Main spoilers for The Final of Us Season 2, episode 2 forward.
We endured and survived, child lady. Till one in all us did not.
The second followers of The Final of Us video games have been anticipating because the HBO adaptation was introduced happened throughout Sunday evening’s episode. It is a second we have been helpless to cease whereas enjoying The Final of Us Half II, and now we have suffered by means of it once more within the second episode of Season 2.
I am speaking about Joel’s brutal, bloody demise.
For individuals who have not performed Naughty Canine’s lauded sequel, The Final of Us Half II, or its remastered model, this improvement will come as a serious shock. Not solely are we compelled to observe the cherished protagonist of one of the crucial impactful TV exhibits of the last decade be brutally bludgeoned to demise, however the actor enjoying Joel is among the web’s most beloved stars, Pedro Pascal. It is hell on TV — and it is supposed to be.
As gamers and viewers, we discover ourselves in the identical forsaken predicament as co-protagonist Ellie (Bella Ramsey within the present, Ashley Johnson within the recreation). There’s actually nothing we are able to do, no motion we are able to take with our controller or distant that can change the destiny of Joel Miller (Pascal within the present, Troy Baker within the recreation).
In each the sport and the collection, The Final of Us makes Ellie watch as Abby (Kaitlyn Dever within the present, Laura Bailey within the recreation) brings a golf membership repeatedly down upon Joel, Ellie’s father determine and a lead character we have personally performed as for a lot of hours we cannot title. Ellie pleads with Abby earlier than the ultimate stroke, nevertheless it’s ineffective. Vengeance has been achieved. It is a second that can really feel retraumatising for followers of the sport and horrifying for brand spanking new viewers, nevertheless it’s essential that it is included.
Mourning Joel in The Final of Us will really feel actual to followers.
Credit score: Liane Hentscher / HBO
Once I first performed Joel’s demise scene in The Final of Us Half II in 2020, I used to be a large number. The second recreation was notably launched in June 2020, mere months into the continued COVID pandemic — a interval of maximum uncertainty, social separation, well being nervousness, and really actual grief for tens of millions. It is nearly too shut for consolation given the storyline of the sport. An infection is not how Joel dies, nevertheless; it is human violence. And reader, I mourned the brutal, violent lack of this fictional character like somebody I knew personally, like somebody I recognized with.
It is a unusual phenomenon, grieving somebody throughout this time who is not actual, however grief counselors acknowledge these connections have a really actual influence on us. (Even Oscar Wilde stated so.) Succession, The Sopranos, Orange Is the New Black, Downton Abbey, Stranger Issues, and Gray’s Anatomy are only a few exhibits the place characters received below our pores and skin, making their fictional deaths really feel actual.
As a viewer of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s The Final of Us TV collection, you’ve got spent over 10 hours making a deep attachment to Joel, attempting to grasp the motivations behind his actions, as polarising as they might be. As a participant, you’ve got spent lots of of hours traversing Naughty Canine’s post-apocalyptic panorama with this sophisticated particular person — actually, as this sophisticated particular person. Enjoying as Joel, you’ve got patched your self up with shitty outdated med kits in crumbling college buildings, snuck previous terrifying Clickers, grieved your daughter’s horrible demise, massacred cannibals and a whole faction of Fireflies, in all probability doomed the world on that final one, and fashioned a real bond with Ellie, who all the time wants a lift to excessive platforms — and all when it is best to actually go to mattress IRL since you’ve received work in just a few hours and also you’re an grownup. And all of a sudden, two hours into the second recreation, you are pinned to the bottom in a chilly chalet, watching Joel’s gentle be stomped out perpetually.
You start the disturbing sequence enjoying as Abby, combating a wave of Contaminated with the very individuals she’s looking: Tommy and Joel. It is a deliberate option to have you ever holding the reins right here as Abby manages to get them again to her base. Druckmann (who’s co-creator of the sport in addition to the present) stated within the 2024 Grounded II: Making The Final of Us Half II documentary, “We get you, through interactivity, to really connect and empathise with this character. And then make you feel like, ‘I’ve led Joel into a trap.'”
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After Abby’s assault on Joel begins, the sport switches your perspective to enjoying Ellie, frantically racing by means of the snow, finding the chalet, and listening to Joel’s cries of ache from someplace inside. Lastly, the one motion you are allowed to take is hitting that rattling triangle button to open a door and discover Joel behind it in a bloody heap, surrounded by Abby and her crew. From right here, it is a cutscene. Ellie (who you are enjoying as) is held down, regularly kicked, and made to observe her father determine being clubbed to demise. Druckmann stated within the documentary that Ellie was initially not current within the first draft of the scene, as an alternative discovering Joel’s physique later. Within the ultimate minimize, with Ellie very a lot current, Johnson’s efficiency as Ellie is nothing in need of soul-destroying. In the meantime, Laura Bailey’s efficiency as Abby is equally gut-wrenching, loaded with that means we do not truly perceive but. “Ashley was behind [me], crying, and knowing Abby was taking this away from her was very difficult,” Bailey explains within the documentary. “And so I was crying while we were filming that scene. It was very emotional.”
