Killing off Pedro Pascal’s Joel, “The Last of Us” star and key player, in the second episode of the second season of HBO’s hit series was, it turns out, just the start.

As the seventh and season’s final episode of this popular post-apocalyptic series aired Sunday night, the show’s writing and directing co-creators Craig Mazin, 54, and Neil Druckmann, 46, showed they still know how to surprise with — spoiler alert! — a cliffhanger ending.

In an audacious throwback we see a pre-plague, pre-destruction cityscape, a lovely shot labeled ‘Seattle Day One” that leaps back to the very beginning of the video game-based saga.

“Why end it on a cliffhanger?” the two were asked in a virtual press conference last weekend.

“This always felt like the natural end point for the season,” Druckmann said.

Added Mazin, “What I want the audience to feel thematically at the end of the season is that they aren’t where they were, but they’re not yet where they are going to go.

“There has always been a story that we’ve been telling about the good and bad of love. But we switch which side is good and bad sometimes — because sometimes we do need somebody to punish someone for us. Sometimes we do need somebody to protect us. Sometimes violence must be done to save the innocent.

“These are difficult moments. There are times where sacrifice is called for, putting other people first is called for. Where creation does more than destruction. And we can now understand this idea that maybe you could do a little bit better.

“We understand that both Ellie and Abby” — the two young women central to the storytelling — “are moving forward in moral trouble because their certainty is beginning to fail them.

“We can see Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is faced with the consequences of things she’s done and people that didn’t deserve to die. She’s starting to feel a swing of the pendulum.

“We don’t know where these two are going but I would hope the audience feels they are not done growing. They are not done falling.”

“Last of Us” began as a videogame, followed by HBO’s dramatization. The videogame makes you the character, part of the action. The series offers a completely different perspective: watching the characters, not being one.

“We’ve talked about the changes quite a bit,” Mazin said. “When you’re in the game it’s 20 to the upper 30 hours, depending how you play. But you decide how you consume it.

“Here, we’re delivering thematic chunks, short stories, week to week. We knew we would not be done with the story in the season. Some of it will have to wait however long it takes us to do the next season.”