What Happened to Joel in ‘The Last of Us’ Season 1? His 8 Most Important Moments (PHOTOS)
The popular HBO series The Last of Us is nearly back. The second season is set to premiere Sunday, April 13, on HBO (streaming on Max), following a two-year wait since its January 2023 series premiere.
The show is set 20 years after a fungal pandemic took over the world. Main characters Joel and Ellie, played by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, are brought together by fate and try to survive this post-apocalyptic world full of fungal zombies called the infected. There are different levels to being an infected. There’s Runners, Stalkers, Clickers, and Bloaters, the former two being the most advanced stages of the fungal takeover of the human brain.
Joel is a ruthless survivor who is willing to do whatever it takes to live. The loss of his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), shown in the first episode’s flashback to the pandemic’s first day full of carnage, made Joel a merciless, cold, emotionally-closed off man who has a hard time opening up to people in fear he will lose them. This affects his relationship with Ellie, who is a resilient, strong 14-year-old girl just trying to get by after she learns she’s immune to the fungal infection, making her blood highly valuable to the quest of finding a cure. Joel is tasked with helping Ellie get to the remaining Fireflies, the forces of rebellion against the fascist FEDRA that’s been in control of the U.S. since the pandemic’s onset, in hopes to find a cure.
Season 1 of the video game adaptation depicts the crucial development of Joel and Ellie’s relationship as found father and daughter. Here, we recap Joel’s pivotal Season 1 moments and analyze his character development to refresh your memory before the show returns.
The Last of Us, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, April 13, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on Max
1. Sarah's Death (Episode 1)
Episode 1 shows Joel before the devastating pandemic transformed him forever. We see that Joel is a caring, lighthearted, and devoted single father to Sarah. He does what he can to put a smile on her face. When the pandemic begins, and the world starts to become chaos, we see Joel go straight into protective mode, picking up Sarah with his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and heading as far away from their town as they can.
After they endure a car wreck, he pulls Sarah out from under the car and sees that she cannot walk, so being the resilient dad he is, he runs while carrying Sarah to an almost empty field. They come across a solider who is ordered to kill everyone in sight, no matter if they are sick or not, because it was too early to tell who was and who wasn’t infected. While the solider aims his gun at Joel and Sarah, Tommy comes out of nowhere and shoots the solider, but it was too late. The solider had already fired and hit Sarah in the stomach. Joel realizing she was shot is one of the most devastating scenes in the whole season. The grief fills his whole body as Sarah bleeds out in his arms. Tommy is yelling at him to move, because the infected are coming, but Joel cannot let his daughter go, mentally and physically. We watch him hold Sarah tightly and cry out, showing us the horror of the pandemic’s onset and the moment that hardened Joel’s heart irreparably.
2. Tess' Sacrifice (Episode 2)
In Episode 2, the powerful trio of Tess Anna Torv, Joel, and Ellie attempt to make it through an infected-infested museum. They come in contact with two clickers and battle to survive. During the fight, Tess gets bitten but doesn’t say anything yet to the others. They then get to the Firefly faction they were trying to reach. Realizing everyone inside is dead, Tess confesses to Joel and Ellie that she’s going to succumb to the bite soon. Joel cries at the thought of loosing Tess, his lover and companion through the post-apocalypse.
Tess didn’t believe Ellie could be immune to the infected bites before, but this encounter proves it when Ellie’s bite heals. Tess begs Joel to take Ellie and do the right thing. He listens and stares while consumed with grief knowing he has to leave without her. In this scene, we see Joel care for someone else besides Ellie. Tess has been by Joel’s side through his time in the quarantine zone, and he has no emotional attachment to Ellie yet. Losing Tess is losing his family all over again. With Tommy long missing, Joel must quickly come to terms with the idea of being alone.
Tess makes the ultimate sacrifice when setting off a bomb that kills the swarming infected and herself along with them to give Joel and Ellie time to escape. Joel honors Tess by committing to getting Ellie to the Fireflies.
3. The Kansas City Infected Battle (Episode 5)
At this point, Joel has started to feel protective of Ellie, their father-daughter dynamic growing by the day. Episode 5 is an action-packed episode where Ellie and Joel meet another duo, a couple of brothers named Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Montreal Woodard). The episode takes place in Kansas City, and the newly formed group of four are trying to escape the city without the rebellion catching them.
They use underground tunnels to get across the city, but at the very end of their journey they get caught by the rebellion group and are forced to fight. The fight leads to a massive sink hole forming that lets out all the infected that have been underground for years. These infected are not like the others. They are angry, ravenous, and ginormous. Joel’s role in the battle against the infected is using a sniper gun from a close tower. He originally was up in the tower to take down a man who was shooting at them with the gun, so when the infected came above ground he used it to his advantage instead of going back down.
