“There’s No Way to Complete This Narrative in a Third Season”: ‘The Last of Us’ Showrunner Reveals How Long He Thinks the Series Will Run

Episode six of Season 2 of the HBO series The Last of Us gave viewers a glimpse into life for Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) before Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) took out her revenge. Not only did it provide answers about the fate of Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) and why Gail (Catherine O’Hara) was justifiably upset about the death of her husband, but it served as a reminder of what made the bond between Joel and Ellie so special and why it was so heartbreaking to see it severed. While standing on the porch of their home in Jackson, Ellie pushed for the truth about what really happened with the Fireflies in the Salt Lake hospital where Joel rescued her and she finally got the answers she was seeking. It’s a moment that clearly changed their relationship, and although she wanted to forgive him, they never got the time to fully rebuild their bond.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, showrunner Craig Mazin discussed the reaction to Joel’s death, the magic that Pascal brought to the role, some of the Season 2 changes they’ve made from the video game, that he likes to have a master plan for what will happen in a season before he starts to write, finding the right moment for Dina (Isabel Merced) to learn that Ellie is immune, introducing airborne spores, how Ellie was testing Joel with the Eugene situation, and why they let Ramsey and Pascal just go for it in their shared moment on the porch. He also talked about the possibility that Season 3 will need to have more episodes, and that they’ll likely need a Season 4 to conclude the story.

Now that you’re a couple episodes past that moment in episode two, what has most surprised you about the reaction? Were you surprised by how many people seemed to not know it was coming?

CRAIG MAZIN: Yeah, a little bit. Neil [Druckmann] and I had a lot of discussions about this because this presumption was that everybody’s going to know. A lot of people played the game, and people talk online constantly. I remember in the early days of social media, whatever the Harry Potter movie was where Dumbledore died, people would go on Twitter and tweet, “Dumbledore dies.” People are jerks. But no, I’m never surprised by how many people do know something. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t. It was incredible. There were so many people in my life who were texting me like, “What?! No!” That was surprising.

But the bigger surprise to me, particularly in light of the way the game had been received, was how accepting the audience was for the show. They understood, “Oh, my God, no! Somebody that we loved is dead. What will happen now?” It was not, “Let’s go stand in front of HBO and throw eggs or blame Kaitlyn Dever.” No. People reacted like a normal audience would theoretically react. There are people who are angry at the video game who will stay angry forever, and they will be angry at the show. If Neil hands out free money, they’ll be angry about denominations that the cash was in. It was amazing, actually, to see how many people were like, “I hate Abby. Kaitlyn Dever should win an Emmy.” They understood what that’s about, and that was actually quite encouraging.

It’s even more heartbreaking because everybody loves Pedro Pascal.

MAZIN: Absolutely, which is a testament to that magical thing he has, which goes beyond just acting. There are great actors that people don’t have these deep emotional connections to. And then, there are actors that you want to take home, hug them, give them soup, and make them okay. I’m always worried about Steve Carell. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing. He can be a villain. It doesn’t matter. I’m always worried about him and I want to take him home and make him feel okay. Melissa McCarthy is like that. Zach Galifianakis has always been like that. And Pedro is the ultimate version of that. You want to take care of them.

The Creative Team Made Various Changes to 'The Last of Us' Throughout Season 2

"We have the space to let things brew a little bit more."

There have been a bunch of little changes from the game this season, whether it’s shifting who is present in certain scenes or when certain moments happen. Which change or changes were you most nervous about, and was there anything you were most excited about because it opened things up with a story or a character in a way that it hadn’t previously?

MAZIN: One change we made that is really big, that almost went uncommented on, which was really interesting to me, was that, in our show, after Joel is killed, Ellie and Dina decide to go to Seattle to punish the people who did it. In the game, Tommy is the one who goes, and Ellie and Dina go afterward, following the trail of Tommy’s revenge as they go. I felt like, “Oh, that’s actually quite a significant change.” It’s also a significant change in the show that three months go by when Ellie has to recuperate. We created a circumstance where she had to just sit and stew. In the game, it’s pretty much the next day that she’s like, “Off we go.” Interestingly, people just accepted that, and it didn’t necessarily strike them as a big change.

But the one that I was both nervous and excited about was the way we laid out the development of Ellie and Dina’s relationship. In the game, they get together physically before Joel dies, and Dina is not present there. It’s Tommy who’s present when Joel dies. I thought people were going to be pretty angry at me. I thought Ellie-Dina stans would be like, “What is this tent scene where they’re not kissing and they’re not together? She’s like, ‘You’re gay. I’m not.’” I was like, “I just need them to hang on for a week, and then they’ll see.”

