The Last Of Us season 1 comes to a shattering conclusion
In the lean “Look For The Light,” Joel makes a tragic decision
TV Reviews The Last Of Us
The Last Of Us is about many things: social collapse, types of tyranny, a mycotic virus ravaging the human race…. But as we come to the end of season one (this finale, “Look For The Light,” takes its title from the Firefly graffiti sprayed on a wall in the premiere, “When You’re Lost In The Darkness”), it’s clear that TLOU is, overwhelmingly, about bonds between parents and children—and how, when those bond are broken, new ones are forged, for better or worse.
We watched Joel lose his daughter and find another twenty years later in Ellie. Properly grieving Sarah while permitting himself feelings for Ellie has been agonizingly slow, but the process re-humanized Joel. (Until it becomes the justification for monstrous cruelty. More on that below.) Ellie was born into a fallen world, severed from her mother. Those who have been adopted or orphaned shortly after birth may not know the extent of trauma that infant Ellie survived, but they can relate to lifelong attachment issues. Ellie is, to use trope common in legend, a magic orphan. From Moses to Harry Potter, such figures are born to change the world.
It seemed almost perverse for the season finale to be only 43 minutes. Four episodes ago, I was complaining about padding and dawdling. Now Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are racing to the finish. Not a moment was wasted. In less than three-quarters of an hour we went from Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) first moments in the world to uneasy questions about her future.
The cold open plays like a gothic fairytale. Heavily pregnant Anna (Ashley Johnson) runs through a forest, chased by an infected. She crosses a field to a dilapidated farmhouse, rushes up to a second-floor bedroom and wedges a chair under the door. Her water has broken; the baby is coming. So is the infected, which smashes through the door. With her switchblade, Anna stabs the ghoul in the head. During the attack two things happened: Anna is bitten on the leg, and she gives birth. Quickly slicing the umbilical cord with her blade, the new mother coos over her wailing infant. “You tell ’em, Ellie,” she says.
It’s hard to expect a less brutal origin story for Ellie. She is the creator and destroyer: the source of a vaccine and a fearsome warrior with ice water for blood. Her berserker killing of pedophile cannibal David (Scott Shepherd) was the most recent, graphic example of the destructive power Ellie can unleash. It pales, however, in comparison to the man who would be her father.
After credits, the rest of the flashback resolves itself with grim predictability. Marlene (Merle Dandridge), who we haven’t seen since episode one, returns to the farmhouse at night with a fellow Firefly. She finds Anna in the bedroom, singing to Ellie, her switchblade poised at her own throat in case she turns. Anna tells Marlene to take the baby, swearing that she cut the cord before she got bit (a lie). Marlene is heading to Boston. Anna bequeaths the baby her switchblade (teenage Ellie’s trusty companion). Then Marlene agrees to Anna’s last wish: death before she turns. The baby cries at the bang of the pistol and we cut to present-day Ellie (Bella Ramsey) sitting in the back of a truck, lost in thought.
Joel and Ellie are back on the road, trekking to the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City. Joel tries to make small talk—he found a smashed guitar, asks if she wants guitar lessons—but Ellie’s barely listening. Their positions are reversed from the beginning of the journey. Back then, Ellie was the upbeat, chatty one while Joel remained stony and withholding. After all the death and loss she’s been through, culminating in the near-rape by David, is Ellie simply numb with trauma?
It’s nothing a petting zoo visit can’t cure. After the descent into hell of “When We Are In Need,” our heroes need some ordinary hiking, climbing, and navigating bombed buildings. The surprise appearance of a free-ranging giraffe adds to the healing vibe. Some good things have survived. Ellie feeds the long-necked ungulate leaves and giggles.
Relaxing for the moment, Joel and Ellie discuss their destination, the Firefly science hub where doctors can study why Ellie is immune to infection, possibly leading to the creation of a vaccine. Joel, feeling a presentiment of losing her, floats the option of not continuing, of going back to Tommy in Jackson.
“After all we’ve been through. Everything I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing,” Ellie replies evenly. “I know you mean well. I know you want to protect me; you have. And when we’re done, we’ll go wherever you want: Tommy’s, sheep ranch, the moon. I’ll follow you anywhere you go. But there’s no halfway with this: We finish what we started.” Ramsey’s delivers this touching speech with clear-eyed dignity. Joel nods in agreement.
As they pass long-abandoned Army medical tents, Joel admits to Ellie that he spent time in a similar one in the early days of the outbreak. It was a bullet graze to his temple. That leads to the confession that after Sarah was killed, he attempted suicide. It’s interesting to see the mix of sympathy and detachment Ellie greets this news with. She tells Joel she’s happy he “missed” shooting himself in the head. But there’s something held back. Remember, Ellie had her heart broken repeatedly, and she was born into the world with profound attachment issues.
As they keep exploring the empty city overgrown with foliage, Joel makes a special request for stupid puns—a metric of how profoundly he’s changed—and Ellie obliges by hauling out the Will Livingston. In a skin-crawlingly effective bit of lensing, director Ali Abbasi shows a Firefly patrol sneak up far behind Joel and Ellie, then toss a concussion grenade, afterwards knocking Joel out with the ol’ rifle butt to the head.
Joel regains consciousness in the Firefly hospital. Marlene is there. She marvels that they made it all the way across the country. She herself lost several men, bodyguards, along the way. Joel demands to see Ellie and is told she’s being prepped for surgery. “Our doctor thinks the Cordyceps in Ellie has grown with her since birth,” Marlene explains grimly. “It produces a kind of chemical messenger. It makes normal Cordyceps think that she’s Cordyceps; that’s why she’s immune.” They’re going to remove those cells from Ellie, multiply them in a lab and thus have a vaccine that could prevent infection.
Sounds great, but Joel puts two and two together and realizes, “Cordyceps grows inside the brain.” They’re going to kill Ellie in order to get those cells. Marlene takes no joy from the prospect of Ellie’s death. She was practically at the girl’s moment of birth. But this has to be done. She orders Joel to be escorted from the hospital by two armed Fireflies and left on the road. If he shows resistance, Marlene orders, shoot him.
“Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right,” the German philosopher Hegel wrote. “Two equally justified, ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.” In that sense, The Last Of Us becomes pure tragedy as Joel, possessed by a father’s love, goes on a bloody rampage through the hospital in search of his baby girl. Joel cannot let her die, even if it’s for the greater good. He’d rather the future burn. It’s both an act of extraordinary humanity and damnably inhumane.
Filmed by Abbasi’s roaming cameras up and down hallways and over Joel’s shoulder, the massacre montage dragged the series back—with brutal inevitability—to its genre fundamentals: third-person shooter. Although the Naughty Dog game famously expanded the moral and narrative boundaries of gaming violence, like our reptile brain, mindless carnage is always there. Our hero has become an active shooter, a serial killer, a monster. Joel follows the sign for Pediatric Surgery, past a bright cartoon mural of monkeys and elephants, to the operating room. He murders the surgeon (Darren Dolynski) and carries the anesthetized Ellie out. It’s a visual callback to the first episode, with Joel cradling Sarah in his arms when she was shot.
This sick inversion of the hero’s journey—a father’s love dooms the world—is a shocking note to end on. Did Mazin and Druckmann have any alternative? Kill Joel? Have Ellie live but the vaccine fail? Vaccine works, the world is saved? The demands of storytelling, inhuman as they may be, push the story on. Joel kills Marlene, takes a Firefly car, and drives the still-anesthetized Ellie back to Wyoming. They’ll settle with Tommy in Jackson. When Ellie wakes in the backseat, Joel lies to her that the Fireflies found others who were immune and have given up looking for a cure. He grabbed Ellie to escape raiders who had attacked the hospital and killed Marlene and the Fireflies. Ellie looks dubious but says nothing.
Hiking the last five hours to Jackson, Joel allows himself to reminisce about going on nature walks with Sarah, who hated the mosquitoes. Clearly he’s relaxing into the fantasy of second fatherhood. As they stand on foothills overlooking the high defensive walls of Jackson, the season resolves with an act of tremendous honesty and unforgivable deception. Ellie tells Joel about the first person she killed, Riley, her best friend, who got infected in the mall. She then asks if the story he told about the Fireflies is true. He says it is. “Okay,” Ellie says quietly.
No, I haven’t played The Last of Us Part II and I don’t need to in order to know showrunner-writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann will dramatize the fallout from Joel’s lie in the already greenlit second season. If this series explores the formation of surrogate bonds after natural ones have been ripped away, then we can expect another deeply rooted theme next year: the toxic legacy of family secrets.
Stray observations
- Last episode I should have noted that James was played by Troy Baker, who voiced Joel in the game. This week, Ashley Johnson played Ellie’s mother, and Johnson provided voice and motion-capture for The Last Of Us (2013), The Last Of Us: Left Behind (2014), and The Last Of Us Part II (2020).
- Ellie wears her backpack with the dangly purple one-eyed monster, last seen (by Joel) in the meat shed last week. Joel must have taken Ellie there (while being careful not to let her see the headless, upside-down corpses).
- For those unfamiliar with Salt Lake City, the overgrown nature preserve where Ellie and Joel encounter giraffes must be Hogle Zoo.
- “It wasn’t time that did it,” Joel glancing at Ellie, his voice catching. Pascal will make us reach for the tissues every time.
- During Joel’s rampage, Abbasi holds the camera on a couple of victims in close up: a soldier and the surgeon. We see the entrance wound, the blood, the vacant eyes. Deglamorizes the violence.
- It’s been an honor to recap Joel and Ellie’s epic journey. To convey the joy and dread it inspired in me, I spent upwards of 18,000 words. If that’s too much verbiage, may I recommend the cartoon version.
245 Comments
Nah, I could have done without the pregnancy scenes and explanation for Ellie’s immunity.
Joel really doomed us all.
Joel is The Death of Us
He did single-handedly kill roughly as many people as cordyceps did.
Nah, humanity was fucked well before Joel made his choice. I would hazard that’s why he made his choice. Curing cordyceps doesn’t fix what’s wrong with humanity, and that’s the bigger plague at this point.
It’s not like we have no idea how humanity would react to a vaccine showing up, or what people would do to preserve what power they have.
Right?! It’s not like we don’t have three years worth of recent fucking history to draw on here to enlighten us about how humanity would act. I actually thought that was one of unspoken but really resonant parts of the episode.
