{"id":39043,"date":"2025-04-21T18:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T18:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39043\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T18:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T18:58:09","slug":"where-does-the-show-go-from-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39043\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Does the Show Go From Here?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis post contains spoilers for this week\u2019s episode of The Last of Us<\/a>, which is now streaming on Max.<\/p>\n

Ellie and Joel. Joel and Ellie. That was the pairing that made the first season of The Last of Us so special. The combination of these two damaged souls \u2014\u00a0her needing a parental figure, him needing a surrogate daughter, both afraid to acknowledge this fact to themselves or each other \u2014\u00a0coupled with spectacular performances by Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal<\/a>, elevated the HBO drama above the usual tropes of a post-apocalyptic survival story. It didn\u2019t exactly make the series into a beacon of hopefulness \u2014\u00a0the first season, after all, ended with Joel massacring a hospital full of people who were trying to synthesize a cure for the plague that had infected most of humanity, all because he couldn\u2019t abide the fact that Ellie would have to die in the process \u2014\u00a0but there was enough in their bond, and in the interplay between the two actors, to make it a show beloved even by people who generally don\u2019t have patience for zombies (or zombie-like creatures) running amok in a ruined world. So long as there were Ellie and Joel, some part of it all would be OK, it seemed.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo now what?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLast night\u2019s episode<\/a> ended in horrifying fashion. Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), whose doctor father was the first person Joel killed on his rampage in the Season One finale, tracked Joel down with the help of her militia friends, and savagely beat him with a golf club. Then, after Ellie showed up in a futile attempt to save him, Abby fatally stabbed Joel in the neck with the shaft of the club she had broken against his body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLiane Hentscher\/HBO<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is a plot development well known \u2014\u00a0for good and for ill \u2014\u00a0to the many people who played The Last of Us Part II game, and who have spent the past few years waiting to see when, how, or even if the TV show dealt with it. Showrunners Neil Druckmann (who co-created the game) and Craig Mazin could have put this off until much later in this batch of seven episodes, perhaps by spending more time in the long gap between seasons, or simply by dealing more with life in Jackson, and various non-Abby threats facing the insulated city. Or Mazin, the veteran screenwriter who was not involved in the game, and thus isn\u2019t as invested in it, could have looked at how well Pascal and Ramsey worked together in the first season \u2014 and how much audiences responded to them \u2014\u00a0and tried to convince Druckmann to take the show in a different direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead, they stuck with the source material, having Joel\u2019s death happen at roughly the same point in this season where it happens in the game. (Though the attack on Jackson by a horde of infected is an invention of the show\u2019s.) No delaying, no denying \u2014 just cold, cruel, death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd at least some non-gamer members of the audience are saying that Joel\u2019s death has made it their last episode of The Last of Us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt will be quite a while until we see whether this twist has any impact on the series\u2019 ratings, whether on HBO or on Max. The Last of Us Part II has to date sold less well than the original game, but it\u2019s also only been available for five years, whereas the original came out in 2013. Many gamers were upset with this development, some because they felt the core of the game was Joel\u2019s relationship with Ellie, some because they didn\u2019t appreciate the straight male hero being killed off while the queer female antiheroine stuck around. Take a guess which group was responsible for besieging Laura Bailey, who played Abby in the game, with death threats. On Sunday night, Pedro Pascal went out of his way to try to shield Kaitlyn Dever from a similar fate, by putting this affectionate post on his Instagram:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnecdotally, my social media mentions since last night have primarily been a mix of two responses: 1) gamers impressed that the show not only went through with it, but didn\u2019t stall in order to maximize the amount of Pedro Pascal time it had; and 2) non-gamers who either aren\u2019t sure they want to continue watching, or have outright said that they\u2019re done. Some were watching primarily for that relationship, despite not being crazy about the genre in general. Others suggested that the world feels so dark these days that losing Joel \u2014 and having him die in such sadistic fashion (even if the majority of the torture occurred off-camera) \u2014\u00a0is more than they want out of their fiction right now.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve seen the entire season, and in my review<\/a>, I did my best to write around Joel\u2019s death while talking about my own relative dissatisfaction with what the show becomes without him. There\u2019s a lot of excellent material on the way. Bella Ramsey is a superb actor. Ellie\u2019s relationships with characters like Dina (Isabela Merced), Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and Jesse (Young Mazino) are compelling in different ways, particularly whenever she\u2019s paired with Dina. Still, they\u2019re not Joel, and when there are later flashbacks featuring Joel, the chemistry between Ramsey and Pascal blows every other relationship off the screen. But this season only covers half of the story of the second game, so I can only speak to how well the show plays without Joel in the short term, rather than whether the ultimate payoff is worth his loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is also an unusual circumstance, in that it\u2019s rare to have a show write out its clear lead or co-lead character this early in the run, especially by choice. David Caruso infamously quit NYPD Blue after the first season to pursue movie stardom that never came; that show did fine without him, in part because replacement Jimmy Smits was so good, but mainly because Caruso had by that point already been usurped in fans\u2019 hearts by co-star Dennis Franz. Game of Thrones killed off Ned Stark late in its first season \u2014 even earlier than Joel \u2014\u00a0which was also a case of following the source material. But even though Sean Bean was the cast\u2019s biggest star at the time(*), and even though Ned was our initial point of view character, by the time he lost his head, the narrative had become so sprawling that killing him wasn\u2019t as fundamental a change to that show as killing off one half of what had largely been a two-character piece until now.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t(*) Pascal is at the moment perhaps the most famous GoT alum, after playing a character who, like Ned, was introduced and killed off in the same season.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tIn general, when hit shows have had to replace a lead or co-lead \u2014 whether because the actor wanted to leave or because the creative team decided to do it \u2014\u00a0they\u2019ve remained hits, unless it\u2019s so many years into their runs that some audience attrition was inevitable anyway. (See The Office without Steve Carell, or The X-Files without David Duchovny.) Maybe the most obvious instance of a character death triggering a mass fan exodus was The O.C., whose viewership plummeted after the producers (in a decision they later regretted<\/a>) decided to kill off Mischa Barton\u2019s Marissa Cooper after the third season. And even there, the ratings had already dipped substantially from their first-season peak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo believe The Last of Us will scare away most of its audience when you see it happen. But you also can\u2019t blame fans from not only feeling shock at Joel\u2019s death, but wondering whether the show they loved is still that show without him.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post contains spoilers for this week\u2019s episode of The Last of Us, which is now streaming on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[22131,989,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-39043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-pedro-pascal","9":"tag-the-last-of-us","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114377490754114174","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}