We have these opportunities because we get as much narrative space as we want. One of the challenges that all game developers have, and Naughty Dog is so good at this, but still, for them, they must put gameplay first because they have to, is that when you play a game, you are in control of the length of the experience. That's entirely about gameplay. How much do I want to keep playing? How good am I at this? If I’m taking my time, do I suck? How many times am I dying and going back to a checkpoint? With us, that’s not the case. We have the space to let things brew a little bit more, and then it’s a little more exciting when it does happen. There are some benefits to both media, and we like to take advantage of the ones that we have in television.

Taking more time with the development of Ellie and Dina’s relationship means it also makes more of an impact when Ella had to tell Dina about being immune.

MAZIN: In the game, because spores had been introduced from the jump, Dina discovers Ellie is immune because Dina’s gas mask breaks and Ellie just gives her hers and says, “Don’t worry, I can breathe spores. I’m immune.” Which is shocking to Dina, but then is its own proof. There is no questioning that it’s true. It’s evidently true. Here, because we’ve been delaying the introduction of the spores, it’s not evidently true. It was a great opportunity to see what it would feel like, in that moment, to think, "I have to kill you?” Bella [Ramsey] and I talked about it and were like, “This is a classic actor ‘I want’ scene. What do you want to convince that person to not kill you?” They did such a good job of being like, “Okay, I can see how emotional Dina is. I have to be not emotional and be as rational and clear-minded and careful as I can because I’m not here to change the trajectory of our relationship. I just don’t want to be shot." I think the two of them did some incredible work there.

This season also really feels like it must have been a puzzle to figure out, as far as putting together the pieces of Jackson and the attack there, Joel’s death, Seattle, the flashbacks, and adding a preview the flashback episode, with episode six, to the end of episode five. Did all of that easily fall into place, as far as where to put things, or where there some things shifting around as you tried to sort all of that out?

MAZIN: It’s never easy. We’re now confronting all the same challenges for Season 3. They’re fun challenges because so much of it is trying to figure out, “Okay, we do have these puzzle pieces. We have these moments and these decisions that we love and want to do, but we can’t get to them the same way we do in the game. We have to move some things around and we have to change some things and alter things and allow our minds to go away from the game in order to come back to it.” But all those decisions get made before I start writing. I don’t like to experiment while I’m writing. The experimenting should happen before. We have a master plan and we understand how everything works. That way, when you see things happening in this episode, you understand they’re connected back to the very first episode. It's a holistic thing.

Did you always know that you wanted to put that little tag on the end of episode five?

MAZIN: I remember feeling the most alienated from Ellie and the most shocked when she was torturing Nora. You feel like this person that we’ve gotten to know from little kid to young adult has gone so far away from the decent part of her that we’ve lost her. To me, it was so important to end that episode, not just by saying, “Hey, surprise, Joel’s going to be back next episode, it’s flashback time,” but to show Ellie as a child again and to see, how did we get from there to here? How did this happen? And also to remind ourselves that people who are doing horrible things have also been beautiful in their own way, in their own lives. They’ve been innocent, they’ve been sweet, they’ve been kind. The same holds true for Abby. The same holds true for Nora. We wanted to spend time and privilege Ellie’s experience, so that we understand she’s not just this dead-eyed murderer in a red hallway, with that range going from, “Where is she?” to “Hi!” That’s just how Bella would say “Hi” to me when I would get to set. It was this sweet, “Let’s do our thing together today,” and it was so warm and lovely.

That moment with Nora when she says to Ellie, “I’m sorry you saw it happen. No one should ever see something like that,” is a huge roller coaster of emotions, with her saying sorry, saying that she still hears his scream, and then says, “The little bitch got what he deserved.” That really illustrates how this world can push people to do what they have to do to survive, but how they don’t come out of it unscathed. How did you feel about that moment and the way Tati Gabrielle and Bella Ramsey brought it to life?

MAZIN: I love that scene. That scene is very close to the way it is in the game, but with a little bit of an adjustment, and you put your finger on the adjustment, which is that there’s a bit more of Nora apologizing. What is Nora doing there? Is she just shining Ellie on in order to buy herself some time, so she can throw some bloody water in her face and run away? Yeah. But everything she says is true. There is no lie that she tells. The truth is that it did impact her. She does hear screams at night. She does feel bad for Ellie. She does think no one should ever see somebody die like that. She also believes that little bitch got what he deserved because he did a horrible thing to the people she cared about deeply. That’s why I think that scene worked so well. It’s why you can see, on Bella’s side, their response to it is so visceral because it’s all true. There is no sense that she’s manipulating Ellie. Nora is being honest. I also love the way that (cinematographer) Ksenia [Sereda] photographed that. Ksenia is so good at taking a space and creating light through a practical source. In this case, it was a clunky work light that put them both in light and darkness. I love that scene.

