“If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented,” he explained to Variety. “And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet. Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people.”
In the moment, the scene was still very, very upsetting, of course—enough to make Mazin himself cry in his interview. As game players already knew, Joel’s last breaths come at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of the doctor Joel slaughtered in the season one finale, who’s spent years dead set on revenge. An injured and furious Ellie looks on as Abby does the deed, eventually embracing Joel’s corpse as his attackers retreat. “Ellie’s been kicked in the ribs… She has no reason to think she’s going to survive. She’s not crawling over there just to say goodbye. She’s crawling over there so she could be with him in death,” Mazin said, after getting emotional earlier in the interview. “That’s where she wants to be, and it’s when she takes his hand. We’ve seen her do it before. Bella Ramsey, geez.”
In a post-episode BTS clip, Ramsey said they cried just reading the script for the episode. If Pascal himself seems a little less devastated about the whole thing, it’s only because he’s in “active denial,” as he told Entertainment Weekly in a separate conversation. “I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us,” he said. “And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad.”
While Joel’s body may be wrapped in a sheet, it sounds like we haven’t seen the last of him, thankfully. Eagle-eyed fans may already know that Pascal filmed additional scenes that were teased in season’s trailers. Those moments “are coming,” co-creator Neil Druckmann confirmed to EW. Added Mazin: “We’ve shown that we screw around with time… So characters are gone but not forgotten, and sometimes they are remembered in interesting ways.” R.I.P. Joel—at least you never had a mushroom growing out of your face.
