content. Let's talk about that. NEIL: Yeah, 2013,
when the game came out, downloadable content
were getting pretty popular, like you would release
like a full game, so in the case
of The Last of Us, this was
a 15-hour experience and then, often, you'll release like
additional chapter. Something, an add-on,
a downloadable content. And often, people would use
like a side character, something that was
kind of frivolous, so it wouldn't really effect
the main story. And it's more to talk
about something else that was really popular
at the time, like add-on comic books. Like take your world
and build another story and release it, like,
as a comic book. And so, it's a way to
help market your product, is a very cynical way
to look at it. But I looked at both
of these things, I'm like, "Oh, it's a storytelling
opportunity." What if we treated both
of these things like they matter? Like they're essential. And let's take our most
important character of Ellie and put her in the center
of both of these stories. So with the comic book, I teamed up
with Faith Erin Hicks, who's just a brilliant comic
book writer and artist, and we developed
Riley together for that comic book. And you got to see
how Ellie met Riley, and a little bit more
of the school. And then the idea
started, like, solidifying for the DLC, which was called
Left Behind, which was Ellie and Riley's
final encounter together. Before Ellie is thrust
into the main journey of The Last of Us. And it was a really
kind of great opportunity to spend even
more time with Ellie before she was bitten. What was she like
on her day-to-day business? And then,
what was the event that turned her life
completely upside down? TROY: No cold open.
Straight to the credits. Why the change? CRAIG: Well, I think we were
thinking about the opening of the show
as to-taste, basically every episode,
what does it want? Some episodes want it,
and this one just didn't. NEIL: Sometimes you use
that opening to create almost like a reset. Of, like, okay,
this was its own story, reset, now we're starting
another story. These two stories
are so intertwined. Like that edit
is really important of like going from one
directly to the other. CRAIG: Yeah, Ellie reaches
for the doorknob here, and the screen
cuts to black, and we start
to hear Pearl Jam. We could've cut
to the credits there and used that
as a cold open, and then,
when we come back, suddenly she's back
in FEDRA school. But I think Neil's
absolutely right. We want to understand
that she's reliving kind of a lifetime moment
in this second. And that's why we did it. I don't think there
was even a debate. NEIL: No. CRAIG: I want to talk
a little bit about something that,
again, HBO, in a very smart way,
suggested to us. This wasn't
originally the plan. Originally, this episode
was gonna really play entirely as Ellie's story
with Riley, and one of the things that
HBO strongly suggested, and they were
absolutely right, was to connect it back more
to the story at hand. -Which is how it was...
-NEIL: What it was. CRAIG: ...in The Last of Us
DLC. Sorry, in the Left Behind DLC. That's when we talked
about seeing this image of Joel dying on this
mattress in a basement with this very iconic
blanket on. And I love the way this starts
with Joel telling her to go. And there's this
moment where... -What else can she do?
-NEIL: Right. CRAIG:
What else can she do? Why wouldn't she go
at this point? He is dying.
That's clear. And she's not a doctor. They are not anywhere
near civilization. There's nothing
that can be done. It is a hopeless situation. TROY: He doesn't just tell her
to leave, he shoves her. He reacts in the only way
he can which is by force. And the second
that he does that, and he sees her turn,
the reality of that action, the consequence of that
action is apparent. And he's-- It's not the pain
that's making him cry, it's that. And it's just a single tear,
it's not blubbering. CRAIG: I love that tear
because you're right. Is he mourning his own
impending death? Is he mourning the fact
that she has to leave him, or that she is? Is he mourning the fact that the only way
he could get her to go, to save her,
was to push her away, and the last memory
she'll have of him is something rejecting? TROY: Can she make it
on her own? It's winter. CRAIG: Right.
Will she survive? -TROY: "If you die, I'm fucked."
-CRAIG: Yeah. NEIL: That's my interpretation,
it's the fear of, like, "I can't protect you.
I have to let you go. And I don't know how
this is going to play out, because I'm going to die." CRAIG:
That's the best part of this, is any of those could be true. NEIL: And it's probably
a combination of all of them that's going on in his head. CRAIG: What matters is the
depth of his connection to her, no matter how you slice any of the interpretations
we just offered up, all of them come back
to the same thing. There is this remarkable
depth of connection between the two of them. TROY: Let's talk about music
a little bit more. Pearl Jam.
"All or None." Neil, you have a... -NEIL: An obsession?
-TROY: An obsession. I was gonna be
very careful with my words. But there is-- I was gonna
say connection to Pearl Jam. Is this just sympatico
between you guys, or was there something
that, Neil, you said, "I have a song that
I would like to put in." NEIL: You know,
when you grow up, you have like a handful
of songs that are like an escape
when things are getting hard, or like, when you're down
on yourself for whatever reason. And to me this was
one of those songs. That song, specifically, there's a certain feel,
a mood, a tone. I don't know if I have
the right words for it, but capturing where
Ellie's at right now. That she's alone, she's at a place
she doesn't want to be, and there's kind of
nothing going on for her. And this song, I think,
captures that mood. But it also captures
her attitude, it's called, "All or None." Which is very much Ellie. It's like everything
or nothing. And it's always this kind of
full commitment. CRAIG: Whenever
it comes to songs, there aren't many
that we use in the series. I mean we talked a lot about
Never Let Me Down Again. Long, Long Time,
obviously, is a centerpiece of our third episode. We really want to think
about those lyrics. We don't want to be
too on-the-nose. We don't want to be something
that feels overused or too pop. I read this statistic
that searches of Never Let Me Down Again,
the Depeche Mode version... -TROY: Skyrocketed.
-CRAIG: Yeah. By 500 percent
or something. Well, that's what we want. We want a song that people
discover it with us that are beyond, say,
the fans of Pearl Jam. And Neil is a much bigger fan
of Pearl Jam than I am. That's not to say
I'm not a fan, it's just that
he's a super fan. So I wasn't that familiar
with that song and when he played it for me,
I was like, "Okay, yeah." And there's something
about the way it starts. CRAIG: The guitar
tells you everything before Eddie Vedder
even starts in. There's this sense
of, "Oh, God." And Ellie's situation here
is not simply hopeless, as the lyrics say,
because she's stuck in a FEDRA orphanage
training to become a soldier. It's hopeless because
someone's gone missing. -NEIL: It's hopeless to her.
-CRAIG: Yeah. ELLIE: Give it back! BETHANY:
Well, pick up your pace. I'm not running doubles again
because of your shitty attitude. ELLIE: I don't want
to fight about it. BETHANY: "Fight about it"? You don't fight.
Your friend fights. She's not here anymore.
