The show went too far in the wrong direction with its most shocking moment.
This article contains spoilers through the second episode of The Last of Us Season 2.
Players of the game on which HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us is based knew it was coming—“it” being the death of the show’s protagonist, Joel (played by Pedro Pascal). The Season 1 finale saw him slaughtering dozens of people in a Utah lab to save the teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsey); her immunity to the mutated fungus plaguing the country could have led to a cure if Joel hadn’t stopped the scientists from experimenting on her. In Sunday night’s episode, set five years later, Joel suffers the consequences of his actions: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of one of the doctors he killed, finds him, captures him, and then tortures him until he dies.
The scenes culminating in Joel’s death moved much more quickly in video-game form: Abby’s crew subdues Joel as soon as it learns his name. The next time he appears on-screen, the player sees him through Ellie’s eyes: She finds him on the ground, battered and unable to speak, and is forced to watch a stranger execute the man who has become her surrogate father. The sequence conveys Ellie’s disorientation and surprise; she has no idea who Abby is or why her group has attacked Joel.
The television series, however, indulges in the moment’s brutality. Abby delivers a long speech to Joel about why she’s going to kill him. His torture is extended and graphic; at one point, there’s a clear shot of a broken golf club piercing his skin. At the same time, a horde of “infected”—zombified people transformed by the fungus—suddenly descends on the nearby town: Jackson, Wyoming, the one place where Joel and Ellie felt safe. At its end, the episode cuts between shots of Ellie’s despair and the town’s destruction, her pain echoed by the townsfolk reeling from the invasion.
