Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey on heartbreaking ‘The Last of Us’ death: ‘The first time I ever cried from reading a piece of writing’
The following post contains massive spoilers about The Last of Us Season 2 episode, “Through the Valley”
Even the creative team behind HBO’s The Last of Us found it challenging to follow through on its source material’s biggest narrative swing: the death of lead character Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) in the early stages of Season 2.
“I mean, I knew that Joel was going to die right from Season 1. But reading it in the script … I was dreading getting to it and I cried. Actually sobbed my little heart out,” The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey (Ellie) said in an interview released by HBO on Sunday night. “That was the first time I've ever cried from reading a piece of writing.”
Pascal, too, acknowledged, the powerful way the show's creators handled his character's death.
“I have nothing but respect for the level of investment that people have in a video game or television show, a movie or book. I experience it myself, and I’ve flung the books across the room because its impact is so profound on me in experiencing a story,” Pascal said. “And I think that if it is incredibly painful for people, that's obviously a brilliant achievement of the storytelling.”
Whether fans of the show who weren’t familiar with The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II video games will agree is to be determined. But the series stayed true to the source material: Joel was killed by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a former member of the Fireflies whose father was murdered by Joel during his massacre of the group at the end of Season 1. In the opening moments of Season 2, Abby vowed to get revenge on Joel and kill him “slowly” — and five years later, she and her group of friends finally tracked Joel to Jackson, Wyo., where several twists of fate end up putting Joel and Abby together. During a brutal snowstorm and an unanticipated attack of thousands of infected, Joel saved Abby from certain death. She brought him back to her hideout under the guise of getting more help, but then revealed her true intentions. She incapacitated him, beat him with her fits and a golf club — stopping only when Ellie (Ramsey) entered the cabin. She then stabbed him in the neck with the broken golf club, killing him in front of Ellie, who in turn vowed revenge on Abby. (In the video game, Abby cracks Joel’s head open with a golf club head, and he bleeds to death; her motivations for killing Joel are also not as explicitly stated.)
“When we get to the moment where Abby does what she does, it was as hard for us to write and to shoot as it was, I think probably, for a lot of people to watch it,” co-creator Craig Mazin said after the episode. “But this story is about how we all deal with those moments which do confront us in life. We all think, ‘I could deal with this much stuff,’ and then life says [here’s more]. Then we find out what we can put up with.”
In an interview with Variety published after the episode, Mazin compared Joel’s death to Aslan’s mane being shaved in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“It’s a very sad scene. I cried my heart out, because he was brought low,” Mazin said. “And Joel is brought low here in a way that it’s so heartbreaking. He can’t get up off the floor, but he almost does, because Ellie asks him. It’s so upsetting. We don’t do these things to hurt people. We’re doing it because we’re with Ellie, and she’s experiencing this horrible thing that we will all experience, which is this just grief and heartbreak. It’s coming for us all.”
In the video game, Ellie takes a blow to the head and is knocked unconscious to end the scene. However, in Sunday’s episode, Ellie is kicked in the ribs and remains awake. After Abby and her friends exit, Ellie crawls over to Joel and hugs him, an emotional moment Mazin added for the series adaptation.
“That was in there from the very beginning, draft one. ... She’s clearly very injured. She has no reason to think she’s going to survive. She’s not crawling over there just to say goodbye. She’s crawling over there so she could be with him in death,” Mazin told Variety. “That’s where she wants to be, and it’s when she takes his hand. We’ve seen her do it before.”
The Last of Us will move forward now with a greater focus on how violence begets violence, with Ellie threatening to kill Abby in an echo of Abby’s vow at the start of the season.
“I think some viewers will start seeing some parallels between Abby and Ellie. Abby has lost her dad, and now, inadvertently, Abby has created those same memories for another character,” co-creator Neil Druckmann, who also co-created the video game, said in the interview with HBO. “This event will change all the characters we know forever from this point on. Now, this person that’s capable of such violence, this impulsive character, what’s going to happen to them next?”
New episodes of The Last of Us air Sundays on HBO and stream on Max.