Is she? (CHILDREN CHATTING) -(ELLIE GRUNTS)
-(PUNCH LANDS) TROY: I love the look that
Bethany gives in the face when she's staring her down,
she's like, "Are you--" -It's not quick either.
-CRAIG: No. TROY: She looks like,
"What are you about to do?" And then she sees
the punch coming. But you stay on Bethany
for the-- CRAIG: Yeah, Bethany realizes
she's made a terrible mistake. Just one second too late. TROY: She could've just
walked away from the fight. NEIL: Yeah.
But she was disrespected. -TROY: She was disrespected.
-NEIL: It was personal. -TROY: It was personal.
-CRAIG: It was personal. So, Bethany makes
a couple of fatal errors. One is she
underestimates Ellie. But the second one,
more importantly, is... she brings up
whoever this friend is who's not here anymore, triggers something
inside Ellie that... It's like it
uncorks the demon. We don't know who
this person is yet. Until we meet Riley,
we don't understand that that's who
Bethany's talking about. All we know is Bethany
stepped on a third rail. That Ellie's anger, and whatever
innate violence she has, comes from her connection
to other people. It's not so much about her. It's about, "Don't talk
shit about my friend, because I love my friend." TROY: Here we see a completely
different side of FEDRA. This is almost--
It's shadows of normalcy. -We have...
-CRAIG: Pro-FEDRA, almost. TROY: Kind of, yeah.
It's functioning. She gets in trouble. She goes, essentially,
to the principal's office. And we get to meet
Captain Kwong, who's played by Terry Chen. And then Ellie does this thing. She looks at the picture
of his family. And he walks in,
and he sits down. He doesn't notice it at first. And then he does,
and he turns it around. CRAIG:
Ellie has no problem invading
people's personal space. The fact that he has a picture
of these two girls, obviously, his daughters. Are they alive?
Probably not. She has no problem
invading that space and looking at them
because she's not a parent. She doesn't know.
She doesn't care. She wasn't even alive when
this stuff was happening. Look at them. They're at
an amusement park in that photo. And that's this little thing
where he's like, "Okay, that belongs to me,
not you." TROY: And after that, he lays
out some cold, hard truth. CAPTAIN KWONG:
You're smart, Ellie. You're so smart,
you're stupid. Can't see where
this is going? Let me help you out. Two paths ahead of you. -(OBJECT THUDS ON TABLE)
-First path. You keep acting
like a grunt, so you get
the life of a grunt. Up at dawn. Walk
the streets, walk the wall. You eat shit food,
you do shit jobs, you take shit orders
from your patrol leader, who'll probably be Bethany. And that'll be your life
from now until you catch a bullet
from a Firefly, or fall drunk off a roof, or get your hair caught
in a moving tank tread. -ELLIE: Hmm.
-(KEYS JANGLE AND THUD) CAPTAIN KWONG:
There's the other path. You swallow
this pride of yours. You follow the rules.
You become an officer. You get your own room,
you get a nice bed. We eat well.
We don't go on patrol. We're cool in the summer,
we're warm in the winter. And best of all,
when you're an officer, you get to tell
the Bethanys of the world exactly where to shove it. CRAIG: One of the things
that Neil and I talked about a lot throughout the development
of the show was... never painting
one side or the other as purely bad
or purely good. We've gotten so much
bad FEDRA stuff. I mean,
we saw how abusive, or at least how cold
and controlling, FEDRA was
in the first episode. -NEIL: And corrupt.
-CRAIG: Exactly. And we saw how FEDRA-- Even though we didn't see
what FEDRA did to the people
of Kansas City in our fourth
and fifth episode, we certainly saw the aftermath. And there's
no way to account for how brutal
the uprising was if, as Henry put it, "FEDRA hadn't done it
to them first, and for 20 years." But now, we have
this other conversation. And we thought
it would be important to hear
the other side of it. And the other side of it is, "We're the only things
holding this together. If we go down, these people are going to
starve or kill each other," which we saw happen
in prior episodes. So, he's right. "And you, Ellie,
are the generation that we need to raise
to keep this going, or everything
will fall apart." And he's saying to Ellie, "You can be me.
You can be in charge. You could run
all of Boston one day. You have the innate
intellectual capability, and strength of character
to do this. If you would just
get your shit together." This is the most
parental-possible discussion you can have. But that notion of
the push and pull of FEDRA and its polar opposite,
the Fireflies, is going to come up
over and over. TROY: I know that I
had this conversation multiple times
with principals, teachers. The word that I hated
growing-up hearing -was "potential."
-CRAIG: "Potential." I, personally,
was an overachiever, and I don't
say that proudly. And no one ever said, "Oh, if only you could
get your shit together." My problem was
my shit was too together. So, I'm always
drawn to characters that I wish I had
been more like. And, you know,
in this case, I mean, this is a script
by Neil, but it's all-- Everything goes
back to the Ellie that Neil wrote anyway. One of the reasons
I always loved her is because I wanted
to be like her. I wanted to be that kid.
She's so brave. She says, "Just put me
in the fucking hole." She doesn't care.
She's so cool. NEIL: Well, she has such, like,
an allergy to authority, which-- I've been in those
conversations a lot because I was not
a good student. I would do good enough
on tests to just get by. -TROY: Homework.
-NEIL: But homework, forget it. And I would have
advisor after advisor sit me down and be like, "You have all this potential
and you're squandering it." I'm like-- And I was
just kind of like Ellie. I guess I was just aimless. I didn't know what
I wanted to do. I wanted to,
like, play guitar, and hang out
with my friends. And it was only once I thought about
making video games that I went from, like,
a C student to an A student. So, that one very much
resonates with me. And I guess this whole-- A lot of the idea for
Left Behind as a concept, again, because I was
such a terrible student-- I hope my parents
aren't listening to this. CRAIG: Oh, they're listening.
I'll make sure of it. NEIL:
I skipped school all the time. And we would just go hang out
somewhere or go to the mall. And the thought was like,
"What's the post-apocalyptic
version of that, of skipping school
and hanging out with your friend that
you have a crush on?" TROY: There is this connection,
though, always with her stuff. Bethany starts by taking the
Walkman from Captain Kwong. She says,
"Can I have my Walkman back?" The first thing she said,
for Marlene, "Can I have my stuff back?" NEIL: Some of these totems
are very personal to Ellie. And, like, she has
a reaction when Joel steps on her knife
that's very primal. And then other times, I don't know if this
is unique to Ellie, but these things are so
precious in this world. It's like how many working
Walkmans are there out there? Probably not that many. So, this is one
of those things that Ellie has probably
had for a while. And whenever she's alone
or needs to escape, she just shuts out the world
and put these headphones on. So, for someone to threaten
to take away that, "How fucking dare you?" As from where
Ellie's standing. CRAIG: Her world
is actually very small. Ellie does not have
a lot of friends. In fact,
she has one friend, and that friend hasn't been
around in weeks. So, what does she have left?
