“Through The Valley” feels like the sort of episode where a character is going to die. Maybe newly reformed homophobe Seth (Robert John Burke). Maybe one of our likeable new additions, Dina (Isabela Merced) and Jesse (Young Mazino). Or maybe Tommy (Gabriel Luna) or Maria (Rutina Wesley), to prove even long-time characters aren’t safe on this show. It does not, however, feel like the kind of episode where the show’s protagonist—the beating heart of the series’ central relationship played by easily the most famous person in the cast—is going to be quietly beaten to death.

Narratively, that’s not how stories work; our heroes are supposed to live or at least get meaningful, cathartic deaths that reaffirm that their lives mattered. And, commercially, we’re supposed to know what we’re tuning in for with The Last Of Us—a story about Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her surrogate dad Joel (Pedro Pascal) surviving the apocalypse together. As far as we understand it, there is no show without Joel. But now he’s dead and everything we thought we knew about this series is different. Ellie’s world shifts on its axis when Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) stabs Joel in the neck. And so does ours as viewers.

It was a controversial choice when it happened in The Last Of Us Part II video game and I suspect it will be just as controversial here. Though folks who played the game (or read the spoilers online) have long known this moment was coming, it’s still shocking to see it play out in live action. But, for now, we don’t really know what Joel’s death means for The Last Of Us in the long-term. “Through The Valley” is an episode that very purposefully roots itself in action, leaving any and all emotional processing for future episodes to tackle. We feel the shock here, but we won’t get a chance to fully unpack it until the coming weeks.

Indeed, “Through The Valley” is literally an action episode, one that calls to mind the big battle epics on Game Of Thrones or the Helm’s Deep sequence from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings movies. From the first moment of the episode, we feel a storm brewing on the horizon; both in the clouds and otherwise. Abby and her crew—Owen (Spencer Lord), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), Mel (Ariela Barer), and Manny (Danny Ramirez)—wake up in a lodge near Jackson, where they’re shocked to find the town looks much bigger and more well-protected than it seemed at night. As Abby heads out into the freezing cold to take a guard shift, Owen tells the rest of the group that the best thing they can do is convince Abby to give up the mission and head back to Seattle. Getting to Joel is all but impossible.

As fate would have it, however, Abby will eventually end up accidentally stumbling upon the very man she’s come 860 miles to find. And I do think it’s helpful to think of “Through The Valley” as an episode about fate. There’s quite a bit of plot convenience at play here in terms of how this episode moves various pieces around the board to get players where they need to be for maximum emotional impact. But there’s also a sense of Greek tragedy to this whole tale that makes that convenience feel purposefully devastating rather than structurally lazy.

Ellie, for instance, was just an hour short of getting a last proper “daddy-daughter day” with Joel. When Jesse comes to wake her up for their 8 a.m. patrol, she’s annoyed enough with his chipper banter (and awkward enough about her kiss with Dina) that she says she’d rather do her patrol with Joel instead. “My shit with Joel is complicated, I know that,” she explains. “From the outside it probably looks really bad. It has been really bad. But I’m still me, he’s still Joel, and we—and nothing’s ever gonna change that. Ever.” It’s exactly the words that Joel was so desperate to hear in his various attempts to connect with Ellie last week. But because he wanted to let Ellie sleep in, he never got to hear them. He left on an earlier patrol with Dina, which means his last real conversation with Ellie was their fight at the New Year’s Eve dance.

Fate also seems to be at play in the way that Abby winds up finding Joel. She gets an absolutely terrifying sequence where she slips down the length of a giant snowy mountain only to wind up in a sea of frozen dead bodies. As we heard from Jesse earlier, the infected have been using their dead as insulation only to spring from the snowy ground when an unsuspecting human comes wandering by. And that’s exactly what happens to Abby as a giant horde of infected suddenly rise to the surface beneath her feet. (To quote Mushu from Mulan:  They popped out of the snow! Like daisies!”)

It’s a terrifying sequence that immediately gets us to root for Abby on a visceral level. I cheered when she managed to scale a wall by jumping onto a ladder. And it’s horrifying to see her barely manage to crawl through a crumbling chain link fence with dozens of infected reaching their hands through the wires (literally, in some cases). Because this is an episode that relies on action more than dialogue, we connect with Abby by seeing her thrust into “final girl” horror movie protagonist mode. And it’s a massive relief when someone finally arrives to shoot her infected attacker and offer her a hand up. Until we realize that someone is Joel, the man we know she’s sworn to kill “slowly.”

Pascal doesn’t appear until 24 minutes into this 57-minute episode, so it makes a massive impact once he does. Of all the Greek tragedy elements at play in “Through The Valley,” easily the biggest one is that Joel saves the person who goes on to kill him. He could have let this stranger die or ignored her suggestion that they regroup with her friends at the lodge. But Joel’s time with Ellie has made our once standoffish hero more sympathetic to young women trying to survive the apocalypse—first via his new bond with Dina and now by saving Abby, a 24-year-old he calls “kid” and offers to share a horse with. Joel survived the first 20 years of the apocalypse by trusting no one. In the end, it’s an act of compassion that gets him killed.

Before we get back to that though, let’s talk about the Battle of Jackson Hole, which is a pretty tremendous setpiece, even if it ultimately winds up feeling a little incidental given how this episode ends. Indeed, despite how riveting it is to watch in the moment, the battle is largely there to be a red herring that distracts us from where this episode is truly going. But as distractions go, this was an effective one.

