Here’s Whether We’ve Truly Seen the Last of Pedro Pascal’s Joel in The Last Of Us & The 1 Scene Game Fans Are Hoping For
Warning. Major spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2. Pedro Pascal is everywhere these days. He’s got a rom-com coming, Materialists, with Dakota Johnson. He’s been giving interviews about his role as Joel Miller in The Last of Us, a role he has played since the show’s first season, one which has now come to a heartbreaking, if predictable, end. He is set to star as Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, in Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps and also in the next Avengers movie. He’s also set to return to the Star Wars universe for another Mandalorian movie.
All of that leaves very little time for Pascal to just pop back in in places where his storyline is finished, which doesn’t seem to bode really well for fans hoping to see him back in the role of Joel in The Last of Us. After all, the last time we saw Joel, his storyline was ending pretty abruptly and definitively at the hands of Abby. Joel is dead. Ellie and us got to witness it.
Related: Who dies in The Last of Us Season 2?
But does that mean we won’t see Joel ever again? Is Pedro Pascal coming back to The Last of Us as Joel? We’ve got an answer.
Is Pedro Pascal Coming Back to The Last of Us as Joel?
The answer is probably not surprising for fans of the game, but we will indeed be seeing Pedro Pascal again this season of The Last of Us. Eagle-eyed fans might have already noticed there are shots in the promotional material, including the trailer, that have yet to be shown. Those belong in flashbacks to the five years we didn’t see in the timeline, and which the show will show us at some point in the season.
“But I will say, and I’ll be intentional about this, that we do know that for the viewer, there are some mysteries here. There’s some gaps about Ellie and Joel’s relationship, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler based on the fact that there is a trailer out there with lots of shots in it — this is not the last we will see of Joel,” co-creator Craig Mazin said in The Last of Us podcast.
How much more we’ll see Joel is hard to tell, but game fans are expecting to see at least flashbacks to some specific moments in the game—good moments, from Joel and Ellie’s relationship, as well as a very specific conversation that was left out of Episode 1 that puts into context what we saw at the beginning of Episode 2 and where Ellie and Joel’s relationship was at before Joel was killed.
At the beginning of Episode 2, Joel goes on patrol with Dina. Last we saw Joel and Ellie, they were not on good terms with each other, with Ellie walking past the porch where Joel was sitting on without talking to him. In the game, though, she stops and has a pivotal conversation with Joel, one that might not fix their relationship, but at least makes it feel like they could have one day fixed it.
It’s possible the show cut this porch scene, but it is more likely they saved it to show it to us later, particularly because at the beginning of Episode 2, Ellie even asks about Joel, and seems willing to go on patrol with him—a stark contrast to how she’s behaved regarding Joel in the entirety of the first episode.
So there’s a lot for The Last of Us to show us when, not if, Pedro Pascal returns.
