Warning: This article contains major spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2, “Through the Valley.”
The inside of Joel’s house looks like someone left in a hurry. A mug with the phrase “can’t touch this” above a cactus rests on the kitchen island. A brown ring forms around the bottom as stray coffee grounds linger along the countertop. Upstairs, a mid-chiseled wooden boar and horse are left unfinished in Joel’s workspace, a guitar leans against the bedroom window sill, and a copy of Idiot’s Guide to Space lies half read on the nightstand.
It’s as if time completely stopped after “that day,” which is the particular phrasing co-showrunner Craig Mazin uses for the moment that left this house so devoid of life. On the Vancouver set of HBO’s The Last of Us season 2 in late April 2024, “the event,” “the Joel and Abby moment,” and “the scene” seem to be other go-to descriptors — as if calling it what it is makes it real and, therefore, unavoidable.
“I think it was a hushed thing, like scary words that no one wants to utter,” Bella Ramsey, who plays Joel’s surrogate daughter, Ellie, tells Entertainment Weekly. “It feels like too big of a thing to just speak about it.”
There’s no avoiding it now. The Last of Us season 2’s second episode, “Through the Valley,” premiered Sunday night on HBO and Max, and audiences finally reached the point in the story where this new reality sets in: Joel Miller is dead.
“When it came time to discuss it with other people [outside of production], we were circumspect,” Mazin says. “Everybody really cared about making sure that this felt like what it was, which was an event we all respected.”
Even though he didn’t play The Last of Us Part II, the 2020 video game on which season 2 is based, Pedro Pascal knew this would be his character’s fate from the moment he accepted the job.
“It’s not like they said, ‘Hey, we kill you at the beginning of season 2,’ but it was always an understanding that it would stay true to the source material in a specific way and that the, let’s say, practical and exclusive obligation would be for season 1,” the actor recalls. “It was just a matter of how and when.”
The season 1 finale, which aired in March 2023, left Joel with a choice. He could let Ellie, the only known individual immune to the monster-spawning Cordyceps virus that destroyed the world, die on an operating table so the Fireflies rebel group could engineer a vaccine…or he could save her and kill anyone who tried to stop him. He picked Door No. 2. And now, five years later in the context of the story, a young woman comes to Jackson in search of retribution.
Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), revealed to be the daughter of the unarmed doctor who Joel callously gunned down on his murder spree, tracks her father’s killer to the Jackson, Wyo., community with a group of former Fireflies. The entire town falls under siege by an infected horde, allowing Abby to easily isolate Joel, who left on patrol earlier that morning with Ellie’s friend Dina (Isabela Merced). In a remote house up the mountain, Abby’s allies — Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and Manny (Danny Ramirez) — all bear witness as she bashes Joel to death with a golf club.
Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, and Kaitlyn Dever for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
The death of their main character is what the cast and crew danced around for so long, especially during the press tour for season 2. This crucial element defines so much of what the story, and the show at large, becomes moving forward. Ellie, now consumed by grief and rage, sets out on a mission to exact vengeance against Abby and her crew, causing untold chaos in her wake.
“It wasn’t surprising to me when Neil talked about it when we were just starting to work on the first season,” Mazin comments, referring to his partner in crime, Neil Druckmann, the other showrunner and a co-creator of the video games. “Part of what makes The Last of Us relevant to those of us who aren’t living in a fungal apocalypse is that it portrays the shattering nature of loss. It talks about what is left behind when somebody is torn away from you. Then you start to wonder what price we all pay in our lives — all of us — for caring about people that much.”
So much of the tension Druckmann felt approaching this moment for the second time, now in TV form, came from trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. The Last of Us Part II, a game anchored by this event, won numerous awards after its release in 2020, including Game of the Year. And with season 1 of the drama adaptation scooping up eight Emmys, the sophomore cycle has a lot to live up to.
“So many times adaptations don’t, and you can’t recapture that moment. Here, I feel so lucky that we did,” Druckmann says. “Honestly, knowing now Pedro and Bella, I had no doubt that we would, because I know how they act and what they throw into it. The fact that it still works just speaks to the magic of these incredible actors.”
Pedro Pascal for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
Pascal is sitting on the couch of his Los Angeles hotel, hours before season 2’s world premiere event, as light peeks through the window shades, cradling one side of his face in a warm, almost holy glow. But the Ramsey-dubbed “zombie zaddy” — a moniker he’s convinced has likely run its course, though his fans remain skeptical — is playful in the face of such serious subject matter.
“I get killed a lot,’ Pascal, whose characters died in Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Equalizer 2, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle, says, with a zealous bounce in his voice. “I like to die.”
