Behind the Scenes: The Last of Us II

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There is a version of episode 2 where the brutal death of a loved character isn’t quite so extreme. But they chose not to go there, explains editor Timothy A Good.

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The makers of action adventure The Last of Us broke their own rules in depicting the tragic death of one of its main characters, according to the show’s lead editor Timothy A Good, ACE. Episode two of the second season is already notorious for showing one of the most brutal of on-screen deaths but there was a version where the audience wasn’t put through as much emotional torture.

“Normally we don’t show the moment of violence,” Good explains. “Normally we cut away and show reaction from the character’s perspective. We tried that version. Craig [showrunner Craig Mazin] said, ‘What if we break our rule for the first time? It's going to be even more shocking if we position the audience as Ellie’.”

Good won a Primetime Emmy for his work on the first season of HBO’s video game adaptation and returns as lead editor, also with a co-producer credit, for the second outing.

Fans of the game will already know the outcome and the script by Mazin and video game creator Neil Druckmann doesn’t shy away. The question was how intense that death scene should be.

“My job as editor is to present everything and the kitchen sink of these sequences so they are the largest, most extreme version that I can possibly give, and then we delete our way to success,” says Good.

The show’s emotional heart has been built around the relationship between feisty teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and adoptive father Joel (Pedro Pascal) battling through a post-apocalyptic landscape. In episode 202 ‘Through the Valley’ Joel is captured by a rebel militia intent on revenge. Can Ellie get to him in time?

Creative discussions centred around how much the audience could take of Joel’s torture while knowing what is probably going to happen. A decision was made to compress the time it took for Ellie to get into the cabin to effectively put the audience out of their misery.

“We don’t want to prolong the audience’s suffering, at the same time we want to make sure that she wasn't teleporting into the scene,” says Good. “We don’t want to go straight from her running to all of a sudden opening the door. We still had to see her go through all the beats of getting to the lodge, getting into the lodge, going up the stairs, but everything was propulsively edited so that we only used the tiniest clips to follow her perspective and movement through that space, but doing so in the fastest possible way to get her up there.”

Once inside, there were further discussions about how much the audience should see. This is a show that has until now preferred to show extreme violence happening off screen.

“There was a version of the scene where we actually don't see the death of Joel,” Good reveals. “We see it from Ellie’s perspective only. We see behind the golf club as it goes down, and you see her face in the distance, and then we close in to Ellie reacting. There was a version where her reaction is so sharp then when it happens she screams immediately.”

Mazin wanted to break the rule. “We see the impact from her perspective. It's still a wide shot, not close-up, and still from the character's point of view, but now we are seeing the entire motion of that event play out.”

The scene hits as hard as it does because of the audience’s connection with the characters. Reconnecting with those characters, five years on in story terms, and two years since Season One finished, was the job of episode 201 which Good also edited.

“The first step is we see Ellie as someone who no longer needs help. We see her take down a larger guy with a specific martial arts move. Then we see Joel a little differently too. He’s still taking care of younger people only this time he has another surrogate daughter in Dina whom he treats in a similar fashion to Ellie. We see the close connection he has with her as a way of reintroducing the kind of person he is.

“This is important when we go to episode two because Dina is in the room when Joel is about to die. And because she's in the room, he can't do anything to defend himself. If he does try, he risks losing her, and that’s something he would never do. These nuances are introduced in episode one and hit home in episode 2.”

The first episode also deliberately withholds a scene with Joel and Ellie together until near the end when Joel intervenes to protect her at a dance.

“The way it is written and staged emphasises this huge gulf between them,” Good says. “We see how Joel still tries to protect his ‘daughter’ and then he realises that he has poked the bear. Her reaction is so above and beyond what just happened that we know there’s a much deeper rift between them.”

The rift is the lie that Joel told Ellie during the season one finale. Joel saved Ellie from certain death but masked the truth from her in an attempt to save her from further harm. It’s clear that Ellie has doubts about his version of events.

“There's a moment that they might talk about it, when she comes home and sees him on the porch,” says Good. “He's probably hoping that she will open up to him. He’s fixed the strings on her guitar as if to say ‘I did this for you, let's talk about it’ but she chooses to ignore the invitation.

“Setting all of that up in #201 was what allowed episode two to hit as hard as it does because you recognise that neither Joel or Ellie have the closure that we hope that they have. That's life. You don’t always get the opportunities to rectify things.”

There’s even more going on in episode two, not least of which is a massive Game of Thrones style attack in the snow by the infected on a community of vulnerable humans.

“The pressure of that battle sequence was in making sure that it was logical and told from the character’s point of view. In particular, we hope that you felt what Tommy [Joel’s brother, played by Gabriel Luna] was feeling - that he's almost alone against the horde of infected and we're following all the things that he's experiencing and witnessing.”

This version we see is different from the original cut in which the battle sequence was intercut with  the log cabin sequence.  “At a certain point, we realised that no one wants to go back to the battle because the battle was no longer character-based and is now a distraction from the story of Joel and Ellie. We care so much about Joel and Ellie that once we get them into the lodge we don’t actually want to leave them.

“So, we shifted everything from the battle and frontloaded it all to create a miniature operatic sequence. In theory, we could end on a great cliffhanger and not see what happens up at the lodge.

“Instead, what I think we do best on Last of Us, is we go to the intimate details, the intimate stories and the things that bind the characters together that hopefully the audience is wanting to see. We wanted to save all of that for the finale of this episode.”