On paper there’s a lot of “cool” stuff here—from clever, clear battle plans (“basements and roofs!”) to dramatic warning bells to exploding gas barrels to flamethrowers to a massive bloater (the supersized evolution of infected we last glimpsed in the first season’s battle episode, “Endure and Survive”). But as an episode that explores character through action, I was most impressed by how “Through The Valley” really got me to root for Tommy and Maria. While I’ve liked both of those characters well enough up until now, I wouldn’t say I was hugely emotionally invested in them. But watching the practical yet still emotion-driven way they set about protecting their home totally sold me on them, both as individuals and as a couple.

Both are incredibly levelheaded about what they need to do, making time for just a quick kiss goodbye before they take their respective battle positions. And both manage to keep their cool under pressure, even as their friends and townmates fall around them. (There’s a harrowing moment where someone asks Maria if she’s okay only to get attacked himself.) Still, it’s clear that Tommy and Maria are always thinking of each other as well. When Tommy spots the bloater heading towards the building Maria is perched atop of, he lures the monster away from her and towards himself—allowing her to unleash some dogs that help turn the tide of the fight.

It’s incredibly romantic and in an episode with so many brutal moments (the shot of a bitten survivor handing over his gun was gutting), it was such a relief to see Tommy and Maria reunited after the battle is over. Now that Joel is gone, The Last Of Us will need to hand over its story to new protagonists. And this episode sold me on Tommy and Maria as main characters worth watching in way I’m not sure I quite felt before.

Still, when we think back on this episode in the future, I suspect it will be remembered not as “the Battle of Jackson” but as “the episode where Joel dies.” And those final 15 minutes inside the lodge are ultimately much more intense than the battle itself. They’re also deeply, deeply sad. One of the things that makes the sequence so upsetting is how passive Joel is—how old and weak he seems compared to the hearty survivor he was last season.

I suspect that has less to do with his age and more to do with his mindset. If asked, Joel would absolutely say that saving Ellie was still the right thing to do. And yet, I also think there’s a part of him that agrees that murdering an unarmed doctor was morally wrong too. He doesn’t regret killing the Fireflies to save Ellie. But perhaps he still feels like he deserves to die for it as well—that being in this lodge is his karmic fate. Maybe that’s why he makes so little attempt to stop Abby or plead to her friends. His one request is that she just “shut the fuck up and do it already.”

Two things can be true at once and that also extends to Abby as well. It turns out the doctor that Joel killed was her father. And, on paper, it should be easy to root for a young woman avenging her dad by taking down the mass shooter who doomed humanity’s only hope for a cure against the infected. Yet the extended way Abby goes about torturing and beating Joel is so cold and cruel that even her friends can barely stomach it.

One of my favorite moments from this episode is the opening dream sequence that takes us back to the moment 19-year-old Abby found her dad’s brains splattered across the operating room floor. As she’s walking towards Joel’s carnage, a present-day version of Abby pops up in the dream to warn her younger self not to go into the room and see something she can’t unsee. And Dever does a stellar job making those two versions of Abby feel like entirely different people—the more innocent, hopeful person who went into that operating room and the jaded, cynical one who came out.

That sort of “before” and “after” is exactly what Ellie experiences as she’s pinned to the floor and forced to watch as a bludgeoned Joel takes his last breaths. While Bella Ramsey was great last week, they’re absolutely tremendous this week—capturing both the tough-as-nails maturity and childlike innocence of Ellie’s 19-year-old perspective. Again, you can debate whether it’s storytelling convenience or fate that brings Ellie in to witness Joel’s death. But it’s absolutely devastating to watch her beg Joel to get up and plead “no” as if she can will the inevitable not to happen.

While the full processing will come later, for now all Ellie can do is swear that Abby and her crew will die—the same promise that brought Abby to this lodge in the first place. The Last Of Us certainly isn’t subtle about the idea that violence begets more violence. But Joel’s death brings that idea to the forefront much more boldly than a lot of shows would commit to. If Abby is right that “there are just some things everyone agrees are fucking wrong,” what does that mean for her own act of killing another girl’s father to avenge her own? As the episode’s eerily silent credits sequence confirms, wherever The Last Of Us goes from here, it will be unlike anywhere else the show has gone before.

Stray observations

• I’m assuming Pascal will be back for flashbacks this season (we’ve still got to learn more about what drove Joel and Ellie apart), but the episode leaves zero room for ambiguity about Joel’s death as we get an extended shot of Jesse, Dina, and a distraught Ellie dragging his body back to Jackson.
• Speaking of which: Jesse is such a delightful, warm presence this episode—casually brushing past any hurt feelings he might have over Dina and Ellie’s kiss. As we move into a Joel-less future, he’s another character I’m glad to have around to fill the void.
• Also on the lighter side of things, we get to see the weed-filled 7-Eleven where Eugene used to grow his stash. We also learn he was a Vietnam vet who originally worked with the Fireflies but left the group around 2010. Ellie seems to have a flash of guilt as Jesse talks about how sad it was that Joel had to “put him down,” so that’s another element of mystery at play.
• With the Fireflies wiped out, Abby’s crew are part of a paramilitary organization called “W.L.F.” Their commander has instilled them with the code that they don’t kill people unless they can defend themselves. (Abby chooses to let that go where Joel is involved.)
• The storytelling isn’t the clearest, but I think we’re meant to assume that that construction worker clearing out the infected tendrils in the water pipe is what brings the horde to Jackson. I’m not sure if that would have happened if Abby hadn’t awoken another group of them first, though.
• Also, why had none of those infected been awoken over the past five years? And where did they all come from originally? That’s probably the biggest contrivance of the episode for me.
• It’s terrifying how quickly the infected manage to make it up to Jackson’s rooftops. I assumed the people up there were much safer than they turned out to be.
• For those who didn’t know Joel’s death was coming, I’m curious when you realized the show was actually going to go there. Was it obvious by the time Ellie arrived or did you still have hope for a miracle?
• The final crane shot of Ellie and Joel laying on the ground together is both beautiful and devastating.