You really can feel, in that moment, how all those things can be true at once.

MAZIN: Yes, all those things can be true. That’s why I love this story. That’s why I love telling this story. I love The Last of Us. I love the games. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s a hard thing for us to imagine holding two opposing thoughts in our head at the same time, and yet that’s what makes us who we are. We demand consistency from each other, but we don’t experience it ourselves. We are always some combination of loving and hating, of embracing and fearing, of forgiving and judging, all the time.

'The Last of Us' Showrunner Craig Mazin Explains Why It Was the Right Time to Introduce Spores

"If it's happening down there, at some point, it's going to happen up there."

Nora’s fate is particularly interesting because we now have these airborne spores, but that leads her to realize that because Ellie is not being affected by them, that immune girl she heard about is actually real. What was it like to figure out how best to introduce airborne spores?

MAZIN: Our whole thing about the spores is that we thought, when we do them, we want to do them because they need to happen with the way the story is functioning. There is this notion of descent and what is lurking beneath as we go deeper down. They mention B1, B2, and B3. We never hear about B3, so maybe we’ll find out what’s down there next season, but B2 is really bad. It was important to show the spores. We think of Cordyceps as villainous because it takes us over and makes us do stuff. It can do worse than that. It can keep you alive just to breathe spores out. There’s a sense of, “Okay, if it’s happening down there, at some point, it’s going to happen up there. And when it happens up there, it’s over.” The idea of just being an incubator for your enemies is horrifying to me. It’s very visceral and classic. It’s going to go great. But also, it was a way for Nora to realize instantly, just like how Dina realized instantly in the game, who Ellie is.

We were sitting on the floor with Tati in this grimy hallway, and I try to write as much into the script as I can, but you imagine growing up and you’re taught that Jesus is real and you believe in Jesus. And then, as you grow older, you understand it’s more of a parable and he’s not really up there in the sky. And then, here, moments from your death, you see him and you realize he is real and it is mind-blowing. It is mind-blowing to her. It’s why we go all the way back to episode one, in the very beginning with, “I heard rumors about some girl,” and Mel cuts her off with, “Those aren’t true. It’s not true because it’s not possible.” Well, here it is. It is true.” What Nora thought Joel’s crime was is now so much worse than even what she thought. One of my favorite moments is when she tells Ellie this thing that we assume Ellie doesn’t know. Finally, Ellie hears the truth of what Joel and Ellie says, “I know.”

There’s the moment in episode six when Ellie decides to call Joel out with Gail about what happened to Eugene. There are so many things going on there because Joel understands that maybe you should help someone feel better about what happened to someone that they lost and couldn’t do anything about losing. But then, Ellie essentially calls him a liar, which hurts Gail and Joel and everybody. Does she do that out of anger? Is she just young? How did you see that moment?

MAZIN: My feeling was that it was important for Ellie to come to understand that her suspicions were correct, but at some point, you need more than suspicions. Joel’s story doesn’t add up, as you roll it around. As you get older, you start to poke holes in it. It’s a story that works on a 14-year-old who’s terrified to think that maybe it’s not true. But now, you’re 17, 18, 19 and you know it’s not right, but you don’t have proof. In the game, Ellie actually travels to Salt Lake and finds evidence. We felt like there might be a way to be a little more contained within the story we were telling. We went down this path with Eugene very specifically to get to a place where Joel was going to promise her something, and then break the promise, and she was going to go, “There’s the evidence I needed. That’s what I needed. That is your lying face. Now I know." She is absolutely furious with him because she finally has 100% certainty that he betrayed her and did something horrible and lied to her for years and possibly put the world at risk in a very ugly way. She doesn’t care about the collateral damage. She doesn’t care. She should be upset. “We should all hate you.” That’s her mindset. It is pure anger. Everyone who watched the first episode and was like, “Why is Ellie being such a jerk?,” hopefully now gets it. And then, of course, we arrive at something that is a little more beautiful than that.

'The Last of Us' Showrunner Craig Mazin Says Joel and Ellie's Porch Conversation Had One Magical Take

"He understands that he has to say it at the cost of losing her."

