Who is Alec in The Last of Us (and when did Joel kill him)?
By Daniel Roman
The latest episode of The Last of Us saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) face a terrifying group of cannibals in the Colorado wilderness. Led by David (Scott Shepherd), a preacher hiding a demented side, the group of survivors at Silver Lake came perilously close to chopping Ellie into bits for stew before she brought their whole operation crashing down.
During his iconic “everything happens for a reason” speech to Ellie, David reveals that a member of his group was killed at an earlier date by Joel. This ties back into the episode’s opening scene, where we saw a teenage girl grieving over her dead father, Alec, and asking when they can bury his body, totally oblivious to the fact that he’d already been chopped up for that night’s dinner.
You may be wondering who exactly Alec is, and when Joel killed him. Fret not: we’ve got the answers right here.
Who did Joel kill in The Last of Us that made him an enemy of Silver Lake?
The answer to why the Silver Lake cultists are after Joel can be found in Episode 6, “Kin.” After staying in Jackson for a night and hashing out their feelings, Joel and Ellie set out for the University of Eastern Colorado in search of the Fireflies. It’s there that the duo is attacked by a group of scavengers.
One of those scavengers tries to sneak up on Joel and club him to death with a baseball bat, but Joel catches on at the last second and kills him — but not before he’s stabbed, leaving him at death’s doorstep. This raider was Alec.
While Alec himself is not a character who featured in The Last of Us video game, the motivation for David’s group is pretty much exactly the same. Joel and Ellie are still attacked at the university, Joel still suffers his injury after being forced to kill a bunch of the attackers, and later on we find out that they were scavenging for food for Silver Lake.
The decision to make Alec a named character with his own story is just the latest example of The Last of Us adding a dash of depth to its minor characters in order to make all Joel’s murdering a little harder to digest. But it’s probably still easier to digest than cannibalism, so we won’t hold it against him too much this time.
The Last of Us season finale, “Look For The Light,” premieres this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. ESTT/8:00 p.m. CST on HBO and HBO Max.
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