‘Made it darker’: The Last of Us torments viewers with horrifying scene in its tense season finale

HBO’s hit show The Last of Us was never going to end its season cheerfully. But this? This was more confronting than most viewers could have imagined.

Spoiler warning for everything in season two of The Last of Us

And maybe a mild trigger warning, if you’re squeamish? But hey, if you have already seen the whole season, it’s a little late for that.

Read on at your discretion.

Your face while watching the finale, probably. This is mainly just here to act as one last barrier between you and the spoilers. Picture: Max

The season finale of The Last of Us was never going to be a fun, lighthearted romp, was it?

A less-than-comprehensive list of what we endured: the near-disembowelment of our protagonist, Ellie; the abrupt, fatal headshot of probably our purest remaining character, Jesse; and most harrowingly, the senseless death of a pregnant woman.

Mel, the member of Abby’s crew whose hands are the cleanest, despite her reluctant role in facilitating Joel’s murder back in episode two, is accidentally shot dead in Seattle’s aquarium (Ellie is aiming for someone else, Owen, but the bullet pierces and kills both).

Her final moments are traumatising, for both Ellie and the viewer. Knowing she is quickly bleeding out, Mel – with the clinical calm that comes with her job as a doctor – asks Ellie to cut out her unborn baby, in the vain hope that it might still survive.

“Knife. Do you have a knife? I have like 30 seconds, get the f*** over here, please. Please. You’re going to take it out. You’re going to get it out,” she says.

“What? I don’t know how to do that,” says Ellie.

“I do. I do,” says Mel.

But she expires before an understandably panicked Ellie, near-frozen by the horror of what she’s just done, can act.

(I really love Ariela Barer’s performance as Mel here, by the way. There is no resentment towards Ellie at all. No time for that. Just a quiet desperation to do whatever is possible to save the child.)

The show's version of Mel had to look away in discomfort as Abby ambushed Joel – distinguishing her from the rest of the Seattle crew. Picture: Max

This might be the single most visceral, horrendous, confronting thing we have witnessed in The Last of Us so far.

Worse than Henry shooting dead his infected younger brother Sam and then, in despair, turning the weapon on himself. Worse than David’s cannibals chopping up human beings as food. Worse even than Joel’s face being pummeled beyond recognition with a golf club.

It’s just so utterly, unjustifiably horrible. And that is by design.

“In the game, there’s a very different confrontation, the nature of it is different. Mel actually attacks Ellie, and Ellie kind of kills in self-defence,” says co-showrunner Craig Mazin, whose imagination spawned the grisly final moments of Mel’s life.

In The Last of Us Part II, the game which serves as source material for the show’s second and as yet unwritten, upcoming seasons, Ellie does kill Mel, and does also realise too late that she’s pregnant.

But those last, panicked moments are not present; Mel dies, in this case from a stab wound to the neck, without saying another word.

“Here in the show, this is a true collateral damage moment. And then ... then I decided to make it dark. I called Neil and was like, ‘I think I can make it dark,’” Mazin recalls, with a hint of grim amusement.

Craig Mazin. Picture: Kayla Oaddams/Getty Images

Neil Druckmann. Picture: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO

Neil Druckmann, who co-directed Part II and is Mazin’s partner in adapting it for television, reacted as you might expect, given how harrowing the original scene already was.

“I remember, when he described it before I read it, he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I made it darker.’ And I’m like, ‘How could it be darker?’” Druckmann recounts.

“And then I read it and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s darker.’ But you know, sometimes we have to go there. And it was important for this moment to ... if you’re rooting for Ellie, for it to make you feel dirty. Because that is what collateral damage does.”

The show does not have access to what Druckmann has, in the past, described as a “cheat code” inherent to video games.

In the games you aren’t just watching Ellie, you are Ellie. So when she kills a pregnant woman, even in what could reasonably be called self-defence, you feel complicit. Or “dirty”, as Druckmann put it. The interactivity of the medium acts as a shortcut; it helps induce the desired emotional response.

How do you achieve the same thing in television? With a certain extra callousness.

Ellie in The Last of Us. Picture: Max

“Because Mel is a doctor – and I’m fascinated by doctors and medicine – how a doctor would approach that moment is fascinating,” says Mazin.

“She’s young. But that is how it would be. There are young doctors. And this moment also called for Bella to have and display such a profound level of regret and failure.

“I think it’s important for people to see that it’s not like Ellie is going, ‘I’m cool, whatever, it happened, let’s keep going.’ It breaks her.

“And I think it’s clear to her that Mel didn’t deserve to die. Mel didn’t hurt her, Mel didn’t hold her down, Mel didn’t hurt Joel.

“Before Ellie shows up (in Joel’s death scene) Mel is trying to help Dina, is horrified by what Abby is doing, and tries to stop it and fails. Which is her own shame.”

Now the horror has shifted to Ellie’s side. You probably felt queasy already a couple of episodes earlier, when she brutalised another member of Abby’s team. But that victim, Nora, was less sympathetic; until the end she was mouthing off against Joel. There is no such mitigating factor with Mel.

Ellie is shellshocked by what she’s done, and so are we.

The season ends with its last great bombshell, a point-of-view shift. We’ve gone back in time to the first day of Ellie’s journey in Seattle, but now it is from Abby’s perspective.

This shift happens in the game too, but whether it will translate well to television remains an open question.

“Let’s put this under the column ‘things video games can do that are really hard to do on television’,” says Mazin.

“It’s impossible. What we can’t do is reproduce the shock of becoming another person. In the games, you are Joel, you are Ellie, and when that shift happens it’s jarring.

But here, we are watching everybody equally on a screen. We may identify with (characters from) time to time in different ways, and we may be conflicted, but we aren’t them.

“But it’s never going to be what a video game can do when you shift perspective in a massive way like that.

“I think what we do, and what we’re doing correctly, is honouring the notion that there is a time period where one person experiences it one way and another person is experiencing it so wildly differently, and yet they converge.

“Can we produce that gut punch feeling? No. And I think if we had chased it, we probably would have fallen on our faces.”

It will be fascinating to see how viewers react. Will they still be keen to watch this show with an entirely new character set at the forefront? I guess we’ll find out in a couple of years.

Twitter: @SamClench

You can stream The Last of Us on Max

Originally published as ‘Made it darker’: The Last of Us torments viewers with horrifying scene in its tense season finale