There’s also the moment with Joel and Ellie on the porch, after she knows what happened and they’re both looking at each other and tears are coming down their faces. Ellie says that she doesn’t think she can forgive him, but she’d like to try. How did you feel about that moment? Are you someone who gets as emotional as we do, watching things? What was it like to see what the actors gave to a moment like that?

MAZIN: When I was writing that scene, it was an interesting blend of game and new. In the game version of it, there is this other aspect where she’s asking him these questions and forcing him, crime by crime, to say he did it, one after another. Were there other immune people? Could they have made a cure? Did you kill all the people? Did you kill Marlene? And he has to say yes to all of it. This goes back to episode one and this is why we have to plan everything before I start writing. What does Gail tell him? “You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud.” She says the thing that she’s scared of and says, “There it’s in the air. I can’t take it back, but maybe now there’s a chance that you and I can make things right.”

Here, at last, he understands that he has to say it at the cost of losing her, and he is for sure convinced that she is going to walk away from him forever. That was an interesting scene because there was one magical take where we were like, “Let’s just have them go for it, all the way.” Usually, when you’re shooting these scenes, you actually try to pull people back because you don’t want it too big. But Bella and Pedro don’t have that gear. Their natural gear is to be underplaying in a very real, cool way. It’s very rare to see them engage upward like that. It was like, “This would be the time to do it, if we’re going to do it, and if it goes too far, it goes too far.” But it destroyed us, all of us.

It was hard because Bella and Pedro are so close and had become so good at taking care of each other. It’s a hard shoot. It’s a long shoot. Both seasons were. There’s a lot of emotionally demanding work, but really what it comes down to is just a lot of days and time. You spend so much time with somebody, and they just came to rely upon each other and love each other. When you can feel goodbye coming, it just starts to get into your bones. These shows don’t come along very often. This kind of experience doesn’t come along very often. Sometimes it catches you when you’re in your 40s, and sometimes it catches you when you’re a teenager. It’s hard to say how the world works, but for the two of them, they have lived through this pretty crazy cultural moment with this show, and you could feel it.

The finale for Season 2 obviously doesn’t wrap everything up. Looking ahead to Season 3, why did you decide to end the story where you did? Did you have to think about how the end of Season 2 would affect Season 3?

MAZIN: We always think ahead. We thought ahead to Season 3 and Season 4, to try to get as much visibility as we can, so that we don’t end up in a situation where we’re sitting down and getting into details for a season and then going, “Oh, man, if only we hadn’t had that person say that one line or be in that spot or wear that jacket, this would be so much cooler.” So, we really do try to think things through fundamentally. The challenge for our first season was, how do we tell this big story in a way that’s complete and doable within an amount of time and with the budget we have? And with this season, it was, “Okay, this source material goes way beyond one season.”

Now, we’re actually in more of a traditional cliffhangery mode, where you’re telling a story, and then you end the season with something that says, “Whoa, this is going to change a whole bunch of things, and we’ll see you when we get back and pick it up from there.” We ask ourselves a lot of questions and we think about what we ought to do when we think about what the narrative that exists affords us and that we should do. I’m always thinking about, what are the things that only The Last of Us does? Let’s do those as much as we can. And then, you go for it and you make your decisions and mostly just try as best as you can to think about the audience experience and how they’re going to feel when they arrive at the end of something. Hopefully, we set them up to want to return when we come back for the next run.

'The Last of Us' Showrunner Craig Mazin Believes They'll Need a Season 4 to Finish Telling the Story

"Hopefully, we'll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth."

After seeing the way that the story was laid out this season, it feels like if you do another season of seven or eight episodes, you would definitely need a Season 4 to wrap things up in some way. Otherwise, you’d have to have a much longer Season 3.

MAZIN: Yeah, and it would take forever. There are natural perforations in the narrative where you can go, “Okay, let’s tear it here.” I think there’s a decent chance that Season 3 will be longer than Season 2, just because the manner of that narrative and the opportunities it affords us are a little different. The thing about Joel’s death is that it’s so impactful. It’s such a narrative nuclear bomb that it’s hard to wander away from it. We can’t really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story. I’m not sure that will necessarily be true for Season 3. I think we’ll have a little more room there. But certainly, there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season. Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome.

You’ve given us these little bits of the W.L.F. and the Seraphites, and it feels like there is so much more there.

MAZIN: I will say, to people who are wondering, “Are we supposed to know more about these factions? Am I missing something? Did you guys just forget to tell a whole bunch of story?” The answer is that everything has been thought through carefully. No, you haven’t gotten all the information you deserve. Yes, the information will be coming. We did this all by design.