Reviews | The Last of Us episode 9 finale: these are the differences between the video game and the HBO series

It has finally happened The Last of Us has finished its first season in HBO with a final episode that has shaken the entire community that has lived through the experience of going through this story with all its nuances.

The eighth episode, When we are in need, adapted one of the crudest and most disturbing passages of the original plot of the video game for PlayStation.

Once the turbulent meeting with David was over, the reality is that there was not much time left to gameplay true and that has been noticed with this chapter, where almost the entire closure has been emulated, sequence by sequence, adding some original elements.

Even so, with this mixture of factors described above, we are facing a chapter that is relatively short in duration but very forceful. Below we list the main points of distinction.

The main differences between the video game and episode 9 of The Last of Us

From the first minute we came across a 100% original scene that did not officially exist before in the mythology of The Last of Us. Where we see Ashley Johnson, an actress who plays Ellie in the original game, now taking the role of her mother.

In the brief but stark sequence, we finally learn how Ellie ended up immune to Cordyceps, after her mother Anna was bitten at the right moment while she was giving birth to the baby, only for Marlene to arrive late to save her and I ended up running her keeping Ellie in charge.

There are some major changes with that. Ellie doesn’t know Marlene at the beginning of the series and seems to have only basic familiarity with her when Joel and Tess run into them in episode 2. But in episode 7, Ellie and Riley talk about Marlene marking the game as a further relationship. established with her.

So an emotional distance between her and Ellie arises by rebound, which reduces the dramatic impact of the scenes between the leader of The Fireflies and Joel.

The matter of discordant ideas and different ways of approaching the same situation between Joel and Marlene is maintained, but the series itself inexplicably detracted from this thread of high dramatic tension.

The way in which they meet Las Luciérnagas is also radically different. In the game Joel saves Ellie after she nearly drowns only to be knocked out by soldiers as soon as she begins to breathe.

Here in the final episode they are both stunned by a grenade, but Joel is more unconscious than Ellie. The decision seems clumsy at first light, but most likely this change was made to better connect with the plot of the second season.

Ellie very likely knows more than Joel thinks and that will be a key factor for what comes next season.

The logic for seeking a cure for Cordyceps also changes. In the game it is said that Ellie is the carrier of a mutated version that may be the key to generating a “vaccine”.

While in the episode it is said that something happened at the time of delivery that caused the infected to send a signal that she is already one of the infected hive.