When it premiered in 2023, HBO’s The Last of Us was hailed by many as the best video game adaptation ever. A huge part of that acclaim was attributed to how closely series’ creators Craig Mazin and Neill Druckmann (who co-created the game) stuck to the script when translating the 2013 title to television.
For anyone who’d played the game, it seemed obvious; The Last of Us was designed to closely resemble the language of cinematic storytelling. The first season lifted the entire structure of the game — with 1:1 recreation of many scenes and lines of dialogue to the point where fans could practically speak alongside the characters precognitively.
But fans also knew that by the show’s second season, a near-perfect adaptation would be much more difficult. 2020’s The Last of Us Part II was a different beast than its predecessor, with a more sprawling story told from different perspectives — and its own tectonic narrative shifts from the first entry that stirred controversy among audiences.
While its creators have been open about how the story of The Last of Us (the show) will need to evolve to fit the medium of TV, it hasn’t stopped those in-the-know from counting off and decrying some of the biggest alterations to the game’s plot. And while it remains to be seen just how far the trajectory of the narrative will depart from the source material as the series progresses, stretching the game out over multiple seasons, it’s clear from Season Two that even minor updates could have an enormous impact on how television audiences will experience the story of Joel, Ellie, and Abby.
Without getting caught up on minutiae, some of the differing choices are apparent while others are more subtle. Here are all the biggest changes we’ve caught in The Last of Us Season Two from the games.
(Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us Season Two, episodes one to six, as well as the games.)
“I saved her.”
The season premiere opens with a look back on the final moments of the show’s Season One finale, wherein Ellie confronts Joel about the events that took place in Salt Lake City. Joel lies about Ellie’s procedure that might’ve saved humanity from the cordyceps infection and omits the whole bit about slaughtering almost every Firefly in the hospital. It’s ambiguous as to whether Ellie believes him — but the shadow of doubt looms.
In the game, the introduction is framed as a conversation between Joel (Pedro Pascal in the show, Troy Baker in game) and his brother Tommy (Diego Luna in the show, Jeffrey Pierce in game). With somber flashbacks to the violent night, the scene plays out more grimly than in the show, reminding players that even if they agreed with Joel’s actions, he has innocent blood on his hands. When questioned by Tommy about what he really did, Joel replies, “I saved her.” This line does end up in the series but is relayed later by Tommy when speaking to someone else. It’s a small detail, but cutting the interaction gives Joel a lot less screen time early in the show, which focuses more on the people affected by his decisions than his internal struggle about them.
An early introduction to Abby and friends
With the pivot away from Joel in the episode’s opener comes a much earlier introduction to Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and her surviving Firefly cohorts in the immediate aftermath of the bloodbath in Salt Lake City. In a makeshift graveyard outside the hospital, surrounded by the giraffes that Ellie met in one of the first season’s most emotional scenes, the group discuss their next moves after burying their dead. Their mission is clear: kill Joel, after finding another outfit to regroup and rebuild with.
In the game, Abby arrives in the story further down the line as a seemingly innocuous figure during a raid by the infected horde. Her motivations and allegiances remain a mystery until much later, making her serve as a more bogeyman-like threat. Here, she bears more humanity up front, and is intended to be empathized with as a victim of Joel rather than shrouded in the otherness of being the antagonist.
Cordyceps threats take root
One of the biggest changes established in season one was in how the fungal cordyceps spread and wreak havoc throughout the world. Rather than infecting people through airborne spores (necessitating gas masks during encounters), the fungus grows underground, stretching out a nervous system-like web of roots that help it find human colonies for prey.
In Jackson, the town where Joel and Ellie have found refuge with Tommy, an initiative to expand the community unearths a serious issue with water pipelines that are filled with the fungal tendrils (although the threat they pose is played down as a curiosity for those who may not recall their impact in the previous season). All of this is new to the story, and sets up a ticking clock toward a major incursion in Jackson that’s never in any real danger during the events of the game.
