The creator of ‘The Last of Us’ explains the big difference between Ellie and Sarah

If you haven’t seen the first episode of ‘The Last of Us’ yet, watch out for SPOILERS…

The launch of ‘The Last of Us’ on HBO Max has broken records, placing itself as the second best premiere of the platform in the last decade after ‘The House of the Dragon’, and the first reactions indicate that we could be facing one of the best video game adaptations ever.

The first chapter of the first season of ‘The Last of Us’ has dazzled the public and critics by introducing us to Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Sarah (Nico Parker), father and daughter, facing the beginning of a global apocalypse in which it is, of course, one of the best series of zombies, infected and living dead today. But tragically, their relationship will not last. Sarah does not survive the altercations caused by the infectious outbreak and we jump back in time, 20 years later, to witness the beginning of a new traveling companion for Joel, Ellie (Bella Ramsey)., a girl who shows no symptoms of the disease despite having been infected with the Cordyceps fungus. We explain it a little better in the ‘The Last of Us’ character guide, in case you want to take a look at it.

During the official podcast of ‘The Last of Us’ from HBO, the co-creator of the series craig mazin explained, from your point of view, what is the big difference between the characters of Ellie and Sarah:

“Early in the episode, when Joel hits the old lady over the head with the wrench, Sarah is horrified and cries. Even though that woman was trying to kill her, basically. And she’s like, ‘You killed her.’ No she can believe what she just saw. She just saw her father murder someone. Ellie, however, reacts differently when Joel beats the Phaedra guard to death. And that guy wasn’t even threatening Joel’s life. He hits him over and over and over again. And Ellie kicks in. And this is going to echo in the future. This is something that Neil [Druckmann, creador del juego y showrunner de la serie junto a Mazin] and I talked a lot, which was understanding where Ellie is going and understanding what the connection is between Joel and Ellie. That there’s a thread between them that’s more than just, ‘I had a daughter, and you’re a girl too.’ There is something else. There is a connection between Joel and Ellie that is different from his connection to his own daughter, and perhaps potentially stronger and certainly more dangerous.”

HBO

Mazin’s statements delve into the most important thing in the series. ‘The Last of Us’ is not just a video game or a television series about zombies and the infected, as Pedro Pascal himself told us in the interview on the occasion of the premiere. The greatness of ‘The Last of Us’ lies in the richness of its characters and, above all, in the relationship that Joel and Ellie will developand how they will affect each other in their fight for survival.

Despite the fact that there are already several differences between the video game and the ‘The Last of Us’ series, it seems that that essence will be key in both. And that’s how it should be.