SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 2, Episode 3 of HBO‘s The Last of Us.
After a frantic and heartbreaking second episode, Season 2 of The Last of Us gave the audience and its characters alike the space to grieve and process the aftermath of their trauma in Sunday night’s third episode.
The story picks up in the immediate hours after Joel’s murder and the attack on Jackson, with the streets still in flames as Tommy (Gabriel Luna) visits his brother in the makeshift morgue. He takes over from a woman who is sitting with Joel, cleaning his body, and has his final moments alone with his older sibling to say goodbye. At the same time, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) wakes up in the hospital, screaming as she sees the image of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) stabbing Joel in the neck with a broken golf club seared into her head, before she’s quickly sedated again.
Three months later, things feel a bit calmer, but the deep fissures of the loss endured that night remain for both Ellie and Tommy as they weigh whether or not to go after Abby and her crew, who Dina (Isabela Merced) has deduced are based in Seattle. They put it to a vote and, ultimately, the council vetoes the proposal to expend resources on that mission given the rebuilding left to do in their own home — but that doesn’t stop Ellie and Dina from embarking on the dangerous mission themselves.
“Tommy votes yes, and he’s ready to ride out with her,” Luna tells Deadline. “I think part of me knows that she’s going to go. That’s certainly why I go to Gail immediately and try to seek counsel and kind of give myself permission to follow the feelings I’m also having. Perhaps I am afraid that she’s going to go and do something stupid, as I say, and because it’s what I want to do, and she doesn’t have the same tethers that I do.”
In the interview below, Luna dissects Tommy’s complex emotional state in Episode 3 as he’s pulled in multiple directions from Ellie, his town, his family and his own needs. He also shares one major difference from the video game that he says he suggested in order to add more nuance and depth to Tommy’s arc this season.
DEADLINE: There’s a lot of emotional heavy lifting in this episode. We’re coming off of a very action-packed episode to one that is much quieter, but full of grief, heartbreak and confusion. How did you start to understand where Tommy’s headspace would be in the months after losing his brother?
GABRIEL LUNA: We see him in the immediate aftermath as the episode starts, and I was anticipating that probably more so than any of the action stuff. I can’t say that I wasn’t excited about all the action and wasn’t anticipating that. Of course, one one would have to be, but there was just something about what I just called the ‘one man wake,’ which essentially is a repass for his brother. It’s only him that’s there. I kept thinking about, whenever that night would come, how important that is [given] the reflection that we’re asking of the audience after such a monumental shift in the story, the passing of Joel and the attack on Jackson. So I, first and foremost, was just trying to relax, because when I got there on the night, I was all wound up. So much so that, when we were in rehearsal, the moment I said the words, ‘give Sarah my love,’ I was already in tears. I had to quickly recalibrate and kind of slow down a little bit, because we had several setups and a lot of coverage to do. But one thing I did do was ask Peter, our director, if we could just shoot the close up first, because I was kind of already there. It was a really interesting night. It was a nice shoot. The streets were eerily empty. They were real streets. We were in the Jackson set that we built outside, and which was several city blocks of Jackson. At that moment, we were shooting in the mess hall, in the restaurant, which was a fully functioning building, but I was standing out by myself before each take, out in the middle of the road, and it was just me and like two special effects guys who were lighting all the flame bars that gave all the fire elements that were happening outside the windows, because the town was still burning and smoldering.
So I just remember being alone there, thinking about the scene, trying to get into it, maybe kind of overthinking it in a way. But the moment I walked in and saw the body kind of laying there, which was actually a body double named Philippe, really sweet guy who went through full makeup for me so I could have something to react to when I lift the shroud. The moment I’m in that room, there was something kind of truthful about the whole thing. I recalled the many funerals I’ve been to in my life and just went through and did the scene and spoke truthfully. There’s a lot of dialogue in that scene that we cut, which is good, because it was important dialogue, but nothing is more important than the sentiment that my brother will be with his daughter, my niece, and that’s all that matters.
DEADLINE: I have to imagine Tommy is feeling a lot of complex emotions in that scene, and throughout the episode. He just experienced his own trauma with the attack on Jackson. His brother is dead. He’s become somewhat of a caretaker for Ellie overnight. How did you reflect on all of that while shooting?