Joel and Dina are pals
Early in the premiere, Ellie’s friend and potential love interest Dina (Isabella Merced in the show, Shannon Woodard in the game) stops by to pay Joel a visit, discussing the town’s various renovations and the off-kilter behavior of Ellie. It’s quickly established that Joel has taken a liking to Dina and sees in her a healthier father-daughter relationship than he currently has with Ellie, who’s become more distant.
Their relationship is less defined in the game, with Dina seen more through Ellie’s perspective. The deeper ties established here play into additionally added character interactions and sequences that veer away from the game in later episodes, but it also reinforces the strain between Joel and Ellie, even as we see them interact less in the series than they did in the game.
Gail the therapist
One of the strongest aspects of the first season of The Last of Us was the expansion of characters like Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), who go from footnotes in the journey to fully fleshed out people in one of the best episodes of television ever. Season Two does much of this, too, but also adds new characters like Catherine O’Hara’s Gail, who was originally meant to appear in the game but was ultimately cut.
Gail is the town therapist, and although she’s clearly damaged and finding solace in heavy drinking, her role is to help assuage much of the trauma the survivors face daily. Specifically, she is working through Joel’s issues with Ellie — and the secrets Joel himself is withholding, even though Gail hates Joel for killing her infected husband just a year earlier. Gail’s session with Joel has shades of other conversations he has with Tommy in-game, and again reinforces the unstable nature of Joel, who is coming apart at the seams as his relationship with Ellie flounders in the face of his actions.
No “Future Days” or porch reunion
One of the biggest alterations to an important scene from the game comes at the end of the premiere, where Ellie comes across Joel sitting on his porch after making a mess at the town’s party by punching Seth for his homophobic comments. Having already told Joel off in front of everyone, Ellie pauses for a moment to look at her would-be father before silently passing by.
This is one of the most shocking pivots from the game, which at this point in the narrative had spent more time letting players breath in the short-lived family dynamic of the pair. In-game, this sequence is actually the penultimate scene toward the very end, a flashback diving into the last conversation Joel and Ellie ever had that recontextualizes much of their relationship. In the space where the porch scene exists in the series, there’s instead a different flashback where Joel fulfills his promise to teach Ellie how to play guitar, performing an acoustic rendition of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days.” The omission of the song makes sense given that “Future Days” released in 2013, the year the apocalypse happens, which is changed to 2003 in the series, meaning that the song was never written in this reality.
Abby’s physicality and relationship with Owen
From the initial casting announcement of Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, many fans were quick to point out that the actress lacked the bodybuilder-like physique of the in-game character (voiced by Laura Bailey, modeled after Jocelyn Mettler). Although the show’s creators have argued that the bulky musculature isn’t essential to the character, it serves a different purpose in-game, where at the portion the story that makes up episode two, players take on control of the character to see that she plays very much like Joel did in the first game — a powerhouse in contrast to Ellie’s more stealthy gameplay.
While Abby’s lack of raw strength makes her more vulnerable to danger in the show, there’s also cutbacks to her emotional vulnerability with characters like Owen (Spencer Lord in the show, Patrick Fugit in game). In the game, an early conversation overlooking Jackson reveals that Abby and Owen were once romantically involved, but that he’s now with another party member named Mel. He tries to convince Abby that the threat is too great, and that they should turn back. In the series, the details of their love triangle are pulled, and Owen instead rallies the group to abandon the mission behind Abby’s back.
Different patrol pairings
Outside of reshuffling individual scenes, this is a point at which deliberate choices to which characters are present for specific sequences may truly impact the plot of The Last of Us moving forward. In the game, it’s established that brothers Joel and Tommy always take their lookout patrols together, but with a massive snowstorm looming over Jackson, the show opts to keep Tommy planted in-town, while Dina instead accompanies Joel for their ill-fated meeting with Abby. In a parallel subplot, Dina’s ex-boyfriend Jesse (Young Mazino in the show; Stephen Chang in game) replaces Dina as Ellie’s patrol partner.
The effects of this are twofold: It means that Ellie and Dina’s will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic is pushed further down the line as a major interaction between the potential paramours doesn’t occur here; secondly, it places Tommy in Jackson for a life-threatening action sequence that teases his death (but spares him), rather than being in the room when Abby ultimate executes his brother.
