Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us season two through episode two as well as references to the games. Read at your own risk.

ADDITIONAL WARNING: There’s going to be discussion of racism, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, and all the fun things that come with it in this article, including some cited examples. Totally understood if you need to protect your peace by not reading it.

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Intro

Hey guys! So remember when I said at the end of season one that there’s going to be a big ol’ spoiler that happens in season two? Congrats, you’ve found out what it is!

Yeah, the second part of The Last of Us the game decided to take a bold swing - pardon the expression - and boy did it have an impact - again pardon the expression.

Look, you can’t talk about any of this without talking about the Joel’s death of it all so I’m going to get right into it. Warning for how I’m going to be talking about how the game handled it compared to the show but I won’t give away any spoilers that the show hasn’t already told you.

Why Joel Had To Die In The Last of Us Part Two

You may recall how I talked about the point of The Last of Us part one - show and game - is that Joel is not a good guy. If you want the full list of evidence you can go to my writeup for the season one finale that I just linked. For our purposes right now there’s a thing I want to stress: Whether or not you think it was good for Joel to save Ellie, the way he saved Ellie was awful. Got it? Put the trolley problem of save one girl or save the world aside. It is completely irrelevant to the question of how Joel saved Ellie. And the how is that he massacred a bunch of people up to and including an unarmed doctor. He did not have to do that. He had multiple options to save Ellie which involved none of those things and he never even considered them.

Again, if you want the list of multiple options I gotcha back in the season one finale. Go nuts on reading. The thing we need to talk about is that Joel did an act of mass murder. That’s not something Mister Rogers would do, we’re all agreed there, right?

Okay, except not right. Because there is a faction of people out there on the internet who to this day insist that Joel was 100% in the right, there is no question, everybody who tries to suggest otherwise - up to and including Neil Druckmann who wrote the damn thing, is wrong.

You got that? The guy who created the fucking story is wrong about his own story.

Now I get death of the author and authors who write things without being aware of their own themes and blah blah blah. I’m an old school Anne Rice fan. I’m well aware of when the author puts stuff in their writing they deny was there even though it totally is. This is not a case of that.

To give you an example, this very weekend - on April 19, 2025 to be specific - I saw someone online arguing that last week’s episode of The Last of Us had horrible characterization of Ellie because, according to this entirely serious person, Joel did such an objective good by saving Ellie that Ellie should be grateful to him for the rest of her life and should show that gratitude to him constantly by never once disagreeing with anything he says and doting on him whenever she sees him.

I wish I was kidding. I also love this person’s particular Principal Skinner moment of “Is my entire premise here possibly incorrect? No, it’s the entire second game and now season of the show that’s wrong!”

I also wish this guy - and trust me, it’s a guy - was alone. But he’s not. I’m not going to link to it because these parts of the internet are absolutely fucking foul. The worst of racism, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia and more that you can ever imagine times a thousandfold. Seriously, these folks make Andrew Tate look like a social justice warrior.

And it would be easy to say that oh these are just some losers on the internet, ignore them. Except the problem is they’re not. And our current political situation shows that. Many others besides me have done the dive into how Gamergate ultimately shaped the world we’re living in where a douchebag nepo baby who bitches that everything, games included, are too “woke” was handed the keys to our entire government. I’d love to ignore these assholes. I’d love to lock them all in the subreddit they’ve infected since the second game came out and let them circlejerk over how it’s super obvious that Neil Druckmann made The Last of Us Part Two as part of a secret Jewish agenda to brainwash people into becoming transgender and supporters of genocide - I WISH I WAS MAKING THAT EXAMPLE UP, BELIEVE ME - but they won’t stay in their corner with the other losers.

All of which is to say that when the first game of The Last of Us came out, these people didn’t agree with the idea that Joel had been a bad guy. So when Neil Druckmann said okay, part of the point of the second game is that we’re going to dig into Joel’s badness further and really make the audience examine how they feel about murderers (hang on to this, we’ll come back to it), this part of the audience lost their ever loving minds.