No one talks to her. There's a scene
that we shot, that we, ultimately,
cut for time, where Ellie
is in a locker room. It was a very classic, you know,
Hollywood-type scene. She's in a locker room,
and everybody else is chitchatting,
and she's alone. And when your world
gets that solitary, it does come down to these
things that give you comfort, and help you ground yourself. -A Walkman, a switchblade.
-NEIL: A comic book. CRAIG: A comic book. There's a baseball
on the windowsill. There are posters of things
that she's heard about, but will never know about,
or so we think. And there are
a few cassette tapes that we know must
mean a lot to her. We don't know
how she got them. All we know is,
they're hers. And that's the sum totality
of her entire world. You know, once Riley leaves,
this is all Ellie has. TROY: We all want
to talk about Riley, because we've already
mentioned her so much. Riley was played
by Storm Reid, and it's one of those things
where it's like, literally, she just came off
the pages of the comic book and onto of the game. CRAIG: We had
a few things going for us. We had Liza Johnson
directing the episode, who is an excellent director, but also,
of all of our directors, I think the one that was the
most connected to the actors. She just kept them so safe
throughout the process, which was amazing to watch. Anybody who's lived through
the misery of those years... And I, I don't know
who these people are that enjoyed those years,
but if you lived through... NEIL: The worst of the worst.
Middle school is the worst. High school is also... CRAIG:
It's the best and worst, right? It's like, I guess like...
I think of Ellie as like a freshman in high school,
you know? It's like
the worst year possible. And yet,
there is the magic of your heart pounding
in your chest for the first time really. The way that opens up, I mean, that's where
you really start to live. And we're watching it
happen here. And I think the fact
that Storm and Bella are close enough
to that experience that I'm sure they both had,
that you could feel it. It just felt so true. TROY: That first heartbeat
starts not with necessarily love, but fear. Riley comes
through the window, and we see immediately
their relationship. -ELLIE: You're a Firefly?
-RILEY: Jesus! I told you
I'd fucking do it. ELLIE: Talking about
liberating the QZ is not the same as... Fuck! Where did you even-- RILEY: Slow down, slow down.
I will tell you everything. First, you have to
promise me something... sort of crazy. And you're going
to say, "No," but then you
have to say, "Yes." Come with me
for a few hours and have the best night
of your life. ELLIE: No. RILEY: Okay, now say yes. ELLIE: I'm not going
anywhere with you. TROY: You said that Ellie
is allergic to authority. However, she does
submit herself to the authority of Riley. NEIL: I guess for me,
it's not so much the authority of Riley. It's like, Ellie wants... There are certain people
she looks up to. And Joel, obviously, has
become one of those people. And Riley
is this other person, but she wants
to be their equal. She doesn't want to just
follow their commands. She wants
to sit alongside them. CRAIG: Yeah. She's so proud
that she fucked Bethany up. You know,
because she's doing what Riley would do. I think Neil's
exactly right. Riley is somebody that
is older, taller, stronger. And Ellie has aspiration. Ellie is small. I love how small Bella is. I think it's
really important. You know, she's small. And when you're small, people will underestimate
you all the time. But she can pack
a punch, literally. TROY: And Riley
comes back at this moment with a grand plan. We don't know what it is,
but it's-- she's doing a very
typical thing, which is, “I've got some good news
and some bad news. The good news is,
I've got a great night planned for us, but ultimately,
we'll find out, the bad news is why
I've planned this night." And just like in
the installment in the game, the DLC Left Behind, this retroactively
adds weight to our story. There's this one quick line
that Riley says. She goes, “Do you want
another 7-Eleven situation?” CRAIG: Mmm. TROY: What is the
7-Eleven situation? CRAIG: What is the
7-Eleven situation, Neil? NEIL: What is
the 7-Eleven situation? Well, one, again, that
conversation is just like, things could go wrong. Someone could get hurt. Just kind of like--
But there's also... You know, I get this question
so many times of like, “How did Ellie
get her scar?” -CRAIG: On the eyebrow.
-NEIL: On her eyebrow. And then Craig and I
discussed it, and I told him, like, just some
thoughts I had about it. So I was like,
“I don't necessarily want to answer that,
at least not yet. And like,
we could just hint that there is
a story there.” CRAIG: So something
happened in a 7-Eleven that obviously is in the QZ
and abandoned, where, in my mind,
it happened together, right? Ellie and Riley
must've been together. They must have broken in. They must have had
to run out fast. There was some glass,
they go in through a window. Something happened. It's interesting
how in the first, I don't know, 10 minutes
of this episode, the concept of stitches
comes up over and over, which I think is
really interesting. The notion that
you get wounded, and you have
to have stitches. NEIL:
And it's a constant reminder. CRAIG: Yes.
That we are frail. And that comes into play
at the end. It all comes back around. But the notion
that there are scars from living in this world
is a really interesting one. And it was important to, since Ellie and Joel
talk about Joel's scar early on in episode three, this was an interesting
opportunity to at least acknowledge that
something happened. And here it's like, well, we don't know exactly
how Ellie got her scar. We also don't know exactly
how Joel got his scar. All he says is, you know,
"There was a shootout." You know?
