“Lately there are these moments where the fear comes up out of nowhere and my heart feels like it’s stopped,” Joel tells Tommy, eyes filled with tears, when he finally gets the chance to speak to his brother alone. “I have dreams. Every night.”
When Tommy asks what the dreams are about, Joel admits he doesn’t know. “I can’t remember,” Joel says. “I just know that when I wake up, I’ve lost something. I’m failing in my sleep.” The exchange may be short, but for reticent, traumatized Joel, it’s a huge show of vulnerability – one that reframes his entire character. And apparently, part of it came from Pascal himself. “That was obviously a hard monologue to write, but the [lines], ‘I have dreams … All I know is that when I wake up, I know I’ve lost something,'” Mazin paraphrases, “That was something from Pedro directly.”
Listening to the podcast, it’s clear that every word of the script, particularly for this character-heavy episode, works to deepen our understanding of the gulf between who these characters are, who they wish they were, and who they present themselves to be. Joel presents himself as a no-nonsense survivor with few attachments, but longs to be a dad who can protect his daughter from the perils of the world. These contrasting images lead to the truest version of Joel, which presents itself when he’s with Tommy, admitting he feels like a failure deep in his bones.
“That notion that when you wake up you just have a feeling that you’ve lost something is so beautiful and it’s so confessional,” says Mazin. Druckmann notes that the game features an action sequence after which Tommy realizes how much Joel cares for Ellie, but in the series, they made Joel open up instead. “This is not all like something we saw from Joel in the game,” Mazin says. “This is different. This is sadder, I think. It’s a little more broken down and it’s a little more upsetting.”
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