SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 3.
“The Last of Us” Season 2 may be setting up a narrative about the dangers of pursuing revenge, but Isabela Merced wants to remind viewers that it’s OK to not try and be one step ahead of the characters’ moral lessons.
“I think watching this, you have to lean into your feelings that you’re feeling in each moment,” Merced, who plays Dina, said at a screening on April 24 of “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 3. “I don’t think the writers and the designers of the game wanted you to be wiser. I don’t think they wanted you to be like ‘Oh, everyone’s bad because they’re all after their own thing.’ I think they really want everyone to lean into their frustration and their pain.” The event was hosted by Complex and Max, to celebrate the show’s inclusive casting.
“They’re cooking,” Merced said. “The meal’s not done yet.”
Season 2 kicked off with the murder of Joel (Pedro Pascal) by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of the doctor he killed while saving Ellie at the end of the first season. Bereft and full of rage, Ellie vowed to Abby and her friends in Season 2, Episode 2 that she would kill them.
“I don’t think you have to be bigger than the message,” Merced added.
Courtesy of HBO
Merced discussed the show alongside cast members Gabriel Luna, Danny Ramirez, Tati Gabrielle and Ariela Barer. The cast touched on the nuances of how people can be driven to violence and revenge.
Barer said the underlying theme of the current season is “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Ramirez, Gabrielle and Barer — who play members of Abby’s crew — also debated the morality of Abby killing Joel, with Ramirez pointing out that Joel had prevented the creation of a vaccine in addition to targeting their loved ones.
“He was going off on people that we love and so the moment that our bestie, our best friend, is like, ‘Yo, this happened to my dad directly.’ I’m like, ‘Put whoever the fuck in front of us, we got him,’” Ramirez said.
Gabrielle, who plays Nora, said the trio’s perspectives on the death reflected their characters’ mindsets. Ramirez’s Manny wholeheartedly supported the pursuit of Joel, while Barer’s character, Mel, was the least supportive. “I feel like Nora rests somewhere in the middle…Nora is a soldier, but is also a doctor,” Gabrielle said.
Abby’s father “was also a mentor to us as well, so as a doctor, no, that’s probably not the way to go, aren’t we trying to save as many as we can? But then at the same time, he took our people out, he doomed the rest of the world,” Gabrielle said.
Barer said Mel was “not quite on board” with Abby’s desire to enact revenge. “I don’t think she has the loyalty to Abby. She just wants to, above all, do no harm. She wants to help people and save people. And what he did was unforgivable. But I don’t know if punishment is justice and that’s kind of where she lands,” Barer said.
Episode 3 delves into the beginnings of Ellie’s own need for revenge. When asked about who voted yes during the town hall to approve Ellie’s idea for a group of people to go after Abby, Luna said that Tommy and Maria likely voted yes, with an unknown third person joining their camp. He thought Jesse (Young Mazino) voted no because “he is what we’re grooming him to be which is the leader of this town.”
Merced disagreed, saying it was unclear if Jesse voted no. “Well, Young told me he voted no,” Luna said.
“Young and Jesse are different,” Merced replied.
Merced also explained her approach to the Episode 3 conversation scene in which Dina explains the information she hid from Ellie. “Dina tames her. Dina absolutely knows Ellie through and through and knows the shift in Ellie’s eyes or in her body language that would indicate a potential outburst. That’s why I’m so composed in the scene. I had to sort of lock into when a parent has to share some bad news with a kid, that was kind of what I was thinking of,” Merced said.
The cast also answered a question about the influence of the original video games on the show. Although the show’s co-creator Craig Mazin told them not to play the games, Gabrielle said many of the cast did end up actually diving into the source material. Luna also said that people’s awareness of the games was a benefit to the production.
“Because everybody had the opportunity to play the game, you have people in the grips department and the costume department and our ADs, people who already had played it and have this established love for it. I think in the execution, that actually comes out, the mutual love for the source material that not only existed amongst those who are playing characters, but just everybody involved across the board,” Luna said.
The new cast members were aware of the general direction the writers were taking the characters. “Craig was so giving with just everything that he had ever thought about. He thinks so much about every character, he knows so much about everyone,” Barer said.
The show also expands upon that crew in certain ways, compared to how they are portrayed in the game. Ramirez, speaking in an interview with Variety before the panel, said that the character of Manny was adjusted.
“In the video game, he was a shell of himself, and we joked about this all the time,” Ramirez said. “It was a different time when the video game was made…granted, there was also a different timeline in the video game than there is here.”
“For instance, this notion of his Latinidad, if you will, wasn’t as true to the world that he was in…the show has the Infected [happening] at a lot earlier point than in the video game so because of that, culture itself and someone being born into this world shifts, for instance, their accent, or culturally where they came from and who’s talking, so Manny was someone that in the new time shift, that was a big thing that did change.”
“The decision of not having an accent came from understanding that the show was at a different jumping point than the video game itself,” Ramirez said.
