'The Last Of Us' Season 2 Makes Joel's Death Scene Even Worse: "This Is To Shame Us"

HBO did not change the fact that Abby kills Joel in its second season of The Last of Us as she did in The Last of Us Part II game. However, they made the scene even worse than the original.

YouTuber Synthetic Man explained why he believes the season is even worse in the live-action adaptation than in the game.

First, he pointed to the lighting and the setting. Referring to the game, he noted, “The lighting in this scene is so much better than this scene. I mean, it’s in the dark. You know some s**t’s about to go down. You can feel it in the air.”

“You could maybe argue that in the show they did this on purpose so that you wouldn’t be able to predict that Joel was about to get beaten to death, but, I don’t know, in a way it just feels cheaper that they’re just out in the main room of the lodge,” he added.

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He then noted that they replaced Tommy with Dinah and instead of Tommy being pistol whipped as he is in the game, Abby’s crew puts her to sleep with an injection of some kind of anesthetic.

Next, he pointed to why the scene is worse in HBO’s version than in the game, “It’s because Abby monologues for like five f***ing minutes. And it’s just another humiliation ritual.”

From there, he did note the show made one slight improvement to the scene by getting Joel to confess he was the one to kill the Fireflys before they attacked him thus confirming his identity and they were getting revenge on the right person.

However, he then returned to why the scene is so bad, “Everything else about this is pure filler. But not just filler, it’s propaganda. After she shotguns Joel in the leg, Joel just kind of sits there and lets Abby lecture him for minutes, dude.”

“Joel doesn’t interrupt Abby until like several minutes into her f***ing speech,” he continued. “It’s so long and painful. There’s a part where she gets within a foot of Joel’s face. Joel could have just socked her in the f***ing jaw right there. And he would have. There’s no f***ing way he would just listen to some f***ing b***h lecture him for several minutes. This is so bad.”

“And you know exactly why they did this s**t. … This isn’t just to humiliate Joel and to say that he’s a bad person for saving Ellie and killing the Fireflys. No, this is to shame us, the people who supported Joel’s decision because it was the objectively correct one ‘cause Druckman hates everyone who support Joel,” Synthetic Man stated.

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Speaking specifically to Abby bashing Joel with the golf club, he described it as “way s***ier than the original.”

He explained, “Because, once again, this Abby is literally just a normal f***ing woman, dude. And so somehow this tiny, weak Abby actually snaps the golf club hitting Joel and then punches him in the face for presumably multiple minutes. This is a normal woman punching a man in the face. Her f***ing bones in her hands would be shattered. My immersion is so destroyed it’s unreal. The girlboss feminism crap is way less believable than the game.

“At the very least, Abby was f***ing Senator Armstrong roided to the gills — and, yes, it was pretty immersion-breaking that she was on as heavy a stack as a f***ing bodybuilder in the post-apocalypse,” he elaborated. “At least then it justified the crazy masculine actions that she takes throughout the game. I’m never going to believe that from this Abby. This is the same type of feminism propaganda, but just out of a different lens.”

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The show’s second season currently has a 53% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter.

What do you make of Synthetic Man’s thoughts?

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