Warning: This article contains spoilers fromThe Last of Usepisode 1.
Sarah wakes up in the night on her living room couch.
Joel, a single father, is on the phone in the background.
Nico Parker as Sarah in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ premiere episode.HBO
She waited up to give her dad his birthday gift: the watch Sarah had fixed.
Then the world falls apart.
The player then takes control of Joel, desperately trying to protect his daughter.
Nico Parker appears as Sarah Miller, the daughter of Pedro Pascal’s Joel, in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us.'.HBO
The series begins with a day in the life of Sarah Miller, played by actress Nico Parker.
We see her get ready for school in Austin in the year 2003.
News segments on TV alert that something dire is going on in the world at large.
‘The Last of Us’ writer and EP Craig Mazin directs an infected actor.HBO
“She also finds a knife,” Mazin points out within these moments.
“You see her fascination with it.
To me, that’s the kind of thing where you wonder, what would Sarah have become?
Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’.HBO
“They’re not watching the news actively.
This fear is slowly growing in this world.”
“Tommy’s in jail because he fought someone that was infected.
“It was so wild,” Pascal tells EW in a separate interview.
“It was like the entire town of Fort McLeod was our set.
The greatest opportunity of playing make-believe I’ve ever had.”
Luna had to drive the car on set with Pascal in the passenger seat.
The events spill out of the vehicle when a careening car crashes into the family.
It was a madhouse for Mazin and Druckmann as well.
“All of it was very difficult to do,” Mazin says.
“That was some of our earliest stuff we shot.
It was in July in Calgary.
Calgary is very far north, so night lasts about, I don’t know, five hours.
Then we would shoot until about 4:30.
Neil and I get to the street where everything’s gone bad, and we look around.
We’re like, ‘We gotta work on this.’
“‘Inspect this person’s shirt’ and ‘add more scratches here,'” Druckmann chimes in.
“We’ve got four minutes before you have to start rolling,” Mazin continues.
“It was like let’s-put-on-a-show manic insanity.
I think it worked.”
Druckmann also makes note of the massive lights the production set up at the end of the street.
They would turn on at the moment when the plane crashes to the ground and causes an explosion.
“They warn us to not look directly into these lights,” he says.
They look and see a soldier’s flashlight.
For a brief moment, they think they found help.
Then the soldier turns his gun on them.
Tommy intervenes, killing the soldier.
Again, there’s hope.
Maybe they got out of it.
Then Joel hears Sarah’s labored breaths and sees she’s been hit by a bullet.
She dies cradled in her bereaved father’s arms.
It was also a crucial touchstone for Pascal when crafting his performance as Joel, the actor confirms.
That humanity suddenly showing you how inhuman it’s possible for you to be.”
Joel stares into the flashlight of the FEDRA agent, which brings back flashes of the night Sarah died.
Fueled by those tragic memories, he attacks the guard, pummeling him with bare fists until bloody.
Mazin foundthe first episode the hardest to put together.
“In doing so, we get a full picture.”