While the entire episode took more than a month and a half to film principal photography, Joel’s death sequence was shot at the start of March 2024 over the course of two days in Kamloops, Canada, where the wintry climate proved unforgiving. Production’s first effort to fly Pascal in from Vancouver was unsuccessful; the weather forced the plane to reroute and try again the following morning.
“The location lived up to the expectation of being a really tough terrain,” Pascal remarks. “It was freezing cold.”
The day of, he didn’t notice any kind of energy shift until he emerged in the room in his final “bloody pulp” look, complete with a throbbing shiner on his left eye and blood stains on his body, courtesy of the craft team.
Bella Ramsey for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
“I’ve never experienced anything like I did that day where I stepped onto set in full makeup and then killed the vibe completely as soon as anyone set their eyes on me,” Pascal says. “This kind of shock and heartbreak… it was weird to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like the extreme version of, ‘Is there something on my face?’ I really could see this sort of grief take over everyone’s look in their eyes.”
Ramsey recognized the importance of this day early on, but also foresaw a lot of press asking them about the scene in particular. Speaking over Zoom from London, they pull out their journal to read aloud the entry they wrote during production.
“March 7, it was. I wrote, ‘Kill Joel Day,'” Ramsey says, giggling. The actor then reads directly from their notebook: “So, Bella, what was your prep like for that first day? Talk us through it. Well, I pretended like it was a normal day. I actually tried to not be in the zone between takes. I read the scene minutes before shooting it. I watched a video of ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time.'”
The song became an inside joke between Ramsey and Mazin. “It’s like a death song,” Ramsey explains in an aside. “It’s like, ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ comes for us all.'” They continue reading: “I was listening to that at full volume and danced to it, and I mouthed the lyrics right up until action.”
In another aside, Ramsey points out, “If you watch the 10 seconds before the pre-roll, you’ll literally be able to see me singing it.”
Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
Even though she’s playing Joel’s killer, Dever admits it was “heartbreaking” for her to watch, while reflecting on the moment during a group interview with Ramsey and Pascal on the set of EW’s cover shoot.
“I watched you guys in season 1, and your relationship was so beautiful. And watching the end of you guys was really, really hard for me, as a viewer.”
The first time Pascal and Dever met was on a picket line. In 2023, they joined dozens of other actors, writers, and industry allies outside of Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, Calif., one of various locations where members of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America rallied in support of the ongoing actor and screenwriter strikes.
“I knew that she had been cast, but she didn’t know that I knew,” Pascal says, remembering how confused the Booksmart and Apple Cider Vinegar star looked when he then joyously approached her in person. “She is a gangster of an actor, and I’ve gotten to see it in all of the things that she’s done.”
Kaitlyn Dever for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
Pascal’s first scene with Dever for season 2 was, in fact, Joel’s death, which also marked the first material she shot as Abby.
“It was just a massive scene emotionally, and with blocking, too,” Dever describes. “There were so many moving parts and so many things to navigate.”
Dever, however, had a singularly difficult experience preparing for this moment. She was gearing up to tackle material that dealt with a child grieving the loss of a parent at a time when she was going through a comparable circumstance.
“To be as honest as possible,” she begins, “I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible.”
At the age of 39, Dever’s mother, Kathy, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, which she would go on to battle for 14 years. On Feb. 21, 2024, Dever shared a deeply personal statement on Instagram. Accompanied by a carousel of old photos of her with her mom, the actress revealed that Kathy had succumbed to her illness.
“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene [on The Last of Us],” Dever shares, “and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day. So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”
Mazin and Druckmann remain in awe of Dever for the fortitude she displayed during this period.
“We said, ‘Take your time. Take all the time you need,'” Mazin recalls. “While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show. I’m not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process.”
Kaitlyn Dever on set of ‘The Last of Us’ season 2, episode 2, “Through the Valley”. Liane Hentscher/HBO
The crew overhauled the shoot schedule as a courtesy, turning their attention to other coverage they could capture without Dever for the time being. She then picked the day she felt most comfortable filming Abby’s big scene with Joel. The shoot was a closed set to limit the number of bystanders to the necessary people.
Dever’s personal requests for the crew were “minimal,” Mazin adds, “which were easy to honor — and then off we went.”
The only things Dever remembers consuming during that time were donut holes and heavy amounts of coffee; “that’s all I was in the mood for,” she says. “Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it. Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it. I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of… I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”
To her benefit, Dever wasn’t alone. The entire cast came together to pull off this crucial sequence. Director Mark Mylod (Succession) treated the troupe almost like a sports team. They would all gather in between takes to receive notes as a group, rather than individually.
Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, Pedro Pascal as Joel on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
“It made us all feel like we were a team and doing this together,” Dever says. “I’ve never experienced that before.”
Mylod, who’s also been tapped for HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series, came in specifically to direct this episode. Druckmann spoke at length with the filmmaker in advance of the shoot.
“”I thought our conversation would be a lot about the logistics of the infected, or he might ask me some backstory about Jackson or something,” Druckmann says. “Almost the entire time we chatted, it was about the event.”
“I remained, throughout the production, far more terrified of directing the scenes leading up to Pedro’s death than anything in the action sequences,” Mylod reveals. “The action sequences were a huge logistical challenge — and a brilliant challenge, a totally different muscle. I’ve got a whole different side of the brain to the intimacy and pain and vulnerability that we all had to go to try to do justice to such a huge moment and to such beautiful writing.”
Mylod and cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt (House of the Dragon) shied away from depicting much of the actual violence of Abby beating Joel. Instead they focused on faces to tell that story. The camera lingers on close-ups of Lord, Barer, Gabrielle, and Ramirez as the golf club first swings. Mazin recalls a moment from one of their takes on set: As the scene progresses, Barer begins to cry.
“It wasn’t anything that Mark or I had asked her to do,” he says. “It was just she was feeling it. It matters more than any kind of grotesque detail. All those people who are in that room, all those stories are going to continue forward — and in next season, perhaps. But every good story I think always starts with some sort of original sin or an original trauma. And here is that one right here.”
Kaitlyn Dever for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
From the jump, “Through the Valley” signals The Last of Us will approach the event differently than how it plays out in the source material. The game withholds Abby’s backstory so users can discover that information by playing as both her and Ellie at different points, while the HBO drama incorporates new material to create empathy for the character earlier on. One such divergence is a dream sequence that opens episode 2.
Future Abby meets her younger self in the hallway of the Fireflies hospital in Salt Lake City, just after Joel’s rampage. It’s as if Abby is trying to warn herself about what will happen if she enters the room where her father lies dead.
“It just encapsulates everything that she’s feeling for that scene that comes after,” Dever, who’d never acted opposite herself before, explains. “She so badly wants her old life back. She so badly wants the situation to not be what it is.”
Mazin also wrote a monologue for Dever that isn’t in the Part II video game. In the minutes before Abby kills Joel, she tells him everything that’s been weighing on her. To Mazin, that kind of invention, of filling in the blanks of the game’s story, is the fun part of his job.
“It’s really just about imagining how angry she is and how hurt, but also how correct she is in her mind,” he explains. “What is important for her to convey is that what he did was wrong. The end. Guilty. Sentenced to die. No argument. No debate. No nothing. I do love how Pedro portrayed this kind of acceptance of it there. The truth is, what he did is what she’s doing now. We kill for the people we love. Joel has an experience that neither Ellie nor Abby have — and we’re going to explore this further in the season — and that is the experience of loving a child, which is different than being a child and loving a parent.”
Pedro Pascal’s Joel on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
Two other massive story changes offer different shades of the story gamers once knew. In The Last of Us Part II, it’s Joel’s brother, Tommy, who is with him when they encounter Abby and is subsequently knocked out when the bludgeoning begins. In the show, Dina, a love interest for Ellie, now fills that role.
“Early on, we talked a lot about clarifying, or at least demonstrating, how much Dina cared about Joel,” Mazin says. “Dina did care deeply about Joel. To put Dina in that spot and to make her a front-row participant in this murder, it connects us more to her. Her choice to stay by Ellie’s side through thick and thin from this point forward is motivated just as much by her loss as it is by her friendship with Ellie.”
Bella Ramsey as Ellie cradles the remains of Pedro Pascal’s Joel on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
Ramsey teases the relationship between Ellie and Dina moving forward from this: “They’ve become trauma bonded, in a way, but there’s also an element of resentment. I think there was some real jealousy. Dina got to be with him, Dina got to spend that last day with him, and there’s a lot of guilt and regret on Ellie’s part. That was just a little thing that I was laced into, what I took afterwards, especially when they speak about it for the first time.”
Being stuck becomes a recurring theme.
“We know Joel got stuck for the longest time until Ellie came along and unstuck him,” Mazin explains. “We’re going to see in the season how Dina, in a sense, is stuck. And we clearly see here that Abby is very stuck. This is part of our human frailty. We get disrupted by these wounds, and if we can’t even stop ourselves from walking down the hallway, what chance do we have to move past this?”
