The Last of Us creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have explained details from season two’s premiere episode and teased what’s coming in the rest of the season.
The rest of the article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season two, episode one.
The second season of the videogame-based show premiered more than two years after the first one ended, and laid the groundwork for the rest of the season. The show begins with a five-year time jump and depicts a frosty dynamic between Ellie and her parent figure Joel.
The episode also introduces a vengeance-driven Abby, who’s hot on Joel’s heels to take revenge for the fireflies he killed while saving Ellie from the fatal surgery that could’ve saved everyone else from the fungus-infected clickers by developing a vaccine.
The creators explained that Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby was introduced much earlier than she was in the game to give the show audiences time to get to know her character since the season will only be seven episodes.
Commenting on other parts of the episode, Mazin said, “In fact, part of the problem is, at least for the first part of that episode, you get the sense that people are getting a little cocky about all this. Ellie and Dina are like, ‘Oh, let’s go kill some clickers.’ Season 1, Joel and Tess were deadly terrified of clickers because they lived in a QZ where they weren’t facing them all the time.”
He explained, “But now we’re out here in Jackson, where it seems like people have kind of gotten good at this, and they know how to kill these things. They’re having fun learning how to use them as sniper rifle practice. That is the kind of hubris that comes back to bite you every single time, and we wanted to bite people quickly, literally and figuratively.”
Noting that everything the episode depicts is for a reason, co-writer Halley Gross said: “Nothing is frivolous, nothing is done just for decoration. Everything is a setup for a payoff…So I would pay attention to who are they when they feel safe, because things are about to get really dangerous.”
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey reprise their roles as Joel and Ellie respectfully in The Last of Us season 2. New episodes will air weekly on HBO every Sunday.