The Last of Us HBO Show Creator Breaks Down That Major Death in the Premiere

The Last of Us HBO show creator is addressing one of the most pivotal moments of the series premiere – the major death scene that set many of the series’ events into motion. Obviously, MAJOR SPOILERS Follow – so only read if you’ve watched The Last of Us TV series premiere! 

In both The Last of Us video game and TV show, the story begins with the character of Sarah Miller, a young girl living in Austin, Texas, with her single dad Joel (Pedro Pascal) and her uncle Tommy (Gabriel Luna). What viewers/players don’t know is that, despite all the usual presumptions about main character armor, we’re actually meeting Sarah on the last day of her life. It’s from Sarah’s perspective that we see the world fall to the infectious spread of a parasitic infection, which transforms humans into fungal zombies. Sarah, her dad, and her uncle make a desperate escape attempt as Austin descends into ruin all around them – but it doesn’t go well. Sarah ends up getting fatally shot by a soldier as the military tries to curtail the outbreak, dying in a terrified, bloody, heap in her father’s arms. 

The Last of Us HBO series creator Craig Mazin (Cherynobl) talked to EW about recreating the story of The Last of Us game’s opening chapter for the TV series, and the challenge of introducing TV characters to a main character they would only briefly get to know: 

“We’re so used to characters with plot armor,” Mazin explained to EW. “One of the great things that The Last of Us achieved was puncturing that plot armor in such a brutal and gorgeous and sad way.”

However, what The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann and his team achieved in the game (letting players inhabit a character that was about to die), is not something that a TV show could do. So, Mazin, Druckmann and co. got creative: 

“Well, we can’t do that [gameplay] in a television show, but what we can do is give you more moments with her [Sarah] alone,” Mazin explained. 

Nico Parker (Reminiscence, Dumbo) steps up in a big way to carry the opening chapter of The Last of Us HBO series, making viewers connect with Sarah and like her – and therefore take a Game of Thrones-style gut-punch when Sarah is killed. 

“How do we get you to care about Sarah as much as possible, so not only [do] you see Joel’s loss, you feel a loss like you are rooting for this character that now we violently take away from you?” Druckmann said, explaining how the showrunners approached the scene. 

In The Last of Us game, the opening scene is centered on Joel and Sarah and the bare-bones celebration of Joel’s birthday. The players’ first control experience is playing as Sarah, as she wakes in the middle of the night to her Uncle Tommy’s panicked phone call, and her dad missing from the house. Joel comes running in, having encountered the first of his neighbors turning into zombies, and he grabs Sarah and a gun and they jump in a car with Tommy for their ill-fated escape attempt. 

The Last of Us HBO series takes that infamous opening and deepens it, letting us see the entirety of Sarah’s last day, from school to fix her dad’s watch as a birthday gift. It makes us feel for the character, even while giving a sly nod to the games with constant background hints of the apocalyptic dread unfolding all around the doomed teenage girl. 

“There was also an opportunity to show if an outbreak like this happened, what would it look like from a kid’s perspective?” Druckmann explained. “They’re not watching the news actively. They’re just seeing someone’s handshake in the classroom or being shoved out of a watch store because they’re closing early. This fear is slowly growing in this world.”

As Mazin teases, Sarah’s death is more than just shock-and-awe to set up how dark and bloody The Last of Us will get: 

“That is the ultimate identifying skin that the character [Joel] wears for the rest of the season, the defining moment for what will shape who they are and what they do. And how the character of Ellie affects him directly related to this loss and trauma and loss of hope and learning to hope again. That humanity suddenly showing you how inhuman you can be.”

The Last of Us airs Sundays on HBO.