‘Ruined my entire week, month, and year’: The Last of Us season 2’s new episode has devastated viewers, unsurprisingly

• Huge spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2 here
• No really, there will be no holds barred on the HUGE events of that episode
• But we won’t spoil anything about the future from the game – it’s TV-only here

Well, it’s here. The Last of Us‘ TV viewers on Max have caught up to the crushing linchpin of the story’s second act that those who played the game have been dreading.

At the end of the second episode, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) takes revenge for her father’s death and brutally kills Joel (Pedro Pascal) in front of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who can do nothing but cry and plead in anguish, and in vain.

With confirmation that a third season is on the way, there’s been heavy implication that the story of the second game would be split across seasons, and I assumed that they might tweak the order of the narrative to push Joel’s death to the end of the second season.

But no, here we are, looking out today across a landscape of social media posts and reviews from people who are – among other emotions – crushed, furious, confused, and impressed.

I have to start with the post on X from @scarjsn that I referenced in the headline, saying “ellie hugging joel’s body just ruined my entire week, month, and year” because that seems to have hit the target for a lot of people, as does this post.

The moment has hit people in a few different ways. There is, it has to be said, the Pedro Pascal of it all. There is a pretty major portion of the world whose attachment is to having this extremely charming and handsome star at the center of the show – especially given his adorable real-life relationship with Bella Ramsey. A large number of people are devastated at losing him as much as the character.

But for sure there is a huge amount of love for the character being expressed in people’s sadness and anger. It takes a few forms, including people taking what you might call a bittersweet approach, looking at how we got to see the best parts of his character in the final stretch of his life…

…and on the other hand, we have people burning with white hot and unassailable fury at Abby’s actions.

In the current world where people seem increasingly unwilling to keep the real world and fiction separate, the TLoU team and Max seem to have prepared a bunch of social content of everyone on the show palling around, having a great time, and generally loving each other very much.

It’s a slightly sad fact that the post below from Pascal was clearly necessary, and that the reason behind it was instantly noticeable, with one Reddit noting “The fact that Pedro posted this photo after episode 2 so his fans wouldn’t hate her“, while the Daily Beast described it as Pascal ‘shielding’ Dever from fans. (When the game came out, the actress who portrayed Abby in it received a long-running flood of abusive messages and death threats.)

Bella Ramsey’s portrayal of Ellie throughout the whole episode has drawn a lot of praise, not just for the big climax (which we’ll come to), but more broadly for how subtly and honestly they portray the mixed feelings that come in the aftermath of the dance.

That’s helped by the show filling itself with subtle nods to their bond going beyond outward actions or words (pay close attention to the guitar…), but also in Ramsey’s delivery of the line below (full or dramatic irony as it may be).

There are other shifts in Ramsey’s physicality that denote changes deep in Ellie’s core. “She looks somehow older in the space of an episode and like a genuine demon waiting to be unleashed,” says this Reddit thread from a user saying any concerns about Ramsey playing the older Ellie of season 2 had been eliminated.

Of course, subtlety in the delivery out the window when Ellie is injured, trapped helpless on the floor, and forced to watch the person she loves the most die horribly.

Ramsey goes through so many modes in those scenes, and looks as physically destroyed by her anguish as she sounds. The nuclear fury, the painful realization, the cruel half-hope, and the end.

The interesting question is how well the viewership at large responds to The Last of Us‘ big change. Obviously, that’s going to depend partly on what actually comes next, and I’m not going into anything from the game here.

But it’s a big risk – this moment is so cruel to so many characters, and it’s possible for a dark show to go too dark in the eyes of its viewers. That’s the question raised by The Guardian, which asks “will this show survive that horrific death?”. Writer Graeme Virtue adds: “You could also call that ending brave, or even foolish … By killing off Joel in such a savage fashion, and further traumatising Ellie, you surely risk pushing the story too far into bleakness.”

Collider has an interesting take on the unflinching brutality of it all: “Like it or not, we needed to see [Joel die] in ‘The Last of Us’ season 2”.

“Some viewers may have thought it was too much, but, unfortunately, the depiction of Joel’s death is a necessary plot point of this adaptation of The Last of Us, and it isn’t about gratuitous violence and gore,” writes Julio Bardini. “Instead, it’s about being true to one of the most important unspoken rules of storytelling:if someone dies, you’ve got to show a body.”

Bardini notes that permanent death has become hard to believe in the era of legacy-sequel revivals or long-running franchises simply needing to get people in their seats, and the return of a fan-favorite is an easy way to do that. If you want people to feel the devastation that TLoU viewers are feeling right now, you need to make clear that there is no ambiguity about it.

It’s fair to say the show achieved that, and now we are at what Esquire has called “past the point of no return.” As Brady Langmann says: “This show belongs to Bella Ramsey now.”

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Matt is TechRadar’s Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning he’s in charge of persuading our team of writers and reviewers to watch the latest TV shows and movies on gorgeous TVs and listen to fantastic speakers and headphones. It’s a tough task, as you can imagine. Matt has over a decade of experience in tech publishing, and previously ran the TV & audio coverage for our colleagues at T3.com, and before that he edited T3 magazine. During his career, he’s also contributed to places as varied as Creative Bloq, PC Gamer, PetsRadar, MacLife, and Edge. TV and movie nerdism is his speciality, and he goes to the cinema three times a week. He’s always happy to explain the virtues of Dolby Vision over a drink, but he might need to use props, like he’s explaining the offside rule.