SPOILERS AHEAD: The second episode of The Last of Us Season 2, titled “Through the Valley,” delivered one of the most heartbreaking and controversial moments in the franchise’s history—Joel’s death. Fans of the video game The Last of Us Part II knew it was coming, but witnessing it unfold on screen with Pedro Pascal in the role added a haunting new layer of emotional weight.
The action-packed episode sees a horde of infected attack the Jackson settlement, all while Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) attempt to make their way home. Abby (Katelyn Dever), meanwhile, wanders off from the base her group has set up and finds herself on the run from infected who have got smart enough to use their dead to hide themselves.
She’s pursued and trapped behind a fence, but is saved by Joel (not knowing who he is until Dina—who takes Tommy’s place in the show—refers to him by name). She encourages her two saviors to come back to the lodge her people are in, where the truth is finally revealed: she’s the daughter of the Firefly surgeon Joel gunned down in cold blood.
They drug Dina so she won’t have to see what happens, and Joel takes a shotgun blast to the knee from Abby. She proceeds to beat him savagely with a golf club and her bare fists, though much of this happens off-screen. That proves to be a much better approach than what we saw in The Walking Dead when Glenn died, for example.
Ellie (Bella Ramsey), meanwhile, has left the settlement to find Joel and eventually tracks him down, where she too is disarmed. She tearfully pleads for Joel’s life, but as he bleeds out on the floor (seemingly aware that Ellie is nearby), Abby finishes her father’s killer by stabbing Joel through the back of the neck with the broken golf club.
That’s a big difference from the game where she delivered one final blow with a club, and blood started spurting from his head. Why the change? It’s no more or less savage, but either way, Joel is dead, and Ellie vows to kill them for what they’ve done. Take a look at some photos, courtesy of HBO, from last night’s episode:
While the series made some changes from the game, the emotional impact remained staggering. Pascal shared his thoughts with Entertainment Weekly on shooting his final scenes: “I’m in active denial,” he said. “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,” Pascal continued. “And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad.”
The actor admitted the makeup and prosthetics were so visceral, they shocked his co-stars on set. “[I] killed the vibe completely as soon as anyone set their eyes on me,” he recalled. “This kind of shock and heartbreak… it was weird to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like the extreme version of, ‘Is there something on my face?’ I really could see this sort of grief take over everyone’s look in their eyes.”
Co-creator Craig Mazin spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the pivotal scene and why they chose not to have Joel plead for his life. “When Abby tells him, ‘I’m going to kill you, because there are some things we all agree are just f*cking wrong,’ there is this slight moment of agreement,” Mazin said. “Joel knows what he did is capital-W Wrong. But he also had no choice [but to kill the Fireflies last season], as far as he saw it. He did what he needed to do.”
Mazin added that having Dina in the room rather than Tommy raised the stakes. “Abby is basically saying, ‘Make one mistake and we’re going to kill her,’” he explained. “And if there’s one thing we know about Joel, it’s that he’s sort of the ultimate dad.”
As difficult as the moment was to film, Pascal and the creators agree it was essential to the story’s progression. The scene, though less graphic than in the game, was designed to land with emotional devastation rather than shock value. “We didn’t want it to feel gratuitous,” Mazin said. “We wanted it to feel like a tragic inevitability.”
Pascal may be gone from the series, but his legacy—and the consequences of Abby’s actions—will loom large over the rest of The Last of Us Season 2.
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The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
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