Making sense of The Last of Us‘s thrilling, affecting season finale

Kyle: We made it to the last of The Last of Us season one! Which means I get to ask you the first question I asked myself after playing the first game—the one I’ve been waiting weeks to ask you and probably the most important and lingering question of the whole season:

Does Ellie believe Joel?

Andrew: OK, I definitely came away from this with an entirely different lingering question! But like many episodes of The Last of Us, maybe we should cut away from the action so that we can jump back in time and then work our way back up to those questions?

In this episode, Joel and Ellie make it! They’re in Reno, and they find the doctors they’ve been trying to find this whole time. They just need to let the doctors run a few tests, and then they can ride off into the sunset together, their surrogate father/daughter bond intact and healthy and totally great. Right?

Kyle: There are plenty of other questions, to be sure, but I wanted to start with the one that lingers most after that gripping final shot.

But yes, backing up a bit, I like how this episode gets back to some quiet time between Joel and Ellie, who get to joke around and feed giraffes and be generally wistful about their journey together. They have obviously and fully become a surrogate father/daughter pair to each other, which is saying something, given how reluctant they were to even be in the same space back at the beginning of the series.

Andrew: Yes! Yes. That’s the thing.

Unlike just about every other group of people we’ve run into in The Last of Us universe, there doesn’t seem to be anything especially sinister about the Reno Fireflies. Yes, they decide pretty quickly that the only way to study and transmit Ellie’s immunity is to remove her brain. (This is explained somewhat in yet another episode-opening flashback where we meet Ellie’s mother and do in fact learn the incredible true story of how Ellie got her knife, a joke I made a few recaps ago that ended up coming true.)

But they are not, as far as we know, a community of sadistic evangelical vigilante brain-removers. They are, to borrow a phrase, putting the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. And it’s not that I don’t feel deeply for Joel, who is clearly not ready or willing or able to lose another daughter. But his response to the situation…

It leads me to my question: Is Joel the bad guy? Have we, the audience, been hoodwinked by Pedro Pascal’s dadly charms into rooting for a monster?

Kyle: To me, this is not, in the end, a very interesting or difficult question. Any objective look at the situation would conclude that Joel obviously made the wrong choice here. Saving humanity from cordyceps is strikingly more valuable than protecting Ellie’s life.

The only way to come to the opposite conclusion is by being hopelessly sentimental about the whole thing. And Joel’s actions are made even worse because, as Marlene points out, Ellie would pretty clearly be willing to sacrifice herself for that greater good.

That said, I think both the game and the show do a good job of threading the needle between not defending Joel’s actions but still explaining them. By the time we get to these final scenes, we understand how and why a very broken Joel would essentially sacrifice the human race for this girl he met relatively recently. You don’t have to agree with it to understand it from Joel’s point of view, and I think that’s an amazing narrative feat.