Episode 5 - “Feel Her Love”

Summary

HBO's The Last of Us Podcast: Episode 5 - "Feel Her Love" Summary

Release Date: May 12, 2025
Host: Troy Baker
Guests: Series Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann

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Introduction

In Episode 5 of HBO's official companion podcast for The Last of Us, host Troy Baker delves deep into the intricacies of the episode titled "Feel Her Love." Joined by series showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, they unpack the episode's pivotal moments, explore character developments, and shed light on the creative decisions that bridge the acclaimed video game to its television adaptation.

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Episode Plot Breakdown

"Feel Her Love" commences in a hospital setting, where a fierce character portrayed by Alana Ubach confronts a crowd of WLF soldiers. This marks a significant evolution from her earlier portrayal as a civilian revolutionary to a high-ranking officer within the militarized organization. The episode introduces a chilling mystery surrounding the welded stairwell door leading to the basement levels, hinting at unseen horrors beneath.

A pivotal moment occurs when Hanrahan, the character in question, sacrifices her son to contain a deadly spore outbreak within the hospital's basement (B2). This act of selflessness parallels Joel's past decisions, emphasizing the theme of sacrifice that runs deeply through the narrative.

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Character Development

Ellie:
Ellie's journey in this episode is marked by intense emotional and psychological turmoil. After experiencing a moment of respite and connection with Dina—a scene beautifully underscored by Ellie's attempt to play "Future Days" by Pearl Jam—Ellie's dark impulses resurface as she pursues Nora into the infected-filled hospital. Troy Baker articulates Ellie's internal conflict:

"What happens if I start tiptoeing through the graveyard of that memory and it's the, oh, no, I've gone too far and I have to stop immediately with just those words." [17:26]

This relapse signifies Ellie's struggle with her newfound role as a protector and the burdens it entails, mirroring Joel's relentless pursuit driven by personal loss.

Dina:
Dina's character showcases resilience and strategic planning. However, her pregnancy introduces vulnerabilities and shifts the dynamic between her and Ellie. The episode highlights Dina's internal conflicts and the sacrifices she's compelled to make to ensure their survival.

Hanrahan:
Transitioning from a revolutionary to a militaristic leader, Hanrahan embodies the moral complexities of leadership in dire times. Her decisive act of sealing her son to contain the spores underscores her internal conflict between personal loss and collective safety.

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Adaptation from Game to TV

Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann discuss the nuanced differences in adapting the game's narrative elements to television. A significant focus is on the portrayal of "spoors," a concept expanded upon from the game to enhance the storyline's depth. Mazin explains:

"The function of the spores in the game... we needed another mechanic, a narrative mechanic to show with evidence Ellie is breathing this stuff and nothing happens to her." [04:11]

This creative decision not only preserves Ellie's immunity but also enriches the show's atmospheric tension by introducing new threats that evolve over time.

Visual and Set Design:
The team meticulously recreated iconic locations from the game, such as the Lakeview Hospital auditorium, ensuring authenticity while introducing subtle aging to reflect the passage of time. Mazin praises the attention to detail:

"There's a look on her face. I suspect that this elevator will come back, perhaps in another season, but she ends up on the dreaded B2." [47:40]

Sound Design:
The replication of the Seraphites' whistling communication showcases the collaborative effort between the show's audio team and the game's original creators. Druckmann highlights the integration:

"The audio team on the show got together with the audio team of the game and they explained it to them." [37:19]

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Thematic Exploration

Sacrifice and Empathy:
Central to "Feel Her Love" is the exploration of sacrifice, embodied by Hanrahan's heartbreaking decision to contain the spores at the cost of her son's life. Mazin reflects on this moral dilemma:

"This is like... a mother making this choice... it's very mythological. Every culture's mythology, somewhere in there has a story of sacrifice, and usually the sacrifice of a child." [07:12]

The episode delves into the depths of empathy, questioning how far individuals will go to protect those they love and the moral boundaries they might cross in the process.

Trauma and Resilience:
Ellie's traumatic experiences resurface, challenging her resilience. The juxtaposition of her moments of joy with Dina against her subsequent descent into violence paints a complex portrait of a young woman grappling with immense loss and responsibility.

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Production Insights

Happy Accidents and Creative Serendipity:
The episode features unexpected sound design elements born from serendipitous occurrences during production. Mazin recounts a moment where a bass rumble, unintentionally recorded nearby, was seamlessly integrated into a critical scene:

"Tim turned to me and he said, I didn't put a bass rumble in... it was the happiest accident." [15:11]

Such instances highlight the collaborative and adaptive nature of the show's production process.

Set Authenticity:
Commitment to authenticity is evident in the meticulous recreation of in-game environments. From the precise carpet patterns in the Lakeview Hospital auditorium to the atmospheric design of the abandoned dairy plant, every detail serves to immerse viewers in the post-apocalyptic world of The Last of Us. Mazin emphasizes the importance of these elements for fans:

"There's no reason to fix the carpet. It's perfect. And that's what I want because I'M a fan." [18:22]

Visual Effects:
The portrayal of the Seraphites incorporates subtle yet impactful visual effects, such as the reflective eyes of stalkers, designed to be both eerie and grounded in biological plausibility. Mazin explains:

"The way that dogs or sheep or other animals like this at night, their retinas will reflect back white. And something has happened inside the stalkers to do something similar to their eyes." [28:50]

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Notable Moments and Quotes

• Troy Baker on Episode Preferences:

  "Last week I made a very bold claim and I said that episode four of season two was my favorite episode... Feel Her Love." [01:10]

• Craig Mazin on Hanrahan's Sacrifice:

  "She doesn't hesitate. She sacrifices her child for everyone else." [06:56]

• Neil Druckmann on Spores and Empathy:

  "If we don't have empathy, if we cannot figure out how to be invested in the other person winning, then we are all going to lose." [47:40]

• Ellie's Emotional Struggle:

  "I just need Dina to somehow survive in that cage and not get ripped apart." [28:50]

• Seraphites' Ritualistic Violence:

  "They are extraordinarily scary. And should any of our characters end up on the wrong side of a rope with these guys, it's going to be very, very bad." [40:36]

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Conclusion

Episode 5, "Feel Her Love," serves as a cornerstone in the second season of The Last of Us television series, deepening the narrative's emotional complexity and expanding the lore beyond the original game. Through insightful discussions, Troy Baker, Craig Mazin, and Neil Druckmann illuminate the episode's thematic richness, character evolutions, and the meticulous craftsmanship that brings this post-apocalyptic world to life. As the podcast concludes, listeners are left eagerly anticipating the unfolding of these intricate storylines in future episodes.

