Host Troy Baker and The Last of Us showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann unpack this action-packed episode. How did the explosive opening scene come about? What went on behind the scenes while shooting the subway station sequence? And what crucial scene did the team feel pressure to get exactly right? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the key voices behind 'The Last of Us' series?
welcome back to the official podcast for the hbo original series the last of us i'm troy baker and i'm joined as always with the showrunners of the hbo series craig mazen hello and neil druckman hi we are unpacking episode four of season two which is titled day one it was written by craig and directed by kate heron wonderfully
Let me start off by saying I had no idea what to expect going into 204, and it might be my favorite episode so far.
Whoa. All right.
I'm sure that I'm going to end up eating my words. But I was blown away. And what I loved about the opening of this is the vibe is completely different than anything else we've ever seen. We start on the inside of a Fedra truck. It's 2018 in Seattle, and we...
Chapter 2: How was the explosive opening scene in Episode 4 conceptualized?
We meet these gregarious soldiers that are going into battle, it seems, but just telling a funny story and laughing it up, which is something that we don't get to see a lot of in this world. And things quickly take a turn after the punchline when we meet a new character.
Named Isaac, yeah.
Wonderfully, beautifully played by Jeffrey Wright. Just that voice is unmistakable. Took away their right to vote and somebody started calling them voters to mock them.
Till now you know.
I didn't mean anything by it, Sergeant.
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Chapter 3: What inspired the FEDRA truck sequence in Seattle?
Of course you didn't. You're thoughtless. That entire sequence was inspired by a moment you have where you're wandering around in the game. Neil, you put all these little moments inside the game, these little stories that are optional. People can find them or not. And one of them are these notes that are left behind by some FEDRA officers who are long dead.
But you understood that in Seattle, there was a moment where FEDRA officers started turning on FEDRA because it was not working well and that there was, in fact, a kind of internecine warfare. And you also do find a FEDRA truck at one point that you can climb into. And so, like, all those things were bopping around my head.
Yeah. In the game, there's a lot of... what we call environmental storytelling. As you're exploring the city, we give you evidence that, you know, Fedra used to rule this quarantine zone, just as you've seen in season one, or game one, and then they fell. And they fell to this two groups that had an uprising. One were the Seraphites, the Scars, that we'll talk about later, and one was the WLF.
And then, yeah, to Craig's point, there is a truck that you find that has been blown up with the people still inside as part of this uprising.
Chapter 4: Who is Isaac and what role does he play in the series?
And so then in my weird head, I start thinking, well, how did that happen? What was that like? And then there's this notion of whence Isaac. So Isaac is the leader of the WLF. He's the leader of the WLF when you meet him in the game, but there isn't necessarily a sense of where he came from. And so this was one of those mornings where I call Neil and I say, I've got a crazy idea.
And this is, to me, a very fun way to open an episode. It's very contained. It also... allows us to begin to tell a separate story, which is the story of this rookie, this kid who's played by Ben Ahlers. And it's clearly his, what, I don't know, first week on the job.
His helmet doesn't fit very well, and he doesn't quite understand this brutal nature that these guys have, this us versus them, you know, the people are beneath us. And perhaps that is why Isaac chooses to give him a choice as opposed to just fragging him like he does the rest of these guys.
Well, this is a conversation that we have a lot about these factions and how sometimes they'll see people within a warring faction, a different tribe, as they're too far gone. I cannot bring them back, so the only choice I have left is to kill them in order to save my tribe. And here is someone that is fresh enough. They're still malleable. I could give them the choice to come around.
And Isaac makes that calculation in that truck.
You know, when I was playing the game and when most people, the way that we experience this story is we're kind of, like you mentioned, Craig, we're seeing these almost voyeuristically, these conversations that we're picking up after they've happened. You guys have done this several times.
We've even seen it in this season with the introduction of the Seraphites where we get to be with those people as opposed to seeing them through the lens of Joel or Ellie or Abby. in the game. And so this is an opportunity for us to kind of give a little sympathy for the devil before we see characters that, if you play the game, are at least antagonistic.
We're going to see them as the good guys before we see them as the bad guys.
This kind of stuff is some of my favorite bits to work on with Craig and to discuss. And that Isaac was also played by Jeffrey Wright in the game. But you only see him for a short period of time because you only see him when the characters you play as meet him. With the show, we don't have that restriction. We could jump around in time, we could jump to different characters.
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Chapter 5: How does 'The Last of Us' explore themes of love and belief?
I would go into Williams-Sonoma. It's a cookware store. You wouldn't know.
And I would stare at these I'm always thinking about how almost everyone in the apocalypse that we meet is doing something extraordinary. If they're not, we probably won't meet them. But they didn't start extraordinary. So even when we think about David in season one, the leader of the cannibal cult, he lets Ellie know that he used to be a teacher. It was an incredibly mundane thing.
