If we’re being honest, one of the hardest things in all of media is to make an ending that “sticks the landing.” Whether it’s a video game, a TV show, or a movie, if you botch the ending, people will remember it more than they did the highlights of the thing they just watched or have watched for a long time. Many of you can likely cite cases of this off the top of your head. When it came to The Last Of Us, the video game had one of the biggest “sudden ends” of all time, and many wondered if the live-action adaptation would keep that.
As we found out in the season finale on HBO on Sunday, they did. After Joel swears to Ellie that “everything that happened with the Fireflies was true” based on his version of events, she says, “okay,” and the show ends. The intention was to show that a single word can be interpreted in many ways and that Joel and Ellie would never be the same no matter what happened next.
But that doesn’t mean the team behind the HBO adaptation wasn’t considering doing something different. In fact, Craig Mazin, who made the TV series alongside Neil Druckmann, who created the video game, noted in an interview with GQ Magazine that the director for the season finale had something a little “extra’ in mind for the final scene before the credits rolled:
“The change was really more something that Ali Abbasi, our director, had been playing around with. He had this thought of just playing out this slightly longer, sadder version where Ellie says, ‘okay’, and then she turns and walks away. And Joel looks after her. We see the two of them walking, not really together but apart, down towards Jackson. It lingers and then fades. There was something beautiful about it.”
That unintentionally caused a problem. Because both Mazin and others were wondering if they should do that ending to make it “unique” to the show or keep the game’s ending to make it “true to the title.”
“In the end, there’s something very specific about ending on that close-up of Ellie. Not knowing what comes next. Not knowing what she does. Does she walk away from him, does she walk with him, how does she feel? That moment gets suspended permanently.”
Indeed it did. It wouldn’t be until seven years later that we saw the truth, and it was a dark one that we’ll experience when The Last Of Us Season 2 arrives on HBO.
