The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin says it was important to include a particularly disturbing scene that was cut from the game in the season 2 finale.

Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 episode 7 below!

“This is something that we had in the game and cut it out because of time constraints, where Ellie got swept away to where the scars, the Seraphites live,” Mazin said on the official The Last of Us TV show companion podcast.

In the scene, Ellie ends up on the island that belongs to the Seraphites, the religious cult that tends kills to intruders – especially those they consider to be part of the WLF, their main enemy. In the scene, Ellie asks the young Seraphite child to tell his mother than she isn’t part of the WLF, which he knows, but gives her the go-ahead to tie up Ellie and disembowel her anyway. Luckily, she gets away. Though, with The Last of Us season 3 on the horizon, this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the Seraphites.

“It was important to include this. It’s like one, it just shows, here’s another community that’s so xenophobic, that they are about to kill someone that would have fought for them moments earlier, that wanted to protect one of them. But they are not even curious to interrogate any of that. This is an outsider and the outsider must be killed. Isn’t that right, child? And right, that the child agrees immediately.”

Continued Mazin: “And the other thing this scene achieves is it shows, again, Ellie’s obsessive desperation to find Abby. It’s as if the universe is telling her, ‘Stop. Look how far you’ve come. You’ve almost died. Stop. Go back.’ And what does Ellie do? She keeps going to the aquarium.”

The Last of Us season 2 is streaming now on HBO Max in the US, and on Sky and NOW in the UK. For more, check out our The Last of Us season 2 review.