Fair point. When the Last of Us came out Obama was still president. This show comes out after extreme polarization and a worldwide pandemic marked by absurd callousness and cruelty. Can’t imagine an upbeat response to a vaccine roll out now.
Yeah I guess the Ellie-derived vaccine, if it even worked, would be coming about 20 years too late. The fungus zombies are barely a threat by 2023. Even if they disappeared, civilization is gone and humanity appears doomed to live in isolated pockets under fascist dictatorship (with a utopian commune here and there).I felt this episode could have used more time to breathe between Joel and Ellie’s capture and the massacre, to better highlight the moral and ethical dilemma. My initial takeaway was that Joel was doing a very selfish thing by withholding the vaccine from humanity, just so that he could replace his daughter. But I agree with the idea that society wouldn’t look much different even with universal availability of the Ellie vaccine. FEDRA wouldn’t lower the gates and just let people settle wherevs.
If you apply that to the real world, it’s like saying because the Covid vaccine doesn’t solve humanity’s problems, it wouldn’t be worth killing one person to save hundreds of thousands, if not more, worldwide.Now, I think disputing the idea that the sacrifice of the one person in this instance would actually lead to the intended outcome is absolutely reasonable (neither the game nor the show suggests any real chance of that.) But “humanity’s fucked, do whatever” as a justification for Joel’s actions works just as well as a justification for every other terrible act shown in the show. It doesn’t wash.
Humanity, being fucked, had no influence on his decision to murder the Fireflies and get Ellie. He was acting out of his own desires. Marlene even gave him a choice and he doubled down on it. Lying to Ellie, only cements that he knows he’s “wrong” and that he didn’t care. Whether or not the Fireflies would have been successful is irrelevant to Joel at this point, if it ever was(based on what he told Tess, “how many times were were told there was cure/vaccine?”).
It’s interesting, because I look at what you wrote about how none of this shaped Joel’s decision and I think what you cite actually makes a pretty good case that it does shape his decision, even if it’s not his primary motivation.Joel is a product of the world he’s lived in for the last 20 years. The existence that he’s scratched out is bleak and as a result he takes the dimmest view of humanity. He’s not interested in saving people. He’s seen “cures” touted only to fail. All of this informs Joel’s outlook and decision making process, because he is a product of this world. He is the way he is because he knows humanity is fucked, because he has participated in its downfall. That’s why when he’s presented with the choice that he has: save humanity vs. save Ellie, it’s not really a choice for him. What is salvageable in humanity? Twenty years of experience tells him not much. And that humanity needs to be saved from itself, not from cordyceps. So Joel saves Ellie and lies to her because 1. he can’t lose her and 2. because he definitely can’t lose her only to find out that he lost her for nothing. And I think he’s got 20 years of experiences that make a pretty convincing case that he would have lost her for nothing.
We’re both in agreement, I just think Joel stopped caring about humanity the moment Sarah died. He told Ellie, even if there was a cure, he would relocate to a sheep farm and live out the rest of his life in isolation. He’s already turned his back on humanity.
Arguably, he only really lived for Tommy and later, for Tess, and it wasn’t much of a “life” up to that point. Tommy now has a family of his own to look out for and Tess is gone. Now that Ellie is in his life, and emotionally he has adopted her as a daughter, humanity is even further on his list of stuff to care about, if it even was on there in the last 20 years to begin with.
Seriously. We can’t even get people to get vaccinated against Covid. You think these dumbasses are going to take an experimental drug from a group that doesn’t know you can do a brain tissue biopsy without killing the patient?
A brain tissue biopsy isn’t relevant here. They don’t need a sample of Ellie’s brain – they need the Cordyceps growth itself. But it grows throughout her brain. There’s no way to remove the growth without cutting the brain apart.
Nah, humanity was fucked well before Joel made his choice. I would hazard that’s why he made his choice. Curing cordyceps doesn’t fix what’s wrong with humanity, and that’s the bigger plague at this point.“Cordyceps is completely ruining humanity, so we definitely shouldn’t try to cure cordyceps, because look at how much it ruined humanity!”Enlightened centrist takes on the post-apocalypse are the funniest, I have to admit.FEDRA is a fascist organization using the threat of cordyceps to maintain power. Over the decades, they’ve brutalized and abused entire populations. Without cordyceps, they literally couldn’t do any of this. People could leave. People could reorganize. People could found 5,000 Jackson, Wyomings and grow food and swim in a lake.The whole “why would you want to save desperate people in a crisis acting desperately during a crisis from the crisis prolonging their desperation?” is kind of a brick wall argument.
I dunno. The solution they proposed sounded completely unrealistic, with basically no chance of success. You want me to let her die based on that idea? Not a chance.
Well, I know of one random Redditor who will be happy tonight. I recently came across a comment over there complaining bitterly about the fact that giraffes, even those in captivity, hate being stroked and petted like it is in the game.Feeding them, though, is fine, and that’s what they did tonight.That shooting sequence was very video-gamey — preserving ammo, picking up new weapons, killing a dozen heavily armed soldiers without getting a scratch…Still, I probably wouldn’t have noticed as much if I hadn’t known where the source material had come from, and I’m sure some of the gamers will have been happy at the inclusion of the sequence.There better be some serious consequences in season two (and please, no spoilers in reply, not even a confirmation, which is a spoiler in itself).
There better be some serious consequences in season two (and please, no spoilers in reply, not even a confirmation, which is a spoiler in itself).There is quite a wait until season two. Find a way to occupy your time.Maybe work on your golf swing.
Given that the first season of the mushroom zombie show featured very few mushroom zombies, I’m guessing S2 is going to be about Joel’s Sheep Farm and Guitar Lessons. Or, what you said.
If Craig Mazin wrote it, I would watch eight seasons of Joel’s Sheep Farm and Guitar Lessons. And I bet that shit would be compelling.
Having now watched the cutscenes “movie” of/from the videogame, the huge, unbelievable revelation is how *little* Mazin brought to the table.The dialogue was literally all already done. Scenes, props, and character looks were replicated near-perfectly, down to the camera angles. It was insanely uncanny. And I’m saying this as a big fan of this series – I just had NO idea how so much was directly ported over from the game. It really says something about this game.
It’ll be six episodes consisting of flashbacks and only two episodes of plot
I’m holding out hope that they discover run into No Pun Intended author Will Livingston.
It was never a mushroom zombie show.
People joke about this, but the second game is hated a lot for just how much it deviates from the (for the apocalypse setting) feel good found daughter element. It takes on much harsher elements of human violence and darker more challenging stuff that for better or worse (depending on who you ask) works to make a more nuanced and emotional journey at the cost of tons of action. I can’t see them actually not having more zombie action as its in cities and a ton of them, and there are more main or supporting actors and tons of action set pieces that can be done well live action. Car chases, burning cities, the usual set pieces etc. Along with some super violent stuff im sure they will cut out. There are also fractions and polarizing gray area discussions that might drive away the big showing they got off this miniseries due to it being much more manageable for mass audience consumption. Personally it is the better game story wise and gameplay, but i get the condensed, simple or cliche familiar feel of the first one and why it did so well as it was great live action and game wise. I just enjoy more of the media with a bite. Its the season you can’t route for anyone type of stuff that will put people off.
Boosting her up so she can drop a ladder is so very video gamey, I’m surprised there weren’t any slow sideways shuffling across a ledge
It’s funny cuz I actually remember that part with the ladder as one of the most effective parts of the game. All throughout the game there’s been situations where you have to boost Ellie up to get to a ledge and find a way for you to get up, and she just does it automatically… and then this one part at the end, you go to boost her up, and she doesn’t come, and you turn around and she’s just sitting on a bench staring off into space… It was a really effective way of bringing together the trauma of the plot and character development and mechanics by interrupting a process that’s been so easy for 30-40 hours. So I’m kinda glad they put it in even though it felt more like an easter egg for ppl who played the game than something that makes sense in a show lol
That scene sort of replicates a great moment from the game: just after the first time Ellie has to kill someone (to save Joel), they do one of these boost-me-up things for the dozenth time. You push the action button to get Ellie over to you and…nothing happens, because she’s still shaken.
Lol
As someone who played the game through once shortly after it came out, I have been half remembering some things, forgetting others, and misremembering a lot. That being said, the scene early on where Joel gives Ellie a boost so she can send a ladder down hit straight through to when I played it. There is a ton of that in the game. If any one part of the series felt like it pandered straight to the gamer audience, it was that bit. That’s the game.
i dont know how, i completely forgot about the cannibal guy until they were in the burning building.
The ladder stuff came out of necessity in the game. They needed something quite long where very little happens to download the next part of the map in the background without showing a “loading…” screen. Same thing as the lifts in Mass Effect 1.
Honestly hadn’t thought of that. It never felt like it distracted from the gameplay for me.
At least they didn’t present the giraffe in Let’s Game It Out style.
-say something in a public comment
-expects people to not reply/comment
Not very tactical, Tacitus
I’m sure some of the gamers will have been happy at the inclusion of the sequenceYou make it sound like they were throwing us a bone. I mean, Joel shooting everyone is pretty pivotal to the conclusion of the story, so… yea?
“giraffes, even those in captivity, hate being stroked and petted like it is in the game”That giraffe has probably not seen anyone for 20 years. It was desperate for some interaction.
The daughter of the surgeon (Abby) kills Joel in the 2nd game, early on. You’re welcome.
Basura. If I wanted to play a video game I would do just that. Joel is a psychopath.
Iimagine thinking it’s ok to murder a child for science experiments bu Tito’s not ok to save that child.Speaking of psychopaths, I hope you never have children.
Well, stick around for Season 2. The show/game agrees with you.
A little element of the game that was left out in the show: there were a dozen other dead kids who had been experimented on and they were all killed by the Fireflies. Even in the show, they didn’t seem to bother with MRI’s or testing if the gene could be passed down. It made Joel’s decision a lot more justified.
When does this happen in the game? I don’t remember anything like that.
When was that mentioned? I don’t think that was in the game.
Copium that a lot of gamers who have zero media literacy skills cling to make Joel a hero.
I don’t think Joel’s heroic, but the game makes it much clearer that the fireflies are a pretty incompetent organisation (they knock Joel out when he’s trying to save an almost drowned Ellie, the cure for humanity FFS) so I’m with him on that front.
“The Fireflies are incompetent/power hungry” = more gamer fan fiction
Yeah, me neither, and I’ve played the game pretty thoroughly.
