The Last of Us season 2 is finally here, returning viewers to Jackson, Wyoming, where our hearts are sure to get ripped out in no time flat. HBO's post-apocalyptic drama is based on the beloved video game series by Naughty Dog, and as anyone who's played The Last of Us Part II knows, this season is going to get dark.
That's not to say it will explicitly follow the game to a T, however. In the season premiere, "Future Days," we already started seeing a few differences. For example, Joel (Pedro Pascal) has begun seeing a therapist, Gail (Catherine O'Hara), in order to make sense of the growing tensions between himself and his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey).
Of course, Joel can't be totally open with Gail about the fact that he murdered a hospital full of people and denied the world a cure for the zombie plague by saving Ellie's life in the season 1 finale...but Gail has no such reservations. She tries to pave the way for Joel to open up by revealing one of her own dark secrets: she hates Joel because he shot and killed her husband, Eugene. "I know you had no choice," she says, revealing that in spite of that fact she still can't forgive him because of how he killed Eugene.
Who was Eugene? What happened between him and Joel? Let's unpack what we know.
Why did Joel kill Eugene in The Last of Us?
The main facts we can glean from "Future Days" about Eugene are that he was Gail's husband and that he died sometime in the past year, since Gail tells Joel this is her first birthday without him. We also know Joel is responsible for his death, but since Gail says he "didn't have a choice," the obvious guess is that Eugene was infected by the Cordyceps plague and had to be killed. The reason why Gail has such a hard time forgiving Joel is presumably all in the details, which the show will hopefully provide for us at some point.
Eugene didn't appear in The Last of Us Part II game, but he is mentioned. In the early hours of the video game, Ellie and her companion Dina go to one of Eugene's secret hideouts in the mountains outside Jackson where they wait out a storm. We learn a few details about Eugene there, like the fact that he was an avid cannabis farmer as well as a former Firefly, but the game doesn't explore him much beyond that.
As Neil Druckmann revealed to Inverse in late March, this meant that the show had a good opportunity to expand Eugene's character in the same way that it expanded minor characters like Bill and Frank in the first season. "I will say, like Season 1, we look at characters that might afford us opportunities to expand the story," Druckmann explained. "[Co-showrunner Craig Mazin] had this brilliant idea of taking Frank, who you just hear about in the game and just see a body, and expand [it] into a beautiful romantic relationship. But our approach is never 'What was successful in Season 1, and how do we replicate that?' We replicate the process, so that the process led us to the Bill and Frank episode."
"This time, the process might lead us to different things, but one of the things we've already talked about is how Eugene plays a major pivotal role in the story. Likewise, there’s a new character — Eugene’s wife, Gail — who has afforded us different ways to explore Joel, Ellie, and Jackson as a community.
That's our process, how we pick and choose these moments and see where they take us. And sometimes it’s a dead end, and we're like, 'OK, well that wasn’t worth anything,' and sometimes it’s a really beautiful moment, like the stuff that we have with Eugene later in the season."
So we have confirmation that at some point "later in the season," we'll find out more about Eugene. We even know that the show has cast Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix) in the role, so we will actually see Eugene onscreen at some point during season 2. But until then, we'll have to keep our eye on the breadcrumbs The Last of Us drops for us about him.
The Last of Us season 2 premieres new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
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