This week’s episode of ‘The Last of Us’ absolutely wrecked us

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

(CNN) — If “Game of Thrones” gave us the Battle of the Bastards, what shall we call the latest episode of “The Last of Us”? Perhaps, The One Where We All Cried For the Rest of Time.

The HBO drama’s recipe for heartbreak: Take safe zone Jackson, add a horde of hundreds of infected rising from the snow and smother it in game-changing tragedy. (Major spoiler ahead.)

In the episode, Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) search for Joel (Pedro Pascal) came to a climax as she tracked him down by sheer luck and slowly killed him, exactly as she had planned.

Here’s how things played out.

Abby and her crew finally made it to Jackson and set up camp at a cabin overlooking the town. But come daylight, they realized that the settlement was way more settled and sprawling than they expected. They had no real plan for how to get in or to find Joel.

Meanwhile, Abby went out to take watch and spotted two people on horseback, later revealed to be Joel and Dina, who had gone out early on patrol together. To get a closer look, Abby tumbled down the snowy hill and landed in a pit of infected, who at first glance appeared to be frozen underneath the snow.

Turns out, they weren’t frozen at all. Hundreds arose from the snow and began to chase Abby. One almost caught her until Joel saved Abby from harm, bringing her to a barn where Dina (Isabela Merced) and their horses were.

Abby realized then that she found Joel after Dina said his name, and convinced them to bring her back to the cabin where she said her friends had supplies and could help them.

Once at the cabin, Abby revealed herself and her motive. Mel (Ariela Barer) gave Dina a shot in the arm that Abby said would make her sleep for an hour, but before Dina went lights out, she noticed a patch on one of their backpacks that read “W.L.F.” – a clue about Abby and her crew that will likely come into play down the line.

Abby shot Joel in the knee to disable him and proceeded to tell him that he killed 18 soldiers and one doctor that day at the hospital. But that doctor, she said, was her father.

She said that there’s a code in the militia that she’s been with in Seattle for the past five years, that their commander trained them to not kill people who can’t defend themselves. Joel, she pointed out, was in that position now with his knee shot out, but she said she was going to kill him anyway.

“Because it doesn’t matter if you have a code like me or you’re a lawless piece s*** of like you,” Abby told Joel. “There are just some things everyone agrees are just f*** wrong.”

After Abby brutally beat Joel, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) happened upon the cabin and burst through the door to see Joel, nearly dead, lying bloodied on the ground. She was immediately restrained by Abby’s crew and sobbed for Joel on the floor, heartbreakingly screaming for him to “get up.”

This is when Abby finished the job, stabbing Joel in the neck with a spear.

Ellie screamed that she would find them and kill them, which seemed to be setting up how the rest of this season will play out, before she crawled over to Joel and laid with him.

It was a devastating scene, punctuated by Jesse, Dina and Ellie later heading back toward Jackson on horseback, with Joel’s body wrapped in a white cloth being dragged behind them.

Even more gut wrenching, earlier in the episode, Ellie told Jesse that even though there was tension with her and Joel, and even though they still hadn’t really confronted each other about that tension, that “I’m still me, he’s still Joel and nothing’s ever going to change that.”

“This story is about how we all deal with those moments, which do confront us in life,” executive producer Craig Mazin said in a post-episode featurette.

Executive producer and creator Neil Druckmann also set the scene for what’s to come during the featurette, saying that parallels between Abby and Ellie both losing their dads are now becoming more clear.

“This event will change all the characters we know forever from this point on,” he ominously added.

“The Last of Us” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO, with the episode available to stream on Max. HBO and Max, like CNN, are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

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