Pedro Pascal for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
Tommy’s (Gabriel Luna) role, meanwhile, is repurposed. He’s busy protecting the entire Jackson community when an infected horde attacks their gates — effectively cutting off Joel from any aid he might’ve received. In the game, players hear talk of how this community defends itself from constant infected onslaughts but never experience it themselves. Druckmann wanted, in part, to demonstrate “what could happen to Jackson when its defenses are down or when they’re attacked in a really pivotal way.”
He continues: “We really wanted to talk about community. This was something that we just couldn’t do in the game because we were so dogmatic about POV; you’re only seeing events either through Ellie’s eyes or Abby’s eyes, that’s it, in the game.”
Now with this sequence in the show, “You’re seeing Tommy go from ‘I’m trying to save the town’ to all of a sudden, ‘No, no, I’m trying to save Maria, because as much as I care about everybody else in this town, there’s two people in this town that I care about more,’ and that’s his wife and his son.”
Endless boardroom meetings, storyboarding, previz planning with VFX supervisor Alex Wang, scheduling the play-by-play with first AD Dan Miller, and countless other craftspeople went into pulling off such a massive feat, according to Mylod. The director even calls out the stuntman who portrayed the Bloater that Tommy fights on the ground.
“On one day, it’s like 12 or 14 times we blasted him with that flamethrower,” Mylod says. “We almost gave him hypothermia, which I know sounds counterintuitive, but every time you prep for a burn, you have to cool. They put all these cooling pads and a cooling tent on. So every time we did a take, we then had to super cool him, basically, for an hour or half an hour before we could do the next take. But he just kept going.”
Bella Ramsey’s Ellie and Tati Gabrielle’s Nora on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
One constant of both the game and the show is Ellie. As the town fights for survival, she stumbles upon the violent scene with Joel and is forced to watch as Abby delivers the final blow — driving the broken golf club shaft into the back of his neck. On set, Mazin says the hardest part of pulling off the scene wasn’t the actual filming of it. That, he explains, ultimately comes down to logistics.
“The hardest part was watching Bella watching it happen,” he notes.
Mazin continues, “Pedro and Bella are extraordinarily close. They worked hand in glove, they care deeply about each other. If you’re going to pretend to be in that moment, it’s probably a simple thing, but this isn’t pretend. I can tell you just from being in that room, it’s happening: The pain that [Ellie’s] feeling there and then that rage… That is not calculated or synthetic. It was hard to feel like we were breaking something that we had all spent so much time very carefully building and making work.”
Ramsey got emotional the first time they read the script for this episode.
“I’ve never cried reading a piece of writing before, but I had such a gastral reaction to it,” they say. “It’s almost like we’ve played that dynamic, me and Pedro, for a year, and it feels like father-daughter in some way. I think my reaction to that being over was quite a gradual feeling. Also knowing that that would be the end of Pedro and us two working together in this capacity.”
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover story. Gina Gizella Manning
The final minutes of the episode are solemn. Jesse (Young Mazino) finally catches up with Ellie and Dina, but he’s too late. All he can do is help them transport Joel’s dead body back home for burial, while the town buries their own dead and puts down those infected.
As we see Joel’s remains dragged through the snow, a song begins to play. Ashley Johnson, who originated the role of Ellie in the video games and played Ellie’s mom in The Last of Us season 1, makes a voice cameo to perform a haunting rendition of Shawn James’ 2012 folk tune “Through the Valley,” from which the episode takes its title. It’s the same song Johnson recorded for the very teaser that first announced The Last of Us Part II in 2016. Mazin confirms the piece featured in the episode is a blend of that original performance and “a slightly updated version.”
“It is an interesting thing in a moment like this,” he continues, “when your only parent is taken from you and the parent you’ve never met, the one you don’t even know about, is there watching.”
Kaitlyn Dever, Pedro Pascal, and Bella Ramsey for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
In the aftermath of this fateful day, Ramsey’s Ellie walks through Joel’s empty house, taking in each room. Mirroring a familiar sequence from the game, she stops at the bedroom closet where she sees his jacket hanging there. His scent lingers on the fabric, and the moment it hits her nose, memories flood back and she begins to weep.
Pausing in between camera setups, Mazin predicts Joel will be trending the night of episode 2’s debut. In the thick of production, he says he went to bed “in a panic” and woke up in a similar state, stressing about doing justice to this world-shaking piece of the game. “I feel like I’m going to be [hiding] underneath my sheets that night.”
