We can never fully prepare for the death of someone we care about. Nobody tells you, or if they do, they can’t fully convey what that means. Even if your loved one has time to get their affairs in order, even if you think you’ve told them everything you wanted to say while they could hear it, there will always be details we missed. Questions left unanswered. 

More haunting, perhaps, are the questions we didn’t think to ask, because we didn’t know better. Are these thoughts too heavy a load for a TV show based on a video game? That’s for you to decide. 

But “The Last of Us” is not a standard console shooter pitting clear-cut white hats against bad guys. Joel, the main antagonist, survived an apocalypse for as long as he did by marauding before he turned to smuggling. Before civilization fell, he was a contractor struggling to support his little girl. She was killed the night the Cordyceps outbreak transformed nearly all of humanity into mindless, violent cannibals. It was also his birthday.

The dangling, tear-soaked thread of resentment made Joel’s death uniquely painful, and the sixth episode a welcome consolation.

Casting Pedro Pascal to play Joel in HBO’s adaptation guaranteed a baked-in sympathy for the character, even when he treated Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the 14-year-old he was hired to protect, with a heartless chill. We knew why, but she didn’t, making his affectionate turn at the end of the first season immensely moving, and his shocking death at the start of Season 2 pointedly cruel.

Now he’s a memory that Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin and fellow writer Halley Gross revisit one more time, and at a point in Ellie’s journey when a vendetta threatens to obliterate her moral compass. When the season begins, Ellie is visibly upset with Joel, who can’t seem to do anything right. We’re left wondering whether she ever found out that Joel lied to her about what happened inside the Salt Lake City hospital, where a doctor was supposed to make a cure from her body. 

Joel told Ellie that she was one of many immune people, rather than admitting that he had gunned down a hospital full of people because he valued her one life more than the prospect of her death aiding in saving humanity as a whole.

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in "The Last of Us" (Liane........

© Salon