Posted in: HBO, Max, TV | Tagged: the last of us

The Last of Us S02E03 Trailer; Mazin, Druckmann on [SPOILERS] Death

The Last of Us Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann on deciding when "The Very Bad Thing" should happen; S02E03 trailer released.

Whether you were familiar with the video game or read the rumblings on social media ever since live-action adaptation was first announced, you knew that "The Very Bad Thing" was most likely going to go down during the second season of HBO and Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann's Pedro Pascal (Joel) and Bella Ramsey (Ellie)-starring The Last of Us. But while most were expecting "The Very Bad Thing" to go down later in the season, they learned during tonight's episode that would not be the case. At this point, we're throwing on the "MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!" sign and throwing down an image spoiler buffer as we check out what Mazin and Druckmann had to share about the decision to have "The Very Bad Thing" happen so early in the second season.

If you were hoping Joel would escape his video game fate, we're sorry to report that he didn't. After saving Kaitlyn Dever's Abby from a wave of infected, Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) were led into a trap. After shooting Joel in the leg, Abby would go on to brutally beat Joel nearly to death. Tragically, Abby saved the final kill shot for Ellie (who tracked Joel only to be nearly beaten to death herself) to see. Noting that "every choice was on the table," Mazin and Druckmann shared with Variety what went into the decision to kill off Joel so early into the season.

"Ultimately, I think we needed just to settle back into the show. Because even in the game, there's like an hour or something before you get to this moment. But we also knew it needed to be early enough, because this is the inciting incident for this story. So yes, we always pick every permutation, but the later it got in the season, it just felt we were kind of dragging our feet instead of just getting to the meat of what the story is about," Druckmann shared.

Mazin continued, "There's a danger of tormenting people. It's not what we want to do. If people know it's coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don't know it's coming are going to find out it's coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn't shown up yet. Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people."

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