Set photos indicate that The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin and his team are filming one of the most controversial scenes from the video games. Could we be off?
The first season of The Last of Us, adapted from Naughty Dog’s hit video game of the same name, was a hit on HBO. Audiences took Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) into their hearts as they made a daring cross-country journey across a ruined, zombie-infested United States. The second season, based on the video game The Last of Us Part II, is in the works, and will probably air sometime in 2025.
You’d think that predicting what will happen in the The Last of Us season 2 would be pretty easy. The first season stuck close to the plot of the first video game, so the second season will stick close to the plot of the second video game, right? We’ve seen them casting lots of characters from the second game, so there’s no reason to expect any huge swerves from the source material.
And yet, showrunner Craig Mazin is out here advising fans that their fan theories about what’s going to happen next are off. “I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit, people are very clever, they like to see where we’re shooting and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means,” he said on the Scriptnotes podcast. “I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, ‘No.’”
“Most of the theories are incorrect, some of them are halfways correct, some of the conjecture is like 28% correct. But I do enjoy it all, I like the interest, it’s fun.”
Again, it’s hard to know what exactly Mazin is talking about here, because I can’t imagine the show straying too far from the main plot beats of The Last of Us: Part Two, not with game developer Neil Druckmann on board as a producer.
Looks like The Last of Us is filming the scene where [MAJOR SPOILER] in season 2
For example, recently fans have noticed that The Last of Us production has rented out a house in the town of Mission in British Columbia, Canada. The house bears a striking resemblance to a key location from The Last of Us: Part Two video game. For real, go no further if you wish to avoid SPOILERS.
Pretty early in The Last of Us Part II, a new character named Abby (to be played by Kaitlyn Dever on the show) tracks down Joel to Jackson, Wyoming. She’s mad at Joel for killing her father in the first game; her dad is one of the many people Joel kills while trying to save Ellie from the surgeon’s knife during his climactic massacre at the hospital in Salt Lake City. Abby brutally kills Joel in front of Ellie, sending Ellie on an epic revenge quest.
That’s what fans think is being filmed at that house in Mission. Again, I assume that Mazin isn’t saying that fans are wrong about this particular theory; Joel’s death is too important a part of the story for them to cut or alter overmuch. But maybe there are other theories out there he feels are way off.