Jackson in ruins
By far the biggest addition thus far to the series is a large-scale action sequence in Jackson that pays off on the tease of the cordyceps network previously introduced beneath the town. Invaded by a sprawling horde of infected, including a giant bloater that almost kills Tommy, Jackson is left almost entirely in ruins. The events of the raid occur simultaneously with Joel and Dina’s arrival at the resort where Abby’s group waits in hiding.
In the game, Joel and Tommy find Abby surrounded by infected (as she is in the show), but the stakes are somewhat lower, and Joel’s intentions are more altruistic — wanting to save Abby and bring her in from the storm rather than racing to find armed allies to help quell the assault on his home. For Joel, the endpoint is ultimately the same, but now his death is coupled with countless more in Jackson.
A less brutal death for Joel
For gamers, Joel’s death has been a well-guarded secret in the lead-up to the series’ second season. Players knew it was coming, but it doesn’t make the sucker punch any less painful. But there is some softening of the edges — whether to make Abby feels slightly less savage or simply avoid comparisons to another shocking death in a similar show (The Walking Dead) — Abby’s execution of Joel isn’t quite as gratuitously violent.
In the show, Abby does use a golf club to beat Joel to the brink of death, and the squelching of her fists against his face is skin crawling. But after Owen begs her to put an end to it, Abby chooses to stab Joel in the neck with the sharpened edge of the broken driver. While still unsettling, the scene plays more as Abby providing a small mercy to Joel with silent blow, whereas in the game she continues to cave in his skull with the club as a restrained Ellie holds eye contact. It might sound like a nitpick to those who’d prefer a less bloodthirsty approach, but it does change the framing of the scene thematically.
A three-month recovery period
Episode three opens with the aftermath of Joel’s death, seeing Tommy tend to his body and Ellie suffering from PTSD as she recovers from both the severe physical and psychological trauma she endured on the night of. The show jumps ahead three months to show both the town of Jackson and Ellie herself at an uneasy stabilization point. In her sessions with Gail, Ellie is pretending to be fine despite the therapist’s inclinations otherwise.
All of this is newly provided context added for the show that informs how the people of Jackson chose to respond to both Joel’s death and the horde attack (which also isn’t in the original story). In the game, a decision to pursue Abby is made just days after Joel’s burial, providing immediate action and consequences to players who want to get revenge themselves. It also changes who from Jackson wants to take said action given the different circumstances the characters find themselves in from the show.
The introduction of Seraphites
Midway through episode three, the plot shifts briefly away from Jackson to a group of facially scarred travelers (who we’ll later know as the Seraphites). Less equipped with technology and weaponry than the other factions like the Washington Liberation Front and FEDRA, the Scars (as they’re nicknamed) resemble a more hunter-gatherer culture, and wax poetic about the benevolent prophet of their cult. They’re subsequently ambushed and slaughtered by unknown attackers, with even the women and children ruthlessly killed.
This differs extensively from the game, where the Scars debut later in Ellie’s trek through Seattle as a terrifying force depicted more facelessly and savage. Here, Ellie and Dina discover their corpses and assume the violence was the work of Abby’s group (the WLF), reinforcing their perception of the organization as killers to be stopped. In the game, the Scars play a crucial role in Abby’s personal story, but at this juncture of the series, they’re just another sea of victims.
The town hall and a mission denied
Stemming from the major changes made with episode two’s destruction of Jackson, episode three sees a town hall meeting held for the community to debate whether they should send a hunting party out to get revenge on Abby. While Tommy himself wants blood, he’s more concerned about protecting both the town and Ellie, the latter he knows will absolutely try to go it alone to get payback. Despite an impassioned plea from Seth and a relatively well-reasoned one by Ellie, the council votes against sacrificing resources for a suicide mission. In response, Ellie and Dina decide to sneak out themselves, minimizing the impact on the community with a smaller mission.
