The Last of Us Doesn’t Pull Its Punches With a Morally Ambiguous Season Finale

The post The Last of Us Doesn’t Pull Its Punches With a Morally Ambiguous Season Finale appeared first on Consequence.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of The Last of Us, “Look for the Light.”]

Some HBO season finales stretch beyond the hour-long mark, yet The Last of Us kept things tight for its final episode of Season 1, keeping its focus on Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) reach the end of their quest to find the Firefly lab that might know how to use Ellie’s natural immunity to create a cure for this pesky world-ending plague.

Unfortunately for Ellie (and eventually, the world), doing so will require killing Ellie. Moments before getting tracked down by the Fireflies, Joel had just admitted that, after years of grieving his daughter, Ellie has given him a reason to live. So he’s not inclined to accept that fate for her, and his ensuing rescue/rampage through the hospital is as methodical as it is brutal — Pascal’s performance does an excellent job of selling Joel’s buried rage and terror at the situation.

It might not be a very long episode, but it brings so much full circle in terms of the story being told, especially in the case of the episode’s opening flashback. In the lead-up to the show’s debut, co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had teased that the video game’s two key actors, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, would be making significant guest appearances in the series. While Baker’s appearance in last week’s episode was a relatively unflashy role, in “Look for the Light,” Johnson shows up to play Ellie’s mother (named Anna in the series) in a flashback to the day Ellie was born.

While the character in the games was not explicitly designed to look like Johnson, Ellie was modeled on “Ashley’s personality,” according to Druckmann in 2012, and the uncanny resemblance between Johnson and Ramsey is hard to deny. As Mazin explained during a virtual press conference last week, devoted to discussing the finale:

“Troy Baker disappears into a thousand roles. I can’t believe he has all the different characters he plays. But Ashley sounds like Ellie, and Ellie sounds like Ashley. So she’s already this quasi-mythological creature to me, and to see her giving birth to herself in a sense, and to create that genetic connection between her performances — Ellie and the origin story of Bella as Ellie — was just profound. I think everybody just felt something beautiful about it.”

The sequence also confirms how Ellie became immune, though for Druckmann, “more importantly than that,” including Johnson as Ellie’s mom also led to a key bit of storytelling, one that brings extra punch to the end of the episode.

The Last of Us (HBO)

In the flashback, we see Anna demand that Marlene protect Ellie after she’s gone, calling on a relationship that clearly goes back years, if not decades. “So when you get to the ending and we put Marlene against Joel, and they have their own opposite philosophical terms of how to approach of the ends justify the means, knowing how close [Marlene] was with Anna and that Anna’s dying wish was like, take care of my kid, I think gives more weight and maybe more tragedy to the sacrifice Marlene’s trying to make for the betterment of mankind,” Druckmann said.

There’s no question that what Marlene wants — the extraction of whatever makes Ellie Cordyceps immune, which could be the cure humanity has been waiting for all this time — would in fact be a help to the world. Of course, it’s worth questioning the character’s intentions; how would the Fireflies use the world’s only viable solution to the plague? Would they be selfless in its distribution… or use it to take down FEDRA and establish themselves as the new ruling authority?

It doesn’t really matter, though, because Joel’s not thinking about the balance of power in a post-apocalyptic society. He’s just thinking about his “something new to fight for,” as he explains to Ellie at the end of the episode — for him, Ellie’s life is too high a price for the cure.

Mazin said that it’s a decision rooted in one of the show’s ongoing themes: “Unconditional love…. We give that way too much credit, like it’s the highest form of love. Unconditional means literally no conditions, none, uh, including conditions whereby you really ought to be doing something that is not within the best interest of the person you love, at least according to some sort of moral code or a standard of ethics.”

Yet if you don’t think Joel made the right choice by saving Ellie, Mazin can relate. “I’m not suggesting that I have a hard opinion about how things go at the end. I’m confused about it morally. I think it’s a difficult choice. I go back and forth and I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it,” he said.

While morally, we as viewers might struggle with Joel’s decision, it’s impossible to imagine the decision going any other way, after the careful groundwork laid over the last eight episodes. With a two-hander like The Last of Us, the show has been able to really dive into the growing bond between Joel and Ellie, with more nuance than most might give it.

The Last of Us (HBO)

The relationships between people are living organisms in their own right. They need care and feeding, and they shift and change over the years. Maybe the bonds grow more encompassing with the passing of time. Maybe they wither and die with neglect. We see that organic push-and-pull early in this episode, as Joel notes Ellie’s clear reservations about reaching the end of their journey, and does his best to try to engage with her. And we see it at the end, as Ellie seems to sense the lies Joel’s been telling her, about what happened with the Fireflies.

She doesn’t push back on him swearing that it’s the truth, though, and that’s where we end Season 1. At this point, what we know is that the second game in the series will be a major part of the narrative — however, from the beginning the creators have been saying that the show will likely go more than two seasons if allowed to run its course. (So, anticipate seeing the beginning of Part II‘s story introduced in Season 2, but not its ending.)

How that all actually shakes out is a question for the future. A future which, in the context of the show, may have been made worse by Joel’s actions, but remained explicitly faithful to the story the creators wanted to tell.

The Last of Us is streaming now on HBO Max. A second season has been greenlit.

The Last of Us Doesn’t Pull Its Punches With a Morally Ambiguous Season Finale
Liz Shannon Miller

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