In the finale’s climax, Joel becomes the villain - he chooses to become the villain, and we have no choice but to go along with it. Pedro Pascal in “The Last of Us” Courtesy of Liane Hentscher / HBO I know you mean well,” she tells Joel, “I know you want to protect me. Before the Fireflies find them, before Ellie is taken to a surgery she won’t come back from, before Joel learns exactly how the scientists hope to copy the chemical messengers inside her brain in order to protect the rest of humanity, he tells her, “You don’t have to do this,” and Ellie responds, “After all we’ve been through, everything I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing. Not only is Joel acting in his own best interest - killing dozens of innocent people to protect the father-daughter relationship he can’t allow himself to lose again - but he’s defying Ellie’s expressed wishes. Even if you’re relieved that Ellie’s still alive, it’s impossible to like where our leads end up. It’s typically framed as an act of selfless courage - who wouldn’t root for the guy protecting an innocent child? Episode 9 asks you to do exactly that, or at least consider it. As an audience, we’ve seen this ending a million times: The father figure does whatever it takes to save his kid. “The Last of Us” makes clear its ending isn’t a heroic act, but a tragic one. There’s no questioning if he can get to her, just a dreadful inevitability - he will keep her alive.īut he shouldn’t. The camera either lingers on the bodies of Joel’s victims or cuts back to their lifeless expressions. Mournful music plays over each fateful gunshot. Director Ali Abbasi shoots Joel’s twisted rescue mission without an ounce of tension. Only… that’s not what he’s doing, and the audience can feel it from the second he begins his assault. Technically, they’re all trying to kill her, and he’s there to save her. So what does he do? He guns down every person who stands between him and his ward: guards, doctors, even the woman who’s known Ellie her whole life. Our two protagonists have been separated, and when Joel wakes up, he’s told Ellie is about to die. In form alone, Episode 9 builds to an archetypal hero’s ending. When he tries to talk to her about it, Joel struggles to explain why they should feel justified in killing their attacker - it’s as if he’s worried about coming across as a monster, or admitting to himself that he might already be one. In Kansas City, Ellie saves Joel and refuses to acknowledge the toll it takes on her, mirroring his impenetrable exterior. ![]() “Ellie needs a guardian, and in a brutal world like this one, that guardian may need to be capable of comparable brutality.” But warning signs only mounted from there. ![]() “OK, fine,” viewers may have reasoned at the time. Joel snaps, brutally beating the guard who stopped them - and Ellie watches. In the premiere, when Joel, Ellie, and Tess (Anna Torv) are busted at the edge of Boston, memories of his lost daughter trigger a feral defense mechanism. But long before her protector went on a murderous rampage that may have ended mankind’s hopes to survive a fungal apocalypse, co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin showed us who Joel was, just as the Season 1 ending made painfully clear who he continues to be. Maya Angelou’s words may not have been taught in FEDRA military school, and even if they were, it’s unlikely Ellie (Bella Ramsey) would recall the above quote now, since she wasn’t conscious for Joel’s (Pedro Pescal) killing spree. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”ĭr.
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