Supply: Liane Hentscher/HBO / The Final of Us / Pedro Pascal

Avid gamers have already skilled this controversial second in online game historical past. Nonetheless, watching it unfold in HBO’s hit tv adaptation of the long-lasting online game, The Final of Us, has hit even tougher, leaving followers surprised.

Like watching the Titanic barrel in direction of an enormous iceberg, followers of The Final of Us online game knew this present day was coming and eagerly anticipated seeing how informal viewers would deal with this second that sparked loads of discourse within the online game world when The Final of Us Half II was launched in 2020.

*Spoilers Forward*

Okay, should you moved previous the spoiler warning, you now not care about what’s about to be stated.

How Joel’s Time Got here To An Finish In The Final of Us Season 2

On the finish of season 1, we noticed Pedro Pascal’s Joel slaughter a bunch of members of the Fireflies and together with docs who had been about carry out a deadly surgical procedure on Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in hopes of turning her immunity to the fungal plague right into a remedy to finish the Cordyceps mind an infection that ravaged all the globe, principally bringing civilization to a crashing halt.

Joel’s determination to avoid wasting his surrogate daughter comes again to hang-out him in season 2 with the introduction of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who simply occurs to be the daughter of the top surgeon he killed in season 1, and sure, she desires revenge, and she or he will get it brutally.

After Joel saves her from a horde of contaminated, she rapidly realizes he’s the person she has been trying to find. She shoots within the knee with a shotgun earlier than brutally beating Joel with a golf membership, delivering the deadly blow in entrance of Ellie for a gutwrenching scene as she screams for surrogate dad to stand up, earlier than dragging herself over to his lifeless physique.

We knew it was coming, however man, it nonetheless hit like a ton of bricks.

Showrunners Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann Didn’t Need To Torment Followers

The Final of Us tv present is a uncommon gem, because it has wealthy supply materials to attract from within the sport; for essentially the most half, it completely mirrors the sport with some slight adjustments made to the story.

Like on this season, Abby shouldn’t be muscular like she is within the sport, a lot to the chagrin of some purists, however Dever nonetheless performs the function with the identical anger, and Joel’s dying within the present was extra brutal than it was within the sport, and this was carried out on objective.

In an interview with Selection, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann defined why they wasted no time when dealing with Joel’s dying within the present.

They admitted they’d considered each attainable situation. Nonetheless, Druckmann defined from a storytelling perspective that Joel’s dying taking place early made sense “as a result of that is the inciting incident for this story.”

Mazin and Druckmann additionally wished to deal with the elephant within the room, Joel’s dying, as a result of it has been looming over the present since season 1, and so they felt they’d an obligation to spare followers from any extra torment.

“There’s a hazard of tormenting individuals,” Mazin informed Selection. “It’s not what we wish to do. If individuals comprehend it’s coming, they may begin to really feel tormented. And individuals who don’t comprehend it’s coming are going to seek out out it’s coming as a result of individuals are going to speak about the truth that it hasn’t proven up but.

“Our intuition was to make it possible for after we did it, that it felt pure within the story and was not some meta-function of us eager to upset individuals.”

Social Media Reactions To The Final of Season 2’s Heartbreaking Second

As anticipated, the reactions to Joel’s grotesque dying had been these of shock, and largely individuals who knew it was coming had been nonetheless left reeling after watching Pedro Pascal take a golf membership and loads of punches to the face.

We’re unsure if these individuals who had been tuning in to observe Pedro Pascal will stick round, but when this one publish on X, previously Twitter, is an indicator, HBO and The Final of Us may be in hassle.

However we don’t assume final evening’s episode would be the final time we see Pascal’s Joel. Keep in mind, we bought a complete 5 years of time we have to make amends for.

Rattling Joel, we hate it needed to be you.

You may see extra reactons to the episode within the gallery beneath.