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For more detailed discussions and episode breakdowns, tune into the next installment of HBO's The Last of Us podcast.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Unknown Speaker]

I'll go back if you want and I'll keep going if you want. There's no right answer. If I die, it's on me. It won't be your fault. So what do you want to do?

[Troy Baker]

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the official podcast for the HBO Originals series the Last of Us. I'm Troy Baker and I'm joined once again by series showrunners Craig Mazin.

[Craig Mazin]

Well, hello Troy.

[Troy Baker]

And Neil Druckmann.

[Neil Druckmann]

Hi Troy.

[Troy Baker]

Last week I made a very bold claim and I said that episode four of season two was my favorite episode. I then quickly followed up by saying, I have no doubt that I'm probably going to eat my words. And if you could see us, you would see I have set before me a plate, a napkin, a fork and a spoon. And I am prepared to eat this because this is my favorite episode. Feel Her Love. It was written by Craig and directed by Steven Williams. And we're gonna find out what these two guys think about it as well. But this is my fair warning to all listeners, as I do before every episode. Watch the show. If you haven't seen this episode yet, you you cannot complain and say spoilers because here's your warning. So stop the podcast now. Consider yourself warned. Go watch the show, come back and join us as we dive into this week's episode. Feel Her Love. The episode starts in a hospital and we see the woman who conspired with Jeffrey Wright's character in the previous episode walking through a crowd of WLF soldiers. She's played by Alana Ubach and she is fierce.

[Craig Mazin]

Very small, but very fierce. So a little bit like Ben Aller's character from last week, the rookie who's went from ephedra soldier to this WLF soldier soldier. We see that Hanrahan, that's the character's name, went from a citizen who was a revolutionary to a high ranking officer in a militarized organization. And there is a mystery here. She clearly outranks all these guys, but it's not like they're backing away from her here. When she shows up, they're sort of Looking at her defiantly as if to say, yeah, we did the thing that you are upset about. There is a stairwell door that has been welded shut. Not just by a little, by a lot. And they don't back away from her, they don't back down. She turns around and she heads into a room to have a one on one conversation with someone else.

[Unknown Speaker]

He said, it's in the air. See, listen. I knew it wasn't an event or we would have all been infected weeks ago. So I scrambled my other team and.

[Craig Mazin]

We locked the only door to B2.

[Unknown Speaker]

And we locked the only door to be one. And we did what Leon said, we sealed them in.

[Troy Baker]

You have said for the last several episodes, it's coming, it's coming. And alas, here we are. Talk to me about spores and how they're different from what we saw in the game and what we're seeing here.

[Neil Druckmann]

The function of the spores in the game, why we had them in the game, is we wanted something to show that Ellie is immediately immune because when she gets bitten, you don't know how. We showed in the show over and over again until the whole night has passed, hours have passed, and you see that the person hasn't turned because that's how long it takes some people to turn. It could take up to two days. So we needed another mechanic, a narrative mechanic to show with evidence Ellie is breathing this stuff and nothing happens to her. So there's a scene coming later that's, you know, from the game that we needed. I guess I'll jump ahead with spoilers. We needed Nora to know immediately that Ellie is that girl. And that was the impetus to start the conversation. Well, we really do need spores. How do we do them? How do we almost reinvent them in some way, even from the game? And there's a really cool mechanism there of how the air gets filled with spores that I love. It's one of those. I'm like, oh, God damn it, I wish we did that in the game. I'll say one other thing, which is just like the. Sometimes you get these happy accidents of like, we didn't do spores because, you know, a lot of different reasons that we talked about in the past, like not wanting to have our actors constantly in gas masks. But now we have this season an escalation of the outbreak. Because of that, we see the stalkers, we see that they evolve and now there's this new threat and it's like this thing is not static. It's constantly fighting back as people are becoming complacent. And they feel like, oh, we could live under these conditions. It changes underneath them. In this instance, literally underneath them.

[Craig Mazin]

The challenge for us was to figure out where the spores would make sense. And then also, what could we do to make them even more dangerous? Actually, not just a little, but a lot, or at least more menacing and threatening. And what we struck on was the idea of the basement. And we have a hospital with three basement levels. B1, B2, and B3. And we have learned that there was nothing on B1. And we now learn from this conversation that there are spores on B2. This woman sent her son down and she had a choice to make because her son says, it's in the air, seal us in. Now, that choice is not dissimilar from the choice Joel has. Do I sacrifice my child to save everybody else, or do I put my child first on the off chance that maybe he'll be okay and put everybody else at risk? And here we see a mother making a very different decision. She doesn't hesitate. She sacrifices her child for everyone else.

[Troy Baker]

The way that you chose to do that. You have this entire conversation, and it's. As Hanrahan leaves, she goes, I'm sorry about your son. And it just cuts away. It's the nastiest thing to do.

[Craig Mazin]

Thanks. Well, I mean, there are so many ways to do these things. And it's not that we're trying to be intentionally cruel to people, but emotionally, maybe a little bit. I mean, maybe a little. Because we're being cruel to the characters too.

[Troy Baker]

Sure.

[Craig Mazin]

In the end, what we're trying to do is invite the audience to feel, at least in small part, what this woman must have felt. And part of the way is to shock them. Because in my mind, when I watch that sequence, I think, oh, she might be talking about her husband. That's what I feel. That's my instinct. She's talking about her husband. But I would never presume to think she was talking about her son. And that circles back to this notion of motherhood and how a mother made this choice. It's very mythological. Every culture's mythology, somewhere in there has a story of sacrifice, and usually the sacrifice of a child, which is the most brutal kind. And to see that there are people who would make that other choice. And we don't condemn her quite far from it, if you understand what spores are.

[Neil Druckmann]

No, she made the most selfless of sacrifices.

[Craig Mazin]

There's also an introduction here of a concept. And the concept is that there is depth under this building. And we now know that there are horrors on B2. If we have not yet seen them, we understand that they're there. But note, nobody knows what's on B3. Just leaving that out there.