Joel followed Ellie’s every move while she was trying to get away from the creatures. He used the sniper gun to kill the infected that were coming at her from every angle, the ones that she could not see or did not have time to fight. He did’t look after Henry, Sam, or anyone else on the ground, just Ellie, showing that his fatherly instincts that he had repressed for so long were returning.
4. Joel and Tommy Reunite (Episode 6)
The brotherly bond between these two is powerful and full of love. Earlier in the season, Joel mentioned that Tommy left with a crew of Fireflies. One of the reasons Joel agrees to take Ellie where she needs to go is because it would supply him with needed tools to go find Tommy.
It takes a while, but Joel and Ellie make it to Wyoming in Episode 6 and are ambushed by a group of people on horseback. The group takes them to their commune, and it’s here that Joel spots Tommy in the distance. They run to each other and embrace in a powerful reunion.
This scene proves that their bond was never broken, and it also proved to Joel that he didn’t lose another family member, allowing a small part of him to heal and carry on his and Ellie’s journey to the hospital.
5. Ellie Kills David & the Aftermath (Episode 8)
Ellie comes in contact with a cannibalistic leader of a survival community, David (Scott Shepherd), while trying to find help for the injured Joel. David traps Ellie and tries to assault her. She escapes, sets the whole place on fire, and brutally kills David with a machete.
While Ellie is fighting to survive, Joel gains the strength to go look for her. He finds her walking out of the burning building covered in blood and says his most pivotal line of the season, the one that cements the fact that these two now see each other as family: “It’s OK, baby girl. I got you.” This is the first time we see Joel treat Ellie like his own.
6. Joel Reveals His Suicide Attempt (Episode 9)
In the middle of Episode 9, we see Joel in his most vulnerable state. As they travel through an abandoned city, Joel remembers the time that he was put into an Army emergency medical camp for a cut on his forehead. He then tells Ellie how he got his scar. Joel reveals to Ellie that he once attempted suicide after Sarah was killed. He says he couldn’t see the point in living without his daughter, but as the gun went off he flinched, leaving a cut on his head.
“So, time heals all wounds I guess,” Ellie says, to which Joel replies, “It wasn’t time that did it.” This is the emotional climax of Season 1. With this, Joel is telling Ellie that she has made him feel whole again. Will this bond stay strong in Season 2? The events of the Season 1 finale may complicate things.
7. Joel Kills Fireflies in the Hospital (Episode 9)
Joel and Ellie finally make it to the Firefly hospital in the Season 1 finale. Here, the Fireflies are supposedly prepared to develop a cure for the fungal infection from Ellie’s immune blood. Marlene (Merle Dandridge, who also voiced this character in the video game) and the rest of the Firefly crew were waiting for their arrival, but horror set in when Joel learned that the procedure would kill Ellie. She consented to the surgery, but she had no idea they were going to kill her during it. Joel goes on a killing rampage in retaliation to save his kid from the operating room.
On the way out of the compound, an unconscious Ellie cradled in his arms, he comes in contact with Marlene. His relationship with Marlene is rocky, but he’s known her since Tommy joined her group and is aware that she has been Ellie’s guardian ever since her mom (played by Ashley Johnson, the voice of Ellie in the video games) died. Marlene tries to convince him to do the “right” thing in sacrificing Ellie for the sake of the world. Joel couldn’t stand the thought of loosing another daughter. He finally got a second chance with Ellie, and he wasn’t going to let that go. With the thought of losing Ellie consuming him, Joel pulls the trigger on the gun one last time and kills Marlene.
This episode solidifies Joel’s love for Ellie that’s been building throughout the season, and it’s a point of no return that will reverberate throughout Season 2.
8. Joel Lies to Ellie About the Hospital (Episode 9)
Joel lies to Ellie about what he did in the hospital after they’ve left the compound, saying that raiders attacked the hospital while she was passed out pre-surgery. He digs his heels in deeper when Ellie presses him further for the truth. While many of the people he killed were armed guards, he also killed the doctor who was going to work on making the cure. Doctors and scientists are hard to come by in this post-apocalyptic world, and Joel just killed the one trying to make a cure. However, that doctor and the Fireflies were willing to kill Ellie to make it, creating a huge moral dilemma.
This lie concludes the first season and is the jumping-off point for Season 2, with teasers for the new episodes showing conflict between the pair over what really happened in the hospital. We wonder what this will bring for Joel in the new episodes. Guilt? Regret? Power? We’ll have to wait and see.
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