There’s No Safe Distance in ‘The Last of Us’
Once so close and yet so far away from saving the world, Joel chose to save his own world instead. And he paid the price in Sunday’s ‘Through the Valley.’
“This isn’t gonna end well, Tess,” warns Joel, a reticent apocalyptic outlaw and forever grieving father, early in the first season of The Last of Us. Joel (played with resigned strength by Pedro Pascal) is trying to convince his partner in crime that their latest smuggling operation really isn’t worth the hassle—in a number of respects.
For starters, the cargo they’ve agreed to transport from one hellhole on earth to another, in exchange for a working set of wheels, is not the typical cache of pills or weapons. It’s a sassy teenaged orphan named Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, who’s full of foulmouthed opinions and an overabundance of free will. But worse than that, Ellie also has bite marks from one of the Cordyceps-infected monsters that roam the planet. And Joel is not the kind of guy who’s accustomed to believing claims such as: No, no, these bite marks are different from all the rest of them, because this girl is a unicorn, and maybe she’s the key to a cure.
Joel’s heard it all before. And with this mission, he’s being asked to go against all his sharply honed survival instincts. But he does need that car. “If she so much as twitches …” he says to Tess, his way of communicating that (a) he won’t hesitate to save himself if Ellie turns and (b) ugh, fine.
Ultimately, Joel is mostly right. This isn’t gonna end well. It’s just that the end comes both much sooner and much later than even he probably anticipated. Sometimes fate is a few feet away, yet it still won’t catch up with you for years.
In the same episode, the second of the series, Tess reveals she’s been infected. And Ellie—now twice bitten, never shy—continues to demonstrate that her gift might be legit. “Joel, she’s fucking real,” Tess insists. Her parting words are an exhortion to go, run, take the girl, and above all: “Save who you can save!”
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That’s exactly what Joel strives to do across the first season of the prestige video game turned HBO series, although his personal understanding of “who you can save” proves to be a moving target. Every so often, in fleeting moments of rare hope, he lets himself believe that the answer could round up to: humanity. But in the times of real desperation—which in The Last of Us is most of the time—there’s just one human that Joel wants to save, no matter the cost: Ellie.
Early in Season 2, which premiered this month and hops forward five years in the show’s story, Joel shows signs of evolving. He serves his Jackson, Wyoming, community with neighborly cheer. He tries therapy. He’s still focused on Ellie, obsessively so, but he has other priorities, too: his brother, his nephew, his mid weed stores. But in last Sunday’s episode, “Through the Valley,” Joel chooses to save a stranger named Abby from a half-frozen undead horde. And it really, really doesn’t end well.
To be honest, I was certain that Joel was doomed last season when he was stabbed in the gut with some rebar in Episode 6, only for him to wriggle his way out of that one somehow. (It felt as improbable as his ability to take down an entire hallway of Fireflies or defeat a clicker in hand-to-hand combat.) Which is why I had trouble believing that the show’s creators could really and truly off the guy this season, even as indications to the contrary piled up.
I haven’t played the Last of Us video games, but I still sensed from the ether (and from the fact that HBO wouldn’t send out advance screeners of “Through the Valley”) that something big was brewing. That likely had to mean a pretty major character death, and there weren’t many options—considering that in this show, the majority of the characters we’ve spent time with are already long gone.
Sam, who just wanted to “endure and survive”; Riley, who had pledged with Ellie to just keep vibing for as long as they could after they got bitten in the mall that fateful night; Kathleen, whose last words were supposed to be a threat but instead became a self-epitaph: “It ends the way it ends”; cannibals and soldiers and surgeons and Fireflies—so many dead.
Which left people like Joel’s brother, Tommy—no disrespect, but not quite the level of character death that’d make you withhold screeners—or the big two themselves, Joel and Ellie. Then, right before I started watching the episode, I saw a Bluesky message along the lines of “It’s about time Joel got what was coming to him!” It was safe to say I’d been spoiled.
But denial is a powerful emotion. As “Through the Valley” unfolded, I protected myself with some mental origami.
Yes, the character Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever, had repeatedly and plainly stated her intentions to kill Joel and avenge his Salt Lake City rampage in the Season 1 finale—but surely it would be too obvious a move for her to follow through with that plan, right? Oh, look, Joel is saving Abby’s life: Maybe that kindness will lead her to mercy! Oh, wow, Abby is shooting Joel right in the kneecap: Well, at least his horse is outside? Oh, God, Abby is fondling a golf club … maybe Joel can do the ol’ “Hey, what’s that over there?” and grab it out of her hand?!
Ellie shows up in the lodge where Abby’s holding Joel late in the episode, and I thought, Finally, surely she can save the day. Wrong again: Instead, she’s forced to watch the closest person she has to a father suffer and struggle and gurgle, paying the ultimate price for his decision, in the Season 1 finale, to use deadly force so that Ellie could live. “Get up!” Ellie screams, echoing Joel’s own ineffective plea to his mortally wounded daughter, Sarah, in the series pilot. Using every last shredded fiber of his broken being, Joel tries his best, managing to move a couple of muscles a couple of centimeters, a twitch that made a whole lot of people emotional.