"And the other guy missed.” So we're hinting
at these things. But what we are saying
explicitly is, violence is permanent
and leaves marks. And sometimes, the only way to close up
a wound is to stitch it. TROY: They make their
way up through this decrepit building. And they come upon
not only a bottle of hooch, but also a dead body. ELLIE:
This isn't moonshine, either. It's, like, from before. This guy must
have spent every card he had to get this. RILEY: No one told him
he couldn't mix pills with that shit? ELLIE: I think he knew
what he was doing. -(BODY FALLS THROUGH FLOOR)
-(ELLIE AND RILEY YELLING) (ELLIE LAUGHING) TROY: Let's talk
about that moment. NEIL: Yeah, we talked
quite a bit about that beat and what it would mean, and
what does it say about Ellie? A lot of it came from, one,
just how brave she is. She's not scared of
something morbid that I think if we saw it,
we'd be like, “Ugh, let's steer clear
of that. Let's call 911. Let's just
take care of this.” But instead,
she's fascinated. Again, she's fascinated with
the dark part of humanity. And here is
someone that just, whether they purposely
or not, took their own life. They ended up
taking their own life just by overdosing on drugs that maybe this person
even bought from Joel. Right? We see that
little baggie there. Also establishing this is
the reality of these two girls. Like, they live in a different
world than the one we know. That it's not that big
of a deal for them. CRAIG: Well, it's definitely
not that big of a deal for Ellie, because she has
never experienced the death of somebody
she cares about. Because she doesn't have
anyone she cares about, except for Riley. She's never known
her parents. And what I loved
about this scene, and what comes after, is that you realize there is
one fundamental difference between Ellie and Riley. And that's that Riley
did know her parents. And Riley
saw her parents die. And Riley's experience
of dead bodies and death is different than Ellie's. For Ellie, she has that
thing that kids can have, which is a sense
of immortality. And so this doesn't mean
anything to her. She laughs when that body falls through the floor
because-- I hope people
don't get the sense that we're saying
that Ellie is a psycho. Even though people
jokingly call her a psycho, she's not, at all. She's just grown up
under such different circumstances
than we have. NEIL: But it's also
like that age, right? It's like you're pushing
the boundaries of how far you
could take things. What are the darkest things
you could see or explore. TROY:
In the previous episode, Ellie asks for a drink,
and Joel obliges. And she says,
“Yep, still gross.” Are we seeing
the first time that she's had something
to drink here? CRAIG: I think we might be. NEIL: Yeah. I'm not sure if we
say it's the first time or not, but it's definitely
an early time. And again, it's just-- the idea is better
than the thing itself. Like the idea of being
naughty or doing something that you're not supposed
to do is more exciting than how disgusting
alcohol tastes when you first have it. CRAIG:
This is a rite of passage. I don't know if every kid
goes through it, but certainly a lot do. I did. My parents had this,
it wasn't a liquor cabinet, it was this weird cube. It's like a wooden cube
of 1970s furniture that had this little, tiny knob,
and you would open it, and inside they had
all these bottles. And my parents
weren't big drinkers. So the bottles that were there
were things that people had brought over for the
very occasional, you know, dinner parties or something
that they would have 70s style, with crab dip and horrible
avocado-based foods. And my sister and I were
just like, “Let's do it.” You know, we got in there. And I think
the one we chose, because we liked
the bottle and the name, and the vague smell of it, was Amaretto Disaronno,
which is an almond liqueur. And we both, you know,
took a way too big swig. And it felt like I had
done something permanently damaging to my mouth
and throat and stomach. TROY:
You'll never be the same. CRAIG: No, I was like,
“Did I-- Sorry, was this, like, toilet bowl cleaner, or is this meant
to be drank? Because that's horrible.” Now later on, things changed. But there's something
about that first time where you're trying
to be grown up. -TROY: Sure.
-NEIL: Yeah. CRAIG: And you're not. NEIL: Well, there's one other
thing, which is like, again, high school
parties and stuff, where you're next to
someone you have a crush on, and like,
you feel this nervous-- You're like, “Maybe
the alcohol will, like, make that subside.” CRAIG: Yeah. NEIL: Maybe not
in this initial drink, but as they go forward,
I think Ellie's drinking because she's getting more
and more nervous. TROY: Yeah, she's taking
shots of courage. CRAIG: She is.
And what I like about how
the episode develops is that it's not for nothing. It kind of works. Like, ultimately,
the courage is there. TROY: I do want
to get to the place that Riley is trying
to bring us to, which is transitioning
from this broken down, decrepit reminder
of this failed world, and then the remnant
of what was wonderful. And now,
understanding kind of where maybe we drew
that from, this mall. We get into this epic shot
of this world coming online. (MALL LIGHTS POWERING ON) And what I love is Ellie's
look of wonderment. There's innocence there. CRAIG: And awe. This-- Oh, boy. I'll tell you. NEIL: That's one of
the hardest VFX. CRAIG: I wish I could drag
everybody in the audience back in time to make them sit
through all the meetings we had to sit through
on this one. TROY: Was that practical?
Or was that VFX? -CRAIG: It was VFX.
-TROY: Wow! CRAIG: So, we had
this interesting challenge. I was in love with the mall
from the DLC, and we needed it. This takes place in a mall for all the reasons
Neil said. That's where you sneak away
as a teenager. And I wanted,
as much as Neil wanted, to see Ellie experiencing
what we all took for granted for the first time,
and how magical it is. Well, we got kind of lucky.
To an extent. There was a mall in Calgary that was scheduled
for demolition. So on the one hand,
it was great, because they basically said, “You can do
whatever you want. You can break up
the floors, you can gack up
the whole place with... TROY: “Here the keys." CRAIG: ...mud and vines
and everything. And you have the run
of it for shooting as long as you want
throughout the day.” NEIL: The problem was... CRAIG: The problem was
the mall itself was not great. -TROY: A death trap?
-NEIL: A little sad. CRAIG: It was a sad mall.
It was a one-story mall. There was only one area, like at the very end
of the mall, where there
was an escalator, which obviously we used, that went up to this one
little extra taller section that led into, like,
a Winners, I believe, which is the Canadian kind
of Target-ish sort of store, and then like a clinic. It was really sad up there. NEIL: But if you're standing
at the top of that escalator
looking out, -you just see a wall.
-CRAIG: There was nothing. NEIL: There's like--
because there was
no second floor. Everything, like, tilts down and goes down
to the first floor. CRAIG: So,
if you're like a junky, and you want to know,
like, how we do things, the shot where
we're behind Ellie and we see that mall
coming on, that wasn't at the mall,
that was on a soundstage. We built a little railing
and then there's just blue. And so,
we say to Alex Wang, our visual effects
supervisor, “You're gonna
have to figure this out.” And he was scared. That was one of the few
times I saw him scared, because that is a very
difficult thing to pull off. And when we were
in the physical mall, we needed to kind of paint
like a blue stripe where the first floor
kind of ended, to say, “From this point up, we're going to be building
out and set-extending with visual effects.” NEIL:
We had some conversation like, “Okay, should we just make
it like a one-story mall?” -CRAIG: You can't. No!
-NEIL: And then pretty quickly,
we're like, “No.” CRAIG: There are these phrases
people use in Hollywood. The one that
I hate the most is, “Is the juice
worth the squeeze?” I fucking hate that. TROY: I will never
say that around you. CRAIG: The answer is,
"Yes, it is." It is worth the squeeze. And is it worth it
for this one marquee shot where this world
comes to life? -Yes.
-TROY: Yes. CRAIG:
And does doing that mean that throughout
everything else, we're going to need
to continually show this other floor above it, and it's going to be money
and time expense? Yes.
