It Didn’t Take Long For HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ To Deliver The Moment Gamers Knew Was Coming, & It Still Hurt Seeing It
Written by djfrosty on April 21, 2025
Source: Liane Hentscher/HBO / The Last of Us / Pedro Pascal
Gamers have already experienced this controversial moment in video game history. Still, watching it unfold in HBO’s hit television adaptation of the iconic video game, The Last of Us, has hit even harder, leaving fans stunned.
Like watching the Titanic barrel towards a massive iceberg, fans of The Last of Us video game knew this day was coming and eagerly anticipated seeing how casual viewers would handle this moment that sparked plenty of discourse in the video game world when The Last of Us Part II was released in 2020.
*Spoilers Ahead*
Okay, if you moved past the spoiler warning, you no longer care about what is about to be said.
How Joel’s Time Came To An End In The Last of Us Season 2
At the end of season 1, we saw Pedro Pascal’s Joel slaughter a bunch of members of the Fireflies and including doctors who were about perform a fatal surgery on Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in hopes of turning her immunity to the fungal plague into a cure to end the Cordyceps brain infection that ravaged the entire globe, basically bringing civilization to a crashing halt.
Joel’s decision to save his surrogate daughter comes back to haunt him in season 2 with the introduction of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who just happens to be the daughter of the head surgeon he killed in season 1, and yes, she wants revenge, and she gets it brutally.
After Joel saves her from a horde of infected, she quickly realizes he is the man she has been searching for. She shoots in the knee with a shotgun before brutally beating Joel with a golf club, delivering the fatal blow in front of Ellie for a gutwrenching scene as she screams for surrogate dad to get up, before dragging herself over to his lifeless body.
We knew it was coming, but man, it still hit like a ton of bricks.
Showrunners Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann Didn’t Want To Torment Fans
The Last of Us television show is a rare gem, as it has rich source material to draw from in the game; for the most part, it perfectly mirrors the game with some slight changes made to the story.
Like in this season, Abby is not muscular like she is in the game, much to the chagrin of some purists, but Dever still plays the role with the same anger, and Joel’s death in the show was more brutal than it was in the game, and this was done on purpose.
In an interview with Variety, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann explained why they wasted no time when handling Joel’s death in the show.
They admitted they had thought of every possible scenario. Still, Druckmann explained from a storytelling perspective that Joel’s death happening early made sense “because this is the inciting incident for this story.”
Mazin and Druckmann also wanted to address the elephant in the room, Joel’s death, because it has been looming over the show since season 1, and they felt they had an obligation to spare fans from any more torment.
“There’s a danger of tormenting people,” Mazin told Variety. “It’s not what we want to do. If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented. 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.”
Social Media Reactions To The Last of Season 2’s Heartbreaking Moment
As expected, the reactions to Joel’s gruesome death were those of shock, and mostly people who knew it was coming were still left reeling after watching Pedro Pascal take a golf club and plenty of punches to the face.
We’re not sure if those people who were tuning in to watch Pedro Pascal will stick around, but if this one post on X, formerly Twitter, is an indicator, HBO and The Last of Us might be in trouble.
But we don’t think last night’s episode will be the last time we see Pascal’s Joel. Remember, we got a whole five years of time we need to catch up on.
Damn Joel, we hate it had to be you.
You can see more reactons to the episode in the gallery below.