‘The Last of Us’: Craig Mazin explains why there are nods to the second video game in the first season

Those who have played the two “The Last of Us” video games and are now enjoying the HBO Max series will have noticed that while the adaptation is faithful to the first, it has already included some nods to events or situations that do not appear until the second of the games, especially in the sixth episode.

In the podcast that the chain releases after each episode airs, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the showrunners, talked about all these seeds they left for the future of the story and the Easter Egg hidden for fans only, fans: “When I started working with Neil on this adaptation, it was before ‘The Last of Us Part II’ came out”Mazin explains, “It was my first time going to Naughty Dog and he asked me if I wanted to see a sequence from the second game that talks about Ellie’s fascination with being an astronaut and traveling through space, it was a good moment. I told him we had an opportunity that Neil didn’t have in the first game, because now we know more. It was an opportunity to show how well Joel knew Ellie. She asks him if she knows who her favorite astronaut is, and he knows. Instinctively, he’s already in her head and knows her, and she’s not surprised.”

To make matters worse, Mazin also points out that Ellie’s passion was introduced into the storyline because Ashley Johnson, the actress who plays the character in the game, is a big lover of space and Troy Baker, the game’s Joel, is also a musician, which is why his character loves music. and Pedro Pascal says in the series that when the world returns to normal he will pursue his frustrated dream of becoming a singer.

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But the winks don’t end there. Perhaps someone recognized the girl who watches Ellie from afar in Jackson’s cafeteria, a city that is also key in “The Last of Us: Part II”, and that is, although her name is not revealed; her clothes, her hair and his obvious interest in Ellie points to Dina, a girl who will later be his love interest and with whom he will share his first kiss in that same place.

Whether or not it’s Dina, there’s one cameo that’s even more obvious: Shimmer. During the tour that María and Tommy take them through the municipality, Ellie is introduced to a newborn horse which Maria tells her is called Shimmer. Shimmer is Ellie’s horse in “The Last of Us Part 2”. The seventh episode of the series will air on HBO Max on Monday, February 27 and will focus on Ellie’s past.