This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, which is now streaming on Max.
Hurt people hurt people.
It’s a vicious cycle. Much as the law of conservation of mass says that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, once pain exists in the world, it has a tendency to stick around, passing from one victim to the next.
Joel’s daughter Sarah dies. Joel internalizes that pain for the next 20 years. He resists making connections with people, because he can’t survive that level of loss a second time. Then this other girl gets placed in his care. She is not Sarah, but there is something in her playfulness and openness that he can’t resist, try as he might. And soon Joel begins to love her as much for the second chance Ellie is giving him as for the sweet, endearing kid that she is. He has gotten past the pain, seemingly. He is living again. And then he discovers that in order to save the world, he has to let another daughter die. Joel will not accept that. He couldn’t save Sarah from catching a stray bullet, but he will do anything to protect Ellie. Even if it means killing lots of people who are just trying to help. Even if it means damning the world entire.
Hurt people hurt people. Because Joel couldn’t bear to let another daughter be killed, another girl’s father died. Abby hates Joel for murdering so many Fireflies, and from ruining any hope of a cure for cordyceps, but mostly she just hates him because the doctor who was trying to synthesize the cure was her dad. Joel responded to the loss of Sarah by sealing off his heart altogether for two decades. Abby responds to the loss of her father by turning her heart into a white-hot furnace fueling a revenge she knows she will get one day.
A revenge that she gets today, here, in this shocking, stomach-churning, seemingly unthinkable episode. Joel dies because Abby’s father died, because Sarah died, because the world died. Hurt people hurt people.
And The Last of Us won’t be the same. Can’t be the same. Because Joel is gone.
This episode, written by Craig Mazin, was directed by Mark Mylod, who spent the last few years as the chief director of Succession, and has some experience being behind the camera for an episode of television featuring a death no one saw coming — at least, not at that particular moment. HBO has a long history of character deaths that are as shocking for their timing as for the fact that they happened at all: Logan Roy, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, Ralphie Ciffaretto on The Sopranos, and, of course, Ned Stark not even making it to the end of the first Game of Thrones season. And now Joel.
In some cases, like this one, the timing is from the source material: Ned lost his head in the first A Song of Ice and Fire book, the real Wild Bill was only in Deadwood for a few days before he was shot from behind, and Joel dies relatively early in The Last of Us Part II. Mazin and Neil Druckmann could have deviated from the game. They could have stretched things out so that Joel was alive for most or all of this season, so that Abby’s savage torture and murder of him came in the finale. They could have decided that Pedro Pascal’s chemistry with Bella Ramsey is just so valuable to the series that they tore up the game’s script and told a different story. They could have done a lot of things.
Instead, they stuck to the plan. Joel killed Abby’s father, so Abby stalked and killed Joel. Hurt people hurt people. Earlier in the hour, Ellie acknowledges the rift between her and her surrogate father, but insists, “I’m still me, he’s still Joel, and nothing’s ever going to change that, ever.” But now something very much has changed that. Soon we will see how this particular hurt person responds to being forced to watch her favorite person be murdered in front of her. And we’ll get to see what The Last of Us becomes when it’s not built around Ellie and Joel’s relationship.
But that’s something we can reckon with after we’ve spent the next week absorbing this devastating plot twist, and considering how it and everything else in the episode played out.
It’s a memorable hour of TV, but one that also attempts a bit of misdirection on a massive scale, by devoting a good chunk of its running time to Jackson coming under siege from a stampede of hundreds of infected. That story and the one about Abby’s group are tied together in various ways, not least of which is that Abby is the one who accidentally causes the stampede when she slips and falls down a cliff and disturbs the infected horde’s frozen slumber. But for a while, it almost feels as if Mazin, Mylod, and company are trying to distract the audience from the possibility that Joel could die, and soon, by staging their own version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep — or if you prefer, given that Mylod directed a half-dozen Game of Thrones episodes(*), their version of the Night King’s assault on Winterfell.
(*) None of which featured any action on this scale.
We know that this series can do big action, like the rampage of infected at the end of last season’s Kansas City two-parter — which, like this one, featured one of those giant mushroom monsters known as bloaters. But Last of Us as a TV show at times does itself a disservice when it tries to too hard to treat sequences as levels of a video game. Its greatest strength is in its characters, how they interact, and the terrible choices they are sometimes forced to make. While there are a few people like Tommy and Maria whom we care about inside the walls of Jackson when the attack happens, everything and everyone that really matters is elsewhere in the vicinity. It’s exciting on some level to see Tommy’s well-trained troops finding different ways to repel the horde, from firebombs(*) to attack dogs, but ultimately that stuff largely plays as empty thrills — or, worse, like Poochie trying to distract us all from getting to the fireworks factory that is Abby’s showdown with Joel.
(*) That said, when your primary method of defense is made of wood, it doesn’t seem like the best idea to light your attackers — attackers who are biologically programmed to ignore pain and keep on coming until they are dead — on fire, does it?
The episode opens with another Abby flashback, or rather a dream of one, as we see multiple Abbys in the hospital in the wake of Joel’s shooting rampage. One wants to go in and see her father’s dead body. One has already seen it, and tries in vain to warn the other. She knows what it looks like, and what it will do to her, but she can’t stop the other Abby from going in, and seeing an image that will turn her into a single-minded seeker of revenge. It’s an interesting choice, given how much the casting of Kaitlyn Dever as Abby winds up evoking Bella Ramsey as Ellie; we later learn that when Joel killed her father, Abby was 19, the age that Ellie is now. Mirror Abbys, when Abby is already a mirror of Ellie.
It’s clear that while all the ex-Fireflies — who are now working with a militia based in Seattle, a city that she tells Joel is not particularly safe to visit — want Joel dead, Abby really wants him dead. Like her prey acted on that terrible day in Salt Lake City, she doesn’t even seem to care much about other people getting injured, or worse, in the process of getting what she wants. Things are too hectic and scary after she unleashes the stampede for Abby to even think about the implications of what she did. But if she’d had a moment to breathe, she seems likely to have thought that she was fine with it, given that it prevented anyone else from Jackson from intercepting her, and provided the stroke of luck that made Joel the one to rescue her. And when an incredulous Joel points out that she’s attacking him after he saved her life, she snarls, “What life?” and begins to brutally beat on him with a golf club.
The show doesn’t wallow in the worst of the torture, cutting away to Ellie and Jesse being forced to choose between checking in on Joel and Dina, or going back to help out the town once they see that it’s under siege. This is not a choice for Ellie, who of course steers her horse Shimmer in Joel’s direction. (It’s also not a choice for the show, which is why the siege is less compelling than it should be; we’re not remotely as invested in Jackson as we are in Joel.) All the fight training she’s done with Jesse doesn’t amount to enough against a larger force that’s also well-trained, and Ellie winds up pinned to the floor, forced to watch as this stranger murders the only parental figure she’s ever known. It’s horrifying for her to watch, and for us to watch her, because Bella Ramsey once again holds nothing back. When last we saw the two of them together in the premiere, Ellie was giving Joel the silent treatment. So it’s not just that he dies, but that he dies when they were seemingly on terrible terms. Like Abby after she saw her father’s brains on the floor, the image of Joel being fatally speared by the wrecked golf club will never leave Ellie’s memory.
Hurt people hurt people, and Ellie knows the fact of the person who hurt her and her dad. No good can come of this from her. We have a ways to go to see how much narrative good will come of this for The Last of Us. But this episode, like so many of the other HBO hours referred to above, will be talked about by TV fans for (to borrow the name of a different Last of Us installment) a long, long time.
From Rolling Stone US.
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