I don’t remember it, either, and I watched the cutscene movies recently.
Lol no, that was Joel’s lie. There’s info in some of the records you find of them trying to develop a cure/vax and failing, but the game makes it very clear that Ellie was unique and they never saw anyone that had her immunity and she was the key to a medical breakthrough they were looking for.Also Joel’s decision never had anything to do with the viability of the vaccine.
That’s not true homie. It was explained in the second game that Ellie was the first and only one.
Okay, I’m legit curious, and I did not like the show and have never played the game. I just want to know where the original poster got this apparently false but specific detail.
From his imagination.
I believe it’s a variation on a common misunderstanding, which stems from an item you can find when you play through the hospital sequence at the end of the game. As you run around as Joel gunning down Fireflies, you can find a tape recording in one room in which Ellie’s surgeon reviews her case, saying, “The girl’s infection is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we’ve seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient’s Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid [. . .] however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal.”Because of that italicized portion, some players who don’t listen very carefully concluded that the surgeon was saying that he had already seen “past cases” of immunity, when in fact he’s contrasting Ellie’s infection with “past cases” of infection they’ve studied—as in, normal fungus zombies.
This is 100% false.
Yeah mate, that’s completely fabricated. They had a couple of X-ray images of infected that they experimented on, not kids and not potentialy immune people.
A dozen other kids?? I think you might be misremembering the game
Not sure how you’re able to run an MRI machine during the apocalypse, they can be a bit tricky to keep operational at the best of times due to their complexity among other things.
That’s wrong.First, it wasn’t a dozen other “kids” – the doctor’s recording you can find in the game says “previous cases” they worked on meaning infected people, not necessarily children.These previous cases were “experimented on” in that they were already infected and the Firefly doctors tried various cure attempts on them, none of which worked.The Fireflies didn’t kill any of these previous cases – the infection did. They tried to cure them, but none of their cures worked, and after 1-2 days they turned.So you’re 100% wrong here.
Does Joel go overboard in reclaiming Ellie: Yes.Is it understandable given the circumstances: Yes.
If Marlene and the Fireflies are so certain this is what Ellie would want… they could fucking ask her.
They’re murdering someone, without their consent, on a theory that it *might* yield a cure. They’re the baddies.
This. Ellie didn’t consent, even if she did tell Joel she wanted to see it through earlier. Without full knowledge of what that means (ie: her death), she cannot make an informed choice or give consent. And like you, I wasn’t nearly confident enough in Marlene’s theory of the “cure” to sacrifice a child for it. (Plus, can the good doctor not just perform a brain biopsy on Ellie to get the cells he needs to culture? They were going to culture and synthesize her cells already. Killing the only source of the miracle cells at the first go seems like a risky move. What happens if you screw up, or the first go-round doesn’t work right?). The fireflies are clearly the baddies. I get that the episode is supposed to set up a Big Dilemma. A sort of high-stakes trolley problem: one person in exchange for all of humanity. But I can’t say that I feel particularly compelled to condemn Joel’s choice here. Humanity is already fucked. And at the same time, humanity is 20 years into finding ways of living with cordyceps (with varying levels of civility/barbarity). The damage is done, by and large. And I think that’s what the people who gripe about there not being enough zombies in the show are missing. We’re being asked whether it’s OK to kill one person to save humanity from the zombies, but the zombies aren’t what’s wrong. Humanity is what’s wrong. So you save the girl and leave humanity to sort itself out.
I was also waiting for Joel to throw that exact topic back at Marlene when they were on the subject, something like ‘Well, does she get a say?”It would have set up a pretty interesting discussion (albeit one almost certainly concluded by a few 9 millimeter casings), something an otherwise good episode lacked – but that constant missing of going an extra step above a few tweaks to the game play narrative was one of themes for the series.All in all, it was still an above average show, but it also whiffed on a lot of opportunities that it shouldn’t have along with the periodic sloppiness. If they had followed them up and cleaned things up, it really had a chance to be something special. Maybe in Season 2.
He did say “you don’t get to decide” in his final confrontation with Marlene in the parking lot.
We have no clue what the Fireflies told her before she was sedated. Maybe things that directly contradict Joel’s lies?
In the game Ellie is unconscious when the Fireflies find them. Not sure why the show decided to change this so she is conscious when they take her away from Joel. How much did she see before she lost consciousness? She mentions Marlene – did she see her and talk to her? Why she automatically assume Marlene is there? In the game Ellie never mentions Marlene after she wakes up – she probably assumes she is still back in Boston.
Big gap was left there, and it does make me wonder if the producers will flashback to the Marlene-Ellie interaction that occurred while Joel was unconscious… If there’s no big time jump, I bet Joel’s lie will return to haunt them.
As I said, in the game Ellie doesn’t know that Marlene was even there. The fact that she mentions her in the show makes you think that they interacted, but then why didn’t Marlene tell her what they had to do and give Ellie the choice, since she tells Joel later that she knows Ellie would have agreed to it?The Fireflies don’t realize they have to kill Ellie until after the doctors do their tests on her, so what did they tell Ellie was going on during this? Did they knock her out before they put her in the MRI (or whatever they used to scan her brain)? Why doesn’t Ellie mention any of this in the car when she wakes up?The more you think about it, the more Ellie being conscious when the Fireflies finds them creates so many problems. Should have left her unconscious like in the game.
I agree in theory but doubt that discussion would work in context. My take was that Marlene was acknowledging that debt she owed Joel simply by letting him live (critical error in judgment as it turned out). And on his side, Joel heard “prepping for surgery” and wouldn’t have wasted a second on a semantic argument. He knew he needed to get far enough away from the crowd to…do what he did. Nonetheless, 45 minutes felt anemically short for such a finale, though I confess I don’t know what I would’ve added (puns! more puns!) to the runtime.I DO feel that last minute essentially told us that S2 will be about that missed discussion.
I know the show didn’t go this route, but I think it would be interesting if Ellie actually did consent but then Joel rescued her without knowing that it was her choice. Ellie would know that Joel was lying to her as soon as she woke up, then would have to decide whether to tell him that she knows he is lying or just keep travelling with him with that troubling knowledge but acting like everything is ok. This would only work though if Ellie thought Joel was dead or something, otherwise she would have at least said goodbye.
I had the feeling that Ellie DID figure out that she was going to die, but had made the decision that it was worth it to be able to provide a cure for the world. But being that she is just a teenager, she didn’t understand and/or know how to properly convey this out loud to Joel. Either out of a sense of her trying to protect him (which is a nice parallel to Joel’s actions later) but because she doesn’t tell him that’s her plans, he reacts the way he does, which is also quite understandable. That’s why she’s also no longer trusting of Joel at the end, but since she’s not stupid, she knows it’s better to just say “Okay” than to fight him on this now. Wait it out, find out more information, think it through.
Ellie doesn’t assume she’s going to die when helping the Fireflies create a cure. She says too many things throughout the show/game that tell us that she thinks she’ll show up, help the Fireflies, and then her and Joel will leave. She does not think this will kill her.
Sure, if you think that people never update their minds or are always telling the 100 percent truth, and that writers don’t ever have characters change as the course of a show, then yeah.
It seemed pretty clear in the last episode that she had a realization and a feeling this could become the end of her life, she isn’t totally sure, but it seemed like she figured thats not out of the realm of possibility, and that she was determined to go forward with everything, even if that were the case.
THANK YOU. I screamed “What about a biopsy??” at least 3 times. lol
To me, the clear insanity of the Fireflies’ plan was reason enough for Joel to take Ellie, if only to get them to pump the brakes on “the plan” to flesh it out a bit more. Humanity has been dealing with cordyceps for 20 years. Why does Ellie need to go into surgery minutes or hours after they find her? Why can’t they take the time to make sure she knows the outcome and gives consent? Why can’t they explore possibilities that can save her life, if for no other reason than medicine rarely gets a new drug or new procedure right on the first try. It seemed pretty clear to me that they actively avoided giving Ellie informed consent, so Joel absolutely did the right thing in taking her. That the Fireflies don’t explore this route exposes them for what they are: rash, negligent, and so invested in the power they would get from a cure that they’re blind to anything else, including whether or not their cure will actually work. How do you kill your one and only test subject? HOW?! Especially when you have other options that are less invasive and that will let you make multiple attempts to synthesize a vaccine.
brain biopsy in the post apocalypse is not ideal
I had to come back here and share that our viewpoint has officially been endorsed by a cadre of doctors via Slate: https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/last-us-finale-hbo-season-1-vaccine-ending.htmlI feel vindicated.
I’m glad actual scientists weighed in, if I was in Joel’s position the very first thing I’d say is “wait, where the fuck did this moron go to medical school, or obtain any knowledge of science, I’m not even a doctor and I know how a god damned biopsy works. What the fuck is wrong with you people!”
At that point, I would trust Joel, former construction contractor, to perform my surgery more than I would trust that doc. That might be only a slight exaggeration.
A biopsy wouldn’t work. They don’t need a sample of Ellie’s brain, they need the Cordyceps growth, and they can’t remove that without cutting up her brain. As Joel says, “it grow throughout the brain”.
Right, like they start with the full nuclear option instead of starting at step 1. “Well, I guess we need to remove her entire brain!” The Fireflies should have picked someone besides Dr. Frankenstein as their lead scientist, I guess.
Yes, the logic really doesn’t track. This is not the moral dilemma the writers think it is unless you ignore info from both reality and the show (the Fireflies are sorta incompetent. How would they create a cure? Wouldn’t this be a vaccine not a cure? How has there not been progress in 20 years? Why can’t we just take a few cells? Etc. Etc.).
Yeah, I haven’t been nearly as conflicted as many of the reviewers are. Maybe the game sets up a humanity vs. Ellie choice, but the show doesn’t imo. The show hasn’t pitched the Fireflies as saviors or particularly competent. They get attacked in Boston. They lose half their party getting Marlene across the country. And foremost of all, the fucking doctor wonders aloud if the hospital has enough power to complete the surgery. These are the people who are going to synthesize a vaccine? I doubt they can even refrigerate samples. And in an early episode Joel mentions previous cures and treatments that have failed. Why have faith in this cure, this time? I wouldn’t if I were him.
In the game Marlene specifically says “a vaccine”, not “a cure”. I wonder if the current Covid climate made them feel they had to change this wording for the show.
