What Do We Know About Eugene, the Man Joel Killed in 'The Last of Us'?

The Season 2 premiere of The Last of Us brought some major shakeups with it. The series jumped forward in time five years for the majority of the episode, meaning that we had to catch up with Ellie and Joel at a totally different point in their lives in Jackson, Wyoming.

As we see in the premiere, Joel is in therapy with a woman named Gail, and she brings up the death of her husband, Eugene, repeatedly throughout their conversation. Given that Eugene's death is a key part of their conversation, many want to know what happened to him. Here's what we know.

Gail's first reference to Eugene comes when discussing the paltry weed that Joel brings her.

"That never stopped Eugene. January, February. That man would grow buds the size of pine cones," she explained, before adding that that day was her first birthday without her husband in 41 years. Gail then launches into a more fulsome explanation of what happened to Eugene, who was her husband.

"You shot and killed my husband," she says. "You killed Eugene. And I resent you for it. No. Maybe a little more than that. I hate you for it. I hate you for it. And yes, I know you had no choice. I know that. I know I should forgive you. Well, I've tried, and I can't. Because of how you did it. And looking at your face, sitting in our home, makes me so f--king angry."

This exchange naturally leads us to wonder what happened to him, but there's no character named Eugene in the games that we can refer to. This seems to be a show-invented character, so all we can do is take the hints buried in the dialogue and see if we can come to some sort of answer.

Given that Gails says that Joel "had no choice," it seems likely that Eugene was infected and had to be killed to protect the rest of Jackson.

What we don't know anything about, though, is why Eugene wound up infected or what Gail meant when she said she had a problem with "how" Joel did it. It seems possible that we'll learn more about this particular incident in the weeks to come, but for now, all we can do is guess about what exactly happened to Eugene and how it may play into Joel's overall position in Jackson when the show picks up its action.

Eugene is just one of several breadcrumbs that the show's first episode drops as we continue to learn more about the world of The Last of Us. We also learn about a new kind of infected that seems to be able to think and plan, and we meet a character named Abby who is set on seeking revenge for the murders that Joel committed at the end of Season 1. Needless to say, there are a lot of threads that the show seems set to pick up on in future installments.