How dare he kill Joel? And my god, how dare he allow a - ugh - WOMAN to do it?

You remember how I said last season that part of the point of the first part of The Last of Us was to ask the audience to examine how easily they thought a mass murderer was a good guy? The folks who most needed this lesson didn’t like being told they needed this lesson. Laura Bailey, who voiced Abby in the game, got real world death threats because of it. As did her two year old son. Yeah, it was that fucking bad. And still is.

All of which is to say that it’s a lesson that clearly still needs to be taught because these folks are refusing to take their medicine. Neil is wrong! Everyone is wrong! The whole thing is fake and stupid and not a real story! It’s Neil Druckmann forcing an agenda! Also Abby’s clearly not really a woman because she has muscles! Transgender agenda! Woke!

It’d honestly be funny how much they consistently refuse to understand every single point of the story except for how, again, real world death threats and assholes who agree with this using the exact same frankly evil mindset to say why do we need to give medicine to babies with HIV anyway?

But if we set the wayback machine to when Neil Druckmann was coming up with the idea for the second part, you can see how it makes sense. Namely this: Okay, you saw a story where you met a character, got to know them, got to understand what they cared about, and then they do a horrific thing. Does knowing the character affect your ability to see the horror?

The Last of Us Part Two is the exact opposite of that: in the game you start out not knowing the character. You meet this young woman, Abby. You play as her so you identify with her need to survive but you know nothing about her…

Until she drives a golf club through Joel’s head.

Then you get to know who Abby is.

I have to tread carefully here to avoid spoilers but it’s important to be aware that at this point in the game you don’t know what the show has told the audience: Abby is the daughter of the doctor that Joel slaughtered. You find that out much later. To your eyes, Abby is this random person who came in and killed Joel for no reason that you’re aware of.

That is on purpose. The game is putting you into Abby’s shoes at the end of the first game. She was a kid. She didn’t know who the fuck Joel was. All she knows is this guy shows up and murders her dad for no reason she can see. Literally the exact same thing the audience sees her do to Joel.

The parallels - and you may recall I told y’all back in season one to pay super close attention to parallels in this story (protip: this would be a good time to revisit episode four while keeping parallels in mind) - are not subtle. They’re subtle in the sense that you’re not told Abby’s parallels directly, but you do find them out. Can you meet the person who comes in and does what is to you a random murder and feel sympathy for the one who did it?

And, if you find you can’t feel sympathy for Abby, can you examine why?

As I talked about at the end of the first season, it wasn’t an accident that Joel in the game is Ye Olde Generic Video Game protagonist of a white dude with a scruffy beard, and that in the show it’s The Actor You Get When You Need Him To Play Someone Who Has Darkness But Protects A Child Pedro Pascal. It’s likewise not a coincidence that the person who kills Joel is Abby: Female, young, but equally driven to kill without mercy just as Joel was. Equally possessed of supposedly good reasons for it: It’s a rough world! Only one way to survive! You remember all your arguments to excuse what Joel did, right?

Oh, those don’t apply when you’re talking about a girl? Hmm, funny. Wonder why.

The show made the call to tell you who Abby was right away. As I said last week, I see why they did that. Not just because TV shows don’t work the way that video games do, but because they already knew from the first go at this story that loftiness of story goals aside can and should be at best a secondary concern to whether or not your actress is getting death threats.

Should Kaitlyn Dever have to worry because she’s playing live action Abby? No. Did literally everyone I know who knew about the games say “I hope to fuck they hired body guards for her” once her casting was announced? Oh fuck yeah.

To be honest I don’t know if actor safety was a concern in the story decision. Neil Druckmann and everyone involved gets super delicate when talking about controversy with the story, and in fairness I get that too. Why give any oxygen to the people who are convinced you’re trying to brainwash them into being gay?

But what Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have talked about is understanding that the TV audience needs the context earlier. And safety aside I think that’s not a bad call. It would’ve been some bold TV storytelling to say hey we’re killing off Joel and you don’t get to know why until season three, that’s for sure. I would’ve tipped my hat to it. But I can’t fault them for thinking it might be a move that had too high a risk of not paying off.

