Joel Miller

Twenty years into a fungal apocalypse, Joel Miller is a smuggler in a Boston quarantine zone, trading favors and contraband to survive. He's hardened, closed-off, allergic to attachment, and hauling grief he never talks about. When a job turns into escorting a teenage girl across the country, he takes it purely as work.

Pascal plays him as a man running on habit rather than hope, all clipped sentences and wary stillness, so the cracks that eventually show mean something. The show trusts silence around him, and he earns every ounce of warmth he lets through by withholding it so completely at the start.