Warning: This article contains massive spoilers from The Last of Us season 2, episode 2.
It finally happened. The moment gamers knew would change the show finally occurred on Sunday night’s episode of The Last of Us.
In the episode, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) lures Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Dina (Isabela Merced) to the mansion where her friends have hunkered down. Once inside, the group temporarily puts Dina to sleep, and Abby then reveals herself as the daughter of the doctor Joel killed in Salt Lake City.
To exact her vengeance, Abby shoots Joel in the knee with a shotgun and beats him with a golf club. Ellie eventually storms into the room, but she’s captured before she can save Joel. Despite Ellie’s pleas, Abby stabs Joel with one half of the broken golf club, killing him. The group spares Ellie, who then crawls to Joel’s dead body and lies beside him.
The emotional scene is one of the most heartbreaking moments depicted in the show so far. Filming the scene was not easy for Dever, who lost her mother to metastatic breast cancer in the lead-up to the start of production.
“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene, and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day,” Dever told EW. “So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”
Before Abby kills Joel, she delivers a chilling monologue about how her father’s death led her to this moment. According to The Last of Us co-creator Craig Mazin, Abby’s speech conveyed to Joel that “what he did was wrong” and that “we kill for the people we love.” Because this speech is not part of the game, Dever used it to express Abby’s struggles.
“This very human part of her that has been struggling for so long, and she’s trying to find a way out of that struggle,” Dever explained. “But that is what is very similar to all of those characters, even in that room: all of those characters are just flawed human beings in a lot of ways.”
The third episode of The Last of Us season 2 will air at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, April 27. The episode will air on HBO and stream on Max.