[Neil Druckmann]

I think some people who play the game might know.

[Craig Mazin]

They might have a guess.

[Troy Baker]

But that's how we start this entire episode. After the opening credits, we were back in 2029 Seattle. We're in day two, and Dina explains to Ellie how they're going to get to Lakeview Hospital.

[Neil Druckmann]

Wait, before we move on, I have a question. I'm gonna take over this from you, Troy.

[Troy Baker]

Go for it, buddy.

[Craig Mazin]

Ooh, this is exciting.

[Troy Baker]

We're off the rails.

[Neil Druckmann]

Craig, when you were writing that scene, were you channeling Chernobyl? Cause I get a very Chernobyl vibe from it. Two people in a room smoking a threat underneath. People have to go underground to, like, almost an invisible threat.

[Craig Mazin]

I wasn't conscious of it. I think probably it's one of those cases where it's just that I'm the same guy. But the concept of the basement levels is taken, of course, directly from you, from the game. What I do love to talk about, I guess, are the practical. So maybe the most Chernobylly part of that is the blueprints. So one of the things that I like to think about is, okay, if someone's going to say, we can't afford to lose this hospital, you're telling me there's airborne infection. We have to really believe that it's down there and it's okay and it's safe. And so they go through it in a sort of scientific way. No one else has gotten hurt. We know it wasn't in the vents, or else we would have been sick weeks ago. It is contained because I sacrificed my son, because we sealed it in. And then a very human thing, and I guess a very Chernobyl ish thing. Hanrahan says will tell only those who need to know. This is how humans go about these things, and it is incredibly arrogant. But what can you do? I mean, the bottom line is, once you know it's there, what can you do? It's not like leaving the building is going to help you. If it gets out, it gets out. It's in the air, everywhere.

[Neil Druckmann]

That said, Shor, you may continue. Thank you.

[Craig Mazin]

Dude.

[Troy Baker]

I live for the interruptions. Are you kidding me?

[Craig Mazin]

It's funny you ask about these asking questions. That's all I do with Neil. I ask. So as we go into our exploration of what's going to come next in season three, Neil, brace yourself. The questioning is about to begin again I ask so many questions. Not only, okay, well, what does that mean? Or what? But why did you do this? Why did you do that? What was the thinking there?

[Neil Druckmann]

What else did you consider?

[Craig Mazin]

What else did you consider? Was there stuff that went in between that you weren't able to fit in? And it's part of the way you get to something exciting, I think, is just as a fan is getting as much under the hood as you can get. And I'm lucky because I've got the guy.

[Neil Druckmann]

By the way, the answer is usually, here's why it didn't work for us. Now let's interrogate it. Maybe it could work in this version, in this medium.

[Craig Mazin]

Right.

[Neil Druckmann]

That's where we kind of just unearth things that, again, maybe we couldn't make it work, but now we have a second chance at doing it.

[Troy Baker]

I'll ask this. How far down have you gone before where it's like, oh, no, this doesn't work.

[Craig Mazin]

I'm not sure that we ever have gotten that far down like that.

[Neil Druckmann]

Well, once we've gone pretty far, like, let's say, editing, we might say, hey, I have an idea of what could make it better.

[Craig Mazin]

Right.

[Neil Druckmann]

I think so. Then it's more like kind of tweaking. And there's actually something in this episode that we had a lot of conversation about, which is the song Ellie plays. And that was something that, you know, we changed pretty late in editing based on multiple conversations Craig and I had.

[Troy Baker]

Let's get into that moment. So you're talking about when Ellie is exploring the auditorium where they've kind of made their ad hoc base camp, Right? The band. What was the name of the band?

[Craig Mazin]

Sick Habit.

[Neil Druckmann]

Sick Habit. Do you want a story of where that comes from? Sick Habit.

[Troy Baker]

Yeah, absolutely. That's the only reason why we're here.

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah.

[Neil Druckmann]

There was a moment in time where I wanted to do webcomics, because that was a thing. My website was sickhabit.com because I just had this, like. I felt like this compulsion to create was just a sickness that I just can't get rid of. I think every artist kind of feels that way. Anyways, years later, we needed a name for a band in the game. I'm like, oh, I got something. Sick Habit. So now it made it into an HBO show.

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah, it's canon.

[Troy Baker]

We see the stage set for what would have been, no doubt, this beautiful performance.

[Craig Mazin]

Frozen in Time.

[Troy Baker]

Frozen in time Ellie picks up the guitar. She begins to play Pearl Jam's Future Days.

[Unknown Speaker]

If I ever were to lose you.

[Troy Baker]

This sound that begins to swell as we hear that heartbeat begin and we feel the trauma, but she stops herself. I want to talk about how you guys decided to create this moment, because it's stunning.

[Craig Mazin]

What we wanted to feel was Ellie aching for Joel there that she had had this night before where her heart explodes into romance, and she has this beautiful morning with Dina. And as she walks away from Dina, even before the scene, Dina's like Ellie and just grins at her, and she grins back. It's his love. And then, first of all, credit to Neil, because there were a lot of different options here, and I was sort of going down a different path of what Ellie would play. But Neil made a great argument that shorter is better because we've already seen Ellie play a full song, and it's not like she's playing to anyone here. And that this phrase would have a deeper meaning. And, of course, we will see how that develops. And that was absolutely the right call on both sides of it. But as the camera's moving around and we're looking for a way to imply that the darkness inside of Ellie is reemerging that need to punish. This very strange thing happened in the editing room. So I'm watching this with Tim Good, our editor, and as the camera moves around, there's this low bass rumble that begins, and then it finishes as the camera moves. And I said, tim, that bass rumble that you put in is genius. And he turned to me and he said, I didn't put a bass rumble in.

[Troy Baker]

What are you talking about?

[Craig Mazin]

That came from two doors down where Emily Mendez was working on editing the seventh episode and happened to have this very bassy thing happen that went through the walls. Shut your mouth. I kid you not. And I was like, what? So we went down the hallway, got the sound, went back, put it in, and then when we went to the mixing stage, we were like, guys, hear this sound? This. This is what we're putting in there. It's one of those moments I love being able to not. The only credit I can take is going identify the happy accident as happy. Other than that, it was the happiest accident.