This is a stark contrast to the game, where Tommy himself decides to take on the burden of vengeance, sneaking out to murder Joel’s killers (as he believes Joel would’ve for him). Unlike the show, it’s Tommy’s wife Maria (Rutina Wesley in the show, Ashley Scott in game) who sends Ellie and Dina out, not to kill anyone, but to bring her husband home safely. The show’s divergence here is enormous, first by grounding Tommy in Jackson rather than as the leader of the violent excursion and secondly removing any guise about Ellie’s intentions. Rather than using the salvation of Tommy as an excuse to inadvertently kill those who wronged her, Ellie’s bloodlust is on full display to Dina.
Redemption for Seth
A smaller repercussion of the changing dynamics and character pairings provides the town bartender, Seth, with a moment of redemption for his past behavior. In episode one, Seth spews homophobic rhetoric and slurs at Ellie and Dina during their dance, leading the Joel’s intervention and subsequent shunning from his adoptive daughter. In the show, Seth provides the same weak apology he’s coaxed into from the game, but he also stands up to support Ellie during the council meeting (although he makes it more about projecting strength than making amends).
His final act of penance is being the one to equip Ellie and Dina with weapons and supplies for their venture and helping them sneak out in the night — the role played by Maria in the game, sending the duo off to rescue her husband.
More love games for Ellie and Dina
The show’s framing of Dina is overall very different, giving her much deeper tactical knowledge and street smarts than the more impulsive Ellie. In many ways, she’s the one leading the charge as the brain behind the operation. She also leads their blossoming relationship, luring Ellie into opening about their kiss in the premiere, although stopping short of acting on their chemistry. She also reveals that within the three-month gap added to the series, she’s gotten back together with Jesse (once again).
At this point in the original plot, Ellie and Dina have already slept together and are depicted as essentially being a couple. Ellie remains strongheaded as always, but in the game there’s a more tragic love story at play as she is pulling along a less willing and capable participant under the false pretense of saving one of their own. Here, Ellie is more reserved, while Dina has more agency and control.
The arrival of Isaac
Episode four picks up with a flashback to 2018 (15 years into the apocalypse), where a platoon of FEDRA soldiers is riding in an APC. Their leader is shown to be Isaac (Jeffrey Wright in both the game and show), a world-weary veteran who ultimately turns on the group, killing all but one solder before aligning with the WLF (who get nicknamed as Wolves in the episode).
In the present, Isaac is the leader of the Wolves and is waging a personal war on the Scars to eradicate the rival faction. In a later scene, he can be seen interrogating and executing a Scar at WLF’s home base. This is all in line with the game but comes into play much sooner than before — where Isaac’s role is mostly confined to Abby’s subplot that we’ll likely see in future seasons of the show.
Speeding through day one
While the first game was neatly broken into four parts based on the seasons of the year, The Last of Us Part II has a much more complex structure. Episodes one to three of the show mostly make up the prologue before things would’ve kicked into gear in the game. By episode four, Ellie and Dina are in Seattle for the first of three days that round out this section of the story. But playing the game, each day is an arduous journey in their own right; conversely the show speeds through day one in a single episode.
Ellie and Dina make their way through Seattle, pausing for just one pitstop at a record store, before targeting a defunct TV station occupied by the Wolves. By removing Tommy from the equation, the duo isn’t finding corpses left behind by Joel’s brother to chart their next path — skipping over sequences where Abby’s friends begin dying off. As of now, they’ve been pulled completely from the plot and could potentially all be alive and well.
Ellie’s gets bitten
After fleeing the TV station and killing two Wolves in a remixed turn of events, Ellie and Dina find themselves in a subway tunnel besieged by both WLF and infected. It’s a harrowing sequence lifted directly from the game, but the scene’s ending changes to match the internal logic of the show’s reality. Near their escape, Ellie throws herself in front of Dina, taking a bite from an infected person to save her friend. In this world, that’s a death sentence for anyone but Ellie.
The scene plays out slightly differently in the game, wherein airborne spores force everyone to wear gasmasks — including Ellie, to hide her immunity. In this version, they’re also attacked but her mask is smashed, revealing the truth to Dina as Ellie manages to survive the fatal inhalant. In the show, the bite leads to an all-night standoff where Dina must hold a gun to Ellie’s head until she sees that there’s no transformation.