Because we need to know that they're in a place
that is magical and connects back
to the world we know. In the world we know,
that's what malls look like. And what Alex
and the vendors did to make that happen
is magic. It's just absolute
fucking magic. And I want to say again
how important it is that we're building a show
based on this game. Because it's
the love of the game that brought all these
visual effects artists to the show. And it's the love of
the game that kept them working at their computer
and their tablets for iteration after iteration
to make it great. NEIL: What's interesting, too,
with the DLC is, you know, it wasn't as popular
as the main game, but for people who played it, they have such
a deep love for it. And a lot of the crew members
had that deep love for it. They were so excited
to work on, like, this part of the story. TROY: There's another
thing that this moment specifically does,
and speaking of the game, it's a moment that
happens in the game, it also happens
in the show, where it almost mirrors
something that happens later between Joel and Ellie when she's looking out
and he says, “Is it everything
you hoped for?” CRAIG: Yeah. TROY: We have almost
that same kind of moment. Was that a happy accident
or was that intentional? CRAIG: Mm,
it's probably happy accident. -NEIL: Happy accident.
-TROY: Wow. If it is, it's like-- sometimes these things work
on a subconscious, but it's like-- Right, so we know
that Ellie just has an appreciation for beauty
and for the old world. So, in a similar situation, she's going to have
a similar reaction. And I love these
kind of connections that we didn't even intend. We're just being true
to the characters and they happen organically. CRAIG: There is
this thing about Ellie where the people
who love her want to show her things. They do,
because she appreciates them. She's not a romantic, but she's
a passionate person about the world around her. And even in this
shithole they live in, even though
the mall is wrecked, to see those lights come on
and to see how big it is, it's so magical for her,
she appreciates it. So, of course you want
to show her that stuff. NEIL: Yeah, it's this
awesome moment, right, where it's like
you've seen a great movie, or played a great game, and you get to share that
with your friend, and you get to experience it
again through their eyes. That's what Riley's doing
right here. Like, Riley loves this mall, and then she knows Ellie
would love it even more, and now she gets
to share it with her. CRAIG: Which is basically
what I'm doing now with you. I'm like, "I want everyone
to see the thing!" TROY: But she's also--
one of the things I love is that Riley gets surprised -by the thing that Ellie--
-CRAIG: Right. TROY: She freaks out
over the escalator. CRAIG: Yeah. TROY: We have
a big conversation about the world that was
and what was important; sneakers, not soap. But then it leads quickly
to this other moment, really the first moment
of tension between the two of them
at the Victoria's Secret. RILEY ABEL: I mean, I don't
get why people back then wanted all this stuff. ELLIE: Do you need me
to explain it to you? RILEY: Haha.
No, I know why. It just looks
uncomfortable. ELLIE: Yep. (RILEY CHUCKLES) ELLIE: What? RILEY: Nothing.
I was just trying to imagine -you wearing that.
-ELLIE: Shut up! (RILEY LAUGHS) RILEY: All right, come on.
We're almost there. NEIL: Malls are just
such weird places, right? They got this
weird collection of all these
different stores. Right? It's like shoes
and a food court. And then you have
like this store that's all about sex. And again, you think back
to the years as a teenager where, like, your brain
is just getting pumped full of hormones, and then you can't help
but think about attraction and sex
and all these things when you're next
to that store. And ultimately, we know
where the story goes. And both of these girls
like each other, like really like each other, but they're too afraid
to say anything. And here, like,
Riley gets to poke at it and see the reaction. And Ellie has a very, kind
of weird, nervous reaction, because
she doesn't want to-- she does want to reveal
how vulnerable she is, because she loves Riley. And that's why
after Riley walks away, we get this lingering moment
where Ellie's just looking at her
own reflection, and we see an insecurity. CRAIG: Yeah.
Liza really understood this moment beautifully, that here are
two girls who-- Well, we've all seen
the episode now, so no big secret,
they're both gay. And their sexuality is... confusing to them
and scary to them because the world,
to remind everybody, in our show stops in 2003. The revolution that we've
gone through as a culture to become accepting
of homosexuality, and whatever
we would call non-heteronormative
sexualities, hasn't occurred. Which means,
if the world stops in 2003, it just doesn't happen. In this world, that stuff is still
problematic, as they say. So you have these two girls
who are uncomfortable with and afraid of
their own sexuality. And they're looking at
the most heteronormative presentation of female
sexuality there can be. Lingerie
designed to be incredibly feminine
to attract men. And neither one
of them seem to quite get the allure of it. Which is not surprising.
It's not their thing. But what I love about what Riley does there
is that she-- And people do this, right?
We know they do this. She gets scared of her
own feelings for Ellie, and so she basically
puts Ellie down to cover up
how she's feeling in this weird moment. And Ellie doesn't
understand that. And it hurts. NEIL: She gets defensive. CRAIG:
And she gets defensive, and then she gets insecure. And she's looking at herself
in the reflection of this angel, you know,
the Victoria's Secret angel. And she is not an angel. She doesn't like her face.
She doesn't like her hair. She doesn't like the way
any of it is. And she's pretty sure
that Riley would never,
ever like it either. And I can't think
of a more 14-year-old teenager-y thing
to think than that, because God knows I was
thinking that stuff myself. NEIL: We are shaped
so much by media and how we're
bombarded by movies and games
and comics and ads. A big part of it is ads. These girls didn't grow up
with that. So then, you get a glimpse into this other world
where like, “Look how easy they had it. Look how beautiful
they were.” Like, it's almost like
it becomes this fantasy, instead of like looking
back at a reality. TROY: We move
from that moment into-- The mall gets even more magical. We find this merry-go-round, which is taken straight
from the game. -CRAIG: Yeah, it sure is.
-TROY: And we hear-- CRAIG: I love when that happens. TROY: We hear this
almost calliope version of The Cure's
Just Like Heaven. CRAIG: Yeah,
and I have to give credit to our editor, Tim Good. That was his. Tim, I think,
is as important to the creative integrity and success of the show
as anyone. And he had been waiting,
I think, to put this in a show forever. And I think he had tried, and people have been like,
“What? No.” And then I heard this,
and I was like, “Oh, my God, it's
the most beautiful thing.” And is there realistically
a merry-go-round that would play
a calliope version of-- NEIL:
That's where we're joking. This is like the coolest
merry-go-round in the world. CRAIG: In history. TROY: It plays OK Computer. CRAIG: Yeah, it's like
the coolest merry-go-round. I think a lot of people,
I suspect, are going to be like, “Wait, what was that?
Wait, that was The Cure?” I'm excited to see
how people discover that. TROY: Second viewing for me.