[Neil Druckmann]

It speaks to just this process, which is like, you always have to be open to a new, better idea, always. Until the very end, until it's taken away from you. You have to keep being open. Can I iterate it? Can I plus it? And that's what we do. Just over and over again until it's done, as we just keep plusing it and plusing it and plusing it.

[Craig Mazin]

You Dream of moments like that where some little bit of serendipity drops a gift in your hands. Because serendipity, unhappy serendipity occurs all the time. All the time. You need to shoot outside. It's raining. This was one of those moments where I was just like, oh, my God. And it's crucial because we need to understand that Ellie is turning here not into zombie. Turning, turning into dark Avenger. Ellie. It's not all happiness and light. She remembers. She took a break. She enjoyed herself. She saw something positive and beautiful. Break is over.

[Troy Baker]

To me, what I saw on display is, oh, I can have this thing that's this wonderful connection and it's this source of comfort. Even I can pick up a guitar. And now I've been able to reclaim that activity with this moment with Dina. And I picked up a guitar and played. I'm alone by myself. I can play this. What happens if I start tiptoeing through the graveyard of that memory and it's the, oh, no, I've gone too far and I have to stop immediately with just those words. If I ever were to lose you. Woof. It clearly landed for me. That auditorium is just.

[Craig Mazin]

That auditorium is. We did not build. That is a theater in Vancouver that we found that is so close to the one in the game. A ton of credit to Alex Wong and our VFX team and all of our vendors for very subtly aging it. There's some subtle aging going on because we couldn't mess their carpets up. We couldn't mess their seats up or their walls. But we also that this was fairly well preserved. This was kind of a tomb that had been left untouched, a safe haven for Dina and Ellie.

[Neil Druckmann]

I will say it's another one of those instances that was scary how close it was to the game walking onto that set.

[Craig Mazin]

So Don McCauley and our art department did make everything else in the theater. So the rooftop that they run onto, the lobby that they walk into, the balcony that they sit on where Dina's explaining how triangulation works.

[Neil Druckmann]

They're even looking at the carpet. And it would match the game.

[Craig Mazin]

Oh, yeah. No, we don't screw around. Like, that's one area where for me, my feeling is if we're going to make a set and we're going to put carpet in here, then we're putting the carpet in from the game. Like, why wouldn't we? That doesn't make any sense. There's no reason to fix the carpet. It's perfect. And that's what I want because I'M a fan. It matters if you played the game. There's a certain sense memory. And if you haven't, well, now you have the experience that we all had.

[Troy Baker]

But we move out of this beautiful theater, this wonderful location that you guys found in Vancouver, and we find a pile of dead bodies. These are Seraphites, and there's a wall behind them that says, feel her love, but spray painted underneath it is, feel this bitch. And this gets a very specific reaction from Ellie.

[Unknown Speaker]

We shouldn't be here. You shouldn't have come. I shouldn't have dragged you here. You're having a fucking baby. What am I doing? Dina? Do you want to go back? I'll take you back. You don't need to do this with me.

[Craig Mazin]

This tableau is inspired by a movie that I have gone back to over and over and over again. It was something that I studied lengthily with Johan Renk when we met Chernobyl. It is Come and see, which is a Russian war film. Oh, I can see from your face you have not seen it, Troy.

[Troy Baker]

Never seen it.

[Craig Mazin]

It is the greatest war movie that has ever been made.

[Troy Baker]

I'm adding a note right now.

[Craig Mazin]

It's an incredible piece of work. And there is a moment that this is very forwardly quoting from the way that these bodies are arranged against that wall. But one thing that I thought was important was to show that response, that this is like, great. You want to tag the wall? We'll tag the wall. We'll tag the wall with your bodies, and then we'll write this. They're leaving each other messages. The Seraphites come to the TV station, hang and disembowel wolves, and leave a message on the wall. And then the wolves come here, execute a bunch of these people, leave their bodies, leave a message on the wall. This is the worst kind of communication possible. And in that moment, I think Ellie understands. She is taking Dina into a place that is so horrible, so ruthless and violent and dehumanizing, that she's putting Dina and what she now thinks of as their baby at risk. And she doesn't say, let's go home. She says, I'll take you home. Like, we'll go back, I'll take you home, then I'll return and handle this myself. But you shouldn't be here in your condition, essentially, is what she's implying.

[Troy Baker]

There's also this beautiful addition to that says, we're having a baby.

[Craig Mazin]

Right? We're having a baby. I'm gonna be a dad. And in the game, when you travel with Dina, you do get some of the story about her life and her background. And we did hint at it a little bit back in the third episode when Ellie and Dina are on horse and Dina asks, who was the first person you killed? As Deena points out, Ellie never asked who the first person was that Dina killed. And here this story comes out.

[Unknown Speaker]

Whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn't deserve that. And I think, what if I hadn't snuck out? What if my mom and sister were beaten to death in front of me? What if that motherfucker made me watch as he did it? Would it make a difference if my family had hurt his people first? No. No. And if I hadn't killed him, if he had gotten away, I promise you, I would have hunted him down forever.

[Craig Mazin]

It's a little different than the story in the game, but it is a very moving performance from Isabella Mercedes. And as it turns out, when she said to me later that she had been practicing and rehearsing and memorizing that.

[Neil Druckmann]

Speech for, like, two months, what's nice for me is there's also a lot of heavy lifting that's happening in the writing that seems also effortless. But I know all the mechanics of it because we had a lot of conversations around it. And part of the fun of my job is to get a scene like this from Craig. Cause what that scene needs to do is not only right. Eventually Isabella has to sell us that she's. She has these convictions. She needs to convince the audience that even though she's pregnant, she has reason to keep going. There's something about this backstory that is like. It's like a trauma that she has. And that's why she knows how Ellie feels, because she's been there.

[Troy Baker]

She recognizes, first of all, that Joel was targeted.

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah.

[Troy Baker]

She knows what a raider coming in is like. This is something different. She says, whatever reason Joel gave those people to do what they did, he didn't deserve that.

