The following story contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 9.
IT WASN’T long ago that Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie on The Last of Us, told Vogue that the hit HBO show’s finale would divide audiences “massively—massively.” And, well, now that we’ve seen that finale, we can see where she’s coming from. The Last of Us stuck us with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Ramsey) for the full duration of it’s nine-episode cross-country first season journey, and anyone who was expecting this show, of all shows, to end with some sort of feel-good catharsis… should probably have been watching some other show from the get-go.
This story of Joel and Ellie was never going to have a simple—letalone happy—ending. From the very start, we saw two figures: a man who didn’t quite know how to connect with his own daughter even before losing her and the world coming to an end, and a teenage girl born after the end of the world who never even knew what a properly-functioning world was like, letalone her own place within it. And that messy start to a story came to a predictably messy conclusion.
The Last of Us has been a show where nearly every episode has come to some kind of upsetting, tragic, frightening, or otherwise devastating conclusion. But the finale gives us another kind of trouble: a debate. We’ll be talking and thinking for a long time about what Joel did in that hospital, and we’ll be talking and thinking for a long time about what he told Ellie after it all went down. And opinions will be had, takes will be made, and people will feel strongly one way or the other.
It’s hard to think too much about what’s right or what’s wrong, and that’s by the design of The Last of Us co-showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who may have saved their master stroke for last. Everyone will think about this finale a little differently, but we’re mainly glad that we got to see the way the writing, along with Pascal and Ramsey, brought these characters and this story to life.
Let’s get into it.
The Origin of Ellie
The episode opens firmly in the past, as a deeply pregnant woman named Anna (Ashley Johnson, who did the motion capture and voiced Ellie in The Last of Us video game) stumbles her way away from infected and into a house, protecting herself only with a knife; she gives birth to her child, cutting the umbilical almost simultaneously as she, unfortunately, was bitten by an infected. She killed the kinda-zombie, and we’re left wondering what the hell happens from here.
Well, by proxy, we know. We shift perspectives to a group of Fireflies led by our old friend Marlene, who, you may remember, told Ellie that she was there when she was born. Not that we thought she was lying, but, well, here it is. Anna’s bite is getting bad, and she’s holding a knife to her own neck in one hand—in case she turns—and a baby in the other. Marlene shows up and instantly knows what she has to do, but can’t quite bring herself immediately to do it; Anna, who reminds Marlene that they’ve known each other for their entire lives, urges her to take her child (named, yes, Ellie), and find someone who can raise her. She also wants Marlene to kill her.
Marlene takes the baby, but refuses to comply with Anna’s other request. At least initially; after a few beats, she walks back into the room and shoots Anne before she changes her mind. It’s reminiscent of The Last of Us‘ Kansas City ordeal, when Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), in a fit of rage, returned to the storage unit and shot her childhood doctor. Perhaps this is Mazin and Druckmann’s way of telling the audience that sometimes acts of mercy can look an awful lot like acts of vengeance. But circumstances can always differ.
Back to Joel and Ellie
Gonna be honest—we’re going to largely gloss over the first part of the Joel and Ellie story in this episode (which is, by the way, titled “Look for the Light,” a clever way to end the season, finishing the Fireflies motto after the premiere was titled “When You’re Lost in the Darkness”), because the back portion just has… well, it has so much more to talk about. But we’re still going to cover the bases here.
From the start of the episode, Ellie seems a little out of things. Perhaps she’s still a bit shaken from the absolute madness that we saw in Episode 8. Perhaps she’s got a bit of a spider-sense that something is going to go wrong. But Joel is clearly having a great time spending his days with his “baby girl,” as he so affectingly referred to her at the end of the last episode. They’re walking through cities and roads just like the old days, and he even encourages her, at one point, to take out the old pun book. He may be rating the puns with a 0/10 or a 3/10, but you can just tell that he’s finally found a light in his life again with this figure that he really, truly, seems to care for.
Before Joel and Ellie run into the Fireflies and everything goes to hell, the two do share a few important moments. They clearly find a place that used to be a Zoo, given the presence of Giraffes. I guess Giraffes are immune to the Cordyceps? Why not pull a vaccine from Giraffes? Hello? Is this thing on?
Anyway. While looking at the Giraffes, Joel tells Ellie something he probably should’ve said a long time ago. They don’t have to make their way to the Firefly lab, or the doctors, or whatever. They can just go live in luxury (or, well, you know, as close to it as it exists) with Tommy in Jackson, Wyoming, where they can have a real family, some decent food, and, hell, even movies. But nah. Ellie has a mission, and she wants to do the right thing. They’ve come this far, right?