Once could argue the Boston chapter was incompetent or simply not powerful enough to really do any damage to FEDRA there. If anything they’re just some resistance collective. Also I think larger groups trying to travel outside the QZ zones are bigger targets in general. They do eventually get Marlene to CO an then UT. But yes, they’re really putting all their eggs in once basket with Ellie that I think they’re completely blinded by the possibility and not thinking it through. Plus I also think this is a means to overthrow FEDRA. If they have a vaccine that can prevent you from becoming sick they’ll look an actual competent alternative to FEDRA.
Yeah, the writers needed to work harder to make it seem plausible that killing Ellie would lead to a cure. There’s no dilemma, and thus no real drama, if the Fireflies just seem delusional.
That’s the point, in the game and the show. “The fireflys are clearly the baddies” – you never know that, and balancing the personal bonds against the weight of unknown lives saved is the point. You play/view as Joel, a man still traumatised by the daughter he could not save, seeing a chance to save another even if it means killing a hospital full of people, an unsubtle way to call out all all the lives he’s taking with that choice. And that lie to Ellie at the end – it was one of the rare times a game took my breath away, and as the credits rolled I was still absorbing it. Is it selfless redemption, or a selfless act? The show moved the beats around a little, and absolutely nailed it.
that part! the fireflies have been so incompetent this entire time. The first meeting of Joel and Ellie he’s taking her as cargo because their compound got WRECKED. Then they show up at the state capitol building, THAT group got wrecked and infected too, that’s how he ends up with her in the first place!! They’re basically proposing killing the ONLY person who we know is immune for a cure this doctor “thinks” will work. I didn’t see a state of the art lab in that rundown hospital. I didn’t see any equipment for mass production of a vaccine. he’s basically going to cut her brain open and what, put it in a cooler? then hope for the best? and the cherry on top is her saying “this is what Ellie would want” after straight up telling Joel Ellie has no idea what’s happening when they put her under. very sus.
I had to come back here to your post because our viewpoint has been endorsed by a series of actual doctors via Slate:https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/last-us-finale-hbo-season-1-vaccine-ending.htmlI feel vindicated.
The Firefly doctors have been working on a cure for ~20 years, so they are the only experts around.Yes, the Fireflies have been attacked by FEDRA and Infected – duh. That is the world they live in. I could also say that FEDRA has been attacked by the Fireflies and Infected so by your definition they are equally as incompetent.We’re told that they ran tests on Ellie and the Cordyceps growth in her brain is what they need to create a cure. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Just because we don’t see a lab doesn’t mean one isn’t there – this *is* a hospital.
How can they ask her though? What if she says no?
(Plus, can the good doctor not just perform a brain biopsy on Ellie to get the cells he needs to culture? They were going to culture and synthesize her cells already. Killing the only source of the miracle cells at the first go seems like a risky move. What happens if you screw up, or the first go-round doesn’t work right?).It’s a contrived science situation to create a trolley problem dilemma or whatever. It’s just the logical cap to something’s that doesn’t even reach the level of junk science (there is not even a remote chance anything like this could come even close to happening and certainly not at the exact same moment globally even if it somehow could – which it can’t) just to all make the plot happen from start to finish. I think you’re right, there’s going to be all sorts of non-lethal options that could potentially work.Which depending on how much you care about the fidelity of the sciences in popular entertainment can be fine depending on how much you want to think about these things.
It’s very clear she didn’t know the cure would mean giving up her life. We see as she tries to cure Sam with just her blood.
That’s a good point. I hadn’t even thought of that.
Sure, but because of that attempt she now knows that just her blood doesn’t do anything, so may have updated her thinking on it accordingly.
No, it just means smearing your blood on raw wounds doesn’t cure them.
Yes, and she may have updated her thinking on it accordingly.
The companion podcast had an interesting bit where Druckman said that when they play-tested the original game and surveyed the testers, the non-parents split about 50/50 on whether Joel was the villain in that sequence at the hospital. The parents, though, were all-in with Joel.
This tracks. Parents are literally all immoral monsters.
So you think it’s immoral to stop the murder of a child?
Its true, I’d rip off your fucking head and shit down your throat if you tried to hurt my children.
Yeah, I’d nuke you all if you came at my kids. WWIII and everything. I don’t have a choice, it’s biological imperative.
One person for all humanity is the easiest decision in the world.Unless that one person is yours. Also, Pedro at this point could murder puppies and we’d still love him. If the rest of humanity wanted us to side against him, they should’ve cast, say, Jai Courtney. Or Jared Leto.
That is so interesting to me. When I played the game for the first time in 2013, both my kids were really young. In fact, my youngest had only been born a little over a year earlier.I remember feeling strongly as the credits rolled that Joel was justified, and if that were my kid I would have burned the Fireflies to the ground before letting them touch her. I remember being surprised by how strongly I felt that, because I thought the game (and now the show) did a good job of presenting all aspects of the tragedy.I have softened over the years as the discussion on this point has continued to be had, and I don’t think my position is as rigid. But, as a parent, I had a very intense reaction of protectiveness the first time I played the game. I have been gaming for forty years-I don’t think another game has ever made me feel that strongly before. I am still surprised by it.
well there’s no villain. the firefly did a terrible thing; he did too.
Non parent (unless dogs count) but cool aunt.I would burn that fucker to the ground if anyone hurt or pulled that shit with my dog, or my niece. Pascal’s turn from grouchy Joel to fatherly Joel with regard to how he talks to Ellie is a master class in acting. The tenderness of his telling her about the guitar, and Boggle, and that Sarah would have liked her and “not that you aren’t girly”, etc. There’s a great Making Of…. doc on HBOMax, I loved the stuff about getting the giraffe used to the blue screen so they could film Bella feeding her. Shallow note: Love Ashley Johnson with darker hair. Almost didn’t recognize her. Apparently the Fireflies are a bunch of assholes. Duh. We have an idea that might work but we’re going to kill this young girl because in 2020 whatever doctors don’t know how to do a brain tissue biopsy….oh wait. It’s bad enough to live thru this hellscape with the mushroom zombies, but to have to deal with humans fucking you over at every turn. JFC
That is very interesting. This brings to mind that parents who played the Telltale Walking Dead game played it a bit differently.
Yeah, I find the back-and-forth about the scene since the game so tiring because the answer is everyone is wrong. I think the show’s changes are interesting in that they simultaneously made Joel out to be more of a cold-blooded killer (compared to the games where you Rambo through everything, the “I kill 10 guys without a scratch” sequence here comes off far more brutal because there’s comparatively less violence in the show) and also made the Fireflies even more terrible (because the show makes it more explicit they’re really just taking a stab in the dark while murdering Ellie. It’s not some smart, informed science where her life will be sacrificed for a tangible gain, and they’re not giving her the opportunity for informed consent.)Even if you’re a “needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few” utilitarian, you don’t look at the mad scientists and think “yep, these guys are definitely going to cure the world.”Mostly it makes it extra dumb that everyone tells Joel what’s happening, versus “hey she’ll just be sedated while we take samples” and following up with “oh my god she died on the table, I’m so sorry” excuse. It’s like these people aren’t living in the same universe as the show 😀
Yeah, I think this is pretty correct. Both Marlene and Joel are wrong in how they act here, and they’re both right. But it’s the lies that tell…Joel is obviously wrong to potentially doom the human race, but it’s his humanity — his acting like David said the cordyceps works — as a parent that makes sense. He’s lost one child and he’s not going to lose another. Of course he knows he’s wrong because he lies.Marlene is also wrong. She’s not a parent, but she knows what Anna was like. She lies to Joel about being there when Ellie was born to try and engage with him way after it’s too late — because if she were there when Ellie was born, it’d likely mean Anna wasn’t bitten and Ellie wouldn’t be there. Having seen Anna’s dedication it’s Marlene’s humanity — connection to one another, but lacking a parent’s drive — that makes sense. She doesn’t grasp in order to save the world she needed to dig two graves in that hospital and kill Joel as well — he was never going to let it go.
My 1st thought were “why are you telling the guy who was just able to singlehandedly get her across the country, thus has been in and can get out of some serious shit, the details to your “Well it will kill her, but we have this working theory on what is going on with her that might be right, might not, but hey we’ll see soon enough!” plan.
Yes, and Marlene’s stupidity in telling him the plan really detracted from the drama for me. It made her a less worthy antagonist.
look man, that’s not how parentheses work
‘Even if you’re a “needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few” utilitarian, you don’t look at the mad scientists and think “yep, these guys are definitely going to cure the world.”’Agreed. And it’s striking to me because you’d figure that desperation might be valid if this takes places months or even a couple of years after the initial outbreak. You know, that faint hope that some semblance of civilization/life prior can be restored. But two decades later, there’s a new reality to life. So the notion that these doctors haven’t done any legitimate research and pretty much are just winging it without any semblance of a backup reeks of illogical insanity.
Marlene really didn’t know Ellie. She was terrified she would say no.Joel did know Ellie. He was terrified she would say yes.There really are no baddies (except David.)
Exactly. Joel should’ve just said “Then why didn’t you fucking ask her?!” At least Cannibal David gave her a choice at first.And the whole “our doctor THINKS it could be a cure…” I mean, isn’t there a brain surgeon around who can do some, you know, non-lethal brain surgery?
They don’t need Ellie’s brain, they need the Cordyceps growth in her brain. It can’t be removed without cutting up the brain.
Can someone who has played the game recently confirm something for me?
I played TLOU back when it first came out and I *hated* the ending because a) you as the player didn’t get a choice as to whether to save Ellie or not, and b) I swear that it was made explicitly clear that Ellie had agreed to the procedure, knowing it would mean her death, and Joel selfishly overrode that anyway to avoid his own selfish outbreak. Now I’m wondering if I didn’t just imagine that last part over the ensuing decade of bitterness.
If Marlene and the Fireflies are so certain this is what Ellie would want… they could fucking ask her.yeah; besides it’s not like they’d exhausted every option in a few hours. that’s a bit too much.
This is why the story is fundamentally flawed. The poorly constructed final conflict is something the show could have resolved, but its even more rushed in the show than in the game. The idea of Joel choosing Ellie over the cure is a great idea dramatically, but you have to actually earn those kinds of moments for them to work. If there’s no set up then there’s no payoff. That’s just bad writing. Many justify this nebulousness as a sort of “artistic choice,” which just demonstrates to me that audiences have full on surrendered to franchise culture and fandom overall else. There’s a lot of people who would rather be invested in something being “a masterpiece” rather than using their own critical thinking skills.
