As fans of the game well know, anything can happen on HBO’s hit adaptation of The Last of Us. And it did at the close of the Season 2 finale, as the audience is led to believe that the entire point of view will shift when the third season comes around– which is thought to be a very long time from now.
Sigh.
But here’s some good news. Just a few days before the season finale ran on Sunday night, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann held a news conference for reporters in which they alluded to and even revealed some surprising aspects of what’s to come.
Warning: there are spoilers ahead. Some of the characters that we thought were dead are actually…not.
The last words heard on The Last of Us were from Abby, played by Kaitlin Dever. “I let you live,” she says to Bella Ramsey’s Ellie. “And you wasted it.” She points her gun at Ellie, who screams. Then Abby fires, and the screen goes to black.
And just like in the second game version, the perspective shifts to Abby’s, in Seattle. But is that really the end of Ellie?
“Even if I thought I knew now exactly how it was going to go, I’m experienced enough to know that two weeks from now we may have a different idea of how it should go,” Mazin said. “All I can say is we haven’t seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever and we haven’t seen the last of Bella Ramsey, and we haven’t seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven’t seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story.”
Druckmann added this nugget: “Whether you will see them on screen or not, their presence will be there throughout.”
So does that mean Joel (Pedro Pascal) will be back in more flashbacks? “I wouldn’t have guessed we would have a short story about Joel’s dad before we wrote the season, so there you go,” Druckmann said, referencing a flashback to Joel’s childhood from Episode 6. “You can’t predict these things.”
Both creators acknowledged that the show is going to be different every season, which at this point includes a potential fourth.