LUNA: I think the way its scripted is really nuanced and lends itself to each of these angles that are kind of attacking Tommy’s spirit. I think there’s a lot going on. Number one, he’s an instrumental part of the rebuild. So he’s thinking about the community at large. He has his own anger and his own guilt for not being there, which is a very interesting change that we made from the game — one that I had kind of requested in the first season, and then one that I’m thankful that Neil and Craig were receptive to, which is the idea that that Tommy wouldn’t be there, and he wouldn’t be the one to tip off the group to our names and give us up. It happens in a much more organic and kind of believable way [in the show] when Dina, in haste to get to safety, she’s calling out, ‘Joel, let’s go.’ So in the game, Tommy’s like, ‘I’m Tommy. This is Joel,’ to a complete stranger, which, I think, always didn’t really make sense to me. We changed all that, because Neil and Craig are brilliant and adaptive people. There’s a lot of guilt now for Tommy having not been there. There’s a strong desire to go find these people and get them, but there’s also a duty to the community and an adherence to our laws and the way we do things and and.
Between he and Ellie, [Bella and I] already have this really beautiful relationship. I love Bella and care for them so much. So it was easy to play all that. We all know that we’re transitioning from Pedro’s beautiful leadership to Bella’s leadership and Kaitlyn and myself and the people who are going to keep telling the story. There’s the awareness of that within the characters. There’s also the adult that Ellie is. I’ve been more observant of how much growth has gone on there, and how much development, and the person she’s becoming, the warrior that she’s becoming. I know how capable she is. So there’s a bit of that…of allowing choices to be made, trying to manage it, trying to figure out how you balance all these things, and what duty I have to protect her. But can I protect her? Can I protect her from herself? That’s kind of the questions I have later, I guess, with Gail, when we sit down at the ball game.
DEADLINE: Another pretty big change is that, in the show, Ellie and Dina leave for Seattle first. In the game, Tommy goes by himself first and they follow him. There’s also not any sort of council vote about whether to send a crew. Do you think that, in the show at least, Tommy thinks there’s a world where Ellie wouldn’t go? Or do you think he always kind of knew that, no matter the outcome of the vote, she would leave?
LUNA: I mean, Tommy votes yes, and he’s ready to ride out with her. But, once again, his wife and the community deserve a say, and he’s also willing to honor that. I think part of me knows that she’s going to go. That’s certainly why I go to Gail immediately and try to seek counsel and kind of give myself permission to follow the feelings I’m also having. Perhaps I am afraid that she’s going to go and do something stupid, as I say, and because it’s what I want to do, and she doesn’t have the same tethers that I do. So yeah, I think that there is something to that and in kind of just surrendering to the force of nature that she is. Surrender to the events as they play out. I think there’s something to it. There’s something to Tommy kind of releasing. At that point, every choice is going to start being made for us, unfortunately, I think.
DEADLINE: In that conversation with Gail, she calls Ellie a liar. Tommy really bristles at that and tries to defend her. Why? Do you think he can come to terms with that characterization of Ellie?
LUNA: She’s my family. She’s talking about my family, and I know the goodness in her, but Gail knows the truth. That’s kind of what I went there to see. I went there to ask her, which is for her to impart the truth that she sees in people. I think, quickly after that, I kind of realized that does kind of check out about this kid. At same time, I don’t like hearing it, just like any of us don’t like hearing people talk down on the people we love. I think it’s just a lot of that kind of gut reaction of family looking after family.
DEADLINE: Joel was always a protector of his family and the people he loved at all costs. Now that he’s gone, how is Tommy viewing the role he may or may not have to step into in order to keep people safe?
LUNA: I think it took a lot for Tommy to be broken and to be tamed in his life. Now that he is where he is in his life — they were just a few months away from the stability that they were seeking, that they were trying to build. I think it’s just extremely confusing time for him. Personally, he’s not well equipped for it. He’s somebody who lives to serve. I think Joel calls him a follower in the first season. I think that’s from Joel’s point of view. He says that from a place of hurting, because of the fact that his brother left him. So he’s like, ‘Well, my brother left me because he went to follow something else.’ But, in truth, I think what Tommy’s all about is service. That’s why he joined the the military. That’s why he is on the Security Council. That’s why he serves his wife as her kind of right hand. For somebody who has that instinct — and now he’s devoted to Ellie and to being the paternal figure. He’s now inherited her, and he needs to be there for her. So I think it’s just, even from the first episode, you see him being drawn and quartered in all directions. I think that’s very confusing and very hard for him.
DEADLINE: Anything else that you wanted to add?
LUNA: I love the Ellie-Dina dynamic and where that’s going. People who play the game, we have an idea, but there’s a lot of really cool and surprising things that are coming up. For us to be a little bit removed from Joel’s death, three months is enough time for it to take a different shape into people. It’s now less about impulse and being rash, and now it’s very calculated and designed, which makes it even scarier. It makes those choices even heavier and weightier. But then within that is all these really beautiful, subtle moments that Bella and and Izzy put together.