Briefly, I once again thought: He’s gonna get up! And then I watched Abby finish off her dirty work with the broken end of a club shaft, and I could no longer deny that Joel was well and truly gone.
Way back in the second episode of the series, Tess doesn’t mince words with Ellie. “Joel and I aren’t good people,” she says—not apologizing or lamenting, just naming what is. All these years after the death of his daughter, Sarah, Joel is taciturn and hardened, gruff and grieving, leading a life that involves tossing dead bodies into pyres and moving hot contraband through the dark market. Later, however, as Tess faces down her own death, she encourages Joel to do something good for a change. “This is your chance,” Tess tells him. “You get her there. You keep her alive. And you set everything right. All the shit we did.”
And Joel does get Ellie there, even as the there changes and changes. He keeps Ellie alive, even when doing so means murdering anyone who stands in the way. Can Joel ever set everything right? I mean, can anyone? Does he save Ellie? Yes—but also, no. Does he save himself? No—but also, yes.
“No matter how hard you try, no matter how many people you kill, she's gonna grow up, Joel,” Marlene tells him in the Season 1 finale, right before he kills her, too. “And then you'll die, or she'll leave. Then what?” It’s no wonder that as the second season begins, Ellie is in the midst of withdrawing from Joel—both because that’s what normal 19-year-olds do and because Ellie has lived an abnormally watched-over life.
Time and again, she’s been saved without asking: first as an infant who was given up by her infected mother; then by Marlene after Ellie’s been bitten in the mall; and then, infamously, at that medical clinic by Joel. “She lives in a broken world that you could have saved,” Marlene tells Joel that fateful day in Salt Lake.
But by then, Joel has become more interested in trying to rebuild his own little world, and he’d rather just save Ellie—even if it’s less for her sake than his own. “You can’t see the scope of the whole world,” Gabriel Luna, who plays Tommy, explained to IGN about Joel’s choice to interrupt Ellie’s operation. “You can only see your world, and Ellie is his world.”
As “Through the Valley” ends, it’s clear that everyone’s world has been rocked off its axis. Joel is dead, his gravitational force scattered. Jackson is in ruins, ravaged by an invasion of infected unlike anything the town has seen in a while. Ellie is hell-bent on getting even. Abby appears unfulfilled, even unmoored, after having finally carried out her goal. Abby’s comrades look horrified by what they’ve now borne witness to. In the background, the actress Ashley Johnson, who voices Ellie in the video game and played Ellie’s mother, Anna, in Season 1 of the series, covers a Shawn James song also called “Through the Valley: “I can't walk on the path of the right because I'm wrong.”
In the end, Joel and Ellie’s path comes tragically full circle. When they first met, Joel considered Ellie to be nothing more than some cargo he had to get from one place to another—and told her so. When we last see them traveling together at the end of “Through the Valley,” though, it’s Joel who’s become cargo, his shrouded dead body being dragged through the snow by a horse.
It’s difficult to forget this final image of Joel brought low, but one way to try is to focus on some better times. Like the premiere episode of Season 2, when Joel teaches the charismatic new character Dina about the inner workings of some circuit breakers he’s repairing.
“Too much current runs through, it heats up the strip,” Joel explains. “It bends, releases the lever—circuit breaks!” He sounds a little like a shop class teacher and a lot like his long-ago contractor self. (This may be an episode titled “Future Days” that shifts time five years forward, but for a second, it’s almost like the fella is young again.) “Otherwise,” Joel continues, “the wires get hotter and hotter. Lights the inside of your walls on fire.” And no one wants that.
It’s a lovely, cozy scene, which is what makes it such a devastating one in retrospect. Not only are we getting a glimpse of a kinder, gentler, more patient version of Joel who could have thrived—ensconced in a friendly, fortified community among friends and family; tinkering with springs and spouting therapy speak; peering over his halfway-down-the-nose glasses; proud and paternal and full of purpose—but we’re also hearing him describe the exact kind of process that will come to threaten both his people and this place. (One of the few things worse than having the insides of your walls on fire? Finding out that all your town’s pipes are absolutely teeming with shrooms.)
Joel could, for a time, save Ellie from certain death, whether she wanted him to or not. But he’ll never be able to shield her from the powerful, terrible cycle of white-hot, unbroken energy that led to his own demise (and will now be further sparked by it, too). In one interview, a Last of Us showrunner called Joel’s death “the inciting incident” of this season, suggesting that his bitter end is just the beginning.
Ellie, 19, is now the same age Abby was when Joel shot and killed her surgeon father in Salt Lake, setting in motion her quest for vengeance. And in “Through the Valley,” as Ellie swears she’ll kill Abby and everyone in her crew on Joel’s behalf one day, you can feel the wires getting hotter and hotter, consuming everyone from within, no circuit breakers to be found. It’s hard not to feel that all of this isn’t gonna end well.
