Major spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, episode 2 ahead.
We endured and survived, baby girl. Until one of us didn’t.
The moment fans of The Last of Us games have been anticipating since the HBO adaptation was announced took place during Sunday night’s episode. It’s a moment we were helpless to stop while playing The Last of Us Part II, and now we’ve suffered through it again in the second episode of Season 2.
I’m talking about Joel’s brutal, bloody death.
For those who haven’t played Naughty Dog’s lauded sequel, The Last of Us Part II, or its remastered version, this development will come as a major shock. Not only are we forced to watch the cherished protagonist of one of the most impactful TV shows of the decade be brutally bludgeoned to death, but the actor playing Joel is one of the internet’s most beloved stars, Pedro Pascal. It’s hell on TV — and it’s intended to be.
As players and viewers, we find ourselves in the same forsaken predicament as co-protagonist Ellie (Bella Ramsey in the show, Ashley Johnson in the game). There’s literally nothing we can do, no action we can take with our controller or remote that will change the fate of Joel Miller (Pascal in the show, Troy Baker in the game).
In both the game and the series, The Last of Us makes Ellie watch as Abby (Kaitlyn Dever in the show, Laura Bailey in the game) brings a golf club repeatedly down upon Joel, Ellie’s father figure and a lead character we’ve personally played as for a number of hours we won’t name. Ellie pleads with Abby before the final stroke, but it’s useless. Vengeance has been achieved. It’s a moment that will feel retraumatising for fans of the game and horrifying for new viewers, but it’s crucial that it’s included.
Mourning Joel in The Last of Us will feel real to fans.
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
When I first played Joel’s death scene in The Last of Us Part II in 2020, I was a mess. The second game was notably released in June 2020, mere months into the ongoing COVID pandemic — a period of extreme uncertainty, social separation, health anxiety, and very real grief for millions. It’s almost too close for comfort given the storyline of the game. Infection isn’t how Joel dies, however; it’s human violence. And reader, I mourned the brutal, violent loss of this fictional character like someone I knew personally, like someone I identified with.
It’s a strange phenomenon, grieving someone during this time who isn’t real, but grief counselors acknowledge these connections have a very real impact on us. (Even Oscar Wilde said so.) Succession, The Sopranos, Orange Is the New Black, Downton Abbey, Stranger Things, and Grey’s Anatomy are just a few shows where characters got under our skin, making their fictional deaths feel real.
As a viewer of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s The Last of Us TV series, you’ve spent over 10 hours creating a deep attachment to Joel, trying to understand the motivations behind his actions, as polarising as they may be. As a player, you’ve spent hundreds of hours traversing Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic landscape with this complicated person — really, as this complicated person. Playing as Joel, you’ve patched yourself up with shitty old med kits in crumbling university buildings, snuck past terrifying Clickers, grieved your daughter’s horrible death, massacred cannibals and an entire faction of Fireflies, probably doomed the world on that last one, and formed a genuine bond with Ellie, who always needs a boost to high platforms — and all when you should really go to bed IRL because you’ve got work in a few hours and you’re an adult. And suddenly, two hours into the second game, you’re pinned to the ground in a cold chalet, watching Joel’s light be stomped out forever.
You begin the stressful sequence playing as Abby, fighting a wave of Infected with the very people she’s hunting: Tommy and Joel. It’s a deliberate choice to have you holding the reins here as Abby manages to get them back to her base. Druckmann (who is co-creator of the game as well as the show) said in the 2024 Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II documentary, “We get you, through interactivity, to really connect and empathise with this character. And then make you feel like, ‘I’ve led Joel into a trap.'”
Mashable Top Stories
After Abby’s assault on Joel begins, the game switches your perspective to playing Ellie, frantically racing through the snow, locating the chalet, and hearing Joel’s cries of pain from somewhere within. Finally, the only action you’re allowed to take is hitting that damn triangle button to open a door and find Joel behind it in a bloody heap, surrounded by Abby and her crew. From here, it’s a cutscene. Ellie (who you’re playing as) is held down, continually kicked, and made to watch her father figure being clubbed to death. Druckmann said in the documentary that Ellie was initially not present in the first draft of the scene, instead discovering Joel’s body later. In the final cut, with Ellie very much present, Johnson’s performance as Ellie is nothing short of soul-destroying. Meanwhile, Laura Bailey’s performance as Abby is equally gut-wrenching, loaded with meaning we don’t actually understand yet. “Ashley was behind [me], crying, and knowing Abby was taking this away from her was very difficult,” Bailey explains in the documentary. “And so I was crying while we were filming that scene. It was very emotional.”
For cruel minutes, you sit with the controller idle in your hands, with no button prompt offered to change the course of the scene. On Abby’s final blow, the camera sits behind Joel’s head, watching Ellie’s reaction. And finally, there’s nothing but black. At the time I was playing The Last of Us Part II, reaching out to friends who were also playing for consolation felt like a massive spoiler, so most of us sat with the loss alone for a time. I’m sure online forums were bursting at the seams, but I didn’t visit them. It felt too raw, too personal a loss. Since then, every time you bring the game up, everyone who’s played it pretty much reacts the same way; there’s much use of the word “shattered.”
