The Last Of Us Season 2 Makes One Perfect Change To Dina

Put down the golf clubs and stop reading right away if you haven't watched "Through the Valley," the second episode of the second season of "The Last of Us." This article contains a whole bunch of huge spoilers!

Throughout "The Last of Us" — the HBO adaptation of the Naughty Dog video game of the same name — the series, run by the game's creator Neil Druckmann alongside TV veteran Craig Mazin ("Chernobyl"), has made some necessary changes. By that, I mean that it's tough to adapt a video game where you play as main characters Joel, Abby, and Ellie, played in the show respectively by Pedro Pascal, Kaitlyn Dever, and Bella Ramsey, and keep it exactly the same. One small change happens in "Through the Valley," an episode with a huge moment — Joel's death at Abby's hands, witnessed in full by a screaming Ellie — which is that, in the game, Joel's brother Tommy is present. (Tommy is played by Gabriel Luna in the show.) Instead, Joel meets Abby while on patrol with another emerging surrogate daughter, Dina, portrayed in the series by Isabela Merced.

So why did Mazin decide to make this change? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said that he wanted to highlight the burgeoning relationship between Dina and Joel, who share a sweet scene in the season 2 premiere "Future Days" (there's a noticeable divide between Ellie and Joel, and Dina is, apparently stepping into the void left by Ellie). This also, incidentally, frees Tommy up to fight in the assault on the Jackson stronghold, which is attacked by infected cordyceps zombies (a sequence that is unique to the show).

"Early on, we talked a lot about clarifying, or at least demonstrating, how much Dina cared about Joel," Mazin told Nick Romano, who was on set during the episode's production. "Dina did care deeply about Joel. To put Dina in that spot and to make her a front-row participant in this murder, it connects us more to her. Her choice to stay by Ellie's side through thick and thin from this point forward is motivated just as much by her loss as it is by her friendship with Ellie."

There is absolutely zero question that the death of Joel Miller, the story's apparent protagonist and one of the only people Ellie truly loves, will have enormous ramifications on the story of "The Last of Us" going forward. By bringing Dina into the mix and letting her be present for Joel's death — though I should note she's rendered unconscious by one of Abby's friends, as they actually have no intention of hurting her — it brings Dina and Ellie even closer together. That's saying something, considering that the two are already best friends and, in "Future Days," they share a kiss during Jackson's New Years celebration, hinting that they'll pursue a romantic relationship before long.

Bella Ramsey also spoke to Entertainment Weekly for this thorough piece and said that their understanding of this change is that Ellie has complicated feelings towards Dina now; because of Joel and Ellie's clear divide, Dina got to spend Joel's last day with the man, and Ellie missed out on time with one of the only parental figures she's ever known. "They've become trauma bonded, in a way, but there's also an element of resentment," Ramsey said. "I think there was some real jealousy. Dina got to be with him, Dina got to spend that last day with him, and there's a lot of guilt and regret on Ellie's part. That was just a little thing that I was laced into, what I took afterwards, especially when they speak about it for the first time."

This is a fascinating perspective for Ramsey to bring into the rest of the season, and just reaffirms that Craig Mazin was wise to bring Dina into this situation for dramatic effect. Not only that, but Mazin said that it helps create a throughline between not just Ellie and Dina, but Ellie, Dina, and Abby.

After five years of hunting, Abby finally gets what she wants in "Through the Valley," which is to say that she finally gets revenge against Joel for killing her father. (As she reveals to him in her pre-murder tirade, Joel killed her father, an unarmed doctor trying to use Ellie's brain to find a cure for the cordyceps virus, in a Firefly hospital; we saw this play out in the show's season 1 finale "Look for the Light" but didn't know the doctor's daughter would ever resurface or that he had one in the first place). Abby, presumably, thinks she'll get some closure from killing Joel, but that's not really how this works; violence just begets more violence, and considering that Ellie makes it quite clear that she'll hunt Abby down and make her pay for killing Joel, this is just going to a continue a cycle. That cycle now involves Dina too, because of her connection to Ellie ... and the fact that, as Craig Mazin put it, all three of these girls are "stuck" in some way, just like Joel was before he met and basically adopted Ellie. (I should say Mazin does not specifically say Ellie is stuck, but her thirst for vengeance is certainly going to mean that she's stuck in a particular mindset for quite some time.)

"We know Joel got stuck for the longest time until Ellie came along and unstuck him," Mazin explains, referencing the loss of Joel's daughter Sarah, played by Nico Parker, in the 2023 series premiere. "We're going to see in the season how Dina, in a sense, is stuck. And we clearly see here that Abby is very stuck. This is part of our human frailty. We get disrupted by these wounds, and if we can't even stop ourselves from walking down the hallway, what chance do we have to move past this?"

"The Last of Us" continues its run on Sundays on Max and HBO at 9 P.M. EST, so we'll see how Abby, Ellie, and Dina all move forward after this week's incredibly traumatic episode.