'The Last of Us' cocreators explain why that 'heartbreaking' death happened so early in season 2

• Season two, episode two, of HBO's "The Last of Us" killed off a major character.
• The showrunners said they eliminated him early in the season because it's "the inciting incident."
• They also didn't want to torment fans who had been anticipating the character's death.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "The Last of Us" season two.

The latest episode of HBO's "The Last of Us" adapted a key moment from the video game franchise that fans had been dreading — and it was even more heartbreaking than anticipated.

Episode two of season two, titled "Through the Valley," shows the series' main character, Joel (Pedro Pascal), getting brutally beaten with a golf club and killed by a vengeful Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) as his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), is forced to witness his demise.

Fans of the game, which the TV series follows closely, knew Joel's death was inevitable — it was just a question of when the show would incorporate it. Killing off a major character so early into a season is a surprising move.

But in an interview with Variety published on Sunday, the show's cocreators and showrunners, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, explained why Joel's death needed to happen in that episode.

They considered every possible moment, but Druckmann said that from a storytelling perspective, eliminating the character early on made sense "because this is the inciting incident for this story."

Joel's death had been looming over the series, so the showrunners also wanted to spare fans any further agony.

"There's a danger of tormenting people," Mazin told Variety. "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."

The scene is even gorier than in the game as Abby becomes fully consumed by her rage over Joel killing her dad five years prior, seen in the season one finale. The sadness of the moment is compounded by Ellie's reaction to seeing her father figure so powerless.

"Joel is brought low here in a way that it's so heartbreaking," Mazin said.

The showrunners said it was "important just to see the brutality" of Joel's death because it's going to have ripple effects on season two and drive the decisions that other characters make.

"Therefore, we couldn't spare the audience, either, because we need them in that same mindset," Druckmann said.