I’ve managed to keep Joel’s death a secret from my partner for five whole years. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds. For the first four years, she didn’t even know who Joel was, and wouldn’t have cared even if she did. She’s also not on Twitter, so unlike the rest of us, she hasn’t had to suffer through the endless discoursehis death inspired back in 2020. It’s only been since we started watching the HBO adaptationThe Last Of Usthat she’s cared about who Joel is and whether or not he lived or died. And let me tell you, she cared a lot.
I don’t imagine there are a lot of people out there who will have a pure, untainted reaction to this week’s episode of The Last of Us, so I was excited to see what she thought about Joel’s death, and my incredibly impressive secret-keeping skills. As you might expect, she did not enjoy watching the main character of one of her favorite shows get stabbed through the neck. In fact, she hated it.
“I’m Never Watching This Show Again”
I was actually a little taken aback at just how upset she got about it. She gasped, she yelled, she asked me if Joel dies in the game. When I told her he did, she realized what was happening on screen was real. It wasn’t a dream sequence, no one was going to rush in to save Joel’s life. Joel’s story is over, and apparently, so is her interest in watching this show.
I told her Joel would still be around in flashbacks to try to soften the blow, but she still isn’t sure she’ll keep tuning in.
If your only engagement with The Last of Us is the show, I don’t think this is an overreaction. It’s extremely uncommon for a show to kill off main characters, and when it does happen, it’s always controversial. It’s a decision to intentionally alienate the audience, and it usually isn’t done unless there’s no other choice.
Most of the time, when the star of a show dies, it’s the result of something happening in real life. When Roseanne Conner died of a pill overdose in the Roseanne reboot, Charlie Harper was killed off-screen in the ninth season of Two and a Half Men, and Prue Halliwell got blasted through a wall by a demon in Charmed, it wasn’t because the writers wanted to take these stories in a bold new direction, it’s because the actors who played these character got fired, so they were unceremoniously written out of the show.
There are a few shows that, like The Last of Us, have killed off a main character strictly for creative reasons, rather than as a result of behind-the-scenes drama. The two that stand out the most are Ned Stark’s death in Game of Thrones and Glenn Rhee’s death in The Walking Dead. Both deaths were shocking, but they were each received very differently by fans.
Ned Stark’s death at the end of the first season ofGame of Thronesremained one of the most devastating moments in the series up until its conclusion, but it was also a necessary inciting incident that propelled much of the character paths and plot developments that followed. In contrast, Glenn’s death in the premiere of the seventh season ofThe Walking Deadis regarded as the beginning of the end of the series. Though it trudged along for four more seasons, the death of one of the show’s last remaining beloved characters was poorly received by fans to say the least.
With Joel’s death, The Last of Us is now at a crossroads. Will the audience embrace this pivotal moment as they did with Ned Stark’s death, or will they reject it as they did with Glenn’s?
A Death Designed For A Different Medium
It’s no coincidence that all three of these TV shows are adaptations of other stories. You can’t adapt Game of Thrones without killing Ned Stark, just like you can’t adapt The Last of Us without killing Joel. These deaths are essential to the core themes and narrative direction of the source material, and a version of The Last of Us that kept Joel alive would be unforgivably unfaithful to its namesake. No matter what Craig Mazin and the other creatives behind the series thought about killing Joel, it was a foregone conclusion as soon as the show was greenlit.
While The Last of Us is faithful to the games in all of the important ways, there are certain elements that, because of the differences between games and TV, make the show a fundamentally different experience.
Joe’s death will be received differently by audiences than players because of this. Joel dies an hour into The Last of Us Part 2, a game that released seven years after Part 1. The game is a self-contained experience that costs $60 upfront, and you can experience the story at your own pace - including all 20 hours at once if you want. Whether you love or hate this moment, you already bought the game.
In the show, Joel dies in the second episode of season two, just two years after his television story began. This is an event within the narrative of a single show that can only be experienced week-to-week over the course of several billing cycles. I don’t think you should give up on The Last Of Us, but it also wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to do.
There’s also the fact that we haven’t just lost Joel from our Sunday night ritual, we’ve also lostPedro Pascal. Pascal has become one of the most popular actors in the world, thanks in part to his humble and charming off-screen persona. For better or worse, giving Joel a loveable face changes who the character is. It changed how the hospital massacre was received, and it will change how his death is received too.
Time will tell how audiences react, but what’s clear is that, as bold a choice this was for the game, it’s an even bolder choice for a TV show. In any other circumstance I find it hard to imagine a studio being cool with an A-list actor getting killed off at the start of the second season of a hit show - especially when that leaves the show in the hands ofa woman who isn’t buff enough and a non-binary actor who isn’t attractive enoughfor the internet.
