‘The Walking Dead’ Makes Me Worry About ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2

Ever since we could confirm that The Last of Us on HBO was actually going to be good (about five minutes into the first episode), I have been worried about a very specific place the show would be forced to head in season 2. And I keep thinking of a very specific moment in the Walking Dead that mirrors what’s coming, and what it did to that series.

To talk about this any further, we are going to have to get into spoiler territory for both season 2 of the show and the second game. The Last of Us game-players no doubt already know what I’m talking about.

Spoilers ahead.

Yesterday, we finally saw the beginnings of a true bond between Joel and Ellie. While Joel still refers to her as “cargo,” not family, we know that’s where things are heading, and the joke book “runs in your jeans” moment with the two of them giggling was suitably adorable.

The bond between Joel and Ellie is the root of the entire series, which is what leads to the wild finale of Joel picking Ellie over the potential fate of all humanity by shooting a doctor trying to extract a potential cure from Ellie, a procedure which would kill her. It also leads into Part 2 where that bond is shattered.

In Part 2, Joel is tracked, hunted and beaten to death with a golf club by Abby, a young woman who turns out to be the daughter of the doctor who Joel killed. Joel is killed right in front of Ellie, brutally, and the rest of the game is a split narrative between Abby, where the game tries to force you to see things from her side, and view Ellie as the next monster to slay, and then Ellie herself, who is naturally trying to exact revenge on Abby for Joel’s death at all costs.

I am worried about the show executing Joel like this, despite the fact that it’s from the source material. I am worried that TV audiences won’t be able to handle it, even more so than game audiences, where Joel’s death remains a point of controversy to this day.

Why? Enter The Walking Dead.

You can say that HBO viewers are familiar with big character deaths because of shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, but this is different. This is almost exactly the same situation as The Walking Dead’s famed season 7 premiere execution of Glenn at the hands of Negan, where he was violently beaten to death with a barbed wire bat in front of his wife, Maggie.

For show-watchers, it didn’t matter that this sequence was pulled almost frame by frame from the source material, down to Glenn’s eyeball popping out of his head. It was the fact they killed Glenn, and the way they killed him which became such a massive turn-off that many people stopped watching the show entirely. That’s how devasting and gross it was.

This wasn’t just talk, even though anecdotally, I know a lot of people who said they stopped watching when Negan killed Glenn. It’s also reflected in the numbers. Glenn’s death episode was the most watched episode in series history, and then immediately, the next week, the show lost 5 million viewers, and declined every subsequent season after that. It never recovered its lost viewership after that.

I am concerned about The Last of Us audience potentially reacting the same way, even if this would be an exact interpretation of the source material. And while we have seen the show change the fates of some characters, ie. Bill getting a peaceful death with Frank, they can’t not kill Joel. It’s the impetus for the entire storyline of the second game, which is supposed to span two seasons of the show. There’s no way around it.

We are about to see an audience fall even more in love with Pedro Pascal’s Joel over the course of this season. He’s even more endearing than game Joel. And we are absolutely heading to a place where the show will have to shatter its audience, and I just wonder if they’ll be able to pick up the pieces and recover, or if we’ll have Negan-Glenn part 2, and it ends up being a mass departure point for the series. I hope it isn’t, but having lived through that Walking Dead era, it’s always on my mind.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.