Ellie and Dina consummate their relationship
Unlike the game, where Ellie and Dina hook up early on, the show takes some time teasing out their potential pairing. Following Ellie’s bite, an awestruck Dina finally makes a move after the emotional whiplash of realizing that she hadn’t lost her newfound love. It’s here that Dina also reveals that she’s pregnant with Jesse’s baby, with Ellie proudly proclaiming that she’ll be the dad in their triple parenting situation.
Obviously, this sex scene occurs much sooner in the game, but it’s also the impact of the pregnancy reveal that’s changed. In the source material, Dina’s pregnancy is used as an excuse to leave her behind in the theatre, pitting players as Ellie alone, who can set aside any pretenses of the journey being anything more than a revenge mission without her partner’s safety to worry about.
The Wolves go to war
Similarly to the game, the episode ends with a massive explosion rattling downtown Seattle. Using a stolen walkie lifted from the TV station, Ellie and Dina can suss out that it’s the Wolves who are making a move on some other entity, and the pair quickly plan to make their move in the middle of the chaos to find their marks.
Although it’s unclear exactly who the Wolves are raining fire upon in both versions of the story, it’s presumed to be the Scars in the adaptation; whereas in the game, Ellie and Dina believe that Tommy is responsible for the carnage. If it turns out to be Wolves attacking Seraphites, it will shift up the timeline of the game where the Wolves have escalated their attempts to eradicate the group that plays heavily into later portions of the story. For now, the identity of who’s involved remains a mystery.
The tragedy of Leon
Episode Five opens with a conversation between two Wolves named Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach) and Elise (Hettienne Park), with the former investigating the latter for killing a troop of her own men — including her son, Leon. At Hanrahan’s behest, Elise had sent a squad of Wolves to the basement of the Lakehill Hospital that the faction is occupying. After receiving a call from Leon cryptically stating, “It’s in the air,” Elise is forced to seal the soldiers in the basement to die.
Both Hanrahan and Elise are new characters created for the show, as is Leon — although there is another character in the video game that suffers a similar fate. In The Last of Us Part II, players can find a note while exploring Seattle that tells the story of a would-be bank robber with the same name, who is also sealed into a vault to meet his demise. Here, Leon’s fate helps flesh out the human toll the Wolves are suffering but also teases a much greater reveal later in the episode.
Dina’s backstory becomes even sadder
During their trek through Seattle, Dina and Ellie stumble across a mural painted to worship the prophet of the Scars, now defaced by graffiti and blood after WLF soldiers executed a group of the cultists, leaving their bodies in a pile. Dina throws up again and Ellie urges her to go back to protect herself and the baby. It’s here that Dina explains that she shot a raider who murdered her mother and sister. He was the first non-infected person she’d ever killed, and the event left her orphaned.
This is similar to Dina’s backstory in the game although, originally, Dina’s sister Talia survives the ordeal and raises her in the following years. Talia teaches Dina about their family’s Jewish faith, which becomes a big part of Dina’s worldview as she imparts stories and parables to Ellie during in-game dialogue. In the show, Dina doesn’t mention religion, instead teaching Ellie about Amish communities in the pre-apocalypse. The loss of her family remains a driving factor in wanting to bring Joel’s killers to justice.
Jesse and Tommy join the fray
After a grueling encounter with multiple infected stalkers, Ellie and Dina are saved by the surprise appearance of Jesse, who tells the pair that both he and Tommy left Jackson shortly after their departure to bring them back safely. Having split up, Tommy is now on his own searching for the girls, leaving the newfound trio to track him down. The group quickly stumbles upon a pack of Scars slaughtering Wolves, causing Dina to take an arrow to the thigh and retreat with Jesse to the theatre while Ellie continues her pursuit.
This is the reverse of the scenario laid out in the game, where Ellie and Dina leave Jackson to find Tommy, although Ellie does run into Jesse in a similar situation. In the original story, Ellie encounters the Scars alone and takes the arrow herself, although it’s mostly shrugged off as a minor injury given that players need to trudge on with the mission. In the show, Tommy’s whereabouts are unknown, whereas the game’s plot sees Ellie tracking him throughout the city as he carves his way through the Wolves and sews chaos.
