What Happens to Joel in ‘The Last of Us’ Video Game? His Fate Revealed — And How It Impacts Season 2

The Last of Us season 2 is in full swing, but there are some lingering questions about Joel Miller’s (Pedro Pascal) fate.

The Last of Us spoilers below.

The HBO show’s highly anticipated second season premiered on Sunday, April 13, with Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) promising to “slowly” kill Joel after his hospital massacre of the Fireflies. Her rather violent way of thinking seems to hint at Joel’s fate before the season comes to an end.

Still, the show’s cocreator Craig Mazin isn’t offering any hint as to what could possibly in store for the characters or the show’s many avid fans.

“Anybody who has a central role in a story and drives a central relationship of the story will always permeate everything,” he said during a Monday, April 14, appearance of the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, when asked about the possibility that Joel might not survive season 2. “In a show where people are constantly appearing and dying, every death needs to matter.”

Mazin continued, “The way it matters is not what it does to us at home. The way it matters is what it does to the people who survive it inside that story and how it drives them.”

In other words, if Mazin plans to stick to the video game’s story, Joel will die — it’s just a matter of when.

For the uninitiated, when The Last of Us Part II video game was released in 2020, players watched Abby get her revenge on Joel for the murder of her father (the Firefly surgeon he killed at the end of the first game) by beating him to death.

In terms of the show, Mazin has stayed pretty ambiguous about what’s happening with Pascal’s version of Joel — although fans are prepared for the possibility he won’t make it out of the series alive.

“We don’t get too caught up in the idea of the story as religion,” he told IGN while promoting the show’s second season. “We just try and make the best show, but we do it with, I think, an enormous respect for the aspects of the game that work so well. Otherwise, honestly, what the f*** are we doing it for?”

Neil Druckmann — The Last of Us video game writer and show cocreator ­— weighed in on the idea of keeping the show true to cannon during the same interview.

“Certain changes are essential to adapting this. We look at everything in front of us, and say, is this better? Or is this better again for this type of story?” he said. “That creates those wonderful surprises that I, sometimes, enjoy the most.”