The HBO live-action version of the Naughty Dog game The Last of Us has been very successful with every episode released.
With the swift dethronement of House of the Dragon, the series quickly rose to the top of HBO Max’s streaming debut, and a second season has already been ordered.
A lot of people have been praising The Last of Us for how it brought the game to life and for consistently producing top-notch episodes.
All that being said, Joel underwent a significant alteration in the most recent episode of the show, changing how his anxiousness manifested itself in the video game.
In the latest The Last of Us Podcast episode, co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin explained why the changes they made for the HBO series were needed.
“We wanted to explore the impact of what has happened to Joel in the wake of Henry and Sam, in spite of time having passed and it has shown when he exits the cabin and then seizes his chest. What is happening is Joel is having a panic attack and he does not know why. It is your body telling you that you are in terrible danger but you do not understand why. This episode’s about Joel coming to terms with how terrified he is that she is going to die and it is going to be his fault. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that as many times Joel has helped her, he has failed her. And those are the things that he dwells on.
“Like many of us, if you have core trauma the way that Joel does, the things you do well are discounted but you’ll magnifiy your failures and your tragedies until they threaten to consume you. He’s convinced what is best for Ellie is to let her go but it is to protect himself. In the game, the camera’s quite far back. You swing it around the character, there is no way to see what is going on in the faces so we just did it with dialogue. We made Joel distant, like their relationship’s gone backwards. Here, we can have some intimate close up moments with the camera, we can show it in subtle ways. Ellie’s reaction is like when you look at your parents who have protected you since forever, you do not want to accept that they have any sort of weakness.”
During a previous interview for Empire Magazine, Mazin shared that they wanted to focus more on the characters’ humanity than on the monster aspect of the story.
In other words, this is a show exploring people and their struggles in such an extreme setting, first and foremost, and this obviously includes mental health.
HBO Max currently has The Last of Us’s first five episodes available for streaming. The first season of the show will consist of nine episodes, with new episodes airing once per week.