The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6: TV Show vs Game Comparison

The following article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 6.

Season 2 of The Last of Us has thus far presented events in chronological order, a departure from the game’s frequent dips into non-linearity. That means there are several important flashbacks it has skipped over – fan favourites like Ellie’s birthday at the Wyoming museum and Joel singing Future Days. Thankfully they were not consigned to the cutting room floor: we got a whole bunch of them in episode six, grouped together for an hour-long look at Ellie’s past.

Three key flashback sequences from the original game were adapted for this episode. Here we’ve compared them against the original source material, analysing what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. You can see both versions in the video above, or read on below for our written explanations.

Prologue

Episode six takes us back a few years to one of Ellie’s birthday’s. Now living in Jackson, she’s treated to a birthday cake and a present from Joel: the musical instrument that some folks call a gee-tar.

This is an adaptation of The Last of Us Part 2’s second scene, and so arrives much later in the story than it did in the game. The framing of the scene has been changed significantly, as in the game it was not Ellie’s birthday, rather just a random late night. After having spoken to Tommy about what he did at the end of the first game, Joel visits Ellie to bring her the guitar. The shift in framing means the environment is much darker and more somber in the game, but otherwise the events of this scene are largely identical.

We see Joel play Pearl Jam’s Future Days in both versions of the scene, and both Troy Baker and Pedro Pascal perform the song in a similar fashion. In the show Ellie urges Joel to play, while in the game Joel offers himself. The show’s version of Ellie is more animated as she listens, while the game version is more reserved and stoic. But the differences are minute; this is very clearly the same sequence. Both versions of the song end with Ellie saying “Well, that didn’t suck.”

In the game, Joel then gives Ellie the guitar and promises to teach her how to play. In the game the gift is already made obvious; this is Ellie’s birthday, after all.

The Birthday Gift

Originally taking place at the end of Seattle Day 1 in the game, The Birthday Gift flashback that takes up the middle portion of this episode is a fan favourite. It sees Joel take Ellie to the Wyoming Museum of Science and History for her birthday, where she has a close encounter with a T-Rex and blasts off into outer-space (sort of). Of all the recreated flashbacks in this episode, The Birthday Gift is the most lovingly replicated. This is pretty much a 1:1 clone of what we played in the game. I do wish they’d done the pulling faces in the mirror, though.

The scene begins outside, with Ellie discovering the overgrown Tyrannosaurus rex statue and climbing up onto its head. The dialogue here is nearly line-for-line the same as in the game, and the clothing and backpacks used by both Joel and Ellie are very close matches.

The scene skips slightly ahead of the game to take Joel and Ellie to the museum’s space exhibition, which opens on a perfect recreation of the game’s orrey room. This mechanical model of the solar system functions exactly as it does in the game, with the sun orb lighting up and the planets moving through their orbits when Ellie turns the crank.

Of course, it’s the next room where the important stuff happens. There we find a great recreation of the overgrown rocket shuttle cockpit from the game. Ellie acquires her helmet in a very slightly different fashion – in the game she simply picks it up from a display, where in the show she breaks a glass cabinet to get one – but both versions remark that the helmet smells “like space and dust”.

Inside the shuttle, Joel gives Ellie the tape that contains the lift-off recording. He does so with exactly the same dialogue: “This is something that took a mighty effort to find.” The scene then proceeds into a near identical recreation of the “launch”, with the camera focused on Ellie’s face as the lighting replicates that of a space mission. The only real difference is that where the game’s camera is locked directly on Ellie’s face for the full duration of the sequence, the show sometimes uses a side angle to show the shuttle’s window and the bright light pouring in.

Epilogue

The final sequence of this episode recreates The Last of Us Part 2’s epilogue, and so arrives much earlier in the show than it did in the game. A flashback to the night of Ellie’s kiss with Dina and Joel’s subsequent attack on Seth, this scene sees Joel and Ellie hash out their issues and finally arrive at some kind of resolution. In the game it’s a powerful end point – a reveal that Ellie and Joel didn’t part on a bad note. It’s interesting to see that brought forward to an earlier moment in the story, where it now feels more like season 2’s farewell to Joel.

Despite the relocation, the scene remains largely the same. Ellie arrives at Joel’s porch to find him drinking coffee. The dialogue here is practically identical to the game’s script, with Joel explaining that he’s “a little embarrassed” about what he traded for the coffee. The duo proceed to discuss the same topics as they did in the game; Ellie’s complaints about Joel’s behaviour at the dance, Joel quizzing Ellie on Dina’s intentions. This all leads to the real topic at hand: what Joel did at the end of the first game/season.

While the script is broadly similar for this part of the conversation, the characters are notably more distressed in the show. The game’s tone has always been very subtle, its characters very reserved and stoic. In the show, there’s tears and broken voices from both sides. When Joel explains that, if given the chance, he’d make the same decision again, in the show he expands on those thoughts, saying that Ellie will never understand the way he loves her. He ends by saying he hopes that she’ll do better than he did, should she ever have a child of her own.

Both in the game and show, Ellie concludes their conversation by saying that she can never forgive Joel, but that she would like to try. The scene then cuts to black in the show, but there’s a little extra in the game, as Joel responds that he’d “like that”. It’s a line that actually makes the whole sequence feel a little more uplifting – a hope that things may return to “normal”, or something resembling it.

For more from The Last of Us, check out our spoiler-free season two review and our spoiler-filled review of the sixth episode.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.