Joel Is Gone. Neil Druckmann Has Left. The Ratings Dropped. So What Exactly Happens to The Last of Us Now?

PEDRO PASCAL built this show into one of the greatest television events of the decade. Then Season 2 removed him from the story. Here is the full, unsparing look at what went wrong — and whether Season 3 can survive it.
In January 2023, The Last of Us premiered on HBO and became something that television almost never produces anymore: a genuine, unified cultural event. Critics and audiences in rare agreement. Record viewership. A performance from PEDRO PASCAL as Joel Miller that many called the best of his career — which is saying something extraordinary, given the career.

Season 2 aired in the spring of 2025. And something happened. Something the show’s creators knew was coming, because they had lived through it once already in the video game — but something that, translated to screen for a mass television audience, landed differently than anyone could fully prepare for.

Joel was gone. PEDRO PASCAL was gone. And The Last of Us had to figure out who it was without him.

“The ratings for Season 2 crumbled following Pedro Pascal’s exit.” — Industry reports, 2025

The full timeline of what happened

Jan 2023

Season 1 premieres. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Record HBO viewership. Universal critical acclaim. The show becomes a phenomenon.

Apr 2025

Season 2 premieres. Joel’s story ends early in the season — exactly as it did in the video game. Viewership drops noticeably as the season progresses. Fan reaction is deeply divided.

Jul 2025

Neil Druckmann exits. The co-creator of both the video game and the show announces he is stepping away before Season 3 begins production — to focus on Naughty Dog’s next game.

Jul 2025

Halley Gross also exits. Co-writer of the Part II game and executive producer on the show also departs, citing a desire to “make space for what comes next.”

Aug 2025

Craig Mazin confirms. The remaining co-creator tells THR he is “clacking away” on Season 3 scripts alone. HBO targets 2026–2027 TV season for release.

2026

Season 2 receives 17 Emmy nominations — including for Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey — despite the mixed reception. The show’s critical standing remains intact even as audience trust wavers.

What actually went wrong with Season 2

The honest answer is complicated — and depends heavily on what kind of viewer you were coming into Season 2.

For fans of the video game, the removal of Joel was always going to happen. It was the central event of The Last of Us Part II — the narrative engine that drives everything that follows. The show was always going to go there. The question was only when and how.

For viewers who came to the show primarily through PEDRO PASCAL — who fell in love with Joel and Ellie’s relationship as the emotional core of the story — the loss was more disorienting than the creators perhaps anticipated. These were not casual viewers. They were devoted. And they felt it.

The viewership numbers tracked that feeling in real time. As Season 2 continued without Joel, the drop was visible. Not catastrophic — the show remained one of HBO’s most-watched — but significant enough to register.

The seventeen Emmy nominations for Season 2 are a reminder that critical quality and audience emotional investment are not always the same thing. The show remained excellent. It just lost something irreplaceable when it lost Pedro Pascal’s face on screen every week.

Is Pedro Pascal completely gone from the show?

This question has been handled with characteristic care by everyone involved — which is to say, no one has answered it directly.

Craig Mazin, when asked whether we have seen the last of Joel, responded with a notable non-denial. He pointed out that going into Season 2, people kept asking about Joel dying — and that his standard answer was “wait and see what it does.” He then said Season 3 “will arrive, and it will do what it does.” And crucially: “We haven’t seen the last of a lot of people who are currently gone from the story.”

That is not a confirmation. It is also not nothing.

The HBO boss, for his part, said he is “not worried at all” about the show’s future — expressing full confidence in Mazin and the remaining team. Season 3, when it arrives, is expected to shift focus significantly toward Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby. How much space exists in that story for Joel — in memory, in flashback, in whatever form the writing finds — remains genuinely open.

“We haven’t seen the last of a lot of people who are currently gone from the story.” — Craig Mazin, on Season 3

What this means for the show Pedro Pascal built

Here is the truth that sits underneath all of this: The Last of Us became what it became because of PEDRO PASCAL. His Joel — weathered, heartbroken, quietly devoted, ultimately unable to do the right thing because he could not survive another loss — was one of the great television performances of his generation.

He did not just carry the show. He defined its emotional register. He made it safe for millions of people to invest completely in a story about grief and love set in a world that had stopped making sense.

Season 3 will be a different show. Perhaps a great one — Mazin is talented, the remaining cast is extraordinary, and the source material for Part II’s second half is rich and strange and deeply human. But it will be a show that built its foundation on something it no longer has.

The question is not whether The Last of Us can survive without Joel. Television shows survive loss all the time. The question is whether it can build something new that matters as much to its audience as what it had.

That is a question only Season 3 can answer. And we are watching.

“All I can say is we haven’t seen the last of a lot of people who are currently gone.” — And we are holding onto that with both hands.