[Craig Mazin]

And then the next word I think is and if. And if the guy that killed my mother and my sister had gotten away, I would have gone after him and never given up. That if is a big if because we'd like to think that we can do things in circumstances. We like to think we would have certain feelings. We like to think that, but. But then circumstances have a way of crashing in and making things actually quite difficult. Moral questions, as hypotheses, are safe to ponder when you have the information. And the information tells you there is no moral victory here. None. But a Choice must be made. That's where the hard stuff happens. So Dina has a kind of privileged position. She gets to imagine the way she would have behaved had she not shot that guy, if he had gotten away. But Ellie doesn't have that privilege. Ellie only has fact. Now when Dina gets all the facts, if she gets all the facts, remains to be seen. We'll see if that if changes for her.

[Troy Baker]

We move on from this specific part in the city to inside of the building that the wolves don't patrol. And it was eerily quiet, a good way to put it, because it's filled, as we find out, with infected.

[Neil Druckmann]

Not just any infected.

[Craig Mazin]

The worst kind. So little production background. That plant is an abandoned, I guess, no longer used dairy plant in British Columbia. And I wandered in there with our location scene, was like, well, I mean, it smells very bad in here. And we're also shooting in here, for sure. What was kind of funny is every day we would walk through this kind of section that we weren't going to use because it was just sort of a bit bland and warehousy looking. And in those bland, warehousing looking rooms were dozens and dozens of enormous crates full of saved props, costumes, and stage design stuff from Shogun.

[Troy Baker]

What?

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah. Because Shogun had. They got to store stuff, you know, I think they probably knew, like, hey, this show's pretty good. I mean, I bet we get another season of this. We should save some of these boats and swords. But this space was fantastic because we could use its size. And it's silence.

[Troy Baker]

I love how I've always seen how Ellie and Dina plan shooting.

[Unknown Speaker]

Has to be a last resort, okay? Because if the wolves hear gunfire, then we'll have a whole army up our ass. Fine. Ellie. What if it gets bad and we have to make a choice between shooting or running? We run. Last resort. We got it. Oh, you think that no matter what happens, I'm just gonna start firing literally every single time? Yes. Don't get angry. You're a little crazy. And that's exciting. That's one of the reasons I love you. But I do want to make it out of here. You love me.

[Craig Mazin]

The dynamic has been from the start and really clearly back when Dina shows up at Ellie's garage and says, here's how we're getting to Seattle. You don't know what you're doing. I do. I'm smart. I plan. Follow me. She's doing it again, but very quickly. When they realize what's going on and when we realize what's going on, which Is okay. We dealt with one stalker in the supermarket in episode one one. And Ellie lost. Yeah, Right. If she's not the one immune person in the world, she's dead. Or rather, she's infected. Now there's 11 of them. The dynamic here changes completely. Planning doesn't matter anymore. Planning's done. Thinking is done. Dina, you take a backseat. Ellie, you drive. And when Ellie drives, the plan is all Joel. This is a full Joel moment as far as I'm concerned. For Ellie, we see how, like, what did Gale say to Tommy? I think if they were walking the same path, they've been walking side by side from the very start, this is just what Joel would have done. You get in there, you hide, I die for you. Go. And the confidence and the conviction there is so undeniable that Dina just does it.

[Troy Baker]

She says, I can take bites. I can take a lot of them.

[Neil Druckmann]

Well, there's also this other quote from season one that's in the back of our mind, which is from Tess to say, you're not immune from getting ripped apart.

[Craig Mazin]

Right. And so I think even though Ellie is saying I can get bit a lot, you can't. She's just trying to get. Because now it's a different parent child thing. Right. Dina's been the parent, now Ellie's the parent. And when parents need their kids to do something very quickly, they will lie to them. Now, obviously it's true. Ellie can get bit a lot and Dina can't. But really what Ellie knows is she's going to get ripped apart. She's to going, she just needs Dina to somehow survive in that cage and not get ripped apart.

[Troy Baker]

There's something really cool that you do visually, where the stalker's eyes reflect with the flashlight.

[Craig Mazin]

We worked really hard on those. There are versions, you get these sort of things back. Cause it's a visual effect that we do, obviously. And there are versions where it's like, oh, look, they're ghosts. They've got these shiny. You just keep pulling it back, pulling it back, pulling it back and trying to make it as realistic as possible. The way that dogs or sheep or other animals like this at night, their retinas will reflect back white. And something has happened inside the stalkers to do something similar to their eyes. And it's the barest thing. You don't want them to look like jawas from Star Wars. So we really fine tune that stuff to make sure it's just barely there.

[Neil Druckmann]

And that goes back a conversation months prior to when we were concepting the stalkers and talking about, oh, how the cordyceps eats away parts of the eye. It's almost like having cataracts. You see people that have certain eye conditions, their eye behaves in that way. So it's going back. It's based in science.

[Troy Baker]

Just when you think they're not going to be able to get out of here, we hear that shotgun blast.

[Craig Mazin]

Here comes Han Solo. And for a moment. And I love the way Steven and Ksenia shot this. Ksenia used something called a lens baby, which is basically. It's a device that slightly tilts or distorts the lens as you're shooting to create a blurry, weird kind of sense of being dazed. And so it's this bare hint of lens baby. And then this man shows up with his boots and his stride and his jeans. And you can see on Ellie's face now she's a child again because she's so traumatized by what's going on and so stunned and confused. Is it him? She almost for a second thinks it's him.

[Troy Baker]

That moment, as you're describing, with the way that you're shooting it, was that intentional? Was that.

[Craig Mazin]

Oh, yeah. It was really just about being in Ellie's mind there. So it was very intentional. It's in the script that she thinks, wait. And we all do. Wait, is that. But we know Joel's dead, so it's clearly not him. Right. There is no possibility. But it's that weird moment of. Is the man who has kept me safe the one person that makes me feel not afraid? Is he back? And then it's Jesse.

[Neil Druckmann]

I don't remember the conversations around this part, but it's something we. We did something similar in the game at a different moment in time where Ellie's really traumatized. A moment that we'll see in episode seven where in that moment as well, we had Ellie mistaken a different character for Joel. So this just felt very natural to me of just Ellie's state of mind and that wishful thinking of wanting. Wanting something so bad that you start to see it, of Joel coming to rescue her.

[Craig Mazin]

What I love about that is that Jesse is exactly the kind of person that would come save you. And he is worth looking up to. And he is very strong. And he has this, I guess you call it positive paternalism, but, boy, he's angry.

[Unknown Speaker]

Jesse.