“The idea of Joel choosing Ellie over the cure is a great idea dramatically, but you have to actually earn those kinds of moments for them to work.”If you’ve watched the show (or played the game) and gotten to this point and feel that Joel choosing Ellie over the cure hasn’t been “earned”, well, then bless you heart.
The Fireflies could have put a bullet in Joel’s head and tossed him in a trash chute before he woke up. Problem solved. They chose one terrible thing in exchange for one million incredible things. Had they chosen to do two terrible things, they would have saved the world. But it’s likely selfishness and the need to maintain the illusion of being incorruptible that the Fireflies decided to murder Ellie.However, Joel is absolutely incorrigible. He believes the Fireflies can make a cure. He absolutely trusts in their intelligence and resourcefulness WITHOUT QUESTION. And even knowing this, he begs Ellie to abandon the lab at the last second so she won’t leave him for the Fireflies and he can get his happily ever after.Joel isn’t killing the Fireflies because he doubts them — that’s the audience trying to cope with his world view. He’s killing the Fireflies because he completely believes that Ellie is the cure. He even tells them to go and find someone else to kill instead.Joel isn’t a hero and the Fireflies aren’t villains. The Fireflies are anti-heroes and Joel is worse.
“The Fireflies could have put a bullet in Joel’s head and tossed him in a trash chute before he woke up. Problem solved.”Marlene assume Joel is the same man she knew back in Boston – the smuggler who is doing this as a job and doesn’t want to have anything to do with Ellie. She has no idea that the two of them bonded during this trip.“But it’s likely selfishness and the need to maintain the illusion of being incorruptible that the Fireflies decided to murder Ellie.”No, they decide to kill Ellie because that’s the only way to remove the growth from her brain to create a cure.“Joel isn’t killing the Fireflies because he doubts them — that’s the audience trying to cope with his world view. He’s killing the Fireflies because he completely believes that Ellie is the cure.”No, he kills the Fireflies because he wants Ellie to live. He doesn’t know or care if the cure is real or not. He just wants Ellie to be alive and in his life.
If Marlene and the Fireflies are so certain this is what Ellie would want… they could fucking ask her.I thought so too. But. This is more a manipulation of the plot by the writers more than anything. They needed the drama. Asking Ellie, who already demonstrated self sacrifice, would weaken the shock ending that manipulated us into. I get why they did it. But it was somewhat exploitative given what they wanted us to believe about Ellie.These are plot devices of lazy writing. Like, why after twenty years of fighting fungus zombies nobody ever seems to develop the after confrontation protocol of “Hey let’s check each other out for bites, so there are no surprises later.”It’s silly when you take five seconds to think about it. But they want easy drama. And the hope is if the drama is effective you are not supposed to think to hard about it.However, it’s writing like that which tells me to prepare for a bad second season.
Have you not heard of the greater good? Tough decisions do not come lightly. We can watch 9 episodes with 1000 people dying but we stop with Ellie? Joel was wrong. Period.
It’s justified in the game but it’s not in the show. The hospital scene sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the series. It no longer makes as much logical sense.
The Fireflies have been working on a cure for ~20 years. Do you really think they’re going to ask the only immune person in the world if they would consent to this procedure? If they did and Ellie said “no”, do you think the Fireflies would just let her go? Of course not – they’re going to do this procedure no matter what. So why bother asking Ellie at all?In the game you find a voice recorder where Marlene recorded her thoughts and she says that the doctors asked her to give the go-ahead for the surgery “as if I had a choice”. Even she knows that she can’t say no to this – she can’t put her personal feeling for Ellie ahead of saving humanity.Also, Marlene assumed that Ellie was already dead (in the game you find her journal where it describes her arriving at the hospital and being told that Ellie never arrived, so she assumes she died during the trip). Being told that Ellie is still alive but then hearing that the tests showed that she had to die to get at the growth in her brain – that would be too much to revive Ellie just so Marlene could say good-bye to her again.
Not only thay, but in suggesting Ellie would have wanted to sacrifice herself, they suggest a child of that age can give informed consent to being murdered. I’m not sure many adults can give that, let alone one so young.Alao, his murder spree this week is exactly why the series did the right thing and moved Joel away from being a casual killer as he is in the game. The last two episodes have used his capacity for violence in such a way that a game faithful version of the character wouldn’t have managed. You’d have reached the final episode, amd no one would be in any doubt over what he’d do, amd the emotional toll it has would have been lessened considerably. In my opinion, at least.
Ellie at 14 is mature beyond her years, more than most adults in the pre-fungal apocalypse times.
She may be mature, but she can’t know for certain if her death would even save humanity (the scientists only think what they have planned will work). As others have said, people are surviving, and the practical distribution of a cure seems like a pipe dream. I feel like had she died, and it did work, it’d be given to specific people first and just create a new class system. I certainly don’t think it would make the world a better place. People clamouring for a cure. Fighting and killing for it, etc.
When Marlene gave Joel that speech about how it’s what Ellie would have wanted, I really wanted him to say, ”Why didn’t you ask her?” I’m not saying what he did was right, but don’t knock someone out to scoop their brain out then say it’s what they would have wanted.
“I’m not saying what he did was right”Why not?It fucking BOGGLES my mind the way people are bending over backwards to paint people doing fatal scientific experimenting on a teenage girl as anything resembling good.
I mean, you know Joel doesn’t bring that up because he KNOWS it IS what Ellie would have wanted and he actually DOESNT want Ellie to have a choice because he would still stop it anyway. That’s kind of the point of that moment. Joel knows Marlene is right when she says that.
Probably because even if Ellie had said “no”, Marlene and the Fireflies would have gone ahead and done it anyway. Also, Marlene probably didn’t want to revive Ellie and tell her that she had to die, just to say good-bye to her again.
Not just that; if Ellie had said “yes,” I’ll bet Joel would have gone ahead and stopped it anyway. Ellie had no say over what they were doing with her there either way.
The Final was just missing the special part
“Welcome… to Giraffic Park.”
Dang, I had 10 years to think of it and I never did! Take your star!
I know I’m late to the party, but I can’t believe the reviewer and commentors never mention the obvious homage to Jurassic Park:Ellie feeding the giraffe was strikingly similar to Lex feeding the brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park. Even the main female protagonist in JP was named ELLIE!
I know she was in the game but Ashley Johnson would have been an inspired choice to play Ellie’s mother regardless. There are enough similarities between her face and Bella Ramsey’s that I could legitimately believe them as mother and daughter.
Almost wish we could have gotten more of her. That episode was so short – they could have had 10 minutes at the beginning before the infected is chasing her into a barn house, just showing her sneaking out with Marlene and the soldiers (or trying to).
At first, I thought there was some deep faking going on. Looking at pictures, they have similar bone structure. Shallow eye sockets. And they shaped her eye brows to look like Bella Ramsey.
Not knowing she played her in the game, we thought she was cast for her resemblance. Pretty amazing coincidence there.
It’s Chrissy Seaver! I’ll always remember her face from Growing Pains. Even her sort of cameo as “waitress who gets saved and gives interview” in Avengers stood out because her face is so unique.
I actually thought it was a flash forward at first and they did some kind of reverse Deniro on Bella Ramsey.
Yes. At first I actually thought it was some kind of CGI aging trickery on Bella Ramesy to play her own mother.Edit: I see from Bonerland’s comment that I’m not the only one.
I thought the same thing. They have the same face shape and jaw line. Ashley is a perfect choice.
She was really good in the scene she had though.
Really enjoyed the series and appreciate the write-ups. I am a bit confused by something, maybe someone reading this could help me.“Our doctor thinks the Cordyceps in Ellie has grown with her since birth,” Marlene explains grimly. “It produces a kind of chemical messenger. It makes normal Cordyceps think that she’s Cordyceps; that’s why she’s immune.” I heard that, too.But we saw Ellie attacked by Sam and I’m pretty sure that she was attacked in the episode when Tess was bitten. So, she’s attackable but when bitten … what?It’s not a big deal, I can accept her being immune without understanding exactly why she is immune. But I honestly am not sure what Marlene was saying about Ellie’s immunity.Thanks
I would guess the chemical message isn’t received by the cordyceps until they are in her system through the bite. So they don’t stop her from being bitten, they stop them from carrying out the infection. Something like that. It’s make believe biology though. I wouldn’t think too deeply about it.
Yeah, as long as you stop thinking, the conceit around the central character’s potential death doesn’t really matter.
I think it’s also feasible that Marlene doesn’t really know, but I do think it’s more that it stops the infection because her body is already showing as infected (or potentially has an antibody of some sort similar to an actual vaccine that confuses the Cordyceps). I don’t think there’s a way for the Cordyceps to know that just in terms of attacking, keeping in mind a lot of the attacks are done by sound.
I think it would, based on the internal logic of the show. The zombies don’t attack the other zombies.
Right, but in the melee of an attack – I don’t think we’ve ever seen an infected single out Ellie and go for her. Ellie was present for attacks and got bitten in the midst of fighting with them. If she had just been alone minding her business (and not with other uninfected people when one attacked), she may not have ever gotten bitten.
This can’t be it. The infected still attack/bite Ellie, she just doesn’t turn.
In the games the infected will even attack each other.
I didn’t feel like that made sense or that immediately removing Ellie’s brain made sense. The acting carried it for me, but it made Joel’s rampage less morally ambiguous. There is so much failure when drugs are developed. It seemed blindingly incompetent to have them jump immediately to killing the only immune person. No blood tests or clinical trials just a single hail Mary. If it doesn’t work, there’s no second chance.
The cure has nothing to do with Ellie’s brain, or her blood. It’s the Cordyceps growth in her brain, which they can’t remove without cutting up her brain.
My point stands though. They “think” it’s the Cordyceps growth in her brain. They hope they can use it to manufacture a vaccine. They haven’t verified that it is. They haven’t drawn or tested her blood. They haven’t done an MRI or CT scan. Just let’s kill and slice and dice the only person who is immune. It doesn’t make any sense. That level of complete disregard for the actual process of testing a medical procedure doesn’t really make them appear competent.