Second viewing. I was like, “Wait a minute.” I had to go back
and listen to it again. CRAIG:
I love how this functions. I loved how it functioned
in Left Behind, and I love how
it functions here. Ellie allows herself
to slip into the fantasy. And it is just like heaven,
until it's not. Because at some point, the world comes crashing in
on her, even before the merry-go-round
breaks down. She remembers, “Oh, yeah,
this girl doesn't feel about me the way I feel about her.
In fact, she never will.” And that's when she has to kind of
go back to questioning, “What is the thing
with you and me? Why did you run away?
What are we doing here?” ELLIE: Did you really leave because you actually think
you could liberate this place? RILEY: Don't say it like it's
some type of fantasy, Ellie. They've done it in the QZs. Set things right,
the way they used to be. ELLIE: Yeah,
we could do that, too. If you come back, I mean. We're--
We're like the future. You know, we could
make things better. We could be running things. NEIL: The text is
they're talking about the political standing
of the quarantine zone, but they're really talking
about each other. And Ellie's trying to say, “I was so hurt because you left
and you were my everything.” CRAIG: Yeah. I mean,
that's why I think the world
comes crashing in on her because she remembers, “Oh, yeah. Riley just left
and had no problem with that.” Ellie would never leave Riley
for three weeks, ever, because Ellie is
in love with Riley. "But Riley left, no problem. Obviously, Riley's
not in love with me.” And so, Neil's right,
the discussion is, why? And we, in that discussion, learn a really interesting
thing about Riley. Which is that Riley is not
going anywhere at FEDRA. Riley is not Ellie. Captain Kwong is not
sitting Riley down saying, “You're officer material.” TROY:
Gave her sewage detail. CRAIG: Yeah, “You're
gonna be sewage detail.” And that opens Ellie's mind
to an understanding. “Okay,
I'm starting to get it.” TROY: The next beat
that we get into, the photo booth. Let's talk about
what the photo booth meant in the game, both mechanically
and also narratively. NEIL: So a lot of the game, we took these mechanics
that were used for violence when you played as Joel
in the full game, and then,
for this extra chapter, we subverted
those mechanics to get you
to connect with Riley and be on this sort of date,
like running away together. We had this idea of like,
“Oh, what if they went
in this photo booth?” Because again,
this is a thing you do
in a mall with your friends, and you take pictures together. And it would be a moment
that would make it interactive. You could choose what
poses you want to do. So there's a little bit
of agency for the player there as far as shaping
how that experience goes. Ultimately, that moment is about
a cracking of the dam, of seeing, like,
these girls are starting to telegraph
to each other, whether consciously or not, that there is more here
than just friendship. And that was the purpose
for it in the game. And in the game,
it was this huge investment. We would always say,
like, you know, we used to be known for
these set pieces in Uncharted. One of the most famous ones
is you are in this building that's being shot with
missiles by a helicopter, and you're fighting
all these enemies, and you dynamically
jump out of it just as it crashes around you. And it took this massive effort for the whole studio
to pull that off. It was kind of the same
for this photo booth, and it was, like, unheard of
to spend that many resources on this very intimate
character moment. But again,
for people that experienced it, it had the same impact,
the same emotional payoff, even more so
of an emotional payoff than maybe an adrenaline rush. And it kind of changed,
you know, how we approach things
at the studio, as far as the kind of games
we make and the kind of moments
we are willing to invest in. And that's why
I believe Craig was, like, so adamant from the get-go that we need to recapture
this moment, this photo booth moment. CRAIG: Yeah.
That was an easy one. And to try and recapture it
as truly to that experience that I had playing Left Behind
as we could. This is the back and forth
we do all the time. How much fidelity? What are the things
we do exactly? What are the things we change? This was one where
I just thought, as a fan, if I didn't see it, even down to bunny ears
and monster poses and just feeling like
I remember that feeling of being physically close
to a girl that I liked, and she liked me,
and we both knew it, and we were teenagers. And there's just--
I don't know, man. There's just something there,
and-- NEIL: But also,
that moment where, like, you're so insecure, you can't
even have enough proof. There's never enough
proof to say, "She definitely likes me." CRAIG: (LAUGHS) I know. Yeah,
not even when her friend's like, “No, no, no.
She like-likes you.” But Ellie's like,
“Okay, okay, get off.” It's the second time, because in the first time
she's coming down the escalator, she trips and she's like, “No,
okay, I'm fine. No, I'm fine.” It's Ellie gets so excited
by and terrified of physical contact with Riley that when it happens,
she needs to stop it, because she's afraid
that she won't be able to stop herself
from kissing her. NEIL: Ellie's afraid that Riley
will see right through her. She'll see all the emotions
she's feeling, -and she'll be embarrassed.
-CRAIG: Right. NEIL: So she has to
protect herself from that. CRAIG: Yeah,
because what's coming is, “Whoa, uh, we're friends, but I don't feel
that way about you. Also, actually,
now that I know that you're one of those, I don't want to be friends
with you at all.” That's the fear. I mean-- TROY: Of losing someone. CRAIG: Yeah. When I talk to
my friends who grew up gay, and they explain
those additional levels, that's the scariest part. If I liked a girl
and I asked her out, and she said, “I actually
would rather be friends,” like, maybe she'll be
laughing about me with her friends that night,
and that hurts, but there won't be this, like,
crazy rumor mill in the school. No one's going to stop
being friends with me. No one's going to call me
bad names. No one's going to hit me. But that's not true
if you're gay. Not when you're growing up
in the '70s or the '80s or the '90s or even the 2000s. I think it's changed
dramatically, at least in some places. Not everywhere, unfortunately. But that's, I think,
a real fear that Ellie has, that it won't merely be
a rejection of romance, it will be
a total rejection of her as a person
and as a friend. And she can't bear that. TROY:
We'll get to the moment where
she's afraid of losing her, and that's really
at the root of that fear. But first, we have
another wonder of the mall. CRAIG: The most
wondrous wonder of the mall. TROY: Why Mortal Kombat II? Why Mortal Kombat II
specifically? Because that's my fave.
Where did that-- Was that just the one
you could find? CRAIG: No! I mean, okay. First of all, Mortal Kombat II
is the best. -TROY: Ever!
-CRAIG: Right? Like, not every cabinet arcade
game worked like that. Sometimes the first one
was the best. In this case, Mortal Kombat II
I think was the best. TROY: Same. CRAIG: And we had this
opportunity to do something that Naughty Dog couldn't do
when they were making the game, which is use real stuff
because I don't know the rules, I don't understand
the intellectual property thing. In the video game,
the game's called, The Turning? NEIL: Yeah, in the game, one, you know, again,
when I skipped school, the highlight of skipping school
was going to the arcade. -TROY: Absolutely.
