Joel’s Death In Episode 2 Explained

If you’re not up to date on “The Last of Us” — and specifically, if you haven’t seen “Through the Valley,” the second episode of season 2 — stop reading this right now. Massive, major, enormous spoilers lie ahead.

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I haven’t played “The Last of Us Part II,” nor have I played the original game that made this Naughty Dog creation into a sensation. (Scary combat-based video games stress me out; even in games like “Breath of the Wild,” I spend an inordinate amount of time running around and just being a little guy instead of fighting monsters or bosses.) This is all to say that, when it comes to the huge character death that happens in “The Last of Us Part II,” I was wholly unprepared to see it play out on screen, because I’ve never held the lives of Joel, Ellie, or Abby in my hands via controller. When it happened on my TV, I couldn’t look away, no matter how desperately I wanted to.

The ordeal goes like this: Abby, a new character in season 2 of HBO’s adaptation of “The Last of Us” played by Kaitlyn Dever, is introduced at the start of the show’s sophomore season as a girl who’s hunting Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) — specifically seeking revenge for a group of Fireflies and medical professionals he killed at the end of season 1. We learn in “Through the Valley” that the doctor who hoped to use Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) immunity to the cordyceps virus to find a cure was Abby’s dad, and for five years, she’s been searching for Joel to settle the score. When she comes face to face with him, it’s a gut-wrenching, stomach-turning sequence — performed flawlessly by both Dever and Pascal — and it’s straight out of a horror movie, especially for viewers who have come to love Joel (and understand his decision in the season 1 finale). The way it’s shot by director Mark Mylod is unflinching, horrific, and devastating … and there’s no question that this will be one of the most talked-about TV moments in 2025.

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A particularly notable thing about the way Abby kills Joel in the HBO television adaptation of “The Last of Us” — which is helmed by Neil Druckmann, creator of the original game, alongside lauded screenwriter and showrunner Craig Mazin — is that it’s significantly more brutal than it is in the video game. That’s not to say it’s not a horrifyingly violent moment in the game; it’s awful to witness there, but in the show, Mazin and Druckmann let Abby up the ante a little bit.

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After beating him with her bare hands and shooting him in the leg — and incapacitating Dina (Isabela Merced), who was patrolling with Joel before he saved Abby from an infected horde — Abby tells Joel exactly why she’s been literally and figuratively gunning for him. Ellie, who ends up in the abandoned house where Abby and her friends are squatting, watches, screaming and pinned to the floor, as Abby takes the golf club she’s been using to absolutely decimate Joel that’s now broken … and takes the sharp, broken end and stabs Joel in the neck. The really striking thing about this moment is that there’s no way for Joel to survive this; like Sean Bean’s Ned Stark years ago, he is very, very definitively dead. 

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This is, without question, a staggering moment to see for fans of the TV version of “The Last of Us” who haven’t played the games (or, for that matter, fans who haven’t played the games and who have studiously avoided seeing any spoilers related to the 2020 game). For those who have, it’s also pretty stunning because audiences waiting for this moment might have imagined that it would come later in the season. Not the case: Joel dies in the season’s second episode, and the way he dies is brutal, violent, vicious, and shown in its full bloody glory. It’s heartbreaking — particularly to see Ellie’s reaction — and completely unforgettable. So where does the show go from here, particularly when it comes to Abby?

Losing one of the show’s two main characters — who audiences really bonded with throughout the first season of “The Last of Us” — is obviously major. We learned in the season 2 premiere, “Future Days,” that something has come between Joel and Ellie across the past five years, and watching Ellie watch Joel die in the most brutal way imaginable is just, in case I haven’t made this explicitly clear, awful. With all that in mind, it’s easy to imagine that audiences are going to have some pretty complicated feelings about Abby, and fans of the video game already have a complex view of her.

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In the video game, players just start playing as Abby with little preamble towards the beginning of the game after focus switches from Ellie to her (no, I haven’t played the game, but YouTube exists for a reason). Obviously, the show had to change that by introducing Abby at the start of “Future Days” and informing us straight away that her goal is to kill Joel. Joel’s death scene serves a few purposes. It gives Ellie a new mission (now she’s going to be the one trying to avenge a person she loves), gives Joel an end to his story, and sets Abby up as an antagonist (for now). It’s easy to surmise that audiences won’t feel warm and fuzzy about Abby — which is partially a testament to the fact that Kaitlyn Dever, whose characters are typically, well, more likable than this, delivers a genuinely shocking performance as this furious, vicious character. As Ellie, Dina, and the rest of the residents of Jackson grapple with Joel’s death at the hands of a girl he deeply wronged years beforehand, fans will have to figure out how to feel about Abby, the character who killed a character we’ve been following for a while.

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“The Last of Us” had a blueprint for this moment — because, you know, it’s an adaptation of a game where this same thing happens! — but there’s really no question that the series dialed up Joel’s death to an ambitiously horrifying degree. The fallout from it will continue as the show’s second season moves along; new episodes air on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on Max and HBO.