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It's been almost a week, and the world is still recovering from the loss of Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) at the hands (and swing) of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in season 2 of The Last of Us. Now, it might seem that the show was all about ripping your heart out through this harrowing experience (which it did), but the show's creators have recently revealed they had the best interests of the fans in mind when it came to precisely when it was going to happen. To quote Joel himself, they just needed to do it already.
In an interview with Variety showrunners Neil Druckmann (creator of The Last of Us games) and Craig Mazin revealed that they'd battled with the idea of precisely when the big death was going to happen. "Because even in the game, there’s like an hour or something before you get to this moment. But we also knew it needed to be early enough, because this is the inciting incident for this story," Druckmann explained. "So yes, we always pick every permutation, but the later it got in the season, it just felt we were kind of dragging our feet instead of just getting to the meat of what the story is about."
Getting to that moment was harrowing for all involved, with Pascal himself admitting, "I've never experienced anything like I did that day." Mazin revealed that timing was everything, particularly for those who knew Joel's ride up to that snow-swept building would be his last. "There’s a danger of tormenting people. It’s not what we want to do. If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented," he explained. "And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet. Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people."
Either way, fans weren't going to finish the episode in the best of moods with Joel's passing, but the trailers have already confirmed that Pascal will be back in later episodes this season, diving into why these two were on tense terms before everything went to hell. To get the full rundown on how episode 2 differs from the events of the game, head here, but don't blame us if you start tearing up again.
