The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 8, "When We Are in Need," now streaming on HBO and HBO Max.
The Last of Us creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann explained why Joel and Ellie's emotional reunion from the video games was different in the HBO adaptation.
"We didn't want it to happen with the fire around. The danger of the fire just felt a little different than it did in the game," Mazin and Druckmann said while speaking to The Last of Us Podcast. "There was also the question of, 'How does Joel get inside if the keys are on David? It was a little bit of a logic thing, too, and we wanted our Ellie to have completed it to the point where she could literally walk away on her own. I think it was important when the scene was constructed in the game, and I think it's the same for the show, that we want the audience – or the player – to think Joel is going to save Ellie, because that's what this character traditionally does."
The emotional reunion took place in Episode 8, "When We Are in Need," shortly after Ellie (Bella Ramsey) defeated the cannibalistic preacher David (Scott Shepherd). The scene between Ellie and David was celebrated online by fans shortly after it aired on HBO, with many calling for Ramsey to receive an Emmy for her performance in "When We Are in Need." While Ellie's brutal victory over David may have been difficult to watch for some viewers, Ramsey herself has stated that the scene was one of her favorites to film out of the entire production. "But those were some of my favorite days on set," she said. "That sounds really masochistic, but it's the scenes that break me that I love the most, in a way."
The Last of Us Reaches Its Brutal Conclusion
There is only one episode left in The Last of Us' first season, with Episode 9, "Look For The Light," set to air on March 12. HBO Max recently released a 30-second promo for the Season 1 finale, which offered fans a glimpse at Joel and Ellie’s arrival in Salt Lake City, where the Fireflies are trying to develop a cure for cordyceps infection. Despite the series remaining extremely faithful to its source material, specifically the eponymous 2013 video game, Ramsey has teased that the finale is "going to divide people massively -- massively," suggesting that the HBO adaptation may have a different ending than the video game.
Based on the Naughty Dog video game of the same name, The Last of Us is set 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed and overrun by fungus-infected monsters known as "Clickers." The series stars The Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal as Joel, a hardened survivor who is hired to smuggle Ramsey's Ellie, a teenage girl immune to the infection, out west in hopes that Ellie's immunity can be used to find a cure.
The ninth and final episode of The Last of Us Season 1 will air on HBO on Mar. 12.
Source: The Last of Us Podcast