SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.

Every gamer-turned-viewer of “The Last of Us” had one big question on their mind when it came to the second season: When are they going to kill off Pedro Pascal’s Joel?

The season’s second episode, “Through the Valley,” finally answers that question. As an intense snowstorm descends upon Jackson, a routine morning patrol takes a devastating turn: After Joel saves Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) from a horde of infected, she leads him and Dina (Isabela Merced) into a deadly trap.

Abby, seeking revenge after Joel killed her father in the first season’s finale, shoots him in the leg with a shotgun and brutally beats him with a golf club. Meanwhile, Jackson faces its own crisis as a swarm of infected breaches their defenses.

Ellie (Bella Ramsey) tracks Joel to the ski cabin, ultimately taking a beating of her own from Abby’s crew. She watches on in terror as Abby delivers the final blow, killing Joel.

“The Last of Us” creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who co-created the game franchise, spoke to Variety (and even shed a few tears) ahead of the devastating episode to unpack its biggest changes from the game and its most heartbreaking scene.

Craig Mazin: Every choice was on the table, as I recall.

Neil Druckmann: Ultimately, I think we needed just to settle back into the show. Because even in the game, there’s like an hour or something before you get to this moment. But we also knew it needed to be early enough, because this is the inciting incident for this story. So yes, we always pick every permutation, but the later it got in the season, it just felt we were kind of dragging our feet instead of just getting to the meat of what the story is about.

Mazin: There’s a danger of tormenting people. It’s not what we want to do. If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet. Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people.

HBO / Liane Hentscher

Druckmann: In the game, we talk about that Jackson being threatened by infected or raiders. It was important for us to show that here, structurally, because we could jump back and forth in a way that we can’t in the game, and that could raise the tension. But also, Jackson is now a character in the story, and it’s a character that people have to take into account going forward. What does that mean? Not only have we lost this beloved character, but we’ve lost a lot of other people, and now the safety of this town is compromised. Where do we go from here? To present that dilemma going forward, it gave us the excuse to make this completely badass siege of Jackson.

Mazin: And it did give us one moment that I’m sort of obsessed with. Joel is riding up this mountain with Abby and Dina, and he looks out and he sees Jackson in the distance, on fire. He needs to go there. Abby convinces him that her friends will fight, and they can get guns and go there. His concern is entirely about those people, that community. Ellie rides up the exact same trail, sees the exact same thing, and makes a choice to go look for Joel. And that sense of what community is to some people and maybe to other people, is a big part of the story.

HBO / Liane Hentscher

Druckmann: We wanted to show more than we did in the game, because in the game, we just talked about Dina’s relationship with Joel. In the years that Joel and Ellie have settled down in Jackson, Dina has gotten close to Joel and became this other — not quite on the level of Ellie — but this other surrogate daughter he could mentor and teach. She’s this other orphan. But also, you’ll notice that Ellie and Dina’s relationship is different from the game. When Dina joins Ellie, their relationship goes somewhere else that has not happened here on the show. They are friends that have kissed one time, and Ellie’s unsure what that means. We have more to go with these characters.

Druckmann: We don’t actually hold back in the game. I think there’s just something in the live action adaptation that makes it more brutal. We talked a lot about this throughout the season. There’s other instances where we have to make certain adjustments because of that. But it’s also important just to see the brutality. You’ve played the game, and you know how important everyone’s mindset about what happened to Joel is going forward and the choices that they make. Therefore, we couldn’t spare the audience either, because we need them in that same mindset.

Mazin: There’s something so terribly sad to me about seeing a powerful person brought low. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an animated version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” There’s the scene where they shave Aslan’s mane, and it’s a very sad scene. I cried my heart out, because he was brought low. And Joel is brought low here in a way that it’s so heartbreaking. He can’t get up off the floor, but he almost does, because Ellie asks him. It’s so upsetting. We don’t do these things to hurt people. We’re doing it because we’re with Ellie, and she’s experiencing this horrible thing that we will all experience, which is this just grief and heartbreak. It’s coming for us all.

HBO / Liane Hentscher

Mazin: He hears her, and he’s aware of her. He wants to, he just can’t. If there’s one person in the world that could make him do the impossible, it would be Ellie telling him to get up. It also tells us that he knows that she was there, and he got to see her. [Mazin starts to cry] And I’m going to get a little emotional.

Druckmann: Talking about this, I’m just thinking, “Oh man, I want him to get up.” Even as writers, we want Joel to get up. We love this character.

Mazin: Her face is the last thing he sees.

Mazin: There’s your headline. I’m crying in the interview. It’s fucking horrible. Listen, I’m suffering like everybody.

Mazin: That was in there from the very beginning, draft one. Ellie’s been kicked in the ribs. She’s clearly very injured. She has no reason to think she’s going to survive. She’s not crawling over there just to say goodbye. She’s crawling over there so she could be with him in death. That’s where she wants to be, and it’s when she takes his hand. We’ve seen her do it before. Bella Ramsey, geez.

HBO / Liane Hentscher

Mazin: First of all, let me give credit to Neil, because that song is there as part of the game universe. And so sometimes my job is deciding which things to steal. Because Ashley played Ellie’s mother, there is this sense of a ghost that’s always there. So in the end, there is little Ellie gasping for breath with the man who is her father, and we hear the voice of the woman who is her mother. And it’s beautiful. Sometimes the parallel universes touch. I don’t know how else to describe it. We don’t do a lot of meta stuff, but sometimes it touches. And if there’s a moment where you are free for the universes to touch, it’s this one, because this is a shared experience now with everyone. We’re sort of saying, everyone who played the game and now everyone who hasn’t, we have lived through this. The lyrics are beautiful, Ashley’s voice is beautiful, and I just couldn’t think of a better way to end.

This interview has been edited and condensed.