Stunned viewers have not only lost a character they had quickly grown to love, they are now being asked to accept as his replacement the person who was responsible for his demise. Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) has her reasons, of course. In the finale of season one, Joel murdered her father, the surgeon at the Fireflies compound who was meant to perform the surgical procedure that would potentially lead to a vaccine, but would have killed Ellie. Wracked by grief at the loss of his daughter in the series’ first episode, Joel simply couldn’t bear the thought of losing Ellie. But saving Ellie came at a great cost: not just the people he murdered in his bid to rescue her, but the rest of humanity. Her sacrifice could have saved the world; her salvation has almost certainly doomed it. Did all of that register with viewers as Abby was doing Joel slowly, as Paul Keating might have put it: first blowing a hole in his kneecap, then beating him viciously with a golf club and her fists before bringing it to a gruesome end – in front of a horrified Ellie – by driving the broken shaft of a nine iron into his neck? Maybe, maybe not.