The introduction of cordyceps spores
Picking up on the tease from the episode’s opening, a major retcon to the lore of the show comes into play as it’s revealed that the cordyceps can now spread via spores in the air, having evolved to become even more lethal. As Ellie chases one of Joel’s killers, Nora (Tati Gabrielle in the show, Chelsea Tavares in the game) through the Lakehill Hospital, she eventually forces her prey down into the basement where Leon and his crew had previously been trapped. Here, Nora begins choking on airborne spores, sealing her fate — but not before realizing that Ellie herself is unaffected and is the mysteriously immune girl that got her friends killed by Joel back in Salt Lake City.
The reveal is a huge development for the series that brings the nature of the infection more in line with the game, where airborne spores play a major factor from the very beginning. Nora’s realization of Ellie’s immunity plays out similarly in both versions, but has a different level of impact here as the spores now signal a much graver threat to humanity than ever before.
A different perspective of Nora’s death
After the big reveal of both the spores and her immunity, Ellie proceeds to try beating information out of Nora with a massive pipe. Nora refuses to tell Ellie the whereabouts of Abby and her friends, knowing that she’s already doomed after inhaling the cordyceps. It’s a point of no return for Ellie in both versions of the story, as all pretenses of salvation or rescuing her friends are tossed aside, laying bare her bloodlust and vengeful nature as she relentlessly pummels Nora to death.
In the show, the sequence plays out like a heel turn for Ellie as she commits the first flat-out murder of a Wolf, although the scene abruptly cuts to black before Nora’s death can be shown. At this point in the game, Ellie has already killed many people (Wolves included), and although the scene is still impactful, the show’s relative lack of violence from Ellie makes the sequence more shocking, if not quite as sadistic. Bathed in the basement’s red light, Ellie resembles a horror movie monster; however, in the game, the execution is seen from Nora’s perspective, forcing players to press the button prompts for each blow Ellie lands as they experience the murder through the eyes of the victim.
Meeting Joel and Tommy’s Dad
Episode Six begins with a cold open set in 1983, 20 years before the show’s version of the outbreak, where younger versions of Joel (Andrew Diaz) and Tommy (David Miranda) are having a panicked discussion. Tommy’s done something wrong and is afraid that their father (Tony Dalton) is going to react violently. The senior Miller is a police officer and despite his anger over Tommy buying drugs — and Joel trying to take the blame — he responds with a more measured tongue than expected. Joel’s dad instead explains how his own father beat him, and although he has been hard on the boys, he believes that he’s “doing a little better than (his) father did.” He hopes Joel will do the same.
All of this is newly created for the show. In the game, the only depiction of the before times is from the night of the outbreak when Joel loses his daughter, which served as the opener for the series premiere. Players know that Joel is protective of Tommy from conversations they have through the games, none of which are overtly present in the show’s narrative. Instead, this scene shows more plainly why Joel has felt the need to be so violently defensive of his loved ones.
Four birthdays
The whole episode is told through a series of flashbacks, chronicling different birthdays for Ellie from the five-year period between their arrival in Jackson and the night before Joel’s death. We see how happy their early years were as a family, with Joel going out of his way to plan elaborate gifts for Ellie, including cakes, a personalized guitar, and a trip to a nearby museum where she can live out the fantasy of riding in the Apollo 15 space shuttle. By her nineteenth birthday, six months prior to the show’s present, their relationship had mostly fallen apart.
Some of the sequences, like the museum visit and Ellie’s first patrol, are pulled directly from the game, although they’re spread across the first 10 or so hours of the story, usually coming to Ellie as memories. Others, like how she covers up her bite with a chemical burn and tattoo, are pieces only alluded to in passing. Constructing a full episode of these moments, and reframing them all as birthdays, serves to chart the downward trajectory of their bond and succinctly close the book on Joel and Ellie’s relationship.
