The second season of the HBO series The Last of Us recently aired a much-talked-about episode that featured an important and heartbreaking event from the original game.

Spoiler alert!

Joel, the main character, played by Pedro Pascal, is brutally and slowly murdered by Abby with a golf club. Since this plot is already a fixture in The Last of Us: Part II, many showgoers have been speculating about when it will take place in Season 2. Now that the scene has aired, Pascal and series creators and writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman discuss the momentous event at length.

Druckmann told Variety that the main creative team had discussed at what point in the second season Abby would kill Joel, and finally decided to schedule it for the second episode to help move the story forward. "Even in the game, there is an hour or so before this moment is reached. But we also knew it needed to be early enough because that was the trigger for this story," he said. "So yes, we always think about all the possibilities, but if we put it at the end of the season, it feels like we're dragging our feet rather than going straight to the heart of the story."

For his part, Mazin said that he wants to avoid "torturing people" by making viewers guess when the event happened, and he doesn't want them to speculate on whether to wait until the third season. He stressed that when this scene happened, they made sure it felt natural in the story and not to deliberately annoy the audience.

Druckmann and Mazin also discuss why the details of Joel's death are so vividly presented. Druckmann argues that the live-action nature of the series "makes it more brutal than the game," despite the fact that the game itself is already uncomfortable. He believes that "it's important to see this cruelty" because it affects the future direction of Ellie and other characters.

After the episode aired, Pascal stated that he was currently "in a state of active denial" and was reluctant to admit that Joel was dead because it saddened him and that he would not be playing Joel in that situation anymore, despite his close ties to many members of the crew.

貝拉·拉姆齊（飾演艾莉）則透露，他們在日誌中將拍攝這一場景的 2024 年 3 月 7 日稱為“殺死喬爾日”。拉姆齊說，在導演喊開始之前，他們一直在聽並隨著“Peanut Butter Jelly Time”的視頻跳舞，直到開拍前一刻嘴裏還在唱著歌詞。他們表示，在看劇本時，只有在讀到艾比殺死喬爾那一集的劇本時哭過一次。

Caitlin Dever (who plays Abby) said it was "heartbreaking" for her to play the role of killing Joel after seeing Joel and Ellie have such a wonderful relationship in the first season. To make matters tougher, a few weeks before filming this crucial scene, Dever's mother died of metastatic breast cancer, and her mother's funeral was just three days before she filmed Joel's death scene on her first day. She described herself as "in a fog, in a trance".