The Last of Us just made one of the gutsiest moves in TV. Will it survive?

Warning: This story contains major spoilers for episode two of the second season of The Last of Us.

In one of the gutsiest moves ever pulled by a major TV series, the HBO zombie drama The Last of Us has brutally killed off one of its two lead characters, just two episodes into its second season.

The death of Joel (Pedro Pascal) – whose mission was to protect Ellie (Bella Ramsey), seemingly the only person alive to have immunity to the cordyceps virus – will not have come as a surprise to fans of The Last of Us II. He was also killed in the 2020 game on which the TV series is based.

Pedro Pascal as Joel in The Last of Us.Credit: HBO

But many watching the series – which averaged 32 million viewers in its first season in the US, making it HBO’s biggest hit since Game of Thrones – will never have played the game. And that makes Joel’s exit a risky move.

Stunned viewers have not only lost a character they had quickly grown to love, they are now being asked to accept as his replacement the person who was responsible for his demise.

Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) has her reasons, of course. In the finale of season one, Joel murdered her father, the surgeon at the Fireflies compound who was meant to perform the surgical procedure that would potentially lead to a vaccine, but would have killed Ellie. Wracked by grief at the loss of his daughter in the series’ first episode, Joel simply couldn’t bear the thought of losing Ellie.

Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in season two of The Last of Us. 

But saving Ellie came at a great cost: not just the people he murdered in his bid to rescue her, but the rest of humanity. Her sacrifice could have saved the world; her salvation has almost certainly doomed it.

Did all of that register with viewers as Abby was doing Joel slowly, as Paul Keating might have put it: first blowing a hole in his kneecap, then beating him viciously with a golf club and her fists before bringing it to a gruesome end – in front of a horrified Ellie – by driving the broken shaft of a nine iron into his neck? Maybe, maybe not.

Certainly, there was backlash to the scenario in the game (broadly similar, though different in its specifics) when it was first released. The actor who voiced Abby even received death threats over social media. We can only hope Dever, who starred as Belle Gibson in Apple Cider Vinegar, fares better.

The Last of Us isn’t the only show to kill off a major character early on, of course. House of Cards shockingly threw one of its leads, Kate Mara, under a train at the start of its second season, while Ned Stark (Sean Bean) was decapitated in the penultimate episode of season one of Game of Thrones. But offing a hugely popular and central character is a risky move from which some shows never recover.

Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in season two of The Last of Us. 

The most salient example is The Walking Dead, to which The Last of Us is more than slightly indebted. In its early seasons, The Walking Dead made it clear no one was safe in the post-apocalypse, as major characters including Shane (Jon Bernthal) and Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) were offed. But the death of Glenn (Steven Yeun) proved fatal for the show.

In part that was because it was horribly drawn out. First, there was Glenn’s fake-out death: he disappeared under a horde of “walkers”, only to miraculously squirm out of their clutches a couple of episodes later as viewers were working through their grief. It was as big a cheat as the non-death of Jon Snow in the finale of season five of Game of Thrones.

Then Glenn’s actual death was hyped with the series’ sixth season ending on a cliffhanger. The much-heralded villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) finally appeared, wielding a baseball bat wound in barbed wire and doing Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe to decide which of our heroes he would club to death. It ended with a blood-spattered lens, but with the victim’s identity unknown.

That drove the seventh-season premiere audience in the US to more than 17 million – a figure topped only once in the show’s 11 seasons – as people tuned in for the reveal (it was Abraham, played by Michael Cudlitz). Then, when Negan finally turned his attention to Glenn in a killing that was horrendously gory – though totally faithful to the graphic novel source (right down to the bulging eyeball) – it was too much.

The following episode of The Walking Dead was watched by 12.46 million viewers. By season’s end, that figure was down to 11.31 million.

It was the beginning of the end. Viewership dipped below 7 million for some episodes of season eight, and by the time the series wrapped up after 11 seasons, fewer than 2 million people were watching.

Glenn’s death was faithful to the source, and its brutality made sense in narrative terms. Negan was determined to crush Rick’s (Andrew Lincoln) authority as a leader, and make it clear to his crew that he was unable to protect them. But even the show’s star later conceded it went too far.

There’s no way Glenn (Steven Yeun, top right) could survive this. Only, he did. And so began the end of viewers’ trust in The Walking Dead.Credit: AMC

“I do still think [Glenn’s death] might have been when we over-egged the omelette,” Lincoln told Empire last year. “Maybe it was lingering too much.”

The Last of Us doesn’t make that mistake. Joel’s demise is shocking, but it comes relatively quickly, contained to the last 16 minutes of the episode. It appears to be horrifically brutal, but in fact most of that is conveyed purely by sound and make-up, with just three shots involving the infliction of a wound. It’s graphic, but it’s not gratuitous. And, perhaps most importantly, Abby is driven by an understandable desire for vengeance rather than the sadism that motivates Negan.

None of that guarantees viewers won’t push back, of course. But at least the show has ripped the Band-Aid off quickly rather than dragging it out. For that small mercy, we should be grateful.

The Last of Us is streaming on Max, with new episodes dropping on Mondays.

Do you think The Last of Us can survive Joel’s death? Will you still watch it? Tell us in the comments below.

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