For merciless minutes, you sit with the controller idle in your arms, with no button immediate provided to vary the course of the scene. On Abby’s ultimate blow, the digicam sits behind Joel’s head, watching Ellie’s response. And eventually, there’s nothing however black. On the time I used to be enjoying The Final of Us Half II, reaching out to pals who have been additionally enjoying for comfort felt like a large spoiler, so most of us sat with the loss alone for a time. I am certain on-line boards have been bursting on the seams, however I did not go to them. It felt too uncooked, too private a loss. Since then, each time you carry the sport up, everybody who’s performed it just about reacts the identical means; there’s a lot use of the phrase “shattered.”
Within the Grounded II documentary, Baker himself stated he prompt his character Joel ought to die on the finish of the primary recreation, contemplating the ethical line he crosses with the bloodbath of the Fireflies. “Once I learn the ending to Half I, I used to be like, ‘You are gonna piss lots of people off.'” Making the second game, he described the feeling of Druckmann breaking the news about Joel’s Part II death as “actually as if somebody was telling me about how my good friend had simply died.”
However, as hard as it is to cope with this loss, fans should remember that a character’s death doesn’t mean behaving like many did last time.
Joel’s death brought out the worst in some fans.
Credit score: Liane Hentscher / HBO
In The Final of Us Half II, Joel’s demise allowed Naughty Canine to distinguish the 2 video games and develop character dynamics. Primarily, Half I is Joel and Ellie’s recreation, a journey throughout an Contaminated America to seek out the Fireflies and a treatment for the Cordyceps pandemic. Half II is Ellie and Abby’s recreation, with Ellie’s motivation for a street journey now pure revenge. Joel’s demise makes you query perspective on this chilly, arduous actuality — who’s a villain, precisely, on this messed-up modernity? Is there any such factor as a hero now, or morality? Is Joel’s bloodbath of the Fireflies justified as “fatherly love,” or is it an unforgivable act? Is Abby’s path of vengeance simply as professional as Ellie’s?
“We want him to die in this really unforgiving sort of way,” Druckmann says in Grounded II. “It needs to feel senseless for you to say, ‘Fuck these people, I’m gonna pursue them to the end of the Earth and make them pay.'”
These questions across the cycle of violence lie on the core of The Final of Us Half II, with Joel’s demise throwing the participant into an existential disaster — particularly when the sport jumps again in time to allow you to play the exact same timeline from Abby’s perspective, main as much as and previous the purpose of her murdering Joel with extra context.
“It’s hard to imagine the story without Joel dying,” stated former Naughty Canine artistic director Joe Pettinati within the Grounded II documentary. “You feel that hate, Ellie feels that hate. You’re one-to-one. You’re on the stick. And that informs the rest of the story.”
Nonetheless, many followers behaved actually abhorrently in response to Joel’s demise in The Final of Us Half II. Within the documentary, each Druckmann and Bailey revealed that when particulars of Joel’s demise have been leaked earlier than the sport’s launch, they obtained persistent on-line harassment, hate, and even demise threats from outraged followers. “Every time I went online, that was all I saw. It was just death threats and violence,” Bailey stated within the documentary. “The worst of it, the really hardcore death threats, got passed along [to the authorities,] and they made sure that they weren’t anyone that lived close by. They were threatening my son, who was born during all of it. Yeah, it was rough. More than anything it taught me to keep a distance, you know?”
In 2020, following the second recreation’s launch, Naughty Canine issued an announcement condemning the hate directed towards the crew behind The Final of Us Half II. “Although we welcome critical discussion, we condemn any form of harassment or threats directed towards our team and cast,” the corporate wrote on X. “Their safety is our top priority, but we must all work together to root out this type of behavior and maintain a constructive and compassionate discourse.”
For the HBO collection, Baker anticipated fan reactions to Joel’s TV demise in an interview with The Gamer, saying, “I want people to be able to wrestle with it. I did, and for me, it’s a part of that story, it’s the truest version of that story. I know that Craig [Mazin] believes in the story we told in the games, and we’ll do that.”
The Final of Us‘ second chapter would not be what it’s with out Joel’s demise
Credit score: Liane Hentscher / HBO
It ought to go with out saying that abusive fan reactions to Joel’s demise in The Final of Us Half II aren’t OK, however since that is the web, we will must say it time and again — particularly with the restaging of the scene in live-action TV with Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and Kaitlyn Dever. Sending hate and demise threats to the actors behind items of labor merely due to their characters’ actions is, in my humble opinion, prison behaviour.
However there’s one thing the haters are lacking right here, which is that the remaining storyline of The Final of Us proves deeply impactful due to Naughty Canine’s stunning narrative determination. The shattered America of The Final of Us takes on a special perspective when Joel, our parental protector, is all of a sudden gone and the one horizon is vengeance. Ellie’s motivation all through Half II (and now Season 2 of the HBO collection) is pure, chilly, hatred — a aspect of the character we have solely seen in glimpses earlier than. It is compelling stuff, watching the joke-book-loving powerful child from Half I wrestle to not utterly lose herself within the darkness of the world round her. And actually, it is fascinating watching the variations and similarities between Abby and Ellie within the fallout, and what the cycle of violence on this post-apocalyptic world brings out in probably the most seemingly noble of individuals.
“There’s not a single aspect of the game, Part II, that I would change,” Baker stated within the documentary. “Any time someone comes up to me and says, ‘You know, I didn’t really like what they did to Joel,’ I was like, ‘Great. Awesome. Tell me a better version of the story.’ And to this day, they still can’t.”
Characters aren’t actual, however grieving them is. And it is one hell of a motivator for character and plot improvement in video games and on TV. Embrace the ache.
New episodes of The Final of Us Season 2 premiere on HBO and Max Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