[Craig Mazin]

What?

[Unknown Speaker]

How did you find us?

[Neil Druckmann]

The map you left in the theater. Impressive triangulation, by the way.

[Unknown Speaker]

Thanks. That was all Dina.

[Neil Druckmann]

Trust me, I didn't think it was you.

[Unknown Speaker]

How did you find the theater?

[Craig Mazin]

Do I look like I want to.

[Neil Druckmann]

Fucking talk to you right now?

[Unknown Speaker]

You came alone?

[Neil Druckmann]

No, me and Tommy, we split up when we got to the city.

[Craig Mazin]

Covered more ground.

[Unknown Speaker]

Can't believe they sent you after us.

[Neil Druckmann]

They didn't. But you two were gonna die out here, so we snuck out the next night. That's a good thing we did.

[Unknown Speaker]

You know what would been have pretty fucking good at this up until.

[Craig Mazin]

What? Jesse has been very patient with Ellie. He's been patient with her while he was training her to fight. He was patient with her about the town council meeting. He's patient with her about her weird stuff with Joel and not wanting to go on a patrol with him. But here. It's an interesting thing to rescue somebody and so clearly be angry with them.

[Neil Druckmann]

Yeah. And he's rescuing her with one other person that also has a lot of those same qualities, which is Tommy. This is where we find out Tommy's also in Seattle, also looking for them. And they've disobeyed orders back in Jackson to come out here and save them.

[Craig Mazin]

And this touches on a very big difference between the show and the game. In the game, Tommy goes out on his own to avenge Joel on behalf of Ellie.

[Neil Druckmann]

Basically, yeah, he does in the game in hopes that Ellie will not go, to let her know I've gone. So you stay.

[Craig Mazin]

He's trying to keep her safe. He knows she would go. He decides to go first to take care of it, to keep her out of trouble. Here. He doesn't get to make that choice because of the way we structured things and how much time has gone by. And also a very important thing. I think we talked about it when we were discussing our third episode that Neil made a great point about Tommy and Joel and that Tommy understood that Joel wouldn't want to go do this. That was not in Joel's nature. And Tommy, in his own way, was kind of trying to honor that. But here, Tommy and Jesse have to sneak out of Jackson, and Tommy has a wife and a little boy to go save them. Now, we don't know what Tommy's state of mind is, but we do know what Jesse's state of mind is and what Jesse's state of mind is. What is wrong with the two of you? What is wrong with you? This is in violation of our community. We had a meeting. We had a vote. This is not the right thing to do. And Ellie, oh, boy, does she push back. We were doing fine until what? And you see her kind of crumble there.

[Neil Druckmann]

There's this shame that's starting to Wash over the realization. It's like now I've put Jesse and Tommy's life in danger as well. The cost keeps going up and I.

[Craig Mazin]

Wasn'T enough to keep Dina alive. There's this moment where Ellie's not so much worried that she's going to die, but when she looks over and sees the stalkers ripping that cage open, she knows she failed. And this is something that we talked about a lot in season one, that Joel would fail, actually all the time. And Ellie is reliving Joel's experience. Ellie is understanding now viscerally what Joel felt. She doesn't maybe know that this is what Joel felt, but we know it is, that you have one purpose, as Bill said, to keep this person alive. And God help any motherfucker who stands in your way. And Joel kept failing and Ellie is failing. And it is a very small feeling to know that you weren't enough.

[Neil Druckmann]

There's this feeling. I remember we thought about this a lot when we made the game. We talked about this when we made the show. When you're a teenager, specifically your teenage years, you feel invincible. You think whatever is killing and hurting anybody else is not going to happen to me. And then as you get older, you start realizing it could happen to me and it's happening to people close to me. And I think this is that wake up moment for Ellie, which is like, yeah, if Jesse shows up five minutes later, they're both dead.

[Podcast Host]

This podcast is sponsored by Rocket. The American dream of homeownership feels further and further out of reach for many people. Homeownership feels impossible, but Rocket is on a mission to help everyone get home. They've got a range of products and services designed to turn renters into owners. From lowering down payments to as little as 1% to helping turn your rent check into a forever home. Find out [e-mail] Rocket Own the Dream.

[Troy Baker]

Now. Jesse is in the equation. And there's of course the truth that he doesn't know yet, that Dean is pregnant with his child. Oh yeah, he does save them from one threat, but they quickly move from one threat into another.

[Craig Mazin]

I remember and I draw on these feelings all the time. The feeling of being in the game and wandering into this fully overgrown jungle like park in Seattle and hearing that whistle.

[Unknown Speaker]

What the fuck is that?

[Troy Baker]

It was the whistle for me. And as also as your taking cover, as they were taking cover in the foliage and just seeing the torches pass by, it's like I. I mean, I am right there again. I'm right in it.

[Craig Mazin]

You're in it.

[Neil Druckmann]

I just want to touch on the whistling because it talks about our process. I have to give credit to Magid and the rest of our audio team here at Naughty Dog that, you know, we had this idea in the writing that the scars the Seraphites should communicate through whistles. And then they developed a whole language of like, those whistles have specific meanings, almost like Morse code, that the Seraphites can communicate with themselves. So then the audio team on the show got together with the audio team of the game and they explained it to them. They sent them all the assets we needed to re record it for certain rights and stuff, but that's why it's so close to the game. And again, I have to say this over and over again, the people making the show love the source material. And this is just one more example of that.

[Craig Mazin]

Now, in full disclosure to people that do speak Seraphite whistle, there are some times where I think we probably erred on the side of Sonic impact in a moment, as opposed to the verbal clarity.

[Neil Druckmann]

But it's important to note because unlike the game, in the game, you need to start paying attention to those whistles and they tell you how to play it right here. Emotional truth is more important than that.

[Craig Mazin]

Right. But we wanted them to be exact, and the idea that there's a call and answer to those things is important. So again, it's why that scene with the father and the daughter is so important in the third episode, because we hear some whistles and then he turns to me and says, okay. And she says, got it. Let me translate. Da da da, da, da da. We understand the whistles do have specific meanings, and I remember creeping up and watching them lynching that soldier and disemboweling him.

[Troy Baker]

I love that you incorporated this. We've seen the after effects, but we've never actually seen it happen here. And this is what you choose to show?

