The last of us Season two penultimate episode was almost entirely flashbacks in Joel’s life and Ellie together in Jackson. Some of them were torn off directly from the Last of us part II Video games, others are new for the series. The most important thing, however, was Joel’s last conversation and Ellie on his rear porch. If you have never played games (and remember, the television show broadcasts the story of the second game through three seasons, of which we have just finished the first third), you may not know that this scene was originally retained by players until the very end of the game, which means that viewers see it radically earlier. So why did the show made a huge change? According to the director of the series Neil Druckmann, the show of the show thought that this “would not work” to refuse viewers this moment for years. What I say: it’s shot shit.
Druckmann spoke of the scene alongside the Showrunner Craig Mazin and Part II The story led Halley Gross to the last episode of Last of us podcast. The weekly program gives fans a look behind the scenes on the manufacture of each episode, and this week, Druckmann explains how nervous it was to recreate the scene for the show. Because, he says, it is “the most important scene in history”. Yeah, it is Rosetta stone through which we interpret everything that happens The last of us part IISo the show needed to do things well. (I would say that they massacred it by having Pedro Pascal clarified and explain all that his character feels exhaustively, but I get lost.)
This scene is kept until the very end of The last of us part II Because it is supposed to recontextualize everything that is before. The player is enclosed by the full extent of Ellie’s motivations as she undergoes a violent transformation. Discovering gradually through flashbacks that the relationship of her and Joel had deteriorated over the years to the point that she does not contact with him is an essential part of the narrative structure of the game – but nothing comfortably explained her destructive spiral. It was previously unclear for the player during most of the story. So, recently discovered that she did her vendetta because she had lost the opportunity to reconcile with Joel, just as she opened up to the idea, is a heartbreaking revelation. We finally learn what made him switch to the edge at the very end. Now the show revealed it before the story was even halfway. Some (me) could say that it fundamentally undermines the narrative tension of history, so why move it? Here is what Druckmann has to say with more context:
“This porch scene, I was so nervous on this subject because once again, this scene is for me the most important scene in all history,” he said. “This is why, in the game, it is at the very end. One of the choices we made to do it, and the reason why we mentioned it, it is because we fear that it does not work if you were to wait for years to get this gain. And it was here, as we are on this trip with Ellie, it was appropriate to do it at this moment.”
It is a microcosm of the biggest problem of the season, for me. Constant exposure spills, the lack of subtext in writing and displacement around each revelation to ensure that all viewers are quickly on the same wavelength, some feel more comfortable. But I argue that this fundamentally reduces history to the knees, apparently because they did not want to force viewers to this same disconnect, the games thrive. If play players could barely endure this dissonance for more than 20 hours of video games, they are worried, how could viewers support it for years between the seasons? I would say that years of dissonance should have been the consequence of the adaptation of the game in several seasons, rather than treating the structure of the original material – which was at the heart of the way in which history was written – as a disadvantage that requires being written. But like me said in my summaryThis program seems to hell on the suppression of each spine of division of the source material, and the result is a much less daring and stimulating vision of the revenge tours of Ellie and Abby.
If HBO extends this story in three seasons, we are not even halfway through this adaptation, and we already know almost all twists and turns because we thought that the original structure “would not work”. The last of us part II was a source of division, but it was flawless. The show continues to punch and offers nothing in their place. It is not only a simple criticism of HBO not doing things exactly as they were in the game; It is because it seems that these decisions were made without considering how it could disentangle a story which was very deliberate in the way it was told.
Anyway, we have an episode until the end of the season, and the fans are already Prepare for what will come After seeing the overview of the final.
