It's been almost a week, and the world is still recovering from the loss of Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) at the hands (and swing) of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in season 2 of The Last of Us. Now, it might seem that the show was all about ripping your heart out through this harrowing experience (which it did), but the show's creators have recently revealed they had the best interests of the fans in mind when it came to precisely when it was going to happen. To quote Joel himself, they just needed to do it already.
In an interview with Variety showrunners Neil Druckmann (creator of The Last of Us games) and Craig Mazin revealed that they'd battled with the idea of precisely when the big death was going to happen. "Because even in the game, there’s like an hour or something before you get to this moment. But we also knew it needed to be early enough, because this is the inciting incident for this story," Druckmann explained. "So yes, we always pick every permutation, but the later it got in the season, it just felt we were kind of dragging our feet instead of just getting to the meat of what the story is about."
