If somehow you still weren’t aware, Joel dies in The Last of Us Part II. I’m sorry, we are six years and a bad HBO show in, I’m not going to pretend we shouldn’t all know that the Saddest Dad of All Time meets the wrong end of a golf club a couple of hours into the PS4 sequel. Nevertheless, Joel actor Troy Baker thinks we haven’t seen the last of the man who has been dead and buried in Jackson for six years.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Baker says that he thinks Joel may return to the series in some way, and he’s even open to someone else playing him, similar to how Pedro Pascal portrayed him in the HBO show.
“I want to see this character be proliferated and iterated on in multiple mediums, whether it be TV, film, more games, comic books. I see people that cosplay as [Joel] all the time… he made an impact,” Baker said. “I definitely know we’ve not seen the last of Joel, whether that be Naughty Dog or somebody else.”
Kotaku’s Ethan Gach told me to “try not to be too personally affronted” when writing this post, so instead of writing yet another diatribe about how The Last of Us started out as a pretty singular and cohesive story that was pretty successfully iterated on in the sequel in a way that felt additive, and arguing that Naughty Dog should not tempt fate by continuing to try to put the post-apocalyptic story on the assembly line to the detriment of its artistic integrity, here’s an unrelated video of pop star Taylor Swift swinging a golf club around at a concert:
Odds are this hypothetical return of Joel would manifest in a prequel, or maybe Ellie sees him in a dream during the third Last of Us game Naughty Dog is apparently considering after Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. I just think it’s cool when a series that has historically been bold enough to not give players a bunch of fan service continues to not do so. That’s all.
The third season of HBO’s live-action Last of Us adaptation is currently in the works, though game director Neil Druckmann is no longer involved with the show, claiming he wanted to dedicate his time to work at Naughty Dog and was being spread too thin.