Another choice I found interesting is that in the TV show we know that Abby knows who Joel is right away. In the game you don’t know this because it would give it away to the player as well. So it’s not until they’re back in the ski lodge and Abby hears the name Joel that she turns.

I like it in the story because it shows how Abby in her own way has the moment of hey, this is just a random guy. Joel is an older man. Not only that, he’s risking his life to save her from the infected. The sequence adds moral tension as you the player later think about the what ifs - what if Abby recognized Joel’s good deeds here? What if she allowed the possibility for this to change her mind? What if Abby hadn’t heard his name and he would forever be the guy who helped her one day and nothing more?

I suspect the change in the show is because in the game this does stand out as a plot hole. In the game, Abby doesn’t know what Joel looks like down to the smallest scar detail. She knows his name is Joel. So many people, not unreasonably, pointed out she had no way of knowing this was her Joel instead of a Joel who happened to live in Jackson.

So if I had to wager a guess, given how in the show they have Abby stress that she knows everything about Joel, they wanted to make it so that particular question was disregarded. She wants to kill the guy who killed her father, she knows for certain this is the guy, that was her moral decision. There’s no question about would she have killed some random other Joel and gone whoopsie if she’d guessed wrong.

However, by doing this we see Abby leaving an entire city at risk of death. Knowingly and purposefully. In the game, her guiding them to the lodge was not a manipulative action. Here it’s her lying to them to get them somewhere she can kill Joel while she gives zero fucks about an entire city who she knows is under attack. Sure, people with military level protection, but nobody she’s got beef with as far as she’s aware.

So while the show has on the one hand made Abby more sympathetic from the start by telling you she’s the daughter of the doctor, on the other they’ve made her less sympathetic because she showed no empathy for all of Jackson.

Mind you, I’m not saying arguments can’t be made here! Maybe she figured Jackson looked like such a mess there was no point in their small group going to help even if they wanted to. Almost guaranteed death sentence for everyone compared to just Joel dying and Dina and Abby’s group being safe. Who’s to say? I’m just flagging it as something I’m curious about how the show will handle it as the rest of the season goes on.

But yeah. Hi. Welcome to The Last of Us season two. The one where Joel dies because he’s not a nice guy. And if you can’t find it in your heart to understand and forgive the person who killed him, maybe you can see why that person couldn’t find it in their heart to do the same for Joel.

All that remains is - well, can we? That’s for the rest of this season and the next to find out. Just have to wait and see.

Lagniappe

As always, things that don’t fit anywhere else.