Asked about it again one year later, the showrunner has a different response: “I feel this weird sense of guilt, but also a sense of pride because I think we’ve made something remarkable here. I think we’ve made something very shattering that will earn people’s attention and interest for seasons to come. I guess if there’s one thing I would want people to know, it’s that night, I’ll sit there and I’ll watch it. And [if] they are upset, I get it. We’re not doing it because we like to upset people. We’re doing it because this story echoes life, and life unfortunately includes this.”
Kaitlyn Dever for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover story. Gina Gizella Manning
To say gamers had strong reactions to Joel’s death in Part II is putting it mildly. Prior to release, a leaker hacked into the systems of the developers at Naughty Dog and spoiled major plot points from the story months in advance, which fueled a barrage of toxic responses, including death threats, against the creators. In the Grounded II documentary, Laura Bailey, the original actor behind Abby, recalls through tears how people went as far as to threaten her newborn.
Though Dever (as of late March) didn’t connect with Bailey, the actress is certainly aware of those responses. She does have a feeling that she’ll check her phone at some point in the night on April 20, 2025, to see what the reaction is. “It’s so hard not to,” she says.
“I’m taking all of this as it comes,” Dever continues. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to plan for it. I don’t know how people are going to react. I hope that people appreciate what I did with the role, and that’s all I can really do. I feel good sitting in that space just because I really don’t have any control. It’s done. What I did is out there, it’s going to happen. I think that in playing the role, I obviously wanted to do the game character justice, but also bring my own authenticity to the role and humanize her in the best way that I could. With the help of Craig and Neil developing who that character was going to be, I’m very, very proud of it.”
Pedro Pascal for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
Pascal isn’t completely gone from the show. As teased in various trailers, which depict scenes featuring the actor that we haven’t seen yet, Joel will appear at least in flashback.
“If we’ve done our jobs right, you’ll feel Joel there a lot,” Mazin confirms.
“I’m in active denial,” Pascal admits. “I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over. I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us. And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad.”
What fills him with pride, however, is seeing Ramsey take charge. The pair went through the gauntlet together in co-leading season 1. Now it’s Ellie’s story. When Pascal returned to set to film flashback scenes, the parental bond they forged for the screen felt palpable.
“Bella was never my child, but there’s an obvious parental dynamic between the characters of Joel and Ellie,” he says. “I did feel this sort of pride that I had nothing to do with but was able to observe how effortlessly they stepped into a position of leadership.”
Bella Ramsey for EW’s ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 cover shoot. Gina Gizella Manning
“It definitely felt heavier,” Ramsey admits of being the only No. 1 on the call sheet. “I’ve felt the weight of the responsibility of it more, and not the responsibility of being the main character as much. It is more just the workload and being there literally every day. I did feel at times I was carrying the whole thing on my back, which obviously isn’t true. So many people are contributing. Within how dark the story gets this season, it definitely felt heavy, but I was supported the whole time.”
Back on set, Ramsey’s Ellie and Merced’s Dina now sit opposite each other at Joel’s dining room table. Dina brought over homemade cookies as they plot next steps. It’s the first time Ellie hears Abby’s name spoken aloud, and Ramsey takes their time letting the word wash over their character in a whispered tone.
“So… what do we do now?”
Merced, in character, closes out this scene by asking the question through a mouthful of cookies. The pair sit in silence for a beat, pondering the answer before their director, Emmy nominee Peter Hoar (who helmed season 1’s Bill and Frank hour), yells cut. Ramsey then delivers a response. It’s completely off script and meant to be a joke to lighten the mood in between takes, yet it is on theme for what’s to come…
“We gonna kill a bitch.”
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Directed by Alison Wild + Kristen Harding
Photography by Gina Gizella Manning
Motion – DP: Jon Morris; SteadiCam Op: Leo Harim Miranda; 1st AC: Nathan Garfinkel; PlayBack: Doug Ede; Key Grip: John Dryden; Best Grip: Jordy Bird; Grip: Marc O’Reilly; Gaffer: Steve De Zwart; Best Electric: Greg Milton; Lamp Op: Joel Dye
Production Design – Production Designer: Scott Moulton; Art Assistants: Dan Thibideau, Adrian Celis, Jay Sherrill, David Bain
Photo – DigiTech: Mike Tran; Assistants: Wayne Hoecher, John Watson
Production – Producer: Kendra Voth/In the City Entertainment; PA: Shamus Cochlin
Post-Production – Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; Design: Alice Morgan; Sound Design: Morgan Sanguedolce; Score: Neophonic
Video Interview – DP: Nash Stenvanovic; Cam Op: Chris Bedyk; Sound: Eric Davies
