The latest episode of The Last of Us Season 2 left fans stunned as it killed off one of the show’s biggest characters. For those who had played The Last of Us Part 2, this same death was incredibly controversial when the video game first launched in 2020. So much so, in fact, that many questioned whether or not The Last of Us TV show would opt to go in the same direction as the source material. Now, we know that the TV series did, in fact, do things in the same way, which showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann said was never in doubt.
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***Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 are present throughout the remainder of this article. Read onward at your own discretion.
Speaking during the newest episode of The Last of Us podcast, Mazin and Druckmann opened up about their thought process when it came to the death of Joel. Druckmann acknowledged that he had seen speculation that the TV show might not kill Joel, especially given that Pedro Pascal is such a major draw to the series. For Mazin, though, there was never any other option in The Last of Us Season 2 that wouldn’t have resulted in Joel being murdered at the hands of Abby as this is the realness of the world that is being presented.
“Well, they’ve been one step ahead in that they understood it was going to happen,” Mazin said of those who played The Last of Us Part 2. “I don’t think that anyone knew exactly when it would happen.”
“We did see some people say, ‘Oh, Pedro’s too popular, HBO will not let them,” Druckmann added.
“Yeah, HBO, the place that made Game of Thrones when Ned Stark gets his head lopped off. I’m still reeling from that,” Mazin stated. “Well, the easy part was the source material was correct. I remember playing it and experiencing it and feeling horrible. But there is that difference between experiencing something and feeling horrible because you loved somebody. You’re grieving for the loss of that person, and you’re shocked that the story would be so dangerous as to kill that person. And a different response, which is a critical, ‘I don’t think that was a good choice.’ I thought it was a brilliant choice. I thought it was incredibly brave. And I thought it was really smart because, in the end, you have to take plot armor away at some point.”
“If you’re going to tell a story about consequences, and if you’re going to tell a story about a man who does a terrible, terrible thing for the best possible reason there is, then you need the world to provide feedback,” he continued. “And the feedback here is brutality. That’s how the world works. So there was never a question that we were going to do this. The real question was when. We talked about this a lot, and it felt to us like Episode 1 really taught us a lot about where Joel was and what his relationship was like with Ellie, and it doesn’t end well. And here we get to Episode 2, and this happens, and you feel this double destruction because, as far as we know, her relationship with Joel was broken and now she’s forced to watch him die. And it’s like a double wound to the heart.”
Moving forward, it’s expected that The Last of Us Season 2 will make some slight departures from the events of The Last of Us Part 2. Even with Joel’s death, the TV show opted to make some slight tweaks to how he was killed, some of which resulted in it being more brutal. Still, the choice to kill Joel specifically is something that was always going to happen, whether or not fans of The Last of Us wanted it to or not.
The Last of Us Season 2 is currently airing across HBO and Max. New episodes are set to premiere each Sunday at 9pm ET/6pm PT.
