‘The Last of Us’ showrunner reveals the heartbreaking reason behind Joel’s stack of rocks in episode 3

Warning: This article contains spoilers for HBO Max’s The Last of Us episode three, “Long, Long Time.”

Joel showed what was really lurking beneath his gruff facade when he was stacking those rocks in The Last of Us. He’s not known for being forthcoming with his emotions. He doesn’t speak much and when he does, he keeps it brief without revealing anything more than what he wants people to know, but he’s far from emotionless, as hard as he might try to prove otherwise.

Episode three opens up with Joel kneeling by a babbling broke all by his lonesome. He’s stacking rocks and looking pensive, but no other details are given as to why he’s performing this ritual. In HBO’s The Last of Us Podcast, co-creator Craig Mazin answered this question in full.

“We thought it was important to show that Pedro (Pascal)—Joel missed her, that he was mourning her and in his very simple way just making a small cairn of rocks to say, ‘I’m sorry, I blew it, I lost you.’ It’s as much about self-recrimination and doubt as it is about mourning, but it was important for us to show that he cared simply because we know the story becomes about Joel and Ellie.”

In episode two, Joel, Tess, and Elli travel through the ruins of Boston to bring the young girl to a Firefly base camp. They encounter zombies along the way and Tess gets infected. She tells Joel that he needs to continue on with the mission and to hold onto hope before she sacrifices herself by exploding the zombies who’re coming after them. Joel keeps on moving without commenting on it, but his small act proved how much he cared.

Mazin said that this was purposeful and that the show needed to have a transition between Joel caring for Tess and then caring for Ellie.

“We didn’t want Joel to already be, ‘Okay, it’s me and you kid. Let’s go.’ There was a moment where we had to stop and acknowledge what happened and similarly, there was a need for Ellie to address it because we understood that pretty quickly in this episode we needed them to start talking.”

Episode three was an emotionally charged story about a survivalist named Bill who’s isolated himself in a town and meets a man named Frank. Bill’s a lot like Joel and doesn’t want to open himself up to anyone else, but over the course of the story, he learns that that’s his mission, to take care of others, and it’s Joel’s purpose too.

Joel and Ellie are having to work together without Tess and there are definitely some hurdles they have to get past, but they’re slowly becoming more comfortable with each other. Joel’s life is filled with tragedy, and Ellie has much to understand about how to survive and about the past. This episode was the first step of this dynamic between them and it becomes the heart of the story.

Joel stacking rocks wasn’t the only part of the episode that had a deeper meaning. The Last of Us director Peter Hoar explained that the last shot of episode three held significant meaning as well.

The Last of Us is currently streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes released every Sunday.