Warning. Major spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2. Pedro Pascal is booked and busy these days. Everywhere you look, Pascal is in something. He was in the movie Freaky Tales not that long ago. He’s set to appear in another movie, Materialists, with Dakota Johnson. He is, of course, starring as Joel in The Last of Us, a role he has played since the groundbreaking show’s first season. Oh, and of course, Pascal will also headline Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps in the role of Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic.
In fact, the real question should be how Pascal had time to do all of this? How could he film all of these things? And perhaps the answer is that he didn’t have to film all that much for HBO‘s The Last of Us Season 2, considering his character’s fate.
Related: Who dies in The Last of Us Season 2?
But why did Pedro Pascal leave The Last of Us? What happened to Joel? We break it all down.
Why did Pedro Pascal leave The Last of Us?
It’s less accurate to say that Pascal left The Last of Us than it is to say that his time as Joel was always numbered. When Pascal took the role of Joel, it was always with the knowledge that the character would be killed off at some point in Season 2—likely early. In the game, Joel is killed off about 5% into it. So, it’s not that Pascal was written off in a creative decision made for the season, or that he asked to leave the show because he was too busy. This was just the way his character was always going to go.
But what happened to Joel? At the end of Season 1, Joel rescues Ellie from dying at the hands of a group of Fireflies who are looking for a cure for the virus and believe that Ellie is the key to it all. They are not sure if they can develop a cure from Ellie, who is immune, but they are willing to try. When Joel finds out that possibly developing a cure will kill Ellie, he decides that’s too high a price to pay, and he kills all the Fireflies as well as the doctor operating on Ellie, and then takes her to Jackson, where his brother is.
It just so happens that the doctor he kills has a daughter, Abby, who then comes after Joel looking for revenge. She kills Joel in a brutal fashion, while Ellie gets to witness how the only parental figure she has ever had is taken from her. That, in turn, sets Ellie in her own quest for revenge on Abby and everyone in her crew, which is basically what the entire second The Last of Us game is about. An eye for an eye and all that.
We are still going to see a bit more of Pascal, as HBO has shown some scenes in trailers and stills that are likely to be Joel and Ellie flashbacks to better moments in their relationships. Knowing the show, those flashbacks are likely to come when they hurt us most, perhaps in the last few episodes of the season, after Ellie’s path of revenge is already firmly established. The flashbacks are also likely to include the full porch scene we didn’t get to see in the first episode, with Joel and Ellie’s last conversation about what happened with the Fireflies, one of the most iconic moments in the second game.
