One particular The Last of Us Part 2 death was “one too many” for the showrunners to include in the show’s second season.
Please note there will be spoilers for The Last of Us – both the show and the games – below.
The Last of Us Part 2 isn’t short on death and misery. Seattle is carnage, with warring factions the WLF (Wolves) and the Seraphites (Scars) taking no mercy on each other, and that’s before you add Ellie or any of the Jackson community into the mix.
The TV series has remained faithful to most of the game’s key deaths. As in Part 2, The Last of Us’ second season sees Joel, Nora, Mel, Owen and Jesse murdered, the latter three all in the series finale. One character, however, makes it out alive despite being killed in the game: Alice.
Alice is one of the WLF’s canine companions in The Last of Us Part 2, and while she may only be an animation, at the end of the day her death was one that actually hit me hardest when I played the game for the first time. When Ellie makes her way into the aquarium during her search for Abby, Alice is alerted by the noise and attacks her. Ellie then fatally stabs Alice with her switchblade. However, this doesn’t happen in the show.
Why? There are two reasons. The first is that The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, who also penned Chernobyl, felt he couldn’t do another pet killing scene. Chernobyl is a historical miniseries which revolves around the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and one moment sees pets culled in a bid to stem the spread of radiation.
“I think you get like one dog murdering episode a lifetime,” Mazin said when the topic of The Last of Us’ Alice came up during a recent press event (thanks, Polygon). “There are two cardinal rules in Hollywood. One: don’t spend your own money. Two: don’t kill a dog.”
The showrunner added that “because it’s live action, the nature of violence becomes much more, well, graphic. It’s more graphic because… it’s not like there’s an animation between you and it, [and] it’s very disturbing”.
So, that’s Mazin’s reason for not including Alice’s death in the show’s second season, but what was Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckman’s? Well, essentially, the finale had too much death already, with Ellie herself nearly dying at the hands of the Seraphites, before she proceeds to kill Owen and Mel (and by extension Mel’s unborn baby) pretty soon after. Then, before the episode wraps for good, Jesse is shot in the face by Abby, and dies immediately from his wound. It is all quite harrowing as it is, let alone if we then had to also see a dog get murdered in the name of revenge.
“And in our conversation, we’re like this [is] probably one too many,” Druckmann concluded.
Earlier this week, the cast and crew shared a little more about where and who The Last of Us season three will put its focus on.
For more on the show, you can check out my discussion feature: The Last of Us season two wraps with episode seven, but was it a satisfying finale?