The Short Take:
A painful turn that was 100% the the right choice dramatically, even if I personally didn’t want it to happen. Raises questions about moral philosophy, as well as the structure of the season, especially in the context of video game adaptation.
Image Credit: The Hollywood Reporter
[SPOILER WARNING: No one is immune to spoilers. If you haven’t seen the finale, return once you’ve seen it.]
The Long Take:
To be clear: I didn’t want this.
I didn’t want Joel to be a selfish mad dog who turns his back on humanity to save the only other human on Earth who makes him feel anything. I didn’t want him to look Ellie in the eye and flagrantly, devastatingly lie to her about mass murdering a hospital full of people who were just trying to find a cure and make the nightmare end.
I didn’t want this, but I appreciated it as a storytelling choice.
In retrospect, I should have realized that this was the logical place to go after last week’s “baby girl” moment, which made my heart grow three sizes. Ellie and Joel weren’t just going to jaunt over to the Firefly camp, drop off a blood sample, and then say, “see ya later let’s go ride off into the sunset and find that sheep ranch byeeeeee.” This is a post-apocalyptic story called The Last of Us. A happy ending was never in the cards. Still, part of me was hoping for one.
This show has done an incredible job of making me feel things for its characters; as such, it makes perfect sense that in the final hour of its first season, it delivers one more blow to my emotional well-being. Now that Ellie and Joel have finally arrived at a close father-daughter bond, the broken world they live in will almost certainly come between the two of them.
When Joel let Ellie into his heart, he also let in the irrational attachment a parent has for a child; this blinds him to the greater good and, more pertinently to their relationship, blinds him to her need for her own agency as a young adult. Deciding for Ellie and lying to Ellie, keeping her ignorant to the choice she may have had and the role she may have played in saving the world, is likely the biggest mistake Joel has made. It detonates their trust, and it will make Ellie resent Joel when she finds out (and she will). It’s also completely understandable. Maybe even admirable if we conveniently forget that he actively chose to keep the world stuck in a zombie apocalypse.
Image Credit: IndieWire
The Last of Us shows us what Joel could have been like had he not been a selfish parent. Juxtaposing Marlene post-Ellie’s birth flashback with Joel post-rescue murder spree makes Joel look very, very bad. We can say that his actions against the Fireflies and against Ellie (in lying to her) are justified because they come from a place of love and a desperate desire to protect Ellie. But, as we learn from the flashback at the top of the episode, Marlene also had a deep surrogate relationship with Ellie, as the one who took her in when her close childhood friend becomes infected. She tells Joel that she is the only one in the world who understands where he is coming from because she had to tell Ellie’s mother that she would protect her; and yet, she’s about to send her to her death so that they might use her cordyceps-filled brain to create a cure.
Marlene may have a similar affection for Ellie — at least in theory…it’s unclear how long Ellie spent with Marlene as a child — but she still has chosen to give her up. Joel, on the other hand, cannot do this, even if it means saving millions of lives.
As an aside, my game-playing friend, Jordan, noted that the flashback to Ellie’s birth is a new addition specific to the series (not included in the original game). At first, we were saying that it was lame that the show felt the need to medically explain and show us why Ellie was immune when it would have, in fact, been better left a mystery. But then we realized that this flashback was just a means to an end: to deepen Marlene’s character. So when she asks Joel to let Ellie go, she’s saying that with a lot more weight on her shoulders, as she breaks the promise she made to her friend all those years ago. This, we thought, added a lot of depth and complexity to an otherwise two-dimensional freedom fighter character.
Image Credit: Variety
This proposition, of save Ellie or save the world, reminds me of moral philosophy. More specifically, of utilitarianism and The Trolley Problem. Keep in mind, I’m only basing this on one undergraduate philosophy course on social ethics and whatever Chidi talks about on The Good Place. My understanding is that The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in which someone must decide whether to let a train hit five people or switch the tracks to hit one. Utilitarianism would say that we want to maximize the most good for the most people. That means that one person gets hit to save five people. Deontology, on the other hand, would say that the decision to kill people with a train (so in this case actively diverting the train from the five people to the one person) is inherently unethical regardless of the consequences, positive or negative.
Back when my first year writing class was paired up with this social ethics course, I remember students starting to ask questions instead of providing an answer to The Trolley Problem. They needed more information before making this decision. Who were these people? Was the one person a doctor who could save lots of other people? Were any of the people really old and therefore near the end of their lives anyway? Was the lone person we would kill Hitler? It wasn’t a simple numbers game.
So, who Ellie is to Joel, even if she’s only one person pitted against millions who could be saved, obviously influences his decision. He only cares about Ellie and cares not for the rest of the world. But the positioning of Joel next to Marlene here gives us the utilitarian vs. the deontological answer to The Trolley Problem. No matter how many people Ellie’s death could save, it’s still unthinkable to Joel. He doesn’t even hesitate. He’s planning how to bust Ellie out of there the second he hears that she will die during surgery. For Marlene, however, it’s what needs to be done. Ellie’s sacrifice is as noble and worthwhile as it is tragic and difficult.
