The long-awaited finale to The Last of Us is finally here! And fans are entitled to a last episode very faithful to the video game. Warning, spoilers.
Warning, spoilers. It is advisable to have seen episode 9 of The Last of Us before continuing to read this article.
Phenomenon series of this beginning of the year 2023, The Last of Us has everything to win the title of best live-action adaptation of a video game. A real success in the world, the series overseen by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin is coming to an end with the broadcast of its ninth and final episode.
For several weeks, viewers followed the journey of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) through the United States ravaged by a pandemic caused by a fungus, cordyceps. During their journey, the duo will be confronted with infected and hostile survivors that they will have to fight.
If Joel finds himself with Ellie on his arms, it is because the latter is immune to the infection and that Joel has been charged by the Fireflies, a popular militia against martial law set up after the epidemic, of l to a specific landmark in Salt Lake City.
The tragic end of The Last of Us
At the end of the final episode of the series, as in the game The Last of Us: Part I, Joel and Ellie arrive at their destination and they reunite with Marlene (Merle Dandrige) and the Fireflies at St. Mary’s Hospital. Ellie is about to have surgery so she can design a vaccine against the infection. However, the procedure requires removing the fungus that has mutated and grown in Ellie’s brain, which means the girl’s death.
Joel cannot bring himself to lose “his surrogate daughter” and he embarks on a murderous run by killing all the members of the Fireflies, but also the surgeon in charge of the operation and he even kills Marlene. He flees with Ellie, still under anesthesia, in the car.
HBO
Later, when Ellie wakes up, Joel lies to the girl about what really happened. He tricks her into believing that there are other immune survivors like her but they haven’t been of much scientific help and the Fireflies have stopped looking for a vaccine.
Ellie asks if she can believe him and Joel lies to her again. The young girl, however suspicious, chooses to believe him. And together, they go in the direction of Jackson to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Joel’s brother, and live there.
By making this selfish choice, Joel proves his love for Ellie but he also takes the risk of dooming humanity because the young girl could perhaps have been the key to a vaccine against cordyceps infection.
A controversial outcome
This final episode, entitled “Look for the Light” and directed by Ali Abbasi (Border, Les Nuits de Mashhad), is very faithful to the end of the video game The Last of Us. This final chapter still takes some liberties. In particular, there is a flashback to Anna (Ashley Johnson), Ellie’s mother, who gives birth to the young girl, and we then understand how Ellie was immunized against cordyceps.
In addition, all the combat part against the infected, between Claqueurs and Colosses, in the tunnel which leads to Salt Lake City does not appear in the episode. But “Look for the Light” still remains very close to the video game as a whole until its fateful and controversial outcome, which should create a great debate as when the video game work was released in 2013.
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Indeed, as the New Yorker recalls, the debate arose even before the release of the game since the testers were torn by the outcome of the game. Its creator Neil Druckmann, also co-showrunner of the series, had noted that some wanted to have the choice to save the world or just didn’t want to kill innocent doctors.
When the testers arrived in the operating room, half of them looked for another solution before realizing that they had no choice. Neil Druckmann had also noted that testers who had children were much less hesitant to kill the surgeon than the others. Some players were pissed at being deprived of a conventional heroic narrative and being forced to participate in such a morally controversial narrative.
If Joel’s ultimate choice, fraught with consequences, is quite debatable, it is above all a catalyst for all the essence that is The Last of Us. It is a love story and Craig Mazin, the one of the co-showrunners of the series, recalls it and explains it thus to vulnerability :
“Love is behind the most extreme choices we make and the most extreme behaviors we have. Do you love this person more than these people? Parents say things like this to their children all the time: ‘I loves you more than anything.’ Is that really the case?’
For Joel, the answer is yes. It is deep, and it is the ambiguity of the positivity of love that must be advanced. What Joel did in the name of love is a selfish but understandable act. It sets in motion a chain of events that will not be broken.”
HBO
Unlike the video game, the series adaptation of The Last of Us makes it possible to offer more points of view than that of Joel, by developing additional stories and characters, and thus to create more ambivalence in a hero who, of course, protects his “surrogate daughter” but who is no less a murderer.
“We are invested in Joel’s story. We don’t want him to lose the person he loves. What about all the people he kills? Who loves them? also the power of narration, which obsesses me”explains Craig Mazin.
By making this decision, Joel takes that power away from Ellie, who was determined to serve a just cause and be a key part of saving humanity. Joel did not put Ellie’s desires and interests before his own and preferred to keep his “surrogate daughter” for himself, in a very selfish way, even if we understand that she has become his reason for living , he who has already tried to end his life.
If this end is controversial and arouses debate, the fact remains that it allows to open on the second video game The Last of Us: Part II, which, in addition to continuing Ellie’s story, shows the inevitable consequences of Joel’s choice. Already ordered, season 2 of the series The Last of Us will more or less follow the plot of the second opus of the video game work.
The Last of Us series is available in full on Prime Video.