[Craig Mazin]

It's one of those moments where I feel like, generally speaking, Neil and I aren't about grossing people out. We know that some of the things we show will be horrifying and disgusting, but we're not there to do it because it's fun for us. You do it because it's going to impact the audience and the characters, usually in a very deep way. We're trying to stress how serious something is, and we're not shying away from it. And every time I watch that scene, I think, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. I mean, when somebody is that helpless and somebody's just Walking to them that slowly with a sickle, you just think, well, something will make this stop. We just saw a scene where something made something stop. Jesse showed up, saved Ellie and Dina, but nothing makes this stop. It just happens. And that's when you know these Seraphites are not just not victims, they are extraordinarily scary. And should any of our characters end up on the wrong side of a rope with these guys, it's going to be very, very bad.

[Neil Druckmann]

There's something else that's very chilling about this revelation that, you know when we're watching Eli and Dina at the TV station and you see the aftermath of what the Seraphites are capable of, and you're like, okay, to Craig's point, these people are scary. And then to see them and to see how cold they are when they commit these acts, there's no anger, there's almost a celebration. It's a ritual for them. To me, that is the most chilling part. To see someone commit violence and to. It's not even pre calculated. It's just like ingrained into their daily life. And again, the degree that they've dehumanized the WLF is just staggering. And again, this is what Ellie, Dina, Jesse and Tommy and this unborn child have now been put into the middle of.

[Craig Mazin]

They're in the middle of this situation where you've got a young man who is saying, scar got what he deserved. Fucking animal. And they don't even call them by their names. They make up a new name for them. Scars. And here the Seraphites are acting like they're doing this guy a favor. Yes, he's nested with sin. Free him that he may know her love. And then they disembowel him. And in this very kind of matter of fact, oh, well, I guess that's over. The priest says now he is free and they mean it and they believe it.

[Neil Druckmann]

That's their belief.

[Craig Mazin]

They believe they've done him a favor.

[Neil Druckmann]

You know, we talk a lot about love and love is not inherently good or bad. It's powerful and can lead you to all sorts of acts. Faith is very similar. Yes, it's not inherently good or bad. It's powerful and in the wrong hands, under the wrong leadership can lead to atrocities.

[Craig Mazin]

It's going to take us some time as a television show to fully explore who the Seraphites are. We still don't know who this prophet is or how this all began.

[Troy Baker]

To show someone being disemboweled and to make that visceral is very challenging. But to go from that now we have to. You've peaked. Right. And now how do I make an arrow to the knee have any impact whatsoever? And you immediately do. And you do it off camera and you do it silently, which is what's great. It's just the pan over to look and looking down and there's the arrow.

[Craig Mazin]

But this moment where Dina gets shot was also. It's also a change from the game. And the game, Dina has to back away because her morning sickness is really bad. She's just laid out. She can't go anywhere. She has to stay back at the theater. And it's Ellie who gets shot in the leg. Now, because of our more hyper realistic medium, Vellie gets shot in the leg. She's not going anywhere. You're done. Right. So we thought this was an interesting way to achieve the same thing, which was to separate the Dina from Ellie and to put Dina back in the background for a bit to expose Ellie to be on her own and also to make Ellie's decision to move forward to the hospital a dangerous one. In terms of what we know, she knows she's supposed to go back to that theater. She's supposed to just get out of there and meet up with them. That's what she says she's going to do. Bring her back. I'll draw them away. Just you go and I'll meet you back. And then she sees the hospital and she turns her back on Dina and turns her back on Jesse, who just came to rescue her, and turns her back on Tommy, who's somewhere out there looking for her and pursues Nora because she can't help herself.

[Neil Druckmann]

When we were working on the game, there was a conversation Hallie and I would have often. And it came over to the show, which is in many ways, Ellie is like an addict. That this is a relapse, that this thing that she wants so badly, that's again, the way she's programmed. She must pursue it. And like an addict, she's neglecting the people that love her.

[Troy Baker]

We see this addiction take hold of her as she's snuck back into the hospital. And here she is face to face with Nora.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm sorry you saw it happen. No one should ever have to see something like that.

[Craig Mazin]

Stop it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sometimes at night, I still hear his screams. It was a terrible thing the way he died.

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

If that little bitch got what he deserved.

[Craig Mazin]

It's one of my favorite scenes. So Tati Gabrielle, who plays Nora, we've just gotten, you know, little bits of her. We got a little tiny Bit in the first episode, we get a little tiny bit of her part as this person in this larger group. But obviously in the second episode, so much of that is about Abby. And here we have this beautiful moment, and it is, I would say, probably 85% from the game. And then there's this little, like, extra 15% around where you think she's connecting with Ellie. And then we go right back to what she says in the game.

[Troy Baker]

Little bitch got what he deserved.

[Craig Mazin]

And so you see here in Nora something that I think if you are watching carefully, you suspect isn't even true for Abby, and that is a moral certainty for Nora. This is clean. What they did there was clean. And what's interesting about people that are on the same side is they all push towards one goal, but they don't always agree about how righteous their cause is. Nora is somebody that clearly agrees. But Nora also knows something in the back of her head. It was Nora, all the way back in episode one, very first scene, who said, I heard rumors about a girl. So Nora works in medicine. We don't know if she's a doctor or a medic. It doesn't matter. We can imagine that she had connection to the doctors and the nurses who were working in the hospital in Salt Lake City. And we can imagine that she heard a rumor that there was an immune girl. And that's just this added bit of anger that could be there, you know, underneath.

[Troy Baker]

You're talking about the moral certainty, and that's based in the fact that Joel made this unforgivable sin by sacrificing humanity to save, essentially, himself. But she does the same thing because she sees an opportunity to escape and save her own life. And what does she do? She breaks through the door to go down to B2.

[Craig Mazin]

Yeah. And she says, shoot her. The thing about moral certainty is it blinds you. So much about what the second game meant for me was not just the higher moral value of empathy, but how essential it is. If we don't have it, if we cannot figure out how to be invested in the other person winning, then we are all going to lose. And Nora is missing empathy here. And you're absolutely right, she's missing it. And in her attempt to escape. So there's this interesting thing. She looks at the elevator, and it's slightly ajar, and there's a look on her face. I suspect that this elevator will come back, perhaps in another season, but she ends up on the dreaded B2. To repeat, we do not know what is on B3. And Ellie follows her down into what I think is one of the best sequences we've put on tv.

