Tonight on The Last of Us, Joel (Pedro Pascal) ran into Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a new character introduced in the season 2 premiere. Abby lured him back to a lodge where she and her friends were staying, shot his legs out from under him, brutally beat him with a gold club, and finally killed him while his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) watched.
Fans who had played The Last of Us Part II video game knew this moment was coming. Everyone may have been left hyperventilating into their shirt. Did they really just kill off one of the main characters? Yes they did. The story will go forward with Ellie as the driving force.
Abby laid out her reasoning for killing Joel before she did the deed, but in case you're foggy on the details, we'll lay it out here: in the season 1 finale, "Look for the Light," Joel and Ellie arrived at a hospital run by the militant resistance group known as the Fireflies. Ellie is the only person in the world known to be immune to the zombie plague that has brought down civilization, and the Fireflies want to use her immunity to create a cure. The only problem is that Ellie will have to die in surgery in order for the Fireflies to make that cure. Although he knew that the fate of humanity was at stake, Joel couldn't let that happen to this girl he'd come to love. He fought his way through the hospital to reach her, killing many Fireflies along the way, including the doctor who was going to operate on her.
That doctor was Abby's father, and Abby has been on a quest for revenge against Joel ever since. She and her friends came to Jackson looking for him, and it was just dumb luck that she ran into him outside the city limits. And the rest is history.
In both the show and in the original Last of Us video game, the moment where Joel kills Abby's father passes very quickly. He doesn't think about it when it happens. It's only later that it comes back and is revealed to be extremely significant.
Pedro Pascal will appear on The Last of Us TV show again, but in flashbacks. His character is now dead. If you want to know what happens, you can look up a synopsis for the game online. If not, new episodes air Sunday nights on HBO and Max.
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