‘The Last of Us’ Just Did The Red Wedding For Gamers

Well, that happened. The thing that gamers have known was coming from the beginning, the thing we’ve tried so hard not to spoil for the television viewers, finally occurred. The show killed off Joel. I’m honestly surprised social media wasn’t flooded with videos of gamers watching their friends watch last night’s episode, the way readers recorded their friends’ reactions to the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones.

In my recap of the season one finale, I wrote, “There is a reason the camera lingers on the doctor’s body, his brains leaking out onto the linoleum, so hold on to that image for the next season.” That doctor, the one Joel killed in the Firefly hospital before he could operate on Ellie, was Abby’s father - and he’s the reason she’s hell-bent on getting revenge. Which she gets, in brutal fashion! It was inevitable, and necessary if the show plans to follow the game, but I’ll admit the episode did a good job of trying to distract even those of us who knew what was coming. That whole Infected horde that attacked Jackson? That was an invention for the show. At any other time, a set piece that big would be the main event, but here it’s just an impressive bit of dramatic sleight of hand.

The episode was an absolute pressure cooker. As usual, Jackson sends out mounted patrols to scout the surrounding areas. Ellie is paired up with Jesse, Dina’s ex-boyfriend, which results in some delightful ribbing about Ellie’s very public kiss with Dina. She wants to head out with Joel, however - perhaps to finally address whatever unspoken conflict there is between them, but he’s already on patrol with Dina. Meanwhile, Abby and her band have holed up in a convenient mountain lodge with a view of Jackson - which they realize is, uh, heavily fortified. While they think about how to sneak around the aforementioned patrols, into the armed gates, past the trained freaking dogs, and locate Joel in a city of thousands (or how to convince Abby to give up on her revenge and head home to Seattle), Abby takes her shift as lookout. And that’s when she spots a pair of Jackson patrollers on horseback.

When Abby attempts to follow them, she stumbles onto a field of frozen, hibernating Infected who promptly wake the hell up and give chase. She is nearly cornered under a chain link fence, collapsing under the weight of an army of snarling monsters, when Joel does what he does best. He saves her.

Adding to the insanity, a storm has rolled in, which forces Jackson to recall its patrols. Ellie and Jesse are too far away, so they choose to shelter in place, in a 7-Eleven filled with weed courtesy of the dearly departed Eugene. Jesse, Eugene’s former patrol partner, talks about his friend, and makes it clear that whatever happened to Eugene put Joel in a position where he had to “put him down.” OK, so maybe Joel can’t save everybody!

Joel and Dina accept Abby’s clever offer to seek shelter at the Lodge, and Jackson - which hasn’t heard from them since the storm - alerts Jesse and Ellie that they’re missing. The pair split up to try and find Joel, while Joel, Dina and Abby outrace the Infected horde. Luckily for them, and unluckily for everyone else, the horde suddenly breaks off and runs away… toward Jackson, where that pipe full of mycelia has alerted them of larger prey. So, just to underscore this: Abby woke up hundreds of Infected in her pursuit of Joel, which then attack and nearly demolish Jackson.

The battle was great television, don’t get me wrong. The walls are breached by a Bloater, which Tommy single-handedly destroys with a flamethrower! The Infected overrun the city, killing a lot of people, though their extensive defense plans ultimately lead to victory. I probably should say more, but in light of the JOEL DYING of it all, what’s the point? Tommy and Maria survive. ‘Nuff said.

Abby introduces Joel and Dina to her friends, and the penny quickly drops that against all odds, this is the man they’ve been looking for, right here in their clutches - much to her friends’ dismay. It’s clear that their support of Abby is against their better judgment, and even though they all are survivors of Joel’s massacre, they don’t share her thirst for vengeance. During the five-year time jump, they headed to Seattle and joined a militia (note the WLF badge on one of the backpacks, it stands for Washington Liberation Front), and part of their code is not to kill anyone who can’t defend themselves. Abby chooses to reject that rule in Joel’s case, because as she says, “There are just some things everyone agrees are just f*cking wrong,” and slaughtering the Fireflies while ruining humanity’s only hope of finding a cure is just one of those things, apparently.

There is something haunting about Joel looking at Abby and saying, “I saved your life,” because it so perfectly echoes what he told Gail in the premiere when she asked what he did to Ellie: “I saved her.” Abby may think he is a lawless piece of sh*t, but Joel has his own code. He protects his loved ones, and anyone else he can along the way. He doesn’t think about what comes later. If he hadn’t saved Ellie, Abby never would have come after him. If he hadn’t saved Abby, she’d never have gotten him. His path may have been paved with good intentions, but it still leads him to a painful death at the end of a golf club - but if he’d acted any differently, he’d never have been able to live with himself anyway.

Dina is given an injection of something that knocks her unconscious, so she’s spared. And Ellie, who spots their horses outside the lodge and arrives in time to witness Joel’s murder, is also left alive when Abby and her crew leave. They’re gonna regret that choice, however, if Ellie ever makes good on her parting promise: “I’m gonna kill you!”

So The Last of Us stayed true to the arc of the games when it meant doing the unthinkable and killing off the main character, played by the show’s most bankable star, in the second episode of the second season, which is absolutely bananapants in television logic. But now that Joel’s death is out of the way, the real test of The Last of Us begins: Will the show have the conviction to similarly buck conventional logic and give equal time to Ellie and Abby moving forward? Because that’s the second defining aspect of “The Last of Us: Part II.” You see, after Joel dies, the game follows Ellie in her hunt for Abby (Is that a spoiler? I mean, it’s pretty obvious that’s where the show is heading.), but it also forces the player to play as Abby in her own various trials and tribulations. Can you put yourself in your enemy’s shoes and still see them as the enemy? That’s what the game asked, and it was a bold way of looking at cycles of violence and whether it’s possible to end them. I’m very curious to see if the show will do the same, in part because there’s an easy path forward of just prioritizing Ellie as our hero, and in part because that dual-perspective was contentious for gamers. For as much as some people loved the second game, a lot of others loathed Abby and hated being forced to focus on her, and I can see some viewers having the same reaction.

Last season, I appreciated the show’s creative additions to the game, because overall they deepened the story without changing the arc. However, if the show can’t find a way to present Abby’s journey equally to Ellie’s, then I fear it will fundamentally fail to tell the same story as the game, and that would be a shame - because it’s a good goddamn story.