Warning: Major spoilers ahead for “The Last of Us” season two.
“The Last of Us” season two just killed off one of its key characters in a heartbreaking way, but it is exactly what the show needed.
As soon as the second season was announced, fans of the games were concerned about how the HBO series would adapt the most controversial moment in the franchise
Thankfully, the show tackles it in a faithful way during the second episode.
For anyone who has managed to avoid spoilers from a five-year-old game and wasn’t expecting this moment: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) tortures and kills Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) to get revenge for her father and the many others in the Firefly hospital that Joel killed at the end of the first season.
The scene is mostly accurate to the game, including the fact that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is forced to watch Joel die — screaming at him to get up while she’s being restrained by Abby’s team.
But here’s how Joel’s death is different in the series compared to the “The Last of Us Part II.”
Joel’s death is brutal, but it needed to be.
The harrowing scene in the series sees Abby explain that she wants to make him pay for what he’s done and shoots him in the leg.
Like in the game, Joel tells her to just get on with it, and then she starts beating his leg with a golf club.
By the time Ellie has found the lodge, Joel has been beaten so much that Abby has broken the golf club in half. While Ellie is restrained on the floor, Abby stabs Joel in the neck with the broken end of the club.
It’s a horrifying moment to witness because there’s no question that she’s killed him. The writers can’t wave a magic wand and undo his death to capitalize on Pedro Pascal’s popularity.
But the original sequence in the game is a little different.
For starters, Joel’s brother Tommy is with him when they meet Abby, not Dina, and Tommy gets brutally knocked out by Nora (played by Tati Gabrielle in the show).
Abby tortures Joel in a similar way by beating him with a golf club, except it doesn’t snap in half. When Ellie eventually bursts into the room, Abby doesn’t stab Joel in the neck; she just hits him once in the head with the club, killing him.
If the show depicted his death in the same way, it’s possible that some audiences might think/hope that Joel was still alive.
It’s clear that the writers didn’t want that to be a possibility, to ensure that the focus is on Ellie’s grief and horror about losing her father figure.
And like the game, it will set her on a quest to get her own revenge on Abby.
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