Image: HBO
One of the best scenes in The Last of Us’ second season came in this week’s sixth episode, with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) taking a trip to an abandoned museum. It’s a beautiful moment that is ripped right out of the Last of Us Part II video game, and the show does it justice. But fans who have played the game will know that this segment had a bit more to it originally. It’s only natural that the TV show, with its shorter run time, would have to cut some scenes down, but the wild thing is that it looks like HBO actually shot the rest of the segment and just didn’t use it in the final edit.
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This section of the game depicts Ellie’s 16th birthday. Joel knows she has a fixation on space and dinosaurs, so what better way to make her big day one to remember than by taking her to a museum that spotlights both? In the game you find a huge dinosaur exhibit on the bottom floor, and after you’ve explored that one, there’s another section dedicated to space travel waiting for you upstairs. Ellie is ecstatic exploring both floors, with the highlight being when she enters a spacecraft and listens to a recording of a pre-apocalyptic NASA launch so she can imagine what it might’ve been like to get off this ruined rock. It’s an incredibly sweet moment sandwiched between a lot of violence and heartache.
The show, meanwhile, only has one of these floors. We see Joel and Ellie mess around with a solar system diorama and pretend to be astronauts, but we miss the section where Ellie spouts off cool dinosaur facts and puts a hat on their skeletons. Ultimately, if you have to pick one or the other, the spaceship is the more important moment and the one worth showing the TV audience. But, wildly enough, it looks like Pascal and Ramsey shot scenes on a recreation of the dinosaur floor that never made their way into the episode. In the behind-the-scenes featurette for the episode, we can see footage of the actors and crew on the dinosaur floor, complete with all the overgrowth, grit, and grime you’d expect in a place that has been mostly abandoned for decades.
Fans are sad to see the set but none of the scenes that took place in it. Maybe we’ll see some deleted scenes in the special features whenever the season two box set is released. Who among us doesn’t want to see Ramsey putting a cowboy hat on Pascal as he grimaces and lightly protests? Don’t deny me this, HBO.
The Last of Us has one more episode this season, but it won’t be the end of the show’s take on The Last of Us Part II’s story, as HBO is stretching it out across multiple seasons.