It was a weirdly unnecessarily confusing line the show threw in. Obviously the infected detect Ellie. Granted, the game science isn’t particularly realistic, but what makes Ellie special is that she’s carrying a mutated variation of the fungus that doesn’t have any adverse effects on humans. The doctor compares it to penicillin, so long as he can culture it. Unfortunately, that requires invasive brain surgery that will kill Ellie. In the end though? It’s really inconsequential to the story. It’s the lies, the lies we may accept to keep familial bonds, where that weighs on you, and how much you can accept.
The explanation for it in the game is way more complicated (basically, her motor control and emotional regions produce antibodies that devour the fungus and it can’t latch onto them). Interestingly, cordyceps in ants doesn’t immediately affect the brain either. It basically wraps up in their muscle tissue and pilots them like a puppet before sprouting in the brain.
(basically, her motor control and emotional regions produce antibodies that devour the fungus and it can’t latch onto them)My immunology lecturers from back in the day would be laughing themselves silly at this point.
Its all nanomachines bruv.
When Marlene is talking about Cordyceps thinking Ellie is Cordyceps, she’s talking about the infection already inside her. She’s not talking about the Infected people, which will attack anything to spread the fungus to other people.
I thought the series was excellent. I thought the finale was excellent. One of the best games ever spawns one of the best game adaptations ever. Some thoughts:-The last exchange between Joel and Ellie gave me chills on the cut to black, just like it did when I played the game for the first time in 2013. Ramsey and Pascal are so good.-After watching the finale, I stand by my major criticism of the show that I voiced last week (although now I can say it without worry about spoilers!): There were not enough infected on the show. Not because this needed to turn into an action romp, but because a world overrun with infected is what gives Joel’s final choice to save Ellie at the expense of a cure its stakes. The infected in the game were not simply a plot device-on rare occassions they were used for character development (David was a much more interesting character when he and Ellie overcame some Clickers first, and his evil was in doubt for a while). But mosly, it was necessary to run into them a lot because it meant that they were still a big problem, and Ellie’s potential sacrifice could have made a real difference. In the show, it seemed like they WERE a problem, but now there are none in sight. For example, no tunnel scene means our heroes just leisurely strolled through a major city without encountering one infected. Obviously, one of the game and show themes are that humans are the real monsters. But if the infected are not also a suffocating presence, then it really blunts Joel’s choice at the end. Great season one, but I think taking out all the infected scenes was a significant misstep. You have to have them for the ending to reach full potential. -In contrast, the flashback with Marlene and Anna was a much better way to show Marlene’s sorrow over what has to happen with Ellie than what we got in the game. Much more effective then the recordings that were lying around. Plus, hearing Ashley Johnson’s voice again took me right back to 2013!Overall this was spectacular television. It will be super interesting to see what choices are made for TLOU2-a game I liked, but that I think will be hard to turn into a season for television.
100% agree on the finale (and really the season throughout) needing more infected to really drive home the point that they are still a widespread issue.
The finale was great and I love the ambiguous ending (I thought for sure Joel was going to die but this was so much better), but now I totally understand what you meant in our conversation last week about how having more infected would up the stakes of his decision.Having almost no knowledge of TLOU2, I’m guessing a lot of that story will deal with the fallout of Joel’s lie, but I’m very interested to see how it all plays out, especially since the video game must have a lot more to it than just that fallout.
Thanks so much for your response! It was very hard for me to try to make my argument last week without getting into any spoilers! 🙂 There has been a lot of discussion about this issue here and elsewhere, and I think there are a lot of valid positions one can take about the number of infected in season 1. But for me, my unhappiness about that part of the show still stands after the finale (even though I generally loved the first season).I am really glad you enjoyed the finale. I did too. Except for getting rid of another infected set piece, the show followed the game ending almost to the letter. The ending hit me hard when I first played in 2013, and it hit me hard again as the credits rolled for the show. That is a testament to what a great job they all did bringing TLOU to TV.TLOU2 is a much more divisive game than TLOU was. I liked TLOU2 a lot, but it did not reach the same heights as the first for me. The one thing I will say is that I think TLOU2 would be more challenging to turn into a season of television than TLOU for reasons I don’t want to spoil, and so I will be interested to see what choices the team makes and how they proceed. I have a lot of confidence in them at this point, so looking forward to season 2. I also read an interview where the showrunner said they are planning to include more infected in season 2, so maybe I will stop complaining about it……….
Come on, Firefly guy who Marlene tells to cover the baby’s ears. You had one job. One job.
He was probably like “I don’t like babies, why do I have to hold the baby?”
Perfect finale. Really loved it. They nailed all the beats.- The start with Anna with heartbreaking. Ashley did such a fantastic job. So we were supposed to understand that her scratch at that exact point of birth is what caused the immunity?- Way to cover the baby’s ears, dude.- I couldn’t figure out what was up with Ellie at first. I assumed it was trauma from last week after what she went through, but then I realized it’s not even close to winter anymore so a good deal of time has passed (not that that would make it any easier for her). It was so sad to realize why she was actually not her chipper self.- The boosting! That was incredibly video-gamey, I loved it.- The giraffes were PERFECT. Such a moment of pure joy. I loved Joel trying to cheer her up the whole way and then finally succeeding with the giraffe feeding. That view was gorgeous.- Their relationship coming so far as to Joel being able to openly talk about Sarah is fantastic. I love that, unspoken, they both know they belong to each other now when talking about “after”.- I got a lump when Joel said “It wasn’t time.” That story was brutal. The way they looked at each other after made me want to cry.- The dampening of the sound effects and the quiet music while he rampaged through the hospital was *chef’s kiss*. Everything about that scene worked so well and was so powerful. They really did save the brutality for the last episode, showing us that all he cared about Ellie. Marlene was exceptional this episode.- The end was phenomenal. Her questions, his answer, her thinking it over before choosing to “accept” it as truth, and smashing to black. Perfection.I cannot believe they knocked this so far out of the park. I am so excited for the second season, and anything else they bring us. Any doubts about the casting, production, small changes…they were all immediately gone after the first episode. I hope other networks/platforms are paying attention and adapt more stories to this level.
“So we were supposed to understand that her scratch at that exact point of birth is what caused the immunity?” Yes. This has been a theory for years about a possible cause of Ellie’s immunity. Druckmann has said since the finale that this flashback was a scene he had wanted in the original game but he couldn’t figure out a way to add it in (the game doesn’t have flashbacks).“I couldn’t figure out what was up with Ellie at first. I assumed it was trauma from last week after what she went through, but then I realized it’s not even close to winter anymore so a good deal of time has passed (not that that would make it any easier for her).” Ellie here is definitely still affected by the trauma of David. In the game the Salt Lake City scene starts with Ellie looking at a drawing/carving of a deer, which reminds her of the deer she was hunting that led her to David. Even without that in the show, she is still affected by the trauma of that entire experience. It doesn’t matter if a few months have passed, she is still affected by it.
Its very funny to see so many people referring to Joel’s “choice” and references to the trolley problem when both the game and the show make it 100% clear there is NO choice for Joel whatsoever. He’d never allow Ellie to be killed, not in a trillion universes. The last episode isn’t a moral dilemma it’s about the inevitability of parental love.
I have a handful of friends who have become parents in the last two years. After Anna shanked the clicker in the head my male roommate said something to the effect of “Holy shit!” The next shot where the show baby Ellie in her mothers arms I replied “Yeah, that was really easy.”Pregnancy is scary and dangerous now, any time I see it in some dystopian film where a mom gives birth alone some how and also being chased by monsters or something, I mean, I know some people have a quicker go at it than others. Obviously. We’ve been doing this since well before the western world started washing their hands when practicing medicine. But if I remember correctly, at least in “The Handmaid’s Tale” it took June some hours inside that house by herself.
Yeah, I thought the baby popping out after an attack and mother being basically fine (bite notwithstanding) immediately afterwards was *very* silly. I know people will say “it’s a show about zombies, don’t complain about realism” but the point is that TLOU is show/game with zombies that strives to take itself seriously.
It kind of depends. First-children usually take longer to birth, but with subsequent pregnancies labor can go really fast and relatively easy. I’m a paramedic, I’ve attended a number of births that happened quickly and unexpectedly and in non-ideal circumstances. Her running from a zombie in the midst of labor was a little harder to swallow, but I can hand-wave it based on Anna’s desperation. So this was convenient, and turns out fortunate for Ellie, but maybe not entirely implausible.
I didn’t think it was impossible, just really really really lucky. My issue is more that overall births as shown in post-apocalyptic and sci-fi fiction tend to be really quick. Most of the time it seems the TV shows where women take a long time to give birth are sitcoms (and occasionally dramas) where they can just be off screen in a hotel room while their partner has a storyline about waiting.
People are always trying to justify whether Joel did the right thing or not acting like Joel is even thinking about cures. If Joel had to kill 4 other kids to save Ellie he would have. If the only way to save Ellie was sacrificing another girl to find the cure he would have. The point was that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to save her, especially after his past failures and only just allowing himself to love again. Anyways, I loved this season of television as much as I loved the games! Joel for dad of the year
Imagine, for just a few seconds, that you think it’s justifiable to murder a child in order to maybe, possibly, find something in her head? NOW imagine that someone decided it was WRONG to save that child’s life.
NOW imagine that you’re such a monstrous human being that you think it’s reasonable to, PUBLICLY, state that you think saving the girl was somehow cruel. Crueler than lying to a girl and saying you’re running a test on her when you INTEND TO KILL HER.
Jesus, the absolutely monstrousness of suggesting that Joel was somehow wrong.THAT is the only inhumanity on display here.
I just wanted a longer episode. Not that it’s a complaint, but everyone knocked this one out of the park, I just want to spend a bit more time with the characters and this world. At the end of the game, I was exhausted. At the end of the show, I’m still hungry for more. Season 2 will break my heart all over again. I’ll welcome it with open arms.
