HBO's The Last Of Us considered completely removing infected from the show

The Last of Us toyed with the idea of featuring no infected from the Cordyceps pandemic that devastated the globe, which is a significant sway from the game that now initiates a fight or flight response in us whenever we hear someone click their tongue.

There have been a handful of changes to the show from the original material, though I doubt anyone would have a bad word to say about the first episode that preserved the panic of the game's prologue magnificently. HBO's show is less violent than The Last of Us, in order to truly shock viewers when it does happen, and shocked we were when it came to that moment in the second episode.

Yet, the fact that we might have gotten a show with no infected boggles the mind. In a post to the PlayStation Blog, showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin talked fans through their thinking.

Get a glimpse of the forthcoming episodes of The Last of Us here:

“When we started working on the [The Last of Us]…It was very clear you’re going to fight other factions, other humans as they’re trying to survive, and you will have competing goals. That was very clear. And then we’re like, ‘Do we even want the Infected?,’” explained Druckmann. The show is anchored in the scientific, much more so than the original game, as a result of the savvier audience that they would be catering to. I don't know about you, but the impact of the pandemic has had me yelling, “don't touch that, don't touch that with your bare hands” at everything Joel, Tess and Ellie did in the episodes.

The team were also conscious of transforming the pure fear of a Clicker encounter from the game to the small screen. “What the show is a lot about, especially a show like this, was a lot about restraint. When something is horrific like this, it’s scarier when you don’t see it,” continued the co-creator. “We would appreciate the action moments more if they were each unique, separate and apart from each other, each one of them impacting the story directly in a very clear way and either being very small or very big,” added Mazin.

The third episode, Long Long Time, will air on January 29 on HBO Max.