He was a teacher. Everybody was kind of okay. And then the world collapses. And... There is something that is both revealing about Isaac here. It's a little bit of his story of before all this. We don't necessarily know what he did for a living, but we understand, you know, he liked to date. This is how he would attract women, you know, he would cook for them.
But it becomes pretty clear that this is not the first time he's told this story. And that there's a purpose behind it. And the purpose is to intimidate, is to intimidate somebody because Isaac gets to relax and tell a story while somebody else is in chains bleeding.
We see him sear his hand and to see that person go into the repetition of the praying. And then the second time it comes back, the hand is already out. That right there is a level of conviction and obsession with one's beliefs that allows them to transcend even torture.
Yeah, and then Isaac understands it's pointless to continue any further. This one is just way too devoted to the cause. There's another piece of information we get from Isaac that is interesting, I think, here. Because when we first met the Seraphites in our third episode, we meet them through a father and a daughter. They seem peaceful. The daughter asks, why can't she keep us safe, the prophet?
She says, Ezra says the prophet is eternal and moves through the sky. Whoever Ezra is her friend. And her dad's like, no, prophets are just people. Well, here, Isaac says something to this kid. He says, you know, some of you know that she's not some magic fairy in the sky. Some of you know she was just a person.
And this beaten young man, who has every reason to not argue, argues and says, heretics. So we understand not only is there the WLF, and the Seraphites, there's a schism inside the Seraphites themselves. There are some of these people who are perhaps a bit more secular and then some who are really, really fanatical.
And what we have not yet seen is any evidence that the Seraphites are anything but victims. That, of course, will change.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of Ellie's exploration of Seattle?
And now he's no longer this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed recruit, but he's someone who, as Jeffrey Wright's character Isaac has said, has made his choice. And his response is, Scar got what he deserved. Fucking animal.
This was a kid who theoretically was nice and not on any side and wasn't with these brutal guys. And now here he is as a soldier fully dehumanizing them. So the idea of community is something that calcifies and turns us against each other is in full effect here. And it's also... A quiet condemnation of whatever has happened to Isaac over these years.
Because even though we meet him committing violence, we kind of get it. I mean, these guys are brutal. They're literally making fun of brutalizing people. And now here he is and the people that follow him seem pretty brutal and he's torturing people.
So there will be a time, I can't promise it will be this season, but there will be a time where we will get to find out just how all of this came to be.
Do you, when you're writing or even when you're shooting, at what point do you go, hey, just in case we don't get to have a third season, how do you wrangle those fears and go, let's just sneak this in real quick, just in case we can't get it?
That was impossible with this season. No, no. No, no, no. You got to write with confidence. I mean, if you write defensively, just in case we get canceled, you're going to mess your season up. I can't imagine the guys who are in the Severance writing room going, just in case we get canceled, we should probably explain what the hell is going on here.
So, I mean, you get some answers and then there are a whole bunch of mysteries that get left. That's the way it ought to be.
I mean, maybe that would have worked on season one, but this season, there's no way.
No.
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Chapter 7: How are songs and music integrated into 'The Last of Us' series?
So there's these wonderful markers of what we would consider, you know, the past for them and how just like visually we've seen the world grow up around that and in a lot of ways, occlude or completely cover that. But there's still some things that poke through. And like in this music store, Ellie finds a guitar.
Yeah. This section, in my mind, is one of the most true to the game sections. All of this stuff is pulled from the source material. All of it. The fact that we had The Last of Us Part II game available when we made the first season is why we put... Ellie talking about Sally Ride and going to the moon in the first season because we understood that this was some place to go.
So it's a little bit like what Neil was saying. You kind of go back. You realize where you want to go. You run backwards to set it up and to feel inevitable. So the tank and the skeletons, the fact that these two young women... one of whom is openly gay, are walking through a gay neighborhood and they do not know what these rainbows mean. That's right from the game.
That was so, I remember just thinking how both beautiful and sad that was.
What's up with all the rainbows? I don't know. Maybe they're all optimists.
And I think it's even more drawn forward in the show because the world ends a bit sooner in the show. It ends in 2003, not 2013. Even more progress was stopped dead in its tracks. And, of course, then the moment where Ellie plays the guitar for Dina, that's about as close to the source material as you can get.
I mean, of course, Della and Isabella are delivering performances that are, you know, fresh and complete to them. But... From a writing point of view, my challenge for the script was, how do I get the stuff that I love from this section from the game and put it in here in a way that feels like it belongs and it's seamless and it's natural? Because there's so much.
I mean, what Neil and Hallie did there. is awesome. And so it's a little bit like a duck press, you know, like I got to get so much stuff into a small amount of time without it feeling episodic or perfunctory.
It's kind of a fascinating process to me, you know, having worked on the game for so many years at Naughty Dog. And a lot of these ideas are not just, you know, It's me, Hallie, and then 300 other people. But all these things that we discussed so far, the tank, the van with the blown up Fedra people, even this moment where Ellie plays guitar for Dina are all optional in the game.
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