Nearly nine years ago, fans of The Walking Dead watched in horror as beloved character Glenn Rhee (played by Steven Yeun) met a stunningly gory end, bludgeoned to death by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, Lucille, in the Season 7 premiere. Glenn’s demise became one of the Walking Dead franchise’s most upsetting and polarizing deaths ever, with 54% of TVLine readers saying at the time that the episode went too far with its “gratuitous and gross” depictions (and 37% saying, in a separate poll, that they planned to stop watching TWD after the harrowing hour). If you’ve got the stomach for it, you can revisit that eye-popping scene below:
The shocking April 20 death of The Last of Us‘ Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) has evoked similar responses from fans of that series, with the words “devastating” and “brutal” littering the comments section of our recap, and some readers threatening to quit the show altogether. Given the similarities between these two on-screen slaughters — even with almost a decade of TV separating them — we pose this question for your debate: Which death hit harder?
There are plenty of parallels to draw here. For one, both deaths were telegraphed in their shows’ source material; Glenn was killed in the Walking Dead comics, and Joel was offed in the Last of Us Part II video game (though given that Joel’s the main character, and Pedro Pascal is Pedro Pascal, many Last of Us viewers had hoped the TV series might sidestep that particular twist. It did not!). And even in shows crawling with the literal undead, neither Glenn nor Joel were killed by a zombie. Nope, their murderers were entirely human, driven by all-consuming revenge: Negan longed to take at least one life, as punishment for Rick’s group killing Negan’s fellow Saviors; Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) hunted Joel after he killed her father during his hospital shooting spree in the Season 1 finale.
The similarities go on. Both at the start of a new season? Check. Both revoltingly bloody? Check. Both involving… sports equipment? Yep, just when we’d gotten over our Walking Dead-induced fear of baseball bats, The Last of Us has ensured we’ll never look at a golf club the same way again.
Even if we set aside the gnarly gore from these scenes, each one still has an indelible emotional moment that we’ll be thinking about for years to come. For The Walking Dead, it’s gotta be Glenn’s garbled, “Maggie, I’ll find you” after suffering a huge blow from Lucille, while The Last of Us traumatized viewers everywhere with Ellie (Bella Ramsey) crawling up to Joel’s corpse, interlocking their hands and putting her face right next to his. Not since The Lion King have we been so wrecked by a child realizing they’re now an orphan.
