Season 2 of the HBO horror/drama The Last of Us spans seven episodes. The latest season is set five years after the events of Season 1, with Joel and Ellie drawn into conflict with each other and a world that's even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.
In Season 1, modern civilization has been destroyed, and Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. Pedro Pascal returns as Joel, and Bella Ramsey is back as Ellie. Also returning from the first season are Gabriel Luna and Rutina Wesley. New addition to the cast of Season 2 include Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Young Mazino, Ariela Barer, Tati Gabrielle, Spencer Lord, Danny Ramirez, Jeffrey Wright and Catherine O’Hara.
Timothy Good (pictured) is an editor on the show and says Season 2 proved to be particularly daunting.
"There was enormous pressure after the success of Season 1 to deliver at the same high level - and push ourselves even more," Good explains. "The great news is that thanks to our fantastic partnership with Remote Picture Labs (RPL), our Avid remote workflow editorial setup remained the same. Our visual effects editors were all linked together, so sharing between the departments was easy and efficient."
For Season 2, Good says he and post producer Allen Marshall Palmer employed the sound design team much earlier on than the prior season.
"Specifically with Episode 2 ‘Through the Valley,’ as there were two massive action sequences that would require a more bespoke approach to sound design than we could deliver in the bays on time," he shares. "We were able to pass off our early cuts to our sound department and they would return stereo stems back to us when they completed their work - fully mixed on their end - prior to delivery of even the editor’s cut! This greatly improved the efficiency of our workflow, as our showrunner, Craig Mazin, loves sound design and wants to detail the cut as much as possible before it hits the dub stage."
Thematically, Good says Season 2 of The Last of Us was about consequences, lies and the look of a community during an apocalypse.
"Whereas Season 1 was about creating the bond between Joel and Ellie, Season 2 was about seeing how one lie — albeit a big one — frays that bond," he shares. "The absence of connection is much more difficult to edit together than scenes of connection, and for Episode 201, co-editor Emily Mendez and I focused on how to make Joel and Ellie miss each other’s glances, not look at one another and create distance using wider frames to emphasize their conflict and separation."
For Good, one of the show's biggest editorial challenges was helping to craft the new character of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in Episode 202. Early in the season, she makes in known of her plans to do something terrible.
"I found myself trying to guide the audience towards an understanding of how she feels emotionally about having her own father ripped from her by violence," Good explains. "I spent more time on shots of her making decisions, being strong, being afraid - even when those scenes contained our lead heroes, Joel and Dina. I was in closer shots for Abby, but wider shots for the other characters, to reframe the point of view of the scenes more towards her. Every villain has a reason for their actions, and if the audience can even slightly understand those reasons, then you will perhaps hate Abby even more so when she does the unthinkable because you fear you might have grown to know her more and possibly even root for her escape from the infected early in the episode."
The battle sequence of Episode 202 was also a monumental undertaking.
"The episode itself was about 24 days of main unit filming, with over 30 days of second unit filming concurrently," he explains. "Mark Mylod was the director, and his pedigree of action and emotional relationships from Game of Thrones and
Succession gave me voluminous excellent options for how to craft the battle sequence. In keeping with Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s preferred approach, as much of this was done practically as possible with visual effects coming in to fill in the rest of the world and create characters that of course have no possibility of existing practically."
Originally, the sequence was scripted to be intercut with the lodge sequence featuring Joel, Abby and her crew.
"But when we put that on its feet, we realized that the character of Joel is so strong that every moment we were away from him, we were waiting to get back to him, and therefore de-emphasizing the importance and stakes of the assault on Jackson," Good reveals. "So, we decided to completely unravel the intercut and craft two independent sequences with only one interconnecting piece that was required for Joel to be able to see the battle taking place. By allowing the battle of Jackson to run uninterrupted, it gave the character of Tommy and the community of Jackson a chance to command the audience’s attention in full. It also had the secondary effect of making the audience think that Tommy was to meet his fate in this episode against the Bloater."
Good says he was keenly aware to edit Tommy’s heroic stand to lure the Bloater towards him as a visual echo of Season 1, Episode 5, when the character of Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) lured the Bloater towards him and away from Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), resulting in his death by being ripped in half.
"When it came time to fine cut the sequence, we deleted a significant amount of scenes that ultimately did not affect the main spine of the action, including the introduction of a homemade net bomb that exploded when the first waves of infected breached the walls, and a sequence where Maria and a team of horsemen redirect the horde towards the area where the net bomb has been laid out," he shares. "Ultimately, it simplified and clarified the action, and in terms of stakes, it increased the threat to the town now that nothing was there to stop the invasion. One of the additions that enhanced the humanity of the action sequence was the introduction of the real people of Jackson hiding in basements and taking to the roofs to defend their community. If there are no real people at stake, then what is the purpose of action at all? In the final scene of the sequence, we used a combination of real and VFX dogs to help turn the tide of the battle towards the community of Jackson which allowed us to then refocus the audience towards the entire lodge sequence of Joel and Abby."
As for the murder scene itself, Good says it was incredibly traumatic to put together.
“I had to stare at Bella Ramsey recreating the pain of grief over and over in brilliant and nuanced detail, take after take, and then while working with Craig Mazin, develop an arc to her emotional performance that sees her changing strategies in a desperate attempt to stop Abby, despite being held down by the character of Nora (Tati Gabrielle)," he explains. "I edited this scene five times from scratch because of the wealth of material. I have never done this before, but I felt this was the scene that needed all of the attention for me to constantly reinvestigate the material to make sure I was not missing anything. Ultimately, certain cornerstones emerged and a lot more nuances emerged, including curating a mini arc for Abby’s partner Owen (Spencer Lord) to beg Abby to end the torture and just kill Joel."
One of the most striking decisions in the edit for this scene was to see the violent moment actually take place on-camera.
"Normally on The Last of Us, editorially, we shy away from showing violence in favor of how violence affects others," Good notes. "But this time, we decided that in order for this to hurt the character of Ellie as much as possible, and by association the audience as well, we needed to see what she sees, from her distant point of view, as Joel is stabbed to death. This was not part of the original design so visual effects had to help us extend the golf club and the arm of Abby so that we could make this happen."
Finally, in Episode 205, Ellie comes face to face with Nora, the character who held her down while Joel was killed.
"I noticed very specific similarities in how the action unfolded from both Joel’s murder scene, and the torture of Nora," says Good. "I did not replicate exactly how they played in the edit, but I knew that there would be the echo of that murder felt deeply. To enhance this, in the edit, I musically layered in a slight Joel theme just as Ellie is about to look for the metal pipe to bludgeon Nora with - a reminder that her thoughts are tied to Joel and the revenge quest she is on. Joel killed Abby’s father. Abby killed Ellie’s 'father.' Ellie tortures Nora in search of Abby. Every action has repercussions that continue the cycle of violence borne out of love for their community. All of this reminds me why I love editing The Last of Us - a complex view of love, vengeance and survival in a world where community is sought after, and comes in many different forms."