Let's Break Down How The Last of Us Handles That Major Death in Season 2

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2.

Let’s get right to it: In the second episode of Season 2 of The Last of Us, a woman named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) brutally murders Joel (Pedro Pascal) in front of Ellie (Bella Ramsey). This may have come as a shock to those unfamiliar with the game, but not to those who played as both Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us Part II. Game lovers (and haters) have been waiting for the TV show-only audiences to see and process this Red Wedding-esque plot point for years.

Here’s a look at what happened on the show, how it differs from the game, why the character of Abby set off a bit of a firestorm in the gaming community, and how this act of vengeance sets up the rest of the series (without any spoilers past Episode 2).

How Joel dies

Last season, Joel ushered Ellie to the Salt Lake City hideout of a rebel group called the Fireflies. There, they planned to study Ellie, who is immune to zombie bites, to create a cure for the infection that jumpstarted the apocalypse. But when Joel realized that the operation would kill her, he murdered 18 Fireflies and one doctor to save an unconscious Ellie and take her to Jackson where Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) lived.

We meet Abby in Season 2, Episode 1. After Joel killed her father, the doctor who was supposed to operate on Ellie, she and her friends moved to Seattle, trained as military, and set out on a mission to hunt down Joel. By episode 2, the former Fireflies make it to an area just outside Jackson and see how heavily fortified the city is. While Abby is determined to carry out their plan to murder Joel, all of her friends want to turn back.

Abby sets out on a patrol and accidentally awakens a swarm of infected zombies. She is saved by Joel, who happens to be on patrol with Dina (Isabela Merced), Ellie’s friend and love interest. The group is too far from Jackson to return to the city, and Abby leads them to a lodge where her friends are hiding out.

Meanwhile, the infected attack the city of Jackson en masse. Thousands of zombies sprint through the snow and ice to throw themselves against the high walls of the city. The people inside push the zombies back with exploding gasoline tanks, gunfire, and flamethrowers. There’s even an extra giant zombie that breaches the wall. It’s all very wights attacking the Wall on Game of Thrones.

Ellie and Jesse (Young Mazino), Dina’s ex-boyfriend, set out to look for Joel and Dina when they don’t respond on the radio. Meanwhile, at the lodge, Abby has ordered her friends to drug Dina so she won’t be conscious for Joel’s murder. Abby then threatens Dina’s life to get Joel to admit that he killed over a dozen Fireflies in Salt Lake. Abby then shoots Joel in the leg, beats him with a gulf club, and punches him bloody. Ellie arrives just in time to witness the death of her father figure. Abby’s friends disarm Ellie, and then Abby murders Joel in front of Ellie’s eyes. 

It’s not a spoiler to say that brutally murdering Joel in front of Ellie is a huge mistake and kicks off a cycle of bloody vengeance.

The scene sparked a controversy around Abby in the game

As you can imagine, Abby’s murder of Joel did not go over well with the fandom when it occurred early on in the gameplay of The Last of Us Part II. The game forces players to play as both Ellie and Abby, and the lead-up to the encounter between Abby and Joel is shot from Abby’s perspective. Essentially, it puts the players in the shoes of a person who conspires to murder the beloved protagonist of the first game.

The great innovation of The Last of Us Part II was this switch in perspectives, which continues throughout the game. By playing as both Ellie and Abby in different parts of the story, the player is meant to understand where each woman is coming from as she tries to avenge the death of her respective father figure, while also growing increasingly horrified by the monstrous acts she commits in this quest. But even as the game eventually builds some empathy for Abby, she remains a wildly controversial character reviled by a certain subsection of gamers. The actor who voiced Abby received threats against both her and her newborn son. Some of that hatred was rooted in misogyny and other biases, while some was simply born of frustration with the storytelling device. 

Read more: Everything You Need to Know About Abby, The Last of Us’ Most Controversial Character

How Joel’s TV death differs from the game

In the game, Joel and Tommy save Abby from infected while out on patrol. In the show, Joel is on patrol with Dina instead when they find Abby. Abby’s friends are much kinder to Dina in the show than they are to Tommy in the game: They drug her, whereas they knock Tommy out by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a bottle. In the game, Abby and her gang also knock Ellie out after Joel dies by kicking her in the head.

The showrunners probably made that Dina-Tommy swap to accommodate another change. In the game, there is no zombie attack on Jackson. But in the show, Abby accidentally sets loose a horde of infected onto the city, probably for the sake of adding an extra action set piece early in the season. Since Tommy is not on patrol with Joel when the incursion happens, he is able to help guard the city and safeguard its people.

In terms of Abby’s friends being queasier as they watch Abby torture Joel, the series creators may be trying to build more sympathy for the characters given how negatively the gaming audience reacted early in the game to Abby and her compatriots when the game was released.

What it means for the rest of the season

In the game, Tommy is as obsessed with avenging Joel’s death as Ellie is—if not more so. A few detail changes suggest that Ellie will be the driving force of their mission of vengeance in the show rather than Tommy. Not only was Tommy not present for his brother’s murder in the show, as he was in the game, but he also has fatherly responsibilities in the TV series. (He’s married but has no children in the game.) 

As a result, it’s possible that he takes a more cautious approach to hunting down Abby in the show than in the game, and it’s Ellie who is largely responsible for running headlong into Seattle to track the former Fireflies.

As for Joel, I am willing to bet we haven’t seen the last of him this season. Without spoiling anything, Joel does briefly pop up in game flashbacks, and it’s hard to imagine he won’t make a cameo or two in the remainder of series. Pedro Pascal is a movie star after all. You don’t waste the precious time you have with him on set.

Plus there are a few dangling threads in Joel’s story. We don’t know what, exactly, broke the relationship between Joel and Ellie, whether it was gradual or whether a specific incident sparked Ellie’s anger. To that end, the show creators introduced Catherine O’Hara as Joel’s therapist Gail in the first episode of Season 2. Gail is an entirely new show creation. Surely, she will appear again. Perhaps we get more therapy settings in flashback form. We also learned that Joel killed Gail’s husband when he became infected. That’s another moment we could yet see onscreen. And, of course, the writers could plumb Ellie’s memories for moments with Joel as she mourns his death.