Alright so The Last Of Us comes with an ending that I think will stick with everyone long after
they experience it. Whether you watched the events play out in the game or show I think that it
leaves a lasting impression due to the situation that the two protagonists find themselves in.
Towards the end of the story Joel finally reaches the fireflies with Ellie but he
discovers that in order to make a vaccine that Ellie has to die. Joel is someone
who lost his daughter and rather than going through the pain of this again he
decides to murder all of the fireflies and take her back to his brother in Jackson.
Joel lies to her about what really happened and he makes
Ellie believe that everything was all for nothing.
Well not for nothing as he now has a surrogate daughter and she has the
father figure that she's always wanted in her life. He tells her in the show
that raiders arrived at the hospital and though he leaves out this detail
in the game he makes her believe that they've given up on finding a cure.
The game and show close out on the exact same scene with Ellie asking
Joel to swear that everything he's said is true.
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Now, was Joel right or wrong?
Well firstly I think we have to discuss the two
sides of the argument and how Marlene and Joel are actually pretty similar.
Both were tasked with guarding Ellie and they made a promise to protect her. Both
knew that she was immune and both were told that there was a way to manufacture a cure from her.
However where they differentiate is that Joel is not willing to kill her for this whereas Marlene
is. Joel is a lone wolf who's seen the worst of humanity and he's been a closed book since the
daughter. He knows what it's like to lose a child and doesn't think that it's worth sacrificing a
kid like this on a cause. Marlene on the other hand is looking at the greater good and whereas
Joel tended to work on his own, she's been part of a group. She sees Ellie's immunity as something
that could help humanity and believes in the best of us as a collective. Joel believes in the best
of us as individuals and he refuses to give up the needs of the few to help the needs of the many.
Joel throughout the series and game was a very closed off man who refused to open
up to anyone because he knew what true loss was. As a parent I can't imagine
how painful it would be losing a child and going off what I've heard from other
people it's the most difficult thing you can go through. He simply refuses to do
this again and views taking Ellie to the fireflies as throwing her to the wolves.
It's safe to say that Ellie also brought something out of him that he thought was
long gone. Throughout the series and game we watch Joel glancing at his watch from time
to time and this is a reminder of the life he had with Sarah. Given to him as a birthday present it
broke during the fall in which Sarah was shot and since them it's been frozen in time like he has.
However he has started to grow with Ellie and whereas he refused
to talk about his past we see him opening up about it in episode 9.
Now they do things differently in the episode and game but they carry the
same meaning. In the game during the Jackson chapter Tommy tried to give Joel a photo of
him and Sarah. He refused to ackownledge it but Ellie ended up stealing it and taking it
on their journey. She presented it to him at the end and he finally acknowledge that you
can't out run your past. In the show he says that Ellie has very much helped him
to move on finally and to put it plainly he doesn't want to go through this again.
Joel knows how bad that loss like that can be and also what it can do to a person.
Little is known about the twenty years between outbreak day and when we catch him in Boston but
we know bad things happened. Due to what he says about Bryan he has clearly killed
people like him before and his run through the hospital shows just how merciless he is.
He is very much sparing himself from becoming this person again or something even worse.
Goign through this twice in one lifetime would break him and he sees Ellie as a
way out of the darkness. The fireflies saying is look for the light and that
is very much what ellie represents. Sarah's ghost still haunts him in many
ways and even just seeing a woman with the same hair as her is enough to set him off.
He can instantly get lost in a day dream imagining
the life she should've had and this is why he's so dead set on saving Ellie.
She's a new chance, the life that he and Sarah should've had together and its all he cares about.
Joel very much represents the individual needs and how one can justify putting themselves
above all else. Throughout the pre podcast show they've constantly talked about how
Love is a constant theme in the show and Joel represents the positives and negatives of it.
When you love someone you can do lots of great things however you can also do
bad things in order to keep that love. Joel is the embodiment of this with him
murdering an entire group of people who in their hearts just wanted to save humanity.
On paper Joel is the bad guy and when people are discussing the game there'll
always be the idea that when you're playing as Joel that you're playing as the bad guy.
However the last of us is never as black and white as that and because we've played
as him we can completely see things from his point of view. Like him we've grown
a bond with Ellie and therefore we want to save her and ride off into the sunset.
He lies to Ellie not only for himself because he doesn't want destroy the
image she has of herself and himself in her eyes. Ellie carries a lot of
survivors guilt due to the deaths she's seen happen. Riley, Tess,
Henry and Sam all died whilst she lived and it would crush her further learning what Joel did.
In the end she is also consenting to this idea too as she accepts his version of events even
though they sound suspect. They are both living this life with each other in which
they can go off and be father and daughter together even though both probably know that
things aren't that cut and dry. They have to constantly keep lying to themselves because
the truth is too difficult to even face up to and Ellie saying Okay carries a lot with it.
It's not an acceptance that that's what actually happened,
it's an acceptance of Joels version of it and deep down Ellie might even
know that something bad could've happened which she was spared from.
Now on the opposite side of this is Marlene.
She's very much the opposite to Joel in both ideology and personality. Whereas he
was someone who tried to keep himself to himself, Marlene did the opposite.
She actively sought people out to build a following and as the leader of the fireflies
she's rallied hundreds to her cause. Oppressed by Fedra these downbeaten and overlooked people
have managed to escape the confines of the fascism they were subjected to and
though they're labeled terrorists they can also be seen as being freedom fighters too.
Marlene sees Ellie as a way to lead humanity out of the darkness and into
the light much like how Joel does. However wheeras that's for his personal life,
Marlene sees it as being something that can help humanity as a whole. Creating a vaccine
will stop the grip that the Cordyseps have on the planet and it means that the species can recover.
