‘The Last of Us’ Kills off Major Character

The Last of Us just brought one of the most tragic moments from Naughty Dog’s video game series to the screen.

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

In Season 2, Episode 2, “Through the Valley,” Joel (Pedro Pascal) was brutally killed by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of a slain doctor at the Salt Lake City hospital where Joel saved Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from in the Season 1 finale.

After arriving in Wyoming and vowing in the Season 2 premiere that she would find and kill Joel, Abby finally got her chance in Sunday’s all-new episode when Joel and Dina (Isabela Merced) save her from a horde of Infected on the mountain. Abby manages to convince the pair, who were on patrol together, to seek out shelter from the snowstorm and the Infected at the lodge where her crew is holed up on the mountainside, and it doesn’t take long after that for her to exact her revenge.

When their identities are revealed to the Salt Lake Crew, Dina is drugged to sleep and Abby incapacitates Joel by shooting him in the leg before viciously beating him with a golf club. He is killed in the final moments of the episode when Abby stabs the broken club through his neck right in front of Ellie, who managed to find tracks leading to the lodge and stumbled upon the gruesome scene. Devastated by Joel’s death, Ellie promises the Salt Lake Crew that they’re all “going to f–ing die.”

The episode ends with Abby and her crew heading out of Wyoming and a somber Ellie, Dina, and Jesse (Young Mazino) making their way back to Jackson Hole, devastated by a breech of the Infected, with Joel’s body.

Opening up about Joel’s heartwrenching death, which pulls directly from The Last of Us Part II, co-creator Craig Mazin told Deadline that “it does hurt tremendously when it happens.”

“It hurts, of course it does, because we love Joel, and more importantly, because Ellie loves Joel, and we’re experiencing her heartbreak, and we’re all going to grieve the loss of this person that we’ve come to love,” he said. “But in terms of the narrative, yes, it felt like an inevitability, because this isn’t a show that goes on and on. This is a show that has an ending. We are a show that confronts people dealing with the hardest emotions. Watching Bella in that moment was heart wrenching. It really was. There were a lot of tears that day from all of us. It was tough.”

While Joel may have met a gruesome fate just two episodes into the season, fans cans till expect to see Pascal. Mazin told TVLine, “There’s a good amount of Pedro and Bella together because we all want it,” promising that “we do get to see them quite a bit together this season. And we also get to see interesting things happening with them — more, I think, than what we saw in season 1.”

New episodes of The Last of Us Season 2 air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. Episodes are also available to stream on Max.