The Last of Us season 2: Why did big death happen early?

We know that there is a new episode of The Last of Us season 2 airing this weekend on HBO, and we know that Joel’s death is still a top story. Even if you knew that it was coming thanks to the video games, that does not make it easy. This was a brutal, painful moment on the series, and we do tend to think it is going to take a lot of time to fully recover from everything that we saw.

Now, we do think there is a fair question to wonder at this point with the show: Why kill Joel off at this point? Why so early? You have a huge star in Pedro Pascal and because of that, you could have easily argued it makes more sense to keep him around as long as possible. Yet, at the same time, the character does die early in the game, and there is a part of authenticity that goes into this.

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Speaking to Variety, co-showrunner Craig Mazin notes that even separate from the source material, there was a clear reason why the death happened when it did:

There’s a danger of tormenting people. It’s not what we want to do. If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet. Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people.

This does make a lot of sense and if you do love Pascal, the one bit of comfort we can offer here is the rather simple fact that he will still be appearing in some form. Odds are, there are either some flashbacks or dream sequences on the way here.

Related – Be sure to get some more news on The Last of Us now, including what else is ahead this weekend

What did you think about the big events of The Last of Us season 2 as of late?

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