This entire part of human history could be looked back on like how we look back at the black death
and in hundreds of years time it's possible that we could at least get back to where we were.
Marlene sees this as a possibilty and she believes that the fireflies will distribute
the vaccine fairly to everyone. She thinks that Fedra would hold people ransom because again,
fascists whereas the fireflies having it would be for the better.
But is that really the case?
Well I actually think that's pretty unlikely.
Kathleen is the perfect example of what happens when Fedra are overthrown and the alternative
is often just as bad. I feel like the fireflies would be like this too as they're happy to bomb
civilians and create warfare in the street just to get their point across. Marlene's heart is
in the right place but whether things actually happened the way she imagined it is unlikely.
What would probably happen is that the fireflies would require people to join
them in order to get the cure and then there'd be a power struggle created. Now you shouldn't judge
a book by it's cover but I also don't think that the fireflies have the facilities to mass produce
a vaccine like this. If we look at our own world there were shortages in them after the pandemic
and that was with a worldwide effort to create them. So I really dont think that the fireflies
would be able to carry this out either and in the waiting times people would get frustrated.
Those in Fedra camps would likely hear of the cure and then tensions would start to flare as
Fedra tried to keep them in check whilst the fireflies spread it. This would take a while
and likely cause further conflict in the zones leading to more deaths.
People would eat themselves just to get a hold of this thing and the fireflies could
run out of resources when trying to mass produce it. Fedra could
also spread information and say that the cure doesn't actually work and then they
may rally people to their cause which would cause further fighting and war.
However Marlenes heart is in the right place even if things aren't practical.
Where the morally grey area comes from this though
is whether it's ok to kill a child in order to do this.
Marlene is alright killing someone elses kid to do it but whether she would do it
for her own child is another thing entirely. If you're a parent then you should ask yourself,
would you kill your own child to give a group like the fireflies the chance to mass produce a cure?
Personally I don't think many would and I know for
a fact that if it came down to it that in the heat of the moment I'd say no.
This is something that really struck me when making this video and over the years I've
often been someone who was rooted solely in the idea that Joel was in the wrong.
I was an idealist who thought that the ends justified the
means and that killing one person was worth it. In my head I was Marlene,
making the tough choice in order to carry out the greater good.
Sure I'd played as Joel and even though I could
definitely see things from his point of view I thought that he was the bad guy.
However since having children myself, I've now began to ask myself would I hand them
over like this knowing that they'd die just so that the fireflies could carry out their goals.
And I don't think I could.
Add to this the fact that Joel has already gone through something like this and I really
started to see why he did what he did. This is a man who's already lost his daughter and
faced with the prospect of losing someone else he cares about he simply refuses to do it again.
Now in all of this the one person we haven't talked about is Ellie.
They make a big point in the finale of talking about what she would have wanted.
Using the ending as hindsight it seems like she's just happy to go along with
whatever Joel tells her, however part 2 does expand on her feelings quite a lot.
In that she goes back to St. Marys hospital herself and discovers the truth about what really
went down there. Horrified she decides to cut Joel out of her life and later on we learn that she's
devastated her life could have meant something. In this moment we see that Ellie was happy to die if
it meant that a cure could be manufactured. She wanted all the deaths that happened to
get her to the hospital to mean something but because of Joels actions they no longer did.
I think Joel knows this too which is why he decides to lie in the end.
He knows it will break Ellie's heart and is doing it to spare
himself even more than he's trying to spare her.
So in the end I think that if we look at this as
being black and white then yes, Joel is in the wrong.
He went against Ellie's wishes and also doomed humanity to a eventual extinction.
The species in the show is on it's last legs and being pushed further down this
road will only lead to more death and division. There's a reason that all of
the kid characters in the show outside of Ellie end up dead and that's because
it's near impossible for a child to make it to adulthood in this world.
So the species will die out eventually due to kids not growing old enough to
have them themselves and we'll slowly dwindle into oblivion.
Therefore I think that when looked at like that that Joel is in the right.
But.
And it's a big but, as a father I can also see why he did the right thing
and honestly if I was in the same position I'd probably do that too.
We would like to think that we are Marlene but when pushed into a situation like
this I imagine that most people will react exactly the same. Whether it's your mother,
father, grandparent, sister, brother or child,
when it comes down to making that choice it's impossible to say you'd happily hand them over.
So I can totally see why Joel did what he did and why I think I'd do the same thing.
Now going back to the question of whether Joel is right or wrong.
Well.
I honestly can't say.
Though I'm like...90%...70% sure he was because of what we've discussed,
there's still that little bit of doubt in the back of my mind and that might
be enough to have me side with Joel. I think when we think about this situation
theoretically that we would all like to believe we'd do it for the greater good.
However if it actually happened and I was forced to make the choice between
my kids and helping out these a**holes. I think I know deep down what I'd do.
Now I actually wrote and recorded this video before the finale aired and after listening to
the podcast I decided to hold off the release so we could add in this extra
bit about what the show runners said. They actually bring up some of the points that
I did about being a parent and also give their thoughts on the choice at the end.
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I think the most important thing to bear in mind is that Joel saved Ellie but in
many ways Ellie saved Joel. He's no going to abandon her to die even if we think that
he should because he's acting like a parent who thinks he knows best. However there is
still a cost that comes with this and it shows that no decision is without its consequences.
So it's a morally grey area in which there's no real right or wrong answer.
And I think that's what gives the ending of the last of us it's staying power. We
can argue over it forever and really go back and forth over what we would do.
So that's what I'm gonna let happen. In the comments below
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the ending so make sure you let me know.
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With that out the way thank you for sitting through the video,
I’ve been Paul and I’ll see you next time. Take care, Peace