• If you’re familiar with the game and wondering why I didn’t address the other things that were notably different in the show, it’s because I promised no spoilers. If any of the other differences become significant, I’ll talk about them when that’s known for sure.
• I’ll be honest, my guess was that they’d either kill Joel at the end of the first episode or in the penultimate episode of the season. I didn’t think episode 2. Which makes me curious if this was originally envisioned as a two parter that ended up airing on separate nights.
• “His brains are on the floor” - a nice reminder that Joel did a needlessly cruel thing.
• “Nothing’s going to change that” - man if I hadn’t suspected Joel was dying in tonight’s episode I definitely would’ve known as soon as Ellie said that line. Luckily the title was a big hint.
• I was thinking about the issue I brought up last week of nobody worrying about the risk of digging in a world where the infected use the ground to communicate. To that end Craig Mazin did address it in the podcast and said it was a deliberate choice to show that the people of Jackson had become complacent. And yanno, as I look out into a real world where even medical professionals rarely mask to stop the spread of disease, I can’t say it’s inaccurate that humans will get lazy about life or death things if given even half a chance to. So hey: points to the show there. I’m wrong, they’re right.
• Now, that being said, I will side eye that the plan is for children and the vulnerable to go into the basements during an attack when, again, you know the enemy uses the ground. Like even if you forget the tendrils the threat they just discovered was that there’s infected hiding below the earth. Dude, even World War Z tells you the way to hide is go up and destroy any ladders and stairs up to reach you. And that’s with regular zombies, not earth based!
• Also, because I am that nerd, I’m going to look at Jackson and channel Historian Roel Konijnendijk by yelling: Where are your ditches???? You’ve got five years and construction equipment and no ditches around your city? Pfft. Amateurs.
• (Okay I’m also nerd enough to acknowledge that maybe where they are in the mountains is too rocky to dig too far down. But in which case you create a ditch like effect by going higher. They wouldn’t be the first to need to solve this problem! It’s doable!)
• I love how the look between Tommy and Maria silently conveyed that they understood one or both of them might not make it out of that attack. I also got the feeling that the two of them deliberately split up in these moments to increase the odds at least one of them will survive to care for their son.
• I liked how you could see everyone had a role to play in running the town. Just because you’re not young and fully healthy doesn’t mean you can’t contribute. For example, I noticed most of the folks with flamethrowers were grey-haired. Not elderly by any means, but possibly not a coincidence that they’re of an age where they’re less likely to have good eyesight. Flamethrowers don’t require sharpshooting.
• I loved the lead in to the invasion. It was very Hardhome from Game of Thrones and I mean that in the best possible way. I’m curious to find out if that was on purpose.
• As someone who owns a German Shepherd I was both very proud of those good doggies and telling myself nothing bad ever happens to them ever ever ever.
• I also loved how much you learn by seeing how matter of fact it is to kill the bitten members of Jackson after the invasion is done. Nobody argued, nobody begged, just understood that’s how it goes.
• Even though I am firmly team Joel Did a Bad Thing I still teared up as I saw all the pieces coming into place for today to be his last day.
• I watch the show and then go directly into doing my writeup so I haven’t seen any reactions as of me typing this. But once I catch up one of the things I’m curious about is how many people unfamiliar with the game assumed Ellie would be able to save Joel at the end. Guessing that’s not an insignificant number.
• Semi-related, if you want to know how deep the denial and the misogyny goes with that horrific section of the internet, there are those who believe it is so obvious that Joel is right and all others are wrong that they fully expected that the show would not kill Joel but would instead kill Ellie. Because surely the show wouldn’t be so stupid as to think people would watch the show without Pedro Pascal? Let alone with girls as the characters we’re supposed to care about???
• Back on the moment where the show absolutely killed off Joel, Bella Ramsey did a great job but their accent was in full force when Ellie was crying out. I’m guessing in the edit they went with valuing the acting of the emotions over the accent, particularly since it was Timothy A Good and we know he is incapable of doing bad editing. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take me out of the scene to hear Ellie going British.
• That being said, we cannot talk about that scene without talking about how amazing Ashley Johnson was when she did it. Fair warning you’ll see some spoilers about things done differently in the game that I didn’t talk about here, but I teed that video up to the exact moment Ellie arrives in the room where Joel is being tortured so it’s the least amount of spoilers possible and only an eagle-eyed viewer would catch them. Watch it. There is reason why people far smarter and more knowledgeable about video game performances than I am say that if you ever want to definitively prove why generative AI can’t replace humans, it’s that exact scene. No computer can capture the raw emotion that Ashley Johnson did. None.
• Speaking of voice actors, Kaitlyn Dever sounded so much like Laura Bailey in that dream sequence I honestly thought the other person was Laura back to play the nurse. (Who she voiced in the game and had a cameo appearance in last year.)
• Hey remember how parallels are important in this story? Remember stuff I pointed out about how pretty much nobody in the show thought Joel was a good person? Including Ellie who gave him side eye when she suspected he lied to her about why they fled the hospital? Maybe pay attention to how other characters react to Abby. Just throwing that little food for thought out there.
• I appreciate that Abby had five years to build up to this and undoubtedly had a thousand variations on her speech ready to go but man alive I was with Joel at the end there of shut the fuck up and do it already. Who knew killing him slowly meant talking him to death?
• They left two perfectly good horses behind? When one of the horses could’ve even carried Joel’s body for them? That didn't make any sense.

So yeah. there we are. Joel’s dead. Now it’s time for the rest of the story. See you next week.