The moth symbolism, explained
One recurring visual motif from The Last of Us Part II is the ubiquitous presence of moths. In the game’s opening title screen, they’re seen fluttering in the light of a windowpane; there’s one on Ellie’s guitar neck, which is implied to be the inspiration for Ellie’s tattoo. That’s all here, too, but mixed around a bit. Rather than Ellie being inspired by the moth on her guitar (which Joel refurbished instead of fully customizing), it’s actually Ellie who’s enamored with moths, referring to them as something she saw in a dream. From her drawings, Joel pulls the image for her guitar and admires the moth tattoo on her arm after simmering down from their argument.
In the game, the importance of the moths is left more ambiguous, whereas the show states it clearly during a conversation between Joel and Gail. The exasperated therapist tells Joel that moths are historically considered symbols of death. Previously, players might’ve only gleaned that knowledge from interviews with the game’s co-director, Neil Druckmann.
Eugene’s death
On Ellie’s nineteenth birthday, Joel takes her out on her first patrol as a gift, which affords them the opportunity to ride horses and bond like they did in the old days. Here, Ellie is planning to confront Joel about the events of Salt Lake City, but they’re interrupted by Eugene (Joe Pantoliano), who has been infected and begs to see his wife Gail one last time before being put down. Ellie thinks she’s convinced Joel to show him mercy, and runs back to get the horses; Joel brings Eugene to the lakefront where he betrays his word and kills him.
In the game, Eugene is mentioned in passing but never appears in the flesh. His hideout is the grow house where Ellie and Dina smoke a little weed and sleep together for the first time, but his role is minimal. Here, his death at Joel’s hands becomes an inflection point for Ellie in the story.
Skipping Salt Lake City and the fallout of Eugene
Following Eugene’s death, Ellie and Joel return his body to Jackson, where Joel attempts to lie to Gail about his demise, saying that he opted to end his own life to spare her the pain. Disgusted by the ruse, Ellie breaks down telling Gail the truth, creating the rift between Joel and Gail seen earlier in the season, and setting up a major confrontation between the already fractured father and daughter duo at the end of the episode. In the aftermath of Eugene’s death, Ellie sees clearly how easily Joel can lie.
None of this happens in the game, but instead there’s a different flashback that the show omits entirely. In that sequence, Ellie disappears from Jackson, leaving Joel to track her back to the hospital in Salt Lake City. There, she confronts him in the way she intended to on patrol (in the show) and learns the truth about his role in killing the Fireflies and Marlene, denying her a choice in the fate of humanity.
The Porch Scene, revisited
Much to the relief of many fans, the penultimate episode of the season does a slight bit of retconning to show that Ellie’s final interaction with Joel wasn’t just ignoring him on the porch the night of the New Year’s Eve party, but rather that the original depiction from the season premiere was a feint by the series’ writers. After passing by Joel, Ellie doubled back to speak with him, demanding the truth about the hospital massacre for the cathartic moment she would’ve gotten in the omitted Salt Lake City scene from the game. He finally tells her real story as he breaks down crying, and although it deeply affects Ellie, she offers the hope that she’ll someday forgive him.
The Porch Scene, as it’s known by fans, is a pivotal moment in the game and was previously a point of contention around the show’s earlier truncated version. As it’s portrayed in the adaptation, it serves multiple purposes — both airing out the truth and showing that Joel and Ellie had, in some small way, opened the door to reconciling on the night before his death. It’s a lot to digest; in the game, there’s months between the revelation and Ellie’s willingness to forgive, and their shared secret is the reason for Ellie’s growing disconnect from Joel. In the show, her suspicions and teenage angst play a larger role than her factual knowledge, and she’s much quicker to make amends within the very same scene. Here, Joel also imparts the same sentiment his father did about doing better for his own kid than prior generations did for theirs.
The biggest difference, however, is the placement of this flashback, which will likely serve as the last time viewers ever see Joel and Ellie together. In the game, it’s part of the final cutscene, and the reveal that Ellie wanted to forgive Joel is meant to imbue a sense of tepid hopefulness at the end of a mostly bleak story.
This story will be updated weekly as new episodes of The Last of Us air.