The decision to make Joel less of a murder machine than he was in the game really pays off in this episode. In the game, while you’re murdering your way through a bunch of Fireflies at the end, the horror of what you’re doing doesn’t carry the same weight until the end, when you’re forced to kill the doctor. Here, Joel racks up a human body count that’s possibly greater than the rest of the series combined (not sure how many he killed in Kansas). It makes the sudden burst of violence that much more poignant.In the game, though, there’s a real argument that Joel was at least partially justified because the Fireflies have proven to be completely incompetent. There’s a bit of that in the show – Marlene barely makes it across the country while travelling with 5 guards – but the main example is written out. At the school where Joel is attacked and nearly dies, they find evidence of Fireflies experimenting on monkeys (the monkeys do make an appearance in the show, but mostly as a jump scare). The Fireflies botch it, though, and a bunch of cordyceps-infected monkeys break loose and attack the Fireflies. It doesn’t say much about the ability of their scientists and surgeons, especially since this was originally where Ellie was supposed to be brought. So it can be argued that Joel shouldn’t just allow an incompetent group of people to kill his surrogate daughter on the off chance they might get something right. In all likelihood, they could botch it, fail at finding a vaccine, and Ellie would be dead. In the show, there’s no good reason to think the Fireflies don’t know what they’re doing. And that makes show-Joel, a man who’s killed a small fraction of how many game-Joel has killed, that much more of a monster. And I think that’s to the show’s credit.
“The Fireflies botch it, though, and a bunch of cordyceps-infected monkeys break loose and attack the Fireflies.”That doesn’t happen. You find a recording where one of the doctors says that he’s supposed to kill all the monkeys because everyone’s leaving, but he decides to let the monkeys go (an act of kindness, not any sign of incompetence), and one of them bites him as he’s trying to free it. This is the body Joel and Ellie find that left the other recording saying that the Fireflies went to Salt Lake City.The rest of the Fireflies leave for SLC. The monkeys are just loose roaming around the university. They don’t attack anyone. You find them twice and they immediately run away from you.The Fireflies – both in the game and the show – are shown to be the only experts about a cure. They are the only ones working on it, and have been for ~20 years. Once they get Ellie they are able to scan her and determine that if they remove the Cordyceps growth from her brain they can create a cure/vaccine. They are definitely not portrayed as incompetent.
I don’t know if it plays out the same way in the game, but Joel’s lie at the end connects back to Anna’s in the beginning of the episode when she tells Marlene she cut the umbilical cord before she was bitten. In both cases, the parent is willing to say whatever they think will save their child. If Anna had told the truth, Ellie might not have lived long enough for her immunity to be discovered. With Joel, he’s not just trying to cover up his own wrongdoing, he’s trying to protect her from additional trauma – as misguided as that might be.
A connection I made in the show that I hadn’t made in the game was, the way they framed the killing spree at the end, with like the funeral death march version of the theme playing and especially with all the sound effects/dialogue distant and muted, felt a lot like the beginning of the episode when Joel is trying to talk to Ellie and it’s distant and muted. Like it does a lot better of selling the idea that he might be having a PTSD episode when he does this imo. Not that that like, excuses anything because even after it’s done he still doubles down on it. Just that in the game it felt a lot more to me like just another action section except for the part where he kills the doctor. I don’t remember feeling the weight of Joel almost losing a second “daughter” (at least that’s how he sees it). It almost makes me think them cutting back on the action for the rest of the season was a deliberate choice to make this sequence more effective.
Joel was wrong for the faith of mankind… but fuck that shit I was cheering for him and I would have done the same. So great. God what is Elle gonna do when she really finds out (she already knows) what he did.
That part is going to be really interesting to explore in the next season, because while Ellie clearly knows that Joel is lying while choosing to accept the lie so their relationship can continue, she doesn’t know exactly what he did and why. So they seem to be headed for a period of willful delusion where they just don’t talk about what really happened at the Fireflies compound, but I think Ellie will still be pissed when confronted with the full truth.
Yeah I’m curious to see if she is or is she just wishes that it goes away and she never hears from the firefiles or about any of it again. And she just wants to be happy. But when she does “find out” that she tears into Joel and wants to leave him.
So the Fireflies are expecting a teenage girl, who may hold the key to a cure, escorted by a middle aged man. Is this in dispute?They see a teenage girl being accompanied by a middle aged man and their first instinct is to throw a grenade at them? And bash the man in the head?
So the Fireflies are expecting a teenage girl, who may hold the key to a cure, escorted by a middle aged man. Is this in dispute?Uhhhh, yes. That’s very much in dispute because that’s not what happened. Marlene hired Joel and Tess to get Ellie to the Boston Capitol Building to meet with a Firefly extraction team who would take Ellie from there. The extraction team is already dead when they arrive, and the only reason Joel and Ellie go on is because Tess begs Joel to try to do the right thing and Joel wants to get to Tommy either way. Marlene and the Fireflies would assumed Joel and Ellie died with everyone else at the Capitol Building, at best. There was never any deal for Joel to escort Ellie beyond there so they certainly weren’t expecting Joel and Ellie to show up all the way across the damn country.
Okay that makes sense.
Also, this is a world where people outside of QZs will plan ambushes to kill you – like the guy pretending to be hurt when Joel and Ellie show up in Kansas City (Pittsburgh in the game).In the game Ellie drowns and Joel is trying to revive her when the Fireflies finds them. They have their guns pointed at them saying “hands in the air” but Joel is doing CPR and they knock him out. That seems cruel, but Joel and Ellie could easily have been faking that – as soon as the Fireflies drop their guns and offer to help, “Joel” and “Ellie” could pull out their own guns and kill them.In this world, you have to assume that any stranger you see is a threat that wants to kill you.
God, the attempt at nitpicking everything in an attempt to be above the material in 2023 is exhausting.
Fireflies: We don’t think anything thru. We just jam the pedal to the floor and then blame others. They’re like MAGA crowd but stealthier.
For those unfamiliar with Salt Lake City, the overgrown nature preserve where Ellie and Joel encounter giraffes must be Hogle Zoo.
That’s not the zoo, that was a baseball stadium they were looking down on. It was just overgrown like everything else as nature had worked to reclaim it. I’m wondering how the giraffes would have made it through winters, though…they generally don’t like any temps below 50 F and they would have had to be out scavenging for food to survive.
I survive stuff I don’t like every day. Every. Damn. Day.
The implication, given the numbers of giraffe, is that it’s a functional herd just stopping off in SLC to graze during summer. Presumably they’d move to lower elevations during the winter. As you note, giraffes could not survive a winter. Lots of other typical zoo animals from warmer climates actually could, so long as there’s shelter available, but giraffes have a very low tolerance for cold. Most of the work that their heart does is to keep blood pumping up their giant necks to their brains. When the ambient temperature drops into the 50F range their circulatory system can’t pump enough warm blood throughout their bodies to keep them feeling comfortable. They can actually start showing symptoms of hypothermia in that range.
That’s a great point…for some reason I didn’t consider the fact that they can go wherever they want and don’t have to stay in one spot all the time. Although that makes me think of how the cordyceps zombies interact with wildlife…do they attack on site like with people, or do they leave them alone?
While I know they have said next season will draw on the Last of Us Part II, I cannot – given the success – imagine that they don’t plan to either draw that out significantly or rewrite it significantly. I think they’ve cast it where time jumps are possible – Bella Ramsey is physically small and looks young, but she’s older than Ellie, for example.But I can’t imagine they aren’t going to aim to keep the show going past next season.
Given the massive and negative backlash Part II got, I can see them doing a significant rewrite to prevent that from happening to the show.
Part II has a 93 rating out of 121 reviews. There was no “massive and negative backlash” outside of the misogynistic, homophobic troll contingent. Mazin and Druckmann have clearly shown with the first season they don’t give a shit about appeasing them.
Not sure what you’re even talking about and what you mean by “misogynistic, homophobic troll contingent.” The metacritic score by users is at 51%. The review bombing and anger isn’t because of “misogynistic, homophobic troll contingent,” but really because of a certain bad thing and event that happened to a certain major character which I won’t spoil for everyone else reading this and then making you play as the villain who carried out the deed. Taking out a major and beloved character so early in can do that. Maybe try reading between the lines and calming down a bit before jumping in on the offensive with the identity politics? Just a thought.
“Identity politics?” Fuck off. The misogynistic, homophobic, and I should add transphobic (even though Abby isn’t trans), contingent was the backlash. It was literally one of the first big examples of review bombing by trolls on a big release. It was major news at the time and still is all too common. Have you slopped through those negative “user” reviews? It’s primarily misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic regurgitation of right wing attacks. I don’t know how you don’t see that.
Yep. It’s certainly a very loud, very caustic minority.
Maybe they’ll swing big. I just can’t see them sacrificing a big new IP that fast.
For the correct reasons you mention, they’ll have to do it and i’m curious to see how and what the end result will be to keep the series going and fresh. We saw what happened with Game of Thrones when they changed around and ran out of source material.
Maybe they’ll shock me and be like we’re 2 – 3 seasons and done! But I doubt it.
How would adapting one of the greatest games ever made be a sacrifice?
Adapting it as one season would either mean they’re going to run out of plot and have to wing it and/or they’re going to lose the main actor that people are watching for. So it would be sacrificing the IP to end it after Season 2 or tank it by making that move too fast.
From what Mazin and Druckmann said Part II will encompass more than one season but won’t confirm how many. Which makes sense seeing as Part II if far more complex, has far more characters and is almost 3 times longer than the first game.
I suspect they also know they have momentum now to build out a multi-season arc. With the ratings being what they’ve been, HBO is probably willing to give them a bit more latitude/they can worry less about being cancelled.
From what I’ve heard, for season 1 they made Ramsey look younger and smaller then she actually is (she is 19 where Ellie is 14). Their plan is to not do this for season 2 so she will automatically look older then S1 Ellie, even without any makeup they add onto that. Plus they probably won’t start filming for maybe a year, so Ramsey could look years older by the time S2 is filmed.
Right, and they have also said that the plot of the second game will be at least 2 seasons.
One underdiscussed reason for Joel saving Ellie by killing a bunch of people is that she did save his life, even after he told her to leave him. So setting aside that he loves her like a daughter, he would save her anyway as a debt of obligation.
Joel would have done what he had done even if Ellie hadn’t saved his life. It was a selfish decision – he didn’t want to lose Ellie.
I really wanted to see a zombie giraffe. Really feel let down. Speaking of, the cordyceps really do seem to be more of a nuisance, while humans are the clear problem. Half the time I forget there’s a zombie apocalypse at all. If the Fireflies were crossing the country anyway, why the need for this convoluted trip with Joel and Ellie? Maybe I’m forgetting some justification from ep 1 or 2. Do we have to wait until season 3 for the creators to be free of the source material?
The showrunners have expressed no desire to be free of the source material or to go beyond it. They only plan on covering what the games do and when they run out of games they will halt the show.
