**WARNING: CONTAINS HUGE SPOILERS ABOUT THE LAST OF US EPISODE EIGHT... AND INCREDIBLY GRAPHIC, VIOLENT CONTENT**
That incredible final scene from the latest episode of The Last of Us may have left you feeling ALL of the emotions, but it turns out it played out even better in the original game, according to fans who have picked apart the differences between the two versions.
See if you can spot the changes here:
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Episode eight - the penultimate instalment of the hit HBO series – introduces us to the sinister David (Scott Shepherd), a teacher-turned-preacher who serves as the over-zealous leader of Silver Lake.
With a starving community to feed, he secretly starts feeding them human flesh in place of their preferred game meat, with a truly stomach-churning moment showing Ellie (Bella Ramsey) notice a severed ear on the floor next to the basement cage where David has locked her up.
Naturally, it isn’t long before Ellie outsmarts her captor and manages to escape, resulting in a horrifying cat-and-mouse chase against the wonderfully dramatic backdrop of a burning restaurant.
Things eventually culminate with Ellie grabbing a knife from the floor and hacking the predatory David to death with a knife in a frenzy of rage, fear and sheer survival.
She then rushes outside and bumps into Joel (Pedro Pascal), who calms her down with a poignant hug, telling her: “It’s okay, baby girl. I got you.”
In the original Naughty Dog game, however, things play out slightly differently, as Joel actually gets to her before she leaves the restaurant.
He rushes inside the burning building and pulls Ellie away from David’s corpse, reassuring the frightened teenager: "It's me."
It's a slight difference that many fans feel works even better, with one tweeting: “Another good episode, but the game had the better ending to the scene in the restaurant. From Joel and Ellie’s reunion to the final shot.”
Someone else said: “Why the eff didn’t they have him do this in the showwwww it was such a small change such a big effect.”
Another wrote: “Shoulda kept it is in the game clip. Would have been way better, IMO.”
While a fourth added: “I understand why they changed it (cause the doors were locked how tf did Joel get in?) but I wish they kept it because I liked the line Ellie: ‘He tried to-’ Joel: ‘I know.”
However, when discussing the changes in the official The Last of Us podcast, co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman explained that they had a very good reason.
Troy Baker, who hosts the podcast and also voiced Joel in the game, said: “In the game, she enacts her revenge on David with extreme prejudice. Joel takes her from that and tries to pull her away from that violence. In this, nothing is there to stop Ellie from that scene, and she meets up with Joel outside and he says, ‘It’s me. It’s me.’
“Why the difference?”
Mazin replied: “There was a question of how does Joel get inside if the keys are on David. It was a little bit of a logic thing, and it was a little bit of wanting our Ellie to have completed it to the point where she could literally walk away on her own.”
Druckmann added: “But it was important when the sequence was constructed in the game – and I think it’s the same for the show – which is like, we want the audience or the player to think Joel is going to save Ellie, because that’s what this character traditionally does.
“And it was important that no, no, no: Ellie saves herself.”
Druckmann also noted that Joel does save Ellie in some way, but that this is ‘emotionally’, not physically.
Topics: TV and Film, Gaming
Jess Hardiman