They did it, then. The Last Of Us knows how to put on a show – by 4am on Monday morning (UK time), the most recent episode closed with a bang. Joel was dead, and the show’s fanbase reeling.
The episode (ambiguously titled Through the Valley) was surely one of the bloodiest and most visceral committed to screens in recent years.
Watching Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) brutally beat Joel to death, before driving the point of a golf club into his head, was a singularly unpleasant exercise in TV viewership, made all the worse by the fact that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) was being forced to watch it happen, as were Abby’s horrified allies.
Needless to say, the internet is very appalled. And why wouldn’t it be? As a point of comparison, the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones springs to mind, or perhaps the equally zombie-infested Hardhome.
Video game fans, of course, knew this from the start: it’s probably the worst-kept twist in TV history, though gamers have done an admirable job of keeping the news from those who didn’t know it.
Given how faithful the TV adaptation has been of the games so far, the question over whether the showrunners would have the guts to kill off Joel hung heavily over the second season.
But they committed, and watching it play out in on-screen is just as disturbing as it is in the games – made worse by the fact that Joel was the person to save Abby from death at the hands of a horde of zombies. In that one act of mercy, his fate was sealed, and while the torture scene played out a little differently than in the games, it’s still genuinely disturbing to watch.
"We felt that the point we needed to get across was that Abby was not in control of herself,” Mazin told the Hollywood Reporter about the moment.
"There is a rage in her that I think we should understand is not the kind of anger that goes away simply because you killed someone. That's the irony, or, I guess, the tragedy really of being consumed by something like this - there is no way to fix it except to somehow make your peace with it and let it go.”
But it also makes sense — and for my money, killing off Joel is a savvy move. For many reasons, but especially because of how thoroughly it explodes our expectations of what should happen to the characters we love.
When we meet Joel and Ellie at the start of season two, it’s clear that neither of them have moved on from the catastrophic events that marked the season one finale. Joel butchered an entire hospital full of Firefly rebels to save Ellie’s life, and though he lies to her about what happened, it’s clear that she doesn’t entirely believe him.
That sense of malaise hangs over their lives in the present day, five years on. Joel and Ellie’s relationship is strained, and while it seems like they’ve moved on and put the past behind them (Joel works as the town foreman; Ellie does patrol) little flags dropped throughout the first episode hint that there’s a reckoning of sorts coming.
A meeting with his therapist, Gail, devolves into awkward silence when she tells him that she blames him for killing her husband, Eugene (who has died off-screen, presumably as a result of having been infected). Later on, Joel alienates himself still further from Ellie when he interferes in a fight, punching her aggressor in a crowded bar.
“What’s wrong with you?” she shouts at him, before storming off.
Well, Joel is a killer. And despite how much we love Pedro Pascal, how much we think he might have deserved a redemeption arc, bad things happen to bad people. This is comeuppance: karmic justice, doled out by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, at the hands of somebody he has wronged. And if The Last Of Us is about anything, it’s about revenge: what it means to want it, what it does to those who pursue it, how it destroys the lives of everybody around it. Joel’s fractured relationship with Ellie is a result of this; now she has to live with the fact that he died whilst they weren’t speaking. Joel’s death underlines it all beautifully.
We’ll see Pascal in future, of course – he’ll almost certainly be popping up in flashback scenes, giving us further glimpses of his and Ellie’s relationship over the last few years.
But his death tips the series on its head in an entirely unexpected, excellent way – or at least, it was entirely unexpected for those playing The Last Of Us 2 when that came out, all the way back in 2020.
It was an audacious move at the time, and one that completely split the fanbase. They are, in fact, still split: critics hailed the game as one of the best of all time, while the backlash towards Joel’s death saw Laura Bailey, who played Abby, get death threats.
Now, with the audience (and characters) reeling, the show has another mountain to climb: making people feel sympathy for Joel’s killer, Abby. The showrunners have committed to the harder route – the one without easy answers – and with Ellie on her own revenge mission, the show is about to get a whole lot darker. One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be compelling television.
The Last of Us is streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW
