Created by Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann
Written by Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann
Starring Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna, Storm Reid
Season One now streaming on HBO & HBO Max

by Jacob Harrington, Contributor

*Please note that this piece contains spoilers for the whole first season of The Last of Us.

“Okay.”

The ending of The Last of Us pulls you in two different directions. When I played it for the first time it left me so torn, intrigued by what would come next and apprehensive about how it played out. The ending is what really made this story stick with me.

The world took Joel Miller’s daughter from him. Yeah, there was a zombie outbreak, a flash pandemic illness that crumbled society, mass panic and chaos. But those factors didn’t specifically take Sarah from him. A soldier following orders did. There is no way to say for certain that a cure could be derived from Ellie’s immunity, but if it could, it might be the future of humanity’s last hope. When it comes down to it, Joel chooses his surrogate daughter over the world and maybe damns everyone. It is both a decision made out of love and a brutal, selfish act.

I think the first half of this season was much stronger than the second. It’s a nine episode season instead of ten and two of those episodes were 80-90 minutes long. “Long Long Time” was a wonderful episode of television and significantly expanded, and improved, on Bill’s story from the game—it also barely featured Joel and Ellie. Spending two episodes in Kansas City really truncated the overall story. Obviously in adapting the game to TV, characters had to be added, the world needed to be expanded a little bit. The game is minimalistic in that like 50% of it is just spent with Joel and Ellie. But I came away feeling that Joel and Ellie got a little shortchanged by the season’s overall structure and pacing.

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal are both outstanding as Joel and Ellie. I really enjoyed their performances and their versions of these characters. Every scene with them was wonderful. It’s a shame that after episode five they didn’t have many scenes together until the finale. I think the story could have benefited immensely from an additional episode earlier in the season of just Joel and Ellie traveling and getting to know each other better. So much of their bond developed off screen. I missed the moments of them barely surviving some frantic attack, and their bond developing more because of it. I would trade all those scenes with the Kansas City rebels for more scenes of Joel and Ellie.

I don’t think the Riley flashback episode needed to be almost an entire episode; in the game it’s additional downloadable content. The David episode didn’t do a lot for me; it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Pascal and Ramsey were far and away the best parts of this. I wish the season’s structure and pacing had given us more of them. In that final scene Pascal and Ramsey both absolutely nail it—the way Joel is more warm and talkative than he was at any point previously, Ellie’s quiet discomfort and look as she says, “Okay.” They made this adaptation work with their performances.

With all that said, I do think they pulled off the ending. In their scene together on the highway, just before the Fireflies ambush them, Joel crawls all the way out of his gruff and stern shell of solitary mystery for the first time. He confesses that he tried to kill himself shortly after Sarah’s death. Ellie knows about Sarah now—he told her off screen at some point. He had nothing left to live for, but eventually found something.

Ellie might be a kid but she’s a smart kid. When she says “I guess time heals all wounds,” Joel responds that time isn’t what gave him something to live for. I think it’s really clever to play this moment the way they do—Ellie is moved, sympathetic to Joel, and deeply grateful for his protection and friendship. She is also more than a little uncomfortable. She understands the emotional journey that they’ve been on, what Tess asking him to take her meant to him, and that their bond means something to both of them but something specific to Joel. Joel has no problem viewing Ellie as a surrogate daughter. He was a shell of a man after Sarah’s death. Ellie is the daughter he can save, but she doesn’t want to be his surrogate daughter or replace Sarah.

The tragedy of this ending is that Joel takes Ellie’s choice away from her. She very likely would have been okay with dying to create a cure that might save mankind. Her immunity gives her a purpose. Joel lies to her and says there are many other people like her that are immune and that the Fireflies have stopped looking for a cure. He takes away her choice and her purpose. It’s devastating to her. Like she said at the beginning of the episode, there’s no halfway on this.

Not to mention the brutal violence. Something fascinating in video games is the idea of ludonarrative dissonance, a concept that The Last of Us games are pretty wrapped up in. This is the push and pull of having to kill so many people in gameplay vs. the story elements that drive that gameplay. A great example is another Naughty Dog franchise, Uncharted and its plucky swashbuckling protagonist Nathan Drake. Nathan is an Indiana Jones type treasure hunter, raiding tombs and globetrotting around on adventures. Throughout the course of his four games he kills hundreds and hundreds of nameless bad guys. The tone of the game never shifts from that one main gear—swashbuckling adventure—the characters never stop to say is treasure worth all this violence? When the gameplay and the narrative are so dissonant and in conflict with each other, it can really stretch plausibility and require a lot of suspension of belief.

Both games in The Last of Us franchise are extremely and excessively violent. The level of violence was toned down extensively for the show because it had to be. That’s a consequence of the nature of adapting the game to television. You never go more than about fifteen minutes in the game without having to fight a group of infected or bad guys. Joel kills a few dozen people, and dozens of infected, throughout the course of the story. In television, it would just seem insane and over the top. I do agree with the common criticism that the show is very lacking in scenes with infected/zombies/clickers, whatever you want to call them. I wish they been more frequent.

When you play the ending of the game, you know that what Joel does is horrible and wrong. But it’s also vaguely triumphant. No way in hell would he let Ellie die. It’s in his Dad Programming. The game even gives you an assault rifle for the first time—a reward in the form of the best weapon you’ve wielded up to that point. All the better to ruthlessly mow down soldiers with. You feel the heroic rush of adrenaline to save Ellie, and you also probably feel a little sick as you brutally dispatch Firefly soldiers one after another.

The show makes that sequence pretty morose and uneasy, as it should be. In the game it’s very clear that what’s happening is pretty bad, but the show really cranks it up with sorrowful cello music over Joel shooting surrendering soldiers at point blank. Joel is a cold hard killer who reached a breaking point. We get why he does what he does, and we get why it’s horrible and wrong. The ending has stuck with me for so long because of that duality.

There is lots of debate about this ending that already lived a full lifespan between 2013 and 2020 and is now on its epic second wind. Did Ellie consent to the surgery, knowing it would take her life? (Almost certainly no—not that this is any way justifies Joel murdering a dozen people, but that’s the biggest problem with what the Fireflies do.) Would the Fireflies actually be able to create a cure out of her immunity? How would that cure be practically manufactured and distributed throughout the surviving population? Is a surgery that is going to kill Ellie really the best idea as opposed to running some tests? We don’t know, and Joel doesn’t either. He just knows that this time he isn’t letting the world take his daughter from him again.

Pacing and structure issues aside, I do still think that this is a pretty excellent season of television. The ending is not a happy one. It’s a complicated, layered, deeply emotional and compelling ending. When Joel swears to Ellie that he told the truth, she says, “Okay.” She knows that he is lying. She knows that he did something violent and that he views her as a daughter now. Joel knows that she knows. It’s one of the more nuanced and compelling endings in video game stories. 

I am one of the people who really likes The Last of Us Part II. It will be split into season two and probably three, and if you don’t know what happens in the game, then I encourage you to avoid spoilers at all costs. It was extremely divisive and controversial when it was released. The story is overwhelmingly bleak and thoroughly flawed, no doubt. Not all of it works. But the sum of its parts is something extraordinary. It shares a lot in common with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi; it’s a direct sequel that doubles down on the story, thematics, and characters of the first one, instead of catering to what audiences would want.

This show and story are so bleak that I can get why anyone would bounce of it. Our real-life pandemic made it more meaningful to me. Our world does feel different to me since 2020—a little scarier, a little more unknown. It could always be a lot worse. Joel and Ellie made it through the dark forest, but the journey changed them both. Season two is a ways off, so there is a lot of time to dwell on that ending and what it means. I think this was a flawed, but mostly effective, adaptation of one of the best video games ever. You’re glad that Joel and Ellie found each other, but that ending leaves you with a lot of feelings, none of them simple. There are no simple answers to it. You can only just say “Okay.”