Warning: This article includes spoilers for season 2, episode 2 of “The Last of Us,” which aired April 20.
Ah, Joel Miller from HBO’s “The Last of Us” — we hardly knew ye. Season 2 of the zombie apocalypse series, set five years after the last season, has devastating surprises in store for the beloved main character.
With that, major spoilers for the show about the collapse of civilization following a parasitical fungal outbreak among humanity.
What happened to Joel on Sunday’s episode?
He died, and badly. On Sunday night’s episode, Joel — played by Pedro Pascal — died. He was taken down by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s been burning for revenge since the end of Season 1.
Abby beat Joel to death, blaming him (rightly) for gunning down the rebel Fireflies, including her father, who were trying to find a cure for the outbreak. Their plan was to use Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) brain, who remains immune from the fungus.
But Joel had his reasons: The Fireflies were going to have to kill Ellie to study her, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. It was a lose-lose situation.
All that happened in Season 1, but at the start of Season 2 Abby and her fellow ‘Flies gathered to vow to take Joel down, and kill him slowly.
This was a particularly hard exit — Joel, while flawed, had become a beloved character on the show and a father figure to Ellie (who watched him die in front of her).
What have Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey said about it?
Pascal says he’s in “active denial” about the story twist.
Pascal told Entertainment Weekly, “I’m in active denial (about the death scene). I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over. I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on ‘The Last of Us.’ And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad.”
Show co-creator Craig Mazin explained to The Wrap that Pascal learned how his character would die early on. “We love Pedro, but I told him the very first time I ever Zoomed with him, ‘So here’s the thing, you’re playing this guy, Joel. In Season 2, he’s gonna die,’” Mazin said. “There was never a question. It was always understood that was built into this.”
Fans who played the video game “The Last of Us, Part II” were likely less surprised at Joel’s exit — he dies pretty much the same way in that storyline. And as in the game, Ellie tells Abby that she’s now got a mortal enemy, which simply continues the revenge cycle that no one can win.
Ramsey cried when reading the script about the death, as they told EW: “I’ve never cried reading a piece of writing before, but I had such a gastral reaction to it. It’s almost like we’ve played that dynamic, me and Pedro, for a year, and it feels like father-daughter in some way.”
Pascal obviously doesn’t hold a grudge against Dever; he shared a selfie of the two of them on Instagram smiling with red-chapped cheeks and wrote, “Blizzard Buddies. Thank you, scene partner. You little miracle. @kaitlyndever @thelastofus @hbo @streamonmax #Canada”
How are fans reacting to the death?
Understandably, viewers were devastated. “(T)hey made it even worse in the show (than in the game),” wrote one fan on X.
Echoed another X user, “Ok that was actually much worse than I imagined it would be.”
There’s a lot of Abby anger, too; one X user wrote, “Adding her to my list of Top 10 MOST HATED TV CHARACTERS. And it’s only been two episodes. IDGAF what her reason was. I hate this mf’er with a passion and hope she eats pavement (the actress great tho, like kudos to her).”
But one fan who knows the game’s full story wrote on X that the circle will complete, assuming the show follows the video game: “Trust me when I say this. As someone who has played both games so many times I lost count. It will all make sense at the end.”
Is this the ‘Last’ of Joel?
Probably not. No, he’s not coming back as an active character in the present so far as we know, but in Season 2’s first episode, we learned about a character named Eugene that Joel had killed between the two seasons.
So there’s a good chance there’ll be a flashback to how that came to pass, and why it was important.
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first (or likely last) time a character played by Pascal suffered a particularly brutal death after charming the audience.
On “Game of Thrones,” he played Oberyn Martell — a suave, cocksure and handsome prince who literally had his head crushed during a fight with The Mountain. We’d had our hopes up for him then, too.
Pascal just has a way of winning us over — and breaking our hearts.
