This newsletter contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2.
Earlier this week, I met up with a good friend who reminded me about an educational PBS series that we used to watch as kids. It was called Between the Lions. Our chat incited the perfect combination of my brain cells to recall a recurring sketch from the show about an adventurer named Cliff Hanger. While hanging precariously from a cliff, the character would teach children how to read using his handy survivor manual. The running gag was that no matter his solution, Cliff Hanger would always end up hanging from the same cliff.
Though the segment helped children learn what vowels sounded like when pushed together, it also taught me TV conventions from an early age. However Cliff worked his way out of this episode's trap, we knew that our hero would survive, only to find himself in yet another cliff-hanger the next week. That's just how TV works. But occasionally, really great TV can floor audiences by subverting those expectations entirely.
Enter: The Last of Us episode 2. Throw whatever you know about TV straight out the window. This week, our cliff-hanger is the heartbreaking realization that Joel (Pedro Pascal) is not coming back. Ever. No need to type "Is Joel really dead?" into Google this morning. It's the truth. The Last of Us will continue without Pedro Pascal.
I won't lie and say that I didn't know this was coming. I'm an honest man. Though I've never played the video game that the HBO drama is based on, Joel dies early in The Last of Us Part II (2020) as well. I remember it as a tough moment for gamers. Surely, the discourse around the highly controversial decision is just as maddening for everyone who watched it on TV this Sunday.
For devoted fans of the show, the feeling is likely slowly sinking in now that The Last of Us is a very different story than audiences envisioned after season 1. Change—and certainly a change of this magnitude—is scary.
So, we talked to The Last of Us star Gabriel Luna—who plays Joel's brother, Tommy—about how the series moves on from here. He gave our associate entertainment editor, Eric Francisco, quite the poetic response.
"I've been to a lot of funerals in my life," Luna said. "I try to frame it as: Their cage has opened. Now they're free. Their spirit can go back to the pool of creation, and rejoin The One. There's a lot of hope in the idea of death for me. One of my mottoes is 'Memento Mori,' so that I could live well and fully but always remember death. Then, you can appreciate life on a daily basis."
Luna clearly thought about this moment a lot. The 42-year-old is a big fan of the games, and he knew how important his Last of Us character's reaction would be to his brother's passing. As he told us, Luna based a lot of the scene on when he abruptly lost a close family member in real life.
"I drew a lot on my cousin Adrian," he said. "He was 44 years old and I lost him to liver cancer—just drawing on those emotions and memories. There's this scene that follows the events of the second episode. I won't get into too heavily, but there's a transition that happens, a passing of the torch so to speak. It felt like, not only was it happening in the story, but in our work and in our production. It's exciting moving forward. It's a terribly tragic episode. But now the world expands." You can read the rest of the interview here.
But how does a show maintain its fanbase after killing off its main character? What do we do when TV doesn't leave Cliff Hanger dangling from another cliff?
Well, showrunner Craig Mazin planned heavily for episode 2's massive shocker by turning to another HBO series that previously pulled it off. He called in Game of Thrones's Mark Mylod, who directed six episodes of the fantasy series.
"We're used to television shows hurting the people we love," Mazin told Esquire in our interview last week. "Game of Thrones knocked everyone on their ass when Sean Bean died and then two seasons later knocked everybody out on their ass again when they did the Red Wedding."
Our senior entertainment editor, Brady Langmann, didn't even bring up Game of Thrones when they spoke before the premiere. Mazin did, because he knows that's where your mind will likely drift to first. He's not wrong. But he's hopeful that—just like with Thrones—you'll stick with The Last of Us. One could argue that shocking moves such as Ned Stark's death and the Red Wedding only increased Thrones's critical acclaim thereafter. Even with a highly controversial finale, both moments eventually became shining blueprints that taught writers how to successfully subvert their audience's expectations.
"It is incredibly important that by the time you get to the end of a season, you feel deeply satisfied," Mazin continued. "Even though we like to provoke thought and we like to explore these deep themes, we believe in entertaining in the truest sense of the word. We hope people feel engaged."
Only time will tell.
You can read Esquire's full episode 2 recap here, as well as our deep-dives with Gabriel Luna and Craig Mazin.
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