Here’s Why [Spoiler] Had To Happen In ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2, Episode 2
Spoilers below.
Even for those of us who knew it was coming, Joel’s death is brutal to watch.
Season 2, episode 2, of The Last of Us, titled 'Through the Valley,' indulges in few dramatic departures from the sequence of events that made The Last of Us: Part II such an immediate sensation (and lightning rod) when the PlayStation game dropped in 2020. Players loved Joel after traversing the country with him and Ellie in The Last of Us: Part I, released all the way back in 2013. A sequel game promised fans a reunion — and much more time with the characters they loved. Instead, those fans lost their lead protagonist mere hours into Part II. And not only did they lose him, but they had to watch an unfamiliar woman execute him, via golf club, while Ellie laid on the floor and watched.
Episode two is true to this tableau. In fact, the biggest difference between episode two and Part II has, arguably, nothing to do with Joel’s death: A massive battle sequence takes place in and around the Jackson fortress where Ellie, Joel, Dina, Jesse, Tommy, and their friends live. But even that battle sequence ultimately traces back to Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby, who inadvertently provokes the infected horde that descend upon Jackson.
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As the premiere episode already established, Abby is a former Firefly, and she was present in Salt Lake City for Joel’s rampage in the season 1 finale. She herself survived — along with a few friends, whom we get to know better this episode. But one key individual did not: a doctor, who turned out to be Abby’s father. Joel shot this unarmed doctor in the head while rescuing Ellie from the Salt Lake operating room, where he believed his immune adoptive daughter would be killed during the Fireflies’s pursuit of a cure.
Joel made an impossible, if morally objectionable, choice to save one daughter after losing another. In the process, he (theoretically) doomed humanity to the plague of the infected. But Abby doesn’t want to punish him for forsaking the world. She wants to kill him because he killed her dad. She tries to convince herself that she is operating under some sort of code, seeking a cruel form of justice, righting an unequivocal 'wrong.' That’s why she 'has' to kill him. But in a post-apocalyptic landscape where justice is a dubious concept at best, revenge is the easier choice. And revenge perpetuates a vicious cycle.
Episode two opens with Abby waking from a nightmare, in which she revisits the horror inside the Salt Lake hospital. When she rises from her sleeping bag, she discovers Owen has already scoped out their immediate area. The former Fireflies have taken up refuge in an abandoned lodge a few miles outside Jackson, but in the darkness of night they’ve underestimated Jackson’s true size. Owen has no good news to report: Jackson is huge, well-protected, and therefore virtually unassailable. Abby dismisses this as nothing more than another obstacle to overcome. Owen, recognising that Abby’s not thinking rationally, tries to buy the group time to convince her they’re on a suicide mission.
As it turns out, they needn’t convince her of anything. Their decision will be made for them. When Abby steps out into the frigid Wyoming winter to scout for Jackson patrols, she slips in the snow and tumbles into a pack of frozen infected. At first, they appear to be dead, their fungus tendrils crystallised in ice. But the infected are smarter than they look: They’ve been using the heat of their fellow monsters’ corpses to stay alive beneath the snow. As they clamber to the surface, Abby breaks out into a horrified sprint, leading the massive swarm directly toward Jackson.
Within Jackson’s walls, the survivors have grown comfortable but not complacent. Convinced that the latest round of emergency prep is nothing more than a drill, they nevertheless follow Tommy’s orders to ready the fortress for an assault. Even Ellie is distracted. She’s hungover from the New Year’s party; self-conscious about her kiss with Dina; and defensive about her very public fight with Joel. But, as she informs Jesse, no one need dig any deeper into their business. 'I’m still me, he’s still Joel, and nothing’s ever gonna change that,' she tells him. Oop. Might I detect a hint of foreshadowing?
Sure enough, within hours, the danger has arrived at their doorstep. Tommy attempts to call back all the patrols, but several are too far out to turn around amidst the growing storm. That includes the pairs of Ellie and Jesse, and Joel and Dina. When the former group learns the latter aren’t responding to their radios, they embark on a mad dash to brave the blizzard and find their friends. But by the time they reach them, someone else has gotten there first.