-NEIL: By far. So that just had to be, like,
kind of the climax of what Riley wants
to show Ellie. Which, by the way, having just recently rewatched
this episode, I tear up every time they're standing in front
of that arcade. I don't know what it is,
it's like some combination of like what's happening
in the episode and my own nostalgia
for arcades that have just kind of
disappeared over the years. So when we
made the game, we couldn't use
an existing game because we would've
had to recreate it. -CRAIG: Mm. That makes sense.
-NEIL: So that's one thing. And then licensing
would have been a headache. So we just never
went down that road. So we made our own game
called The Turning. It was called The Turning because when I was working
on the comic book that eventually became
The Last of Us, when it was pitched
at Naughty Dog, it was called The Turning. So this was kind of like
a homage to myself, I guess. -I don't know.
-(LAUGHTER) NEIL: But again, it's just
one of those things you imbue with stuff
to make it more personal to you, so you get more invested in it. That's very much a rip off
of Mortal Kombat II. And it was always intended
to be that way. And the reason
we did Mortal Kombat II, or just thought about it, is there's this evolution
of games and violence in games. How violence is used in games. And Mortal Kombat II, there was this whole
conversation around it with violence in the media, and Senator Lieberman
wanting to censor video games. That's where, like, the
rating system all came out. So it's a lot of, like, really interesting
political things that happened
with video games with that specific game. But to go back
to what Craig was saying, we had an opportunity
to use the original source, the original inspiration,
which is Mortal Kombat II. And I'm like, “Wait a minute,
we could actually, like, probably get the rights
for this relatively easy because it's Warner Brothers.” So it was it was just very cool
to be able to use that. So, then we worked
backwards from there. And if you notice
the opening of the episode, when we're in Ellie's room, she has a poster
for Mortal Kombat II. And these girls would
have had an obsession with this particular thing, because Ellie just has this,
not dissimilar to me, an obsession with violent media,
which, like, you know, I grew up at that age,
or maybe a little bit older, I saw Pulp Fiction
and I read Sin City and was just, like,
very much drawn to that kind of experiences
at the time. CRAIG: Yeah. And there's
this nice circle back payoff to a moment that happened
in the third episode when Ellie finds a dead Mortal Kombat II game
in the convenience store, and tells Joel about
how she had a friend, and she played Mileena, and she would swallow you whole
and barf out your bones, and now we see it. And one of the things
that I was obsessive about, because I concentrate
enormously on sound, I try whenever
I'm writing scripts to write sound into the script. And then when we're mixing-- And I told our mixing team,
which is amazing, led by Marc Fishman
and Kevin Roache, “Guys, this isn't going to be
a normal mixing space for you. I am going to get so granular
about so many things.” And one of the things
I got really granular about was the way it would feel
in your stomach when you dropped that quarter. That bass...
(MIMICKS ARCADE SOUND EFFECTS) -(ARCADE MACHINE RESOUNDS)
-(ELLIE AND RILEY CHUCKLING) -(QUARTER THUNKS)
-(ARCADE MACHINE RESOUNDS) (CHUCKLING) ELLIE: That's so cool.
Oh, my god. CRAIG: This is one
of those meta moments where there's a television show
based on a video game, and the guy that
made the video game, and the guy over here that's
helping adapt the video game both love video games,
and we have our whole lives. And giving everybody
a chance, especially, I think, kids who haven't known the mall arcade experience
the way we have, to just enjoy other people
enjoying it, I think was great. It was beautiful. And I love how Riley
knows inherently that Ellie is going to love the fatality moves,
the special finishers. TROY: For people who
know Mortal Kombat, especially when you
played it in ‘93, the only way you knew
about the cheat codes, or the fatality codes,
was anecdotally, you heard the rumors,
because somebody in the arcade-- NEIL: I'm so glad
you brought that up. I'm so glad you brought that up, because I'm sure people
will watch and be like, “How do they know the moves? How did they
figure out the moves?” This is actually something
we talked quite a lot about. And it's like, again, as they collect these
totems from this old world, one of the things that
used to be really popular, and was still popular
in the early 2000s, were video game magazines. CRAIG: Big glossy things
like a proper book you'd flip through and it
would discuss other levels-- TROY: “That's how you
beat that level! I didn't realize
I missed that there.” NEIL: So. Right.
If they were like, infatuated with this game, Ellie would collect anything
to do with this game, including magazines that
would have listed the moves, that they would
have memorized as if they
could ever play it. But of course,
the tragic thing is they could
never play it, because those games
don't exist anymore. -Until today.
-CRAIG: Yeah. TROY: They have this
wonderful moment, and we leave them
for a second inside of the arcade,
and the purple light, and the cacophonous sounds, and the cartoonish violence that's happening
inside of that video game. We start to pan out, and we
follow this root system, and we see that they're
not alone in this mall. That there is an imminent
threat that wakes up. CRAIG: Yeah. And this
is a difference from the game. In the game,
there's no indication that
there's anything in the mall. -NEIL: Not until much later.
-CRAIG: 'Til much later. And when it does happen,
there are a lot of Infected. And as we talked it through,
we did like the idea that, I mean, you know,
Ellie's like, “That place is full
of Infected,” and Riley says, “Well, if it's sealed off,
then why isn't it sealed off?” And then you get in there,
and you're like, “It's not full
of Infected at all.” Riley's correct. And Riley's been
living in this mall for a couple of weeks, and she hasn't seen
any Infected. There's one. That's all it takes,
is just one. And what wakes him up
is their joy. It's the sound of their
laughing, their having fun. As much as we can, we give our characters the things
they want the most, and then we punish them
for getting them, and we want them
to be challenged by their darkest fears. And so, one of the fears
that you have in this world is that you're never
safe enough to have fun. You're never safe enough
to fall in love. You're never safe enough
to have a first kiss. TROY: There's two threats that
are happening in this moment. First is the-- waking up
the infected that's in there. And also, there's a bit of
a truth bomb that Riley drops. CRIAG: Right. RILEY: Ellie, I'm leaving. They're sending me
to a post in the Atlanta QZ. I asked if you could join
so we could go together, but Marlene said no. ELLIE: Who the fuck is Marlene? RILEY: Marlene is the lady
that helped me get-- It doesn't matter. Ellie I tried. CRAIG: Yeah. Yeah. Ellie finds the truth of what
Riley's been doing here. It's not just this romantic, “Oh, I've joined the Fireflies
and have a gun and all that.” And Ellie's been making fun
of her for it the whole time, “Oh it's 'cause you're
such a fucking Firefly.” Well, there are pipe bombs. And the pipe bombs
have one purpose, and that is to be
thrown at FEDRA. In the middle
of our first episode, we see what those
pipe bombs can do. They blow up a car, they
blow up the side of a building. They almost killed Tess. And Ellie is confronted
with the reality that this girl that
she's so connected to, that she cares so much about, is actively participating in something meant
to kill people like her. And remember, she was told
by Kwong in the beginning, “You're going to be an officer”" That means, one day, Riley is going to be lobbing
one of these things at her, and the whole fantasy comes
crashing in at that point. TROY: We have
this petulant goodbye. What do you think it is
that stops Ellie and makes her go back? NEIL: It's love. It's what this show
is all about. CRAIG: You can't escape
the truth of what you want. You can know, intellectually, “This girl doesn't care
about me the way I care about her. And she is actively
participating in something that could
end up in my death. But what if she does
care about me that way? And what if I told her? Would it matter?” NEIL: There's also
the fear of like, “Is this the last interaction
I want to have with her?” CRAIG: Right. She's leaving. NEIL: Like, I think
there's also like, there's such a love that Ellie
is not ready to let her go. And later, right,
she says to her like, “I'll support you. If this
is what you really want.” TROY: “I'm your best friend.” CRAIG: “And I'm not
saying it all pissy. I mean it”" Yeah.