So they continue. And on the road, Joel and Ellie get to discussing the bullet scar on his head, and the guy who “missed.” Joel tells Ellie the truth: he was the guy who missed. Not long after Sarah died, he just didn’t have much to live for; he was ready for the end, but it just didn’t work out that way. Joel tells Ellie that he’s glad it didn’t work out, and makes a few thoughtful allusions to the fact that she, essentially, has saved his life. Ellie, too, expresses gratitude that Joel’s plan did not work out.
Things are going OK as they make their way through a seemingly-abandoned military camp. Until a flashbang grenade appears right behind them. And this is the beginning of a very, very bad series of events.
Not How We Thought a Hospital Scene Would Go
Joel wakes up confused, on a hospital cot, looking at who else but Marlene and a few of her Firefly henchmen. We start off with some praise—Marlene explains how she had five people specifically protecting her and she barely made it across the country, so the fact that Joel and Ellie made it here just by themselves is actually remarkable. Joel deflects, trying to give Ellie credit, but Marlene knows how strong, brutal, and just all-around good at surviving this guy is. She says she never wanted to be in debt to him; we’ve heard about Joel’s brutality in the past, and we saw it last week when he took care of cannibal David’s men. Marlene has seen it before—and should probably know better than what she’s about to unleash.
Anyway. Marlene explains that because the Cordyceps have been growing with Ellie since birth, she is, literally, the cure. At least, it’s inside her, the doctor thinks. And so she’s being prepped for surgery. She tries to downplay this, but Joel is quick. He’s observant. And he knows this means Ellie is not likely to make it out of the surgery. Marlene assures him it’s the cure, and with armed men at her side, Joel can’t really argue much. Marlene tells the men to escort Joel out of the hospital, and once he’s out, to find his way home.
The men, weapons drawn, show Joel out. But halfway down the stairs, Joel goes into 100% savage mode, taking the weapons and killing the men who were his captors. Clearly, Joel went through a thought process as he headed down: live in a broken world with Ellie, or live in a healing world without her. It took him 20 years to find someone he could connect with in the ways he longed to with his daughter, and in that moment, he would be left on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with no one. So he chose the former.
What Joel does from here is an act of unbridled, unfiltered, shockingly immoral violence that I personally cannot recall ever seeing on TV from a similarly (somewhat) heroic character. Joel is a single-man army going through the hospital with automatic weapons in his hands; he not only takes out soldiers shooting at him, but shoots unarmed soldiers who surrendered their weapons and, just, anyone in his path. He even makes his way into the surgery room where Ellie is being prepped and shoots the doctor wielding a scalpel right square in the head without hesitating. The nurses patch Ellie up, and he takes her on his way out.
Joel is getting out of dodge, and the last person he sees—presumably the last person alive in the entire Hospital complex, other than Joel and Ellie—is Marlene, who tells him it’s not too late. That there’s still a chance he can right his wrongs, turn Ellie over, and try to save people. This moments is intercut with a conversation in the car, where Joel blatantly lies to Ellie: he says they actually had other people like Ellie, and the cure didn’t work. So they aren’t trying anymore. Just as Joel tells Ellie—still wearing her hospital gown, so clearly has reason to be skeptical—this, we cut back and see Joel blasting Marlene away. He has made his choice.
The Aftermath
Joel and Ellie are hiking, making normal small talk, and just carrying on like normal. But like the beginning of the episode, Ellie seems a little quiet. A little despondent. A little off.
She tells Joel, unprompted, the truth about the first person she had to kill—her best friend, Riley (Storm Reid, who we met back in Episode 7). They both got bitten. They both waited it out. And only one of them turned. And so Ellie had to take care of business.
This is important because it would seem to be the last bit of truth to be told between them. Ellie may have assumed Joel sharing word of his own suicide attempt was his most personal, secretive thing; for such a macho, quiet, impersonal person, that was quite the share. So she asks him once more—is what you said the truth about the Fireflies?
And so Joel says the only thing he can say: Yes. Which is a lie. And one he cannot really come back from. Season over.
It’s an exceptionally affecting, moving, and thoguht-provoking ending of what has been an exceptionally engrossing season. Joel has done something unthinkable—and he’s done it out of love. But is it what Ellie would have wanted? She wanted to get to the lab. And she got there. She wanted to be the cure. And she was! But did she know it would likely kill her? That much we’ll never know. And any sort of love that she has for Joel, from this point on, is based and rooted in that lie.
There’s also the perspective of Joel. He’s, again, done something unthinkable. We heard all season long about how dangerous he was, and how he’s killed so many people. In Kansas City, he even told Ellie that he killed innocent people. But seeing it in action, even after Ellie seemingly softened him up, is just so much to take in. This man did so much murder for that little girl. It’s a brutally violent act, but at the same time, can you even blame him?
There’s just so much to talk about and so much to think about in this Last of Us finale. This show has given us so much to talk about for all nine weeks of this Season 1.
And now we’ll have, possibly, a lifetime of talking about the way things came to an end. The Last of Us probably wouldn’t want it any other way.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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