It was always a twisted irony in Part II that Abby kills Joel mere moments after he saves her own life. Episode two does not deviate from this script. As Abby runs from the infected, it’s Joel who shoots one in the head mere milliseconds before it can rip into her throat. He then escorts her back to a barn, where Dina waits with their horses, and together they make a run for it. What a different story this might have been, had Joel not been there to rescue Abby. But life is made of many such moments, choices that are instantaneous and irreversible, and The Last of Us understands the significance of their ripple effects. So when Abby tells Joel and Dina that her friends have set up a safehouse not far from them, we all can infer what’s coming.
Abby wastes no time exacting her revenge. As soon as she, Joel, and Dina are safe inside the lodge, her tone — previously harried and frightened—changes. Immediately, she turns sharp, cold, and deadly. She introduces Joel and Dina to her friends, and even in their surprise, they’re instinctive enough to draw their weapons. Manny points a gun at Dina’s head while Joel drops his own, and Mel then injects Dina with something to put her to sleep for an hour. She’s therefore helpless and unaware when Abby shoots Joel in the leg.
That’s just the beginning of the carnage. Jackson is under siege. Despite the best efforts of Tommy and his compatriots, the fortress defenses can’t prevent the infected from breaking through the walls that surround the compound. Soon enough, Tommy is fighting off a bloater with a flamethrower while his compatriots litter the streets with bullets, forced to turn those same bullets on their friends when they’re bitten by infected. Inside the lodge, the violence is more intimate but no less disturbing. As she famously did in the game, Abby picks up a golf club and repeatedly swings it at Joel, bashing him nearly to pieces by the time Ellie discovers the lodge. Listening to Pedro Pascal scream in agony is not an experience I’m eager to repeat. (But, y’know, kudos to a brilliant actor.)
Finally, Ellie bursts into the scene, but she’s quickly disarmed and immobilised by Abby’s friends, who pin her into place as Abby exacts her vendetta. Ellie shrieks and sobs for her beloved father figure, writhing on the floor as she pleads for him to get up before Abby can finish the job. In a particularly brilliant choice on Pascal’s behalf, one of Joel’s fingers visibly twitches in response, as if — even on the brink of death—he will make every possible effort to reach Ellie. In one small but devastatingly impactful deviation from the game, the audience witnesses Abby’s killing blow. In the game, we see only the shadow of Abby’s final swing. In episode two, we see Abby stab the golf club into his neck like a shiv. There is no question, at this point, that Joel is dead.
The former Fireflies argue amongst themselves, most of them clearly rattled by Abby’s violence. They choose not to kill Ellie or Dina as part of their code not to murder those who can’t defend themselves, and they leave Joel’s bloodied corpse behind, to which Ellie crawls after Manny busts her ribs. She lies beside him, clutching his hand and pressing her cheek to his, which is how Jesse discovers them when he eventually locates the lodge.
Jackson is already in mourning. Without even knowing yet that his brother has died, Tommy collapses into his wife’s arms, shaking with tears. The survivors stumble amongst the corpses, shell-shocked but already beginning the painful labor of reconstruction. And as they attempt to recover, Jesse climbs the nearest hill with Ellie and Dina on horseback, dragging along Joel’s corpse, wrapped in a canvas bag.
It is a haunting sight. It’s supposed to be a haunting sight, made all the more haunting by the background warbling of Ashley Johnson — who performed both the voice and motion-capture for Ellie in the PlayStation games—as she sings 'Through the Valley,' a song featured in Part II. Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, co-creators of the HBO adaptation, know exactly how to twist the knife.
This story is forever changed. There will be no surprise super-heroic resurrection for Joel. There will be no reveal that this outcome was simply a nightmare. A tale that was once about the father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie will now be about two daughters, alone. Part II is one of my favorite video games of all time. It’s also one of the most painful stories I’ve ever encountered. Judging by episode two, I expect The Last of Us season two will play out in much the same way. And it should. Joel’s death had to happen if the HBO adaptation were to honour its source material, which itself, in part, sought to explore the ways our inherent tribalism blinds us to the broader impacts of our decisions. However painful it might be to witness on the screen, it’s a familiar tale, and one audiences need to reckon with.
Take a breath. Take a beat. The battle has only just begun.
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