This article containers spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 2, “Through the Valley.”
Not since the Red Wedding have fans of an HBO series’ source material had this big a secret to keep. When The Last of Us Part II shipped in June of 2020, video game players were shocked—and, in some cases, infuriated—to discover that Joel, the protagonist of the game’s wildly successful predecessor, died shortly after the story began, and the instrument of his death was not a fearsome fungus-infected zombie but a young woman named Abby, who beat him to death with a golf club. Gamers discussed and debated the twist endlessly, but they managed to keep it to themselves, even after the first season of the game’s TV adaptation became a monster hit. Fans of the game have been speculating for weeks about where in the show’s second season the pivotal moment would land, referring to it with winky coded phrases like “Abby’s golf game,” but on Sunday night, the timelines merged, and gamers and viewers could finally grieve as one.
The HBO series, which was co-created by Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin and the video game’s creative director Neil Druckmann, hews close to its source, even replicating some sequences, like the dance-floor kiss between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) in the second season’s first episode, shot for shot. But “Through the Valley,” to be known henceforth as “The One Where Joel Gets Murdered,” makes a significant alteration to the story, crosscutting Joel’s death with an attack by a massive horde of infected on the fortified human encampment of Jackson, Wyoming. With Joel (Pedro Pascal) incapacitated and Ellie and Dina out on patrol, the Battle of Jackson mostly involves characters we’ve either only just met or spent little time with, like Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). But the fight for Jackson’s survival, directed by Game of Thrones alum Mark Mylod, evokes gut-gnawing tension all the same, with humanity’s future hanging in the balance right alongside Joel’s.
Joel’s death is brutal and agonizingly slow, meted out with chilling determination by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who has spent five years tracking down the man who killed her father. Unlike The Walking Dead, which lost millions of viewers after caving in a beloved character’s skull on screen, The Last of Us mostly spares us the gory details, cutting away after Abby shoots Joel in the leg and picks out a murder weapon from the bag of golf clubs in the abandoned lodge where she and her band of Firefly militia soldiers have temporarily holed up. But it only takes one look at Pascal’s bloodied, shivering face and the golf club’s splintered shaft to imagine what Abby has been doing with it while our attention has been directed elsewhere. As soon as Joel realizes that Abby is the daughter of the doctor he killed in the Firefly stronghold of Salt Lake City, he seems to know he’s not making it out alive—rather than beg for his life, he just tells her to get it over with. But Ellie, who has stumbled upon the lodge and been taken captive by Abby’s comrades, is forced to watch as the man who’s become her surrogate father is coldly executed, his shattered body barely flinching as Abby stabs the jagged metal shaft into his neck.
Joel’s murder is the incident that sets The Last of Us’ second half in motion, launching Ellie on a quest for vengeance that will threaten to consume her. The show’s first season, which found Joel and Ellie trekking across what remains of the U.S. in search of a cure for the plague that has nearly wiped out the human race, was defined by hope—a hope that was shattered when Joel discovered that the only way for the Fireflies to manufacture a cure based on Ellie’s natural immunity to the infection was to kill her first. (As the doctor who would have performed the fatal operation, Abby’s dad is not quite as blameless as she likes to believe.) The second season is defined by the loss of hope, and by Ellie’s inability to see beyond her rage and live the life Joel fought, and killed, for her to have.
As a pair of traumatized loners who can barely trust each other, let alone anyone else, Joel and Ellie have lived a largely solitary existence. And the groups they’ve come upon in their travels, including a cannibal clan who tried to chop Ellie up for meat, have borne out the idea that there’s danger in numbers. But the haven of Jackson shows it doesn’t have to be that way, that people can band together and serve something greater than themselves. Individually, the town’s residents wouldn’t stand a chance against the thousands of infected that hurl themselves against its wooden palisades. But they do fight them off, even if it’s at great cost, using defensive tactics, like dousing the invaders in flammable liquid and then lighting it on fire, that resonate more with the Middle Ages than the 21st century. (It’s also, of course, strongly reminiscent of the epic battles on Game of Thrones, with a newly introduced breed of infected called a bloater filling the role of Westeros’ giants.) The people of Jackson’s hard-fought victory provides a note of triumph that offsets, however faintly, the horror of Joel’s death. But it also contrasts the consequences of going it alone with the protections of being a part of a community.
Unlike the game, which initially presents Abby as a purely malicious antagonist, The Last of Us’ TV version takes care to humanize, if not exactly soften, the character. We first meet her just days after her father’s murder, still reeling from the loss but already fixed on revenge, and her introduction to Joel comes at the end of a sequence where she’s fighting for her life, shimmying through the narrowing gap between a building and a chain-link fence collapsing under the weight of an infected horde—a scene that makes it all but impossible not to root for her survival, even if you end up regretting it a few minutes later. Dever isn’t as physically imposing as the game’s Abby, but the fearsome intensity of her gaze more than makes up for her lack of bulging biceps, and her apparent vulnerability makes it more plausible that Joel would see her as a damsel in distress and not a potential threat.
This won’t be the moment for audiences to savor the nuances of Dever’s performance—not when we’re still enraged by what she did to Joel, and further by the damage we know being forced to watch it will do to Ellie. (It is, however, the moment for gamers who’ve questioned Ramsey’s fitness for the role to acknowledge how spectacularly the actor realizes Ellie’s desperate anguish and her white-hot fury, the instant shattering of the tough shell she’s built around herself.) As devastating as Joel’s death is, though, “Through the Valley” keeps cutting away to remind us that it’s not the only thing that’s happening in this world—there are other perspectives to consider, other tragedies to mourn, and even triumphs to savor. Shutting out that fact is what sent Joel on his Firefly-killing rampage in the first place, and why Abby’s vengeance, however awful to witness, isn’t entirely unjustified. The Last of Us shares in Ellie’s rage, but it wants us to understand that Abby’s is no less real.
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