[Troy Baker]

Man, I gotta say, when we come around the corner and we see these things aspirating and there's this symbiosis between the host and. And the parasite that is working in concert together to achieve a goal. It is fighting to stay alive.

[Neil Druckmann]

It's gorgeous. The team did such an amazing job of building the set. And there's this concept in horror that in the big scheme of things, death is not that scary. You need a fate worse than death. And this idea that it will not only capture you and put you here and then put you to work until there's nothing left of you just to spew out these spores. This is a new concept that Craig came up with and I loved. But the horror of it, of, again, this person. And now we know who this person is. It's the son that's now frozen here until there's nothing left of him. He's just an engine to spew spores out.

[Craig Mazin]

This is the cruelest thing, but it is a very animal thing. We exploit other animals to sustain ourselves. We don't think about it that way, but that's what we do. And animals do it to each other.

[Neil Druckmann]

In our civilized society, we're so protected from how cruel nature can be. The amount of suffering that animals experience, it's staggering in its volume.

[Craig Mazin]

And here is this saddest thing because we understand now the full scope of Park's sacrifice. The officer we met in the beginning who talked about sending Leon down there to B2 because she didn't sacrifice her son to death. She doesn't know this. But what she sacrificed him to was this kind of endless torment. And there is this beauty to it which is undeniable. It's very important to us that the cordyceps be beautiful even as it is horrifying, because that is the glory and terror of nature. But Ellie can move through this and does. And turns the red light on.

[Troy Baker]

Boy, when you add in just that one color palette, it just changes everything.

[Craig Mazin]

It does something to Bella's face that we were obsessed with. Her eyes turn black. And this scene is largely as it is in the game, with one major exception. Because of the way we address the timeline of things and what we learn and when. There is a mystery that is mostly answered here. And the mystery has been there since the first episode. What does Ellie know? What does she know? And we don't know? Joel doesn't know. Joel's terrified that Ellie's figured it out. And Here. I just love the way Tati looks at her when she realizes you're the immune girl. You're real. I remember Steven and I sitting there with her and saying, this is sort of like if you were raised Christian and you mostly believed, but sort of believed in a certain way. And then you saw Jesus for real. You saw an angel for real. You saw the face of God. You realize this thing that could save all of us is real. And then tells Ellie the truth.

[Unknown Speaker]

Don't you know what he did? I don't care.

[Craig Mazin]

You don't care?

[Unknown Speaker]

He killed everyone in that hospital.

[Craig Mazin]

Including.

[Unknown Speaker]

The only fucking person alive that could make a cure from you. That was Abby's father. And Joel. Joel shot him in the head. That's what he did.

[Craig Mazin]

Now, if people feel deeply uncomfortable with that, they should. And of course, if people feel deeply uncomfortable with what Ellie does next, they definitely should.

[Neil Druckmann]

It takes a certain willpower to do what Ellie does at this moment. And Ellie would like to believe she is like Joel. Cause Joel is another one of those people that we saw in season one can torture people to meet some kind of ends. And for Joel, it was to save Ellie. For Ellie, it's to find out where Abby is hiding. But is Ellie like Joel? Can she, like, commit this act and just be okay? This is one of the questions that we asked ourselves when we're working on the game. And now the show is like, is there ever coming back from doing something like this, or does it change you forever? We're going to explore that.

[Craig Mazin]

I mean, Ellie isn't aware of this, but I'm aware of it, that when Abby in our show, sort of the execution of Joel goes a bit differently than it does in the game, just a bit. And one of the differences is Abby uses the golf club to hit Joel on the leg where she shot him. Not in the head, not to kill him, to hurt him. So the first blow that Abby delivers is to the leg. And here Ellie picks up a pipe, and the first blow she delivers is to the leg. And once again, you can't help but wonder how it is that these two people, who are almost identical, are on this horrible path, this horrible collision path. And what is so horrifying and gorgeous in this moment is the way Bella says that final where is she? It is so savage and so disconnected from being a human. It is so brutal.

[Neil Druckmann]

Just one other thing, which is that we talked about. You know, there's this contradiction in Nora and how she thinks she has the moral ground, how she's just. And justifies doing this horrible thing to Joel, and yet she's doing her best to not give up her friend's position.

[Craig Mazin]

Because that's her tribe, that's her community. And we cut away from this brutality to something that is perhaps the most shocking thing to show in contrast to what we're looking at, because we've forgotten, we've all forgotten, that just a few years earlier, Ellie was a little girl. And Ellie wakes up in her bed in Jackson, safe and sound, looks up, sees the person she loves more than anything in the world, and perfectly performed by Bella Ramsey says, hi. It is the most innocent, sweet thing, and you can't help but feel heartbreak that something has gone so wrong that that little kid is in that red hallway doing what she's doing, by the way.

[Neil Druckmann]

Also important to note that, you know, episode one, we see this tension between Joel and Ellie. You never see them happy like this, and yet here they are.

[Craig Mazin]

So what happened? What is the story that went down in those five years between swear to me and Joel's death? I guess we'll have to wait a week and find out, but. Hey, Pedro. Pascal's back, everybody.

[Troy Baker]

You almost stuck the landing.

[Craig Mazin]

I told you. I told you. I promised.

[Troy Baker]

Couldn't have done it better myself. This has been the official podcast for the HBO original series the Last of Us. Our senior producer is Emmanuel Hapsis. Our producer is Elliot Adler and Darby Maloney as the editor. This episode was mixed by Raj Makhija. Our executive producers are Gabrielle Lewis and Bari Finkel. Special thanks to Becky Rowe, Allison Cohen, Erin Kelly and Kenya Reyes from the MAX podcast team. Production music is courtesy of HBO and you can watch episodes of the Last of Us on max. Make sure to join us next week. As Craig said, as we talk through season two, Episode six, and until then, endure and survive.

[Podcast Host]

This podcast is sponsored by rocket. The American dream of homeownership feels further and further out of reach. For many people, homeownership feels impossible. But Rocket is on a mission to help everyone get home. They've got a range of products and services designed to turn renters into owners. From lowering down payments to as little as 1% to helping turn your rent check into a forever home. Find out [e-mail] Rocket Own the dream.