Like, I think Neil's right. There's this need
to just say goodbye. I don't think Ellie
goes back there thinking, “I'm going to tell her
how I really feel, and I'm going to kiss her.” She goes back there
to say a proper goodbye. TROY: But she does go back, and we get to see
another iconic moment from the Left Behind game,
which is the Halloween store. CRAIG: Yeah. TROY:
You use source music again as score with Etta James'
version of I Got You Babe. CRAIG: Taken
right from the game, it's-- Anybody that's
played it just knows it. I think a lot of people
that play that game don't realize it's
I Got You Babe, because Etta's version -is so... different.
-TROY: Different. It's funky and fun
and it's juxtaposed. NEIL: I mean,
that was the challenge, of like, you know,
finding a song that is about romance,
but is not so sentimental that it's just
about romance. And this just strikes
that balance of, again, the lyrics are
about something, but the vibe you get, it's got this,
like you're saying, a funky energy
that it gets to hide what it's really about. Kind of like very much
what is happening between Ellie and Riley
at this moment. CRAIG: Yeah I mean,
literally hiding under masks. And there's this moment
as they're dancing. And I love the way
Liza shot this. Riley is a much
better dancer than Ellie. That much is clear.
Ellie is sort of like... TROY: Doing whatever, like
shuffling to the left and right. CRAIG:
Shuffling, or being a goof. Riley, in that good dancer way, is sort of doing this thing
where she's rotating around, and she turns away from Ellie as she's
dancing around. And as she turns away,
Ellie slowly stops dancing. And here's the magic
of Bella Ramsey. She is wearing a mask that
completely obscures her face, and you know exactly
still how she's feeling just from the way
her body moves. It's magic. It's just there, and what
she's feeling there is this connection to Riley
that is so powerful, and so joyous, that
she just can't let it go. She can't walk away
without begging. She just says, “Don't go.” And Riley says, “Okay.” And then she-- Ellie kisses her. And it's just like the game. And I don't think
that's a bad thing. I think it's a wonderful thing, because it was perfect
in the game, and I think it's perfect here. All of it. Bella's reaction
after she kisses her, which is like 1500 emotions
in 2 seconds, and then, you know,
apologizing. And Riley saying, “For what?” And then Ellie realizing,
“Oh, my god,” and Riley realizing,
“Oh, my god.” NEIL: We give her
like a few seconds of the greatest joy
of her life. -Just a few seconds.
-CRAIG: Yeah. But there's,
like, this thing of the two of them,
like, “Oh, my god, the time we've wasted
being scared when we both felt this way.” And then the world
comes crashing in. TROY: Like you said,
it's quickly interrupted by the pivotal moment
for Ellie, which is, not only is she bitten, but also Riley is as well. And the disparity, again,
between their responses, I don't know-- We don't get to see if Riley
has her freak out moment, but we certainly
see Ellie's, and she smashes stuff
and Riley responds. CRAIG: Direct from the game, and almost everything
that they say between each other
is lifted from the game. There are few
other little bits here or there
that we put in, but what I love about this ending
more than anything, and credit to HBO
for kind of pushing us to keep growing it is, what Riley says to Ellie
at the end here is not merely words of
comfort or vague philosophy. RILEY: It ends this way for
everyone sooner or later, right? Some of us just get there
faster than others. But we don't quit. Whether... it's two minutes... or two days... we don't give that up. I don't want to give that up. CRAIG: It is a lesson
that Ellie has in her bones, and it is why Ellie
fights to keep Joel alive. Because what Riley is saying is,
“We don't give up. Even if we have
two minutes or two days, we just keep going,
because we love each other. And death comes for us all. The time we have
is the time we have. The fact that it must end is not
a reason for us to not love.” And there's Ellie, who
has been told to go away, who knows
Joel is going to die. There's no fucking way she's
gonna be able to save him. She's not going to quit. And she ransacks this house
looking for what? Thread to stitch him up. It's the only thing she knows
how to do with a wound, because of her own life. And she goes
back down there and, oh, my god,
they hold their-- The hands being held,
it's like-- It's so beautiful to me. And then, when
she's sewing him up, the look on
her face is just... What do you describe it?
It's-- NEIL: That's desperation. CRAIG: Yeah. And fury. It's almost like, “I won't
fucking let you go.” NEIL: “I will will it.
I will will the impossible.” CRAIG: Yes. TROY: Will it work? That is something we'll
have to find out next week. Craig, thanks a million,
man, for being here. CRAIG: Thanks, Troy. TROY: And of course,
the same to you, Neil. NEIL: Goodbye. TROY: We will talk
to you both next week. ♪ (MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ This has been the official The Last of Us
podcast from HBO. Again, I'm Troy Baker, joined by Craig Mazin
and Neil Druckmann. You can stream new episodes
of the HBO original series The Last of Us
Sundays on HBO Max. The podcast episodes
are available after episodes of
The Last of Us Air on HBO. You can find this show
wherever you listen to podcasts. Like and follow
HBO's The Last of Us on Instagram,
Twitter and Facebook. Until next week,
endure and survive. NARRATOR: This is the official
companion podcast for HBO's The Last of Us,
hosted by Troy Baker. Our producers
are Elliott Adler, Bria Mariette
and Noah Camuso. Darby Maloney is our editor. The show is mixed
by Hannis Brown. Our executive producers are
Gabrielle Lewis and Bari Finkel. Production music
is courtesy of HBO. And you can watch episodes
of The Last of Us on HBO Max.
