‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 shocker: [Spoiler] dies in traumatic second episode
The following post contains massive spoilers about The Last of Us Season 2 episode, “Through the Valley”
The tagline for Season 2 of The Last of Us warned fans that “every path has a price.” In Episode 2, “Through the Valley,” the bill came due.
Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) was brutally killed by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in front of his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Joel’s death was an act of revenge set in motion by his killing spree five years earlier at the Firefly compound, when he saved Ellie’s life. Among the several people Joel murdered was Abby’s father, a doctor who was going to operate on Ellie to find a cure to the cordyceps outbreak and likely leave Ellie dead in the process.
“You can't just commit acts of violence, walk away, and have your story end,” The Last of Us co-creator Craig Mazin teased after last week’s season premiere. “The repercussions create more of them, not fewer of them.”
“So much of the story is going to be about perspective,” added The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann, who also co-created the video game on which the show is based. “Who the heroes are and who the villains are is based on where you're standing.”
Fans of the blockbuster video game have known Joel’s fate for years. The character dies in the early stages of The Last of Us Part II video game, leaving Ellie and Abby on a collision course. But in a twist from the game’s narrative, Mazin and Druckmann introduced Abby and her motivations at the start of Season 2, rather than keep her reason for murdering Joel a discovery for later in the story.
“We thought it was important to share right up front that there were real people that were impacted by Joel's decisions and his actions,” Mazin explained after the premiere. “Who are they, and basically, what are they going to do next?
Druckmann and Mazin kept Joel’s death a secret as long as possible in the lead-up to Episode 2, as did stars Pascal and Ramsey. “I feel like Joel in Season 2 is an extreme example of what can happen if you don’t face the truth,” Pascal told the Associated Press before the season began.
Five years have passed between Joel’s violent massacre at the end of Season 1 and the start of Season 2. In that time, his relationship with Ellie has broken down. It’s clear the weight of his lie to her about what happened with the Fireflies is untenable, and it has irrevocably altered their bond.
“This is the beating heart of this season. It should be because that’s how the first season ended, and that is a bit of the tragedy — that Joel finally found someone who allowed him to live fully again, to be a parent — not to replace the daughter he lost, but for Ellie to be a new daughter, to raise and to teach and to protect. But it’s only at the cost of telling her this brutal lie that he knows he has to tell her,” Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter before the season. “Because if he tells her the truth, she’ll walk away. But that lie will not stand. It is an impossible thing to maintain. The question is when, why, and how does that break?”
It broke on Sunday, in a blockbuster installment that at least one critic called “one of the best TV episodes” he’d ever seen. Even before its official release on Sunday night, the chapter — written by Mazin and directed by Emmy Award winner Mark Mylod, who also directed the Succession episode when Logan Roy (Brian Cox) died — had drawn comparisons to the legendary Game of Thrones “Hardhome” due to its massive battle sequences and dramatic stakes.
“Certainly, as a Thrones fanatic, I remember watching ‘Hardhome’ and not thinking about how complicated and impressive the action was. What I remembered was how moving and important the things that were happening inside the action were,” Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published last month. “That Wildling woman [Karsi], seeing her get turned, and seeing The Night King raise the dead and being like, ‘Hey, you and me, Jon Snow, we’re on a collision course, my friend, and the more you fight me, the worse it gets for you.’ The desperation, the total loss.”
Mazin added that the show’s philosophy about its action sequences focuses on the characters.
“Always the question was: Why? What is this about, what does this change, and what does this mean for our people moving forward?” he said. In the episode, Joel and Ellie’s somewhat idyllic life in Jackson, Wyo., where they have settled, is fractured by a cordyceps attack. “As we see in episode one, the town is growing, it’s expanding. There is a certain cockiness. They don’t seem particularly worried about the trouble outside,” Mazin said at the time. “They’ve gotten a little complacent. They have a New Year’s Eve dance. They’re going to therapy. They’re refurbishing homes. They’ve got patrols down to a science. On the other hand, you’re like: Guys, don’t you know you’re living in a TV show?”
While The Last of Us team kept Joel’s death a secret, they did allude to the shocking twist in many pre-release interviews. “I’m scared of some of the bigger emotional scenes, leaving not satisfied with my performance,” Ramsey told Variety. The actress told the outlet her coping mechanism as an actor is to become as “light and energetic as possible” before performing traumatic moments. While discussing what they called “the darkest scene this season” — suggested to be Joel’s death — Ramsey listened to the Buckwheat Boyz classic “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” on a loop.
“I was on the floor, my eyes absolutely burning with these menthol tears, and I’m just saying, ‘Peanut Butter Jelllll-y,’” Ramsey said. “You’ll probably be able to tell which one that is when you watch it.”
Pascal and Ramsey also discussed how Season 2 separated them from each other, after sharing the screen so perfectly in Season 1. “While Bella and I are forever joined, to not have them near me for every part of Season 2 felt like a cruel separation,” Pascal said during a press conference before the season. “Good for my co-dependent nature, bad for my heart.”
“It felt like Ellie maturing and growing up,” Ramsey said of the split. “Me and Pedro were with each other literally through everything all the time the whole [first] season. This season was much more of an isolated one for Ellie. It was a lonelier experience, but I don’t say that in a negative way.”
As revealed in trailers, Pascal’s Joel will return later in the season via a flashback episode. Despite his limited screen time — which would have Pascal in at least three of the season’s seven episodes — it’s expected that he will submit for Best Drama Actor at the Emmys, as he did for season one. Cox similarly ran as a lead performer for the final season of Succession and was nominated despite only appearing in five of the season's 10 episodes (two of which were via brief flashbacks).