In the Grounded II documentary, Baker himself said he suggested his character Joel should die at the end of the first game, considering the moral line he crosses with the massacre of the Fireflies. “When I read the ending to Part I, I was like, ‘You’re gonna piss a lot of people off.'” Making the second game, he described the feeling of Druckmann breaking the news about Joel’s Part II death as “literally as if someone was telling me about how my friend had just died.”
However, as hard as it is to cope with this loss, fans should remember that a character’s death doesn’t mean behaving like many did last time.
Joel’s death brought out the worst in some fans.
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
In The Last of Us Part II, Joel’s death allowed Naughty Dog to differentiate the two games and expand character dynamics. Essentially, Part I is Joel and Ellie’s game, a journey across an Infected America to find the Fireflies and a cure for the Cordyceps pandemic. Part II is Ellie and Abby’s game, with Ellie’s motivation for a road trip now pure revenge. Joel’s death makes you question perspective in this cold, hard reality — who is a villain, exactly, in this messed-up modernity? Is there any such thing as a hero now, or morality? Is Joel’s massacre of the Fireflies justified as “fatherly love,” or is it an unforgivable act? Is Abby’s path of vengeance just as legitimate as Ellie’s?
“We want him to die in this really unforgiving sort of way,” Druckmann says in Grounded II. “It needs to feel senseless for you to say, ‘Fuck these people, I’m gonna pursue them to the end of the Earth and make them pay.'”
These questions around the cycle of violence lie at the core of The Last of Us Part II, with Joel’s death throwing the player into an existential crisis — especially when the game jumps back in time to let you play the very same timeline from Abby’s perspective, leading up to and past the point of her murdering Joel with more context.
“It’s hard to imagine the story without Joel dying,” said former Naughty Dog creative director Joe Pettinati in the Grounded II documentary. “You feel that hate, Ellie feels that hate. You’re one-to-one. You’re on the stick. And that informs the rest of the story.”
However, many fans behaved truly abhorrently in reaction to Joel’s death in The Last of Us Part II. In the documentary, both Druckmann and Bailey revealed that when details of Joel’s death were leaked before the game’s release, they received persistent online harassment, hate, and even death threats from outraged fans. “Every time I went online, that was all I saw. It was just death threats and violence,” Bailey said in the documentary. “The worst of it, the really hardcore death threats, got passed along [to the authorities,] and they made sure that they weren’t anyone that lived close by. They were threatening my son, who was born during all of it. Yeah, it was rough. More than anything it taught me to keep a distance, you know?”
In 2020, following the second game’s release, Naughty Dog issued a statement condemning the hate directed toward the team behind The Last of Us Part II. “Although we welcome critical discussion, we condemn any form of harassment or threats directed towards our team and cast,” the company wrote on X. “Their safety is our top priority, but we must all work together to root out this type of behavior and maintain a constructive and compassionate discourse.”
For the HBO series, Baker anticipated fan reactions to Joel’s TV death in an interview with The Gamer, saying, “I want people to be able to wrestle with it. I did, and for me, it’s a part of that story, it’s the truest version of that story. I know that Craig [Mazin] believes in the story we told in the games, and we’ll do that.”
The Last of Us‘ second chapter wouldn’t be what it is without Joel’s death
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
It should go without saying that abusive fan reactions to Joel’s death in The Last of Us Part II aren’t OK, but since this is the internet, we’re going to have to say it again and again — especially with the restaging of the scene in live-action TV with Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and Kaitlyn Dever. Sending hate and death threats to the actors behind pieces of work simply because of their characters’ actions is, in my humble opinion, criminal behaviour.
But there’s something the haters are missing here, which is that the remaining storyline of The Last of Us proves deeply impactful because of Naughty Dog’s shocking narrative decision. The shattered America of The Last of Us takes on a different perspective when Joel, our parental protector, is suddenly gone and the only horizon is vengeance. Ellie’s motivation throughout Part II (and now Season 2 of the HBO series) is pure, cold, hatred — a side of the character we’ve only seen in glimpses before. It’s compelling stuff, watching the joke-book-loving tough kid from Part I struggle to not completely lose herself in the darkness of the world around her. And honestly, it’s fascinating watching the differences and similarities between Abby and Ellie in the fallout, and what the cycle of violence in this post-apocalyptic world brings out in the most seemingly noble of people.
“There’s not a single aspect of the game, Part II, that I would change,” Baker said in the documentary. “Any time someone comes up to me and says, ‘You know, I didn’t really like what they did to Joel,’ I was like, ‘Great. Awesome. Tell me a better version of the story.’ And to this day, they still can’t.”
Characters aren’t real, but grieving them is. And it’s one hell of a motivator for character and plot development in games and on TV. Embrace the pain.
New episodes of The Last of Us Season 2 premiere on HBO and Max Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.