Of course, some things necessarily had to change when the show migrated from console to TV. Druckmann and co-creator Craig Mazin decided to move the date of the cordyceps outbreak from 2013 back to 2003, for instance, so the bulk of the story would be set in the present day instead of a decade in the future. That decision hasn’t yielded too many major ripples until last night’s episode, when Druckmann had to decide whether or not Joel should play Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” on the guitar he made for his surrogate daughter. It’s an important moment from the game, but there was one slight hitch: in real life, the song came out in 2013—long after the TV version’s apocalypse would have started. Eddie Vedder would likely have been filled with too many mushrooms to write it, much less release it in any capacity that would have reached Joel’s ears.
Druckmann decided to use the song anyway. Initially, he said the team considered having Joel play a less anachronistic track, but “as we were exploring it, just felt like we were prioritizing the wrong thing, this timeline of events and when things would be available.”
“Clearly, we’re not in the same timeline as our universe, so we have some leeway,” he continued. “And that song felt so important. Because it was in the game, because it has so much association, not only for fans, but even for myself, we changed course. The thing that we thought we cared about, we ultimately didn’t care about, and the emotional truth of the song was more important than the timeline truth of the world that we live in.”
Of course, game players will know that the show did make one huge change last night; that final conversation between Joel and Ellie—the most emotional moment in last night’s episode by far—initially takes place at the very end of the game, far in advance of where the show is currently. Druckmann says moving the moment forward in the narrative was an easy decision to make, albeit one that may have major consequences for the show’s endgame. When Variety asked if this decision affected Druckmann’s thinking about the end of the show, he apparently took a “long pause” and then answered, “That’s right.” We’ll see what brand new emotional wrecking balls he conjures up as the show moves into its own future days.