While I’m sure where Joel and Marlene stand, I’m not entirely sure how the series positions us, the audience, in this trolley problem. On the one hand, we’ve been conditioned to believe that Joel is awesome (and with Pedro Pascal playing him, that’s not hard). He’s our hero. In fact, in just the episode prior to this one, he tortures and kills several men just to get to Ellie, and we applauded him for it. He was a good protector and therefore a good guy. Now, in this episode, he seems like a cold and ruthless vigilante, blinded by his own personal feelings and blind to the bigger picture. Are we supposed to think Marlene is right? Are we supposed to think Joel is right? Both? Neither? (Share your take in the comments, please. I need help with this one.)
Image Credit: Vulture
Where does Joel go from here? I have no idea what is happening in the second installment of The Last of Us video game, and I have been told by multiple people not to look up any information about the second game because it will almost immediately divulge huge spoilers. But based on this finale alone, it seems as though Ellie will figure out that Joel has been lying to her fairly quickly (she’s no dummy) and their relationship will instantly disintegrate. We’ve seen how tenacious and stubborn Ellie is, so if she does learn at some point that she could have helped create a cure by donating her body to science, she may in fact try to do that elsewhere.
Either way, it seems as though the plot formula that this series has established thus far will be shattered by Joel’s monumental error. They will no longer be able to carry on as they have been, a dynamic duo traversing the post-apocalyptic landscape, taking down humans who are more threatening than the zombies and sharing terrible puns in the interim. I haven’t heard that many complaints about The Last of Us, but the ones I have heard usually revolve around the pacing and the structure of the season. That with each episode we have met a new character we liked who has died. Or that every few episodes Ellie and Joel travel to a new place, meet a new baddie, and then narrowly escape and/or defeat that baddie before they move on. This is a fair criticism, I think, especially after a few episodes of it. The repetition does become very noticeable after Kansas City. It lends itself more to the network model of television, with lots more iterative episodes, rather than the HBO-inspired prestige TV season, with fewer episodes that tell a more linear, progressive arc.
In a recent conversation with Jordan, however, he made the astute observation that when you play the video game, time does not pass as quickly because in between checkpoints (i.e. Kansas City, Jackson, etc.); instead, the player spends a lot of time wandering around collecting items or killing clickers. Episodic television, however, forces us to dip in an out in more condensed slices of narrative time. We dip in for a bit and then out again until next week. This means we don’t get to feel the wearisome duration and the aimlessness of Ellie and Joel’s travels. Does that make the series’ close adherence to the plot of the game a less ideal, less savvy decision than we thought? Perhaps.
Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly
Does that interfere at all with my investment in and subsequent pain stemming from Joel and Ellie’s now fraught, ready to implode at any moment relationship? Not at all. If anything, it indicates to me that the apocalypse here is in some ways merely a McGuffin — just an excuse to tell this story about these two characters. I’m clenching and bracing when I think about what might be in store for them next season.
P.S. There were giraffes!!! That was cool.
The Last of Us Finale throws one more gut punch.
Sorry this took so long!! I had to pick up hbo to finish the last three episodes. I am not usually a fan of scary shows but the acting in this kept me coming back and forking out money for yet another streaming service. Joel asked Marlene if she had told Ellie she would die in surgery. Marlene confirmed she did not so she wouldn't be afraid. I think everyone assumes Ellie would have let them do the surgery. If the answer from Marlene had been yes Ellie was told she would die, I think Joel would be more solidly in the wrong. Knowing that Ellie was not given a choice puts me on team Joel. This could be skewed from being a parent or that Joel is Pedro Pascal.
> Are we supposed to think Marlene is right? Are we supposed to think Joel is right? Both? Neither?
I think we're supposed to recognize that both of them have fantastic arguments for what they think is right, but neither is clear cut because people are going to die (to your Trolley point). You can't really feel good about either choice and that makes it fun to talk about.
In the pod, Druckman said something like they polled play testers on if Joel did the right thing or not and childless folks were 50/50 and parents were 100% on Joel's side.
As a childless Utilitarian, I would side with Marlene as long as Ellie was aware of the risks. I think Ellie would have wanted to sacrifice herself.
> It seems as though Ellie will figure out that Joel has been lying to her fairly quickly
When I finished the game I figured she wasn't quite sure or she believed him. Everyone involved with the game though says "oh, yeah, she knows he's lying" haha. So is her "okay" more of "okay, I can't trust you" or "okay, I love you, so I'm gonna let this slide" or "okay, how much of this is he lying about" etc. ? We shall see in Part 2.
BTW, I'd also avoid the last official podcast. There are a couple very minor Part 2 spoilers but you're smart and if you think about it a lot you might figure out something more.