‘The Last of Us’ Boss Takes Us Inside the Joel & Ellie Rift in Season 2

“Give me my knife” were the first words that defiant 14-year-old orphan Ellie (Bella Ramsey) spoke to hardened survivor Joel (Pedro Pascal) right after she tried to stab him in the 2023 series premiere of the post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us. She followed that up by calling the man she’d just met, who was soon hired to smuggle her out of an authoritarian quarantine zone, an “a–hole.”

They have come a long way (maybe) in the second season of the sci-fi series cocreated by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, creative director of the popular video games on which the show is based. The seven new episodes, which use the 2020 game The Last of Us Part II as source material, pick up five years after the pair’s first-season journey, in which they developed a mutually protective father-daughter relationship while trekking across the American wasteland to a hospital where Ellie, immune from the fungal virus that had ravaged humanity, could be instrumental in creating a vaccine. After she was sedated for her procedure, Joel learned that it would kill her. Horrified, he slaughtered almost everyone at the facility and rescued Ellie. When she awoke, he lied to her that the procedure had been a bust.

Now, Joel and Ellie are settling for what is perhaps the second-best thing to saving all of humanity — protecting the ones they love. Not a bad pursuit. They are safe and sound in the heavily fortified Jackson, Wyoming, the site of a highly functioning community run by Joel’s younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), who now have a young son. “It’s about as close to normal life as you can get in this world,” Mazin says. This place even has community hall dances, y’all!

The problem, beyond those pesky hordes of the infected, human raiders, slavers and all kinds of assorted nasties threatening to break through Jackson’s walls, is Joel and Ellie’s relationship.

“Joel and Ellie have fallen into a bit of a pattern that a lot of parents find with kids as they grow up,” Mazin says. “Her relationship with Joel has become strained, and we are not sure why. Joel’s hope is that it is just the usual teenager-disconnecting-with-parent thing. But we know from the end of Season 1, there is this matter of the lie that Joel told Ellie. So we can’t help but wonder if maybe Ellie’s burgeoning understanding of what happened is partly to blame for the rift.”

“What Bella and Pedro do this season, from my point of view, as a guy sitting in a chair watching the monitor, it’s staggering,” continues Mazin, who directed the first episode, shot in snowy Alberta, Canada. “I am deeply grateful to them. I don’t know how it gets better than this.”

The actors must navigate new territory. Ellie, who doesn’t depend solely on Joel as she once did, has a wider support system now, anchored by her best friend Dina (Isabela Merced). “Dina is funny and witty and brave, but also, as we’ll come to understand, in its own way, there is a tragedy there too,” Mazin says.

The two young women are well-matched. Both are eager members of a group that patrols the zone around Jackson to defend it from the infected, led by their dependable friend Jesse (Young Mazino). Ellie, who spent her childhood in a Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) school where she trained to be a soldier, is hungry for combat.

She may get battles she never expected. The Cordyceps virus, as established in the first season, “can keep evolving, and rapidly,” Mazin says. The sick won’t always play by the expected rules, and you’ll see more of them, a development that producers know will please the fandom. “We heard a lot of people say after Season 1 that the one thing on their wish list that they didn’t get was more infected,” Mazin says. “We delivered what we could; we also felt it was important to really focus on Joel and Ellie. Our ambitions got much higher in Season 2. As we head into this darker phase of the world around them, it also made narrative sense to start to dig more into the threat out there, and how omnipresent it is, and how surprising and quick it can be. You think you’re safe, and then in the blink of an eye, you’re not.”

Uninfected humans aren’t exactly warm and cuddly either. FEDRA still strictly regulates the quarantine zones, or QZs, often using violent tactics, including executions, to control the citizens within. Rebel groups still stand against them. A new face from the dissident world is Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who leads a small band of survivors once affiliated with the Fireflies, the group that hired Joel to get Ellie to that hospital.

Abby and her crew pose a grave threat to the protective Joel and the now-19-year-old Ellie. Abby’s conflict with Ellie will escalate and bring out the women’s bloodthirsty sides. “Even in this world that is so brutal and that has pitted them against each other and has created terrible loss and pain, there is some hope that they can make it through without losing themselves to the darkness that’s inside of them,” Mazin says.

This season’s conflicts, gory and otherwise, will take place in fewer locations, unlike Season 1, as Joel and Ellie made their way across the U.S. “This story is more centered on home in Jackson, and then a not-so-far journey to Seattle, where we’ll stay,” Mazin says. “Seattle is defined by this ongoing struggle. We’re going to meet the people involved in that struggle and come to understand them extraordinarily well. We will learn a lot about them this season. We’re going to learn even more in seasons to come.”

One of those people is Isaac, played by Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), who returns to play the character he voiced in the video game. In that medium, he’s a former Marine and leader of the Washington Liberation Front, which challenges FEDRA in Seattle.

Game players will get the satisfaction of recognizing characters and storylines, but there will also be surprises. “Sometimes we spend a lot more time with a character than the game does. There’s one character in particular that I know we spend more time with,” Mazin hints. “And then there are characters that don’t exist in the game, like Catherine O’Hara‘s, an original creation for the show. We stray from the game storyline, change things up, create new situations, but we’re doing it in service of that story. The things that are important, those things we adhere to, because we love them.”

One thing we love about The Last of Us is its depiction of humans’ deep need for connection, even when the world is being torn apart. In the first season, the series earned praise for the third episode, “Long, Long Time,” which told the stand-alone love story of a couple, doomsday prepper Bill (Nick Offerman) and artist Frank (Murray Bartlett), Joel’s allies and the only residents of a civilized compound stocked with fine wine and guns.

“There is an episode this season that does stand apart in its own way,” Mazin reveals. “It’s quite different than the Bill and Frank episode. You could say it’s sort of a tonal cousin. It is nice in a season, especially one that has as much madness as this one, to have an episode that steps aside and gives us all a chance to reflect, but, more importantly, learn a lot about the people we care about.”

The heart of The Last of Us is, after all, the people. Caring about them is why we watch. And caring about each other is why they keep trying to survive against all odds in the show’s brutal world. Now, pass the flamethrower.

The Last of Us, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, April 13, 9/8c, HBO and Max

This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s The Last of Us: The Ultimate Survival Story special issue. For an in-depth look at the critically-acclaimed HBO series, featuring behind-the-scenes secrets and a preview of the highly anticipated second season, pick up a copy of the issue available on newsstands on April 11, or order online here.