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Before the first season of The Last of Us on HBO had even come to a close, the dread started to build. As one of the many people who played The Last of Us Part 2 back in June 2020, I knew all too well what was hurtling down the barrel. Joel’s violent murder at the hands of avenging angel Abby was burned into my memory – a moment of such gut-punch impact that the idea of having to sit through it all over again in remixed live-action was about as appealing as french-kissing a clicker.
Of course, there was a sense of car-crash curiosity to it all. How would co-showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann handle Part 2's incendiary instigating event? Though largely faithful to the game it adapted, the first season of the show was lauded for several major deviations from the source material. In adapting The Last of Us Part 2, might Mazin and Druckmann do something similarly drastic with Joel's death?
As it turned out, Joel's prestige TV demise played out in near-identical fashion to the game – the right call given the perfectly calibrated gravity of the moment. Players may have known there would be blood – if not precisely when, or how the hammer (or should that be 4 iron?) would fall – but for show-only watchers experiencing Joel and Ellie's story for the first time, the sense of loss, injustice, and anger Joel's death provokes couldn't be mishandled; the future of The Last of Us depended on it.
Do it already
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Whether you knew it was coming or not, there's no denying that Joel's death was one hell of a rug pull. In some ways, the impact was further heightened in show form. The fact that Joel was played by Pedro Pascal, at the pinnacle of his considerable stardom, made show-Joel's unceremonious slaughter even more shocking. Who in their right mind would bench the face of Reed Richards and Din Djarin? In episode 2 of the second season of a breakout hit that hinged on the hard-won surrogate father-daughter relationship between its chalk and cheese leads, no less.
In TV terms, it was a death as jaw-dropping as Ned Stark's beheading or The Red Wedding or, well, the Red Viper's eye-popping demise. A moment so seismic that The Last of Us became something else entirely in its wake: no longer a story about finding hope at the end of the world, but one about perpetuating and breaking cycles of violence. Most shows forge ahead, largely unchanged, after major deaths. That was never going to be possible after a character as central as Joel exited the world of The Last of Us.
Despite clear deference to the work of the game-makers at Naughty Dog, the creative team behind the show did make several noteworthy changes. It wasn't Tommy by Joel’s side when they fell into the Wolves' trap, but Dina. Pascal dialed up Joel’s fear – for Jackson, for Ellie – in comparison to Troy Baker’s hard-edged-in-the-face-of-death final moments. And the whole, excruciatingly drawn-out, event took place in a brightly lit room in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that didn't let the audience forget the show-only mushroom zombie assault unfolding below. The game's claustrophobic basement, by comparison, was like a vision of hell, with no hope on the horizon.
Something to fight for
Like much of The Last of Us Part 2 and its corresponding season of TV as a whole, many of the choices around Joel's death proved divisive. In particular, the decision to explicitly reveal Abby's motivations ahead of her decision to use Joel's head for driving range practice undercuts a key element of the game's mystery. Who is this person? What do they want? That's evident with Kaitlyn Dever's Abby. But Mazin and Druckmann made the show in a world where the cat was already out of the bag, knowing that they didn't have the luxury of telling Abby's side of the story in a single season of TV. It was ultimately the right choice for the medium.
With at least one season still to go (maybe two, that's still tbd) before the show covers the full scope of The Last of Us Part 2, there's still much more to come from Ellie, Abby and co. But there's no question that Joel's murder will continue to reverberate throughout the show, whether Pascal returns for subsequent seasons in flashback form or not. And one thing's for sure: anyone who watched The Last of Us season 2 won't forget Joel's death in a hurry.
Honorable Mentions
- Peacemaker season 2 – Internet sleuths sniffed out the truth ahead of time, but the Earth X reveal was still an alt-universe shocker.
- Severance season 2 – Woe's Hollow's barnstorming ending revealed that Helly was Helena all along, a twist only Severance could pull off.
- Squid Game season 3 – If you guessed a baby would participate in and win Squid Game, congratulations, you're clairvoyant.
- The Long Walk – Screenwriter JT Mollner made a drastic change to Stephen King's original novel, and arguably improved on the source material.
The Last of Us season 2 is available to stream on HBO Max in the US and Now/Sky in the UK. For more, here's everything we know about The Last of Us season 3.