In Episode 1, Marlene intended to take Ellie to the Capitol building, but was wounded in the shootout with Robert. So she hired Joel and Tess to take Ellie. Marlene didn’t know how badly she was wounded, or how long it would be before she could travel again, and she wanted to get Ellie to the Firefly doctors right away.The plan was that they would hand Ellie off to the Fireflies at the Capitol building, and those Fireflies would take Ellie the rest of the way.
The massacre sequence went so long and it seemed so easy for Joel to kill all those people, including the guy who put down his gun and surrendered that it felt like watching a school shooting. I had to close my eyes through most of it.
lmao at joel video gaming his way through the hospital until he reaches the OR where they apparently did not hear any of the murdering. Classic hacky writing!
also lmao at joel waking up and being immediately told “yeah we’re doing evil stuff to ellie” no ambiguity here! He seems dangerous so of course they escorted him out of the building with two dumb guys
Not sure why everyone is so crazy over this show. It is pretty much straight up cliché. You see the ending coming from the beginning….like before the game even started you knew how it was going to end. No way they spend all that time in the game for you to just go “here take her”. Its not some big OMG moment when he doesn’t hand her over.
“Last episode I should have noted that James was played by Troy Baker,
who voiced Joel in the game. This week, Ashley Johnson played Ellie’s
mother, and Johnson provided voice and motion-capture for The Last Of Us (2013), The Last Of Us: Left Behind (2014), and The Last Of Us Part II (2020).”You also omitted her arguably most famous role: Chrissy Seaver on Growing Pains!
If they had just ASKED Ellie, she would have said “Yes” and Joel wouldn’t have murdered them.
I do not think there should be a season 2. This show ended perfectly with a really great morally challenging ending. No happy endings, but not a truly sad one either, just a defensible moral choice done in a bloody way. (I never played the game, but also from what I hear many game players were truly NOT in love with the sequel and many things that made this season great were walked back alot to make a sequel work)I wish the networks would have the courage sometimes to just take a bow and let an IP end with applause instead of bleeding every drop from it…see walking dead)
It’s been a few years, but I remember the player being given a choice about Joel going back to save Ellie, and had the option to just leave and let her get carved up for the greater good. I chose to save Ellie, because obviously.
I can’t find anything about that choice now. Am I remembering this wrong?
You may be. TLOU wasn’t really a choice-based game.
i think it might be a ‘choice’ insomuch as you can not continue playing (like living in the reality of the situation), but i don’t think there’s an alternate ending or anything like that.
You must have dreamed this. This was never a choice in any version of the game – the PS3 version, the remastered PS4 version, or the PS5 remake from last year.On one of the PS3 playthroughs I watched on YouTube, once Joel decides to kill the Fireflies, the player I was watching says “Wait, what if I don’t want to do this?”
The passage of time has made me look at the ending in a different light.First of all, meeting Ellie did not “heal” Joel the way he might think. Ellie isn’t Sarah, and knowing her did not remove the trauma that Joel had to suffer. It’s good that he started to open up and have happy moments, there’s no doubt about it. But his daughter got shot in front of his very eyes and there’s no way to get around that.Secondly, Marlene is an idiot of historic proportions! She could have told Ellie and Joel what needed to happen and let them make the call, which should always have been Ellie’s to begin with. You could argue that she couldn’t take the chance of her saying ‘no’ and that the lie was just her not taking any chance. Which could have worked… if Marlene had just lied for a few minutes longer. Because the worst thing she could possibly do was lie to Ellie about the operation, and then tell the truth to the hired gun who just spent weeks taking care of her!Because no matter how bad it was for the “big picture” that Joel saved Ellie, you don’t even need to have gone through everything he went through to understand where he’s coming from. If it had been me in his place, and that I had just been told that one of my nephews was going to get killed for the sake of humanity, I would also have tried to go on a rampage. I would have been stopped and killed immediately, but I wouldn’t have been rational and would not have seen the truth.The only weakness of the ending, and this is something that creeped in the game’s sequel, is that it doesn’t properly acknowledge how stupid Marlene acted. No matter what she said, she did not understand what Joel was going through, and she shares a responsibility with him for the consequences of their failure.
“First of all, meeting Ellie did not ‘heal’ Joel the way he might think. Ellie isn’t Sarah, and knowing her did not remove the trauma that Joel had to suffer. It’s good that he started to open up and have happy moments, there’s no doubt about it. But his daughter got shot in front of his very eyes and there’s no way to get around that.”Ellie definitely “healed” Joel. Before he met her he was completely shut down emotionally. Tess was the person he was closest too, and even she said that he didn’t care about her the way she cared about him. Learning to love Ellie definitely saved Joel and allowed him to care again.“Secondly, Marlene is an idiot of historic proportions! She could have told Ellie and Joel what needed to happen and let them make the call, which should always have been Ellie’s to begin with.”Marlene had no choice her. If she had told Ellie the truth, what if Ellie had said “no”? The Fireflies would never had let her go, so she had to go through with it no matter what. And Marlene didn’t want to have to tell Ellie this and have to say good-bye to her again.As far as Joel, Marlene though he was the same man she knew back in Boston – the smuggler who agreed to take Ellie only as a job, the man who didn’t like anyone. She had no idea that he and Ellie had bonded. She expected Joel to say “I delivered the cargo, where’s my payment?”You can argue with Marlene’s decision, but she’s definitely not stupid.
Ellie wears her backpack with the dangly purple one-eyed monster, last seen (by Joel) in the meat shed last week. Joel must have taken Ellie there (while being careful not to let her see the headless, upside-down corpses).You can see Joel carrying the backpack in the snow before reaching Ellie, and giving it to her when he gives her his coat.
This show is strangely bad? The massacre in the hospital was strangely, badly shot and unemotional. Everyone knew it was going to happen.
It’s very weird that a show that on the outset seems so topical, doesn’t really have anything to do with the current situation. It’s ultimate point seems to be a kind of conservativism in which the world (at it’s best) regresses into its natural state- the family. The family doesn’t need to be nuclear but it has to be some kind of family/individual. It’s kind of dull.Obviously who cares but there is no way that they would have been able to mass produced anything under those conditions. It was barely possible in the last two years and there was a massive international division of labour.
Joel rambling about how alike Ellie and Sarah are amused me, but because he was so weird and happy. Now with that pesky Firefly business out of they way, the true, Creepy Joel has been unlocked. lol. I half expect once they get home, he’ll dress her up like Sarah, do her hair like Sarah, etc…
Joel has not been a parent for 20+ years. He is out of practice.
My daughter was 6 months old when she had heart surgery. I had to take her into surgery myself and hand her over to the masked and gowned surgeons. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life, and that was in a fully equipped, state-of-the-art pediatric hospital. Joel has my full support for thbe decision he took!
Here’s another thing; Joel protected Elie across a massive, violent journey and those Firefly assholes treat him like that? Fuck those guys. They’re clearly not the saviours of humanity with those morals!
People will forgive a lot, and great acting earns a lot, but they didn’t spend enough time with Ellie and Joel between KC and Jackson, and now we just accept they are so bonded because the acting is good. In the game they have spent actual time together that we have seen and been a part of. HBO needs to stop end-loading all their series.
This is mostly unrelated to this episode, and I realize that this show hasn’t made any sort of attempt to be realistic, but is there some sort of explanation for how the not-zombies can continue to exist for years? Clearly these dudes are not competent hunters, but they must necessarily consume something to fuel their bodies. Are they foraging? Are there stretches of the Midwest where vast herds of cordies roam free, grazing on abundant wild corn and berries?
I think the sort of blanket explanation they offer is that the fungus is preventing decomposition the way penicillin does whatever it does to heal bodily infections or something. They talk about it in the first scene, though of course it probably doesn’t carry much scientific credulity.
Where were the bricks? Where were the bottles? Where were the dumpsters? Where were the planks? Where were the pallets?COME ON!
Well, at least we got a fair amount of dragging large heavy objects across the floor.
Am I crazy or did Ellie not being able to swim not mean *anything* in the show? After she tells Joel and Tess that she can’t swim, was it *ever* brought up again?In the game it’s a big deal because it creates multiple puzzles where you have to figure out how to get Ellie across various bodies of water. I wasn’t looking for these to appear in the show, but I’d thought we’d get at least *one* scene where this mattered.I thought that maybe they were saving it for the final episode. In the game Ellie almost drowns and that’s when the Fireflies meet Joel and Ellie – she is unconscious and Joel is performing CPR so when she wakes up in the vehicle later she doesn’t even know they encountered the Fireflies. Maybe they didn’t want to do this dangerous underwater scene with the actors?I didn’t want multiple scenes in the show of Ellie on a pallet, but why bother mentioning she can’t swim if it doesn’t matter? Because the people that had played the game would complain that this wasn’t mentioned is the likely answer, but I wonder if you asked someone who never played the game if they remembered that Ellie couldn’t swim – would they reply “Oh yeah, she did say that. Why did they have her say that? It never came up again.”
If nothing else I think it functions as solid world-building. It gives us a bit of an idea of what life in the QZ is like for most kids.
I’m late to the party but I had to really take some time with this episode before forming any definitive thoughts… and ultimately I can’t help but feel that this episode kind of flies in the face of everything that’s come before thematically speaking. Up to this point, the show seems like it’s practically screaming at the top of it’s lungs “Love is the only thing worth preserving! Love is the only thing worth fighting for! Survival for it’s own sake is empty!” then this episode comes along and side-eyes me for buying into that premise. The episode works so hard to frame Ellie’s sacrifice as “the right thing”, even though nothing presented suggests that the surgery has any real hope of success. It makes zero medical sense, and even beyond that, the whole point of Ellie’s wondrous reactions to the beauty she’s able to elucidate from this world is to shake Joel of the notion that there’s no hope and all is lost. The implication of the Bill and Frank episode is that Joel’s outlook is wrong, that there is still love to be had, that a satisfying life is still possible. The thing that really aggravates me is Marlene’s bit of dialogue where she says Ellie would’ve chosen this (she’s spent like… 2o minutes with this kid post-infancy?), and you just know that we’re supposed to believe her. Ellie’s experienced loss and trauma, sure, but that’s a given even if you don’t live in fungus zombie land. Up to the very last episode she’s gawking in awe at the magic offered by simple pleasures. To her, this world isn’t hopelessly broken, it’s full of things that bring her joy and amazement.