Does Ellie believe Joel's big lie?
Was Ellie prepared to die for the cure?
The last episode of "The Last of Us" Season 1 is as heartbreaking and divisive as the
ending of the game it's based on.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
As enigmatic as Joel Miller is, the audience gets to know a lot about him in the "Last
of Us" series premiere.
Ellie, on the other hand, remains a mystery for most of Season 1.
Vital blanks about her don't get filled in until the final three episodes.
Perhaps the most significant of these open questions is: Why is Ellie immune to cordyceps?
Viewers are also left wondering about her parentage, as well as her relationship with Marlene.
"Are you my f---ing mom or something?"
"Do I look like your mom?"
"No you do not."
The finale opens with a harrowing pre-title sequence in which a pregnant woman is running
for her life through the woods before taking shelter in an abandoned building.
This is Anna, who is in the final stages of labor when an infected breaches the door and
attacks her just as she's delivering her baby, whom she names Ellie.
She manages to kill her attacker, but not before she's bitten in the thigh.
To save her child from exposure, she cuts the umbilical cord with the same knife with
which she dispatched the infected runner.
Shortly thereafter, Marlene arrives.
Anna assures her that she was bitten after the cord was cut, but Marlene is skeptical,
and we know it's a lie.
It's implied that the exact moment of her birth rendered Ellie immune.
Marlene promises to care for the baby, before killing her friend before she turns.
Presumably, she waits to see if infant Ellie is showing symptoms before eventually stashing
her with FEDRA where she can keep her safe and keep tabs on her.
When Ellie proves to be resistant to cordyceps, Marlene and the Fireflies take a renewed interest
in this miracle child.
Initially, Joel agrees to transport Ellie out West to a makeshift Firefly hospital in
exchange for some sort of payment.
As a bonus, it's his best move for getting out of the Boston QZ alive and his best hope
of finding Tommy.
But as he and his plucky cargo approach their final destination, it's painfully obvious
that Joel no longer cares about his bounty.
From Ellie's unusually flat affect, we can deduce that it's only just dawning on her
and Joel what reaching their goal might mean – not to mention that she's clearly been
traumatized from the horrific events of Episode 8.
He floats the idea of forgoing their mission, suggesting they could instead return to Tommy's
settlement and try to live as normal a life as possible.
Ellie thanks him for protecting her and says she'd follow him anywhere, but insists they
keep looking for the hospital.
Ellie says that after all she's done, she has to see their journey through to its end.
"It can't be for nothing."
She tells Joel that there's no going halfway with their mission, which could mean that
she has realized what might happen to her if they succeed.
What's weighing on Ellie's conscience is two-fold.
To survive, she's killed people and people have died on her behalf.
Some of those people were innocents and loved ones.
Ellie can't justify her morally compromised actions if they were only to buy herself some
more time, even if that time is more meaningful now that she's partnered up with Joel.
She's also working out the math about the value of her own life versus the value of
a potential cure, which is a heck of an existential crisis for a teenager in the apocalypse to
have on their shoulders.
Joel and Ellie don't find the hospital; the hospital finds them ... or, at least, the
Fireflies who operate it do.
After a stun grenade catches them off guard, Ellie is taken to a reclaimed children's surgery
wing after Joel is knocked out cold with the butt of a rifle.
When he comes to, Marlene is there to explain everything.
The circumstances of Ellie's birth mean that her body releases chemical signals that tell
cordyceps she's already infected, much like a vaccine.
A doctor affiliated with the Fireflies thinks he can reproduce that effect with Ellie's cells.
A devastated Joel figures out that those cells will have to be harvested from her brain.
Marlene acknowledges that she won't survive the surgery, but she tries to comfort Joel
by assuring him that Ellie will die peacefully and unaware that she won't wake up from the
medication she's been given.
"I'm sorry.
I have no other choice."
"I do."
In a sequence that mirrors the game, Joel fights like a demon to rescue Ellie, whom
he swore to protect.
Though his main motivation is surely to save the girl he's come to think of as a second
daughter, he objects to the fact that Ellie wasn't given a choice in the matter.
That's his rationale when he's later confronted by Marlene in the parking garage.
Since Ellie wasn't told about the procedure and since she didn't explicitly tell Joel
she was willing to give her life for a possible cure – there are, after all, no guarantees
the surgery or experimental treatments would work – he can't let the Fireflies go through
with their plan.
For almost all of Season 1 of "The Last of Us," Joel and Ellie are keeping secrets from
each other.
She lets him and Tess in on her big secret — her immunity — pretty quickly, but most
of their emotional baggage stays closed up until the finale.
That's when Joel reveals the truth about Sarah and his gunshot wound and that's when Ellie
finally tells Joel the real story about Riley and the first time she had to kill.
Eventually, Joel even goes a step further and begins to openly discuss Sarah again in
a way that he hasn't been able to bring himself to do since she died.
Ellie wonders aloud if what he means is that the passage of time enabled him to better
cope with the loss of Sarah, which means Ellie may someday be able to better cope with the
loss of Riley.
"So time heals all wounds, I guess."
"It wasn't time that did it."
It seems like Ellie and Joel both know they might not see each other again on the other
side of the Firefly hospital mission.
Throughout the series, Ellie and Joel make references to a scar on the right side of
his head and to the fact that his hearing is diminished in his right ear.
The first version of the story he tells Ellie is simply that someone shot at him and missed.
The audience knows Joel has been through 20 harsh years following the cordyceps outbreak
and the death of his daughter, Sarah, so the fact that he's worse for the wear isn't surprising
or particularly noteworthy.
Viewers may have guessed that the wound is the result of an early shootout with authorities
or an altercation with raiders or other smugglers at some point in between 2003 and the present.
However, in a slight departure from the game, Joel reveals to Ellie that he's the one who
shot and missed.
The game merely hints that he's suicidal following Sarah's death.
This moment of extreme honesty and vulnerability on Joel's part comes as he and Ellie sneak
through a long-defunct military medical encampment.
Joel remembers how he flinched at the last second trying to shoot himself the day after
Sarah died.
The memory serves to inform us about Joel's despair on day two of the outbreak as well
as showing us how quickly civilization fell apart.
The other mysteries surrounding Ellie have to do with her friend Riley and the extent
to which Ellie has killed before.
In Episode 1, Marlene mentions someone named Riley, and it strikes a nerve with Ellie,
which is the audience's first clue that something went awry just prior to the series' main storyline.
Early on in their journey, Ellie confides in Joel that she has had to defend herself
with violence before.
To that point, viewers had only seen her put an infected trapped in a basement out of its misery.
So when did Ellie have to kill to defend herself?
The answer is revealed in Episode 7, though luckily we don't have to watch the horrific
incident play out on screen.
Riley was Ellie's best friend (and secret love interest) at the FEDRA school.
When Riley was assigned sewage detail as a FEDRA-designated post-graduate career path,
she defected to the Fireflies.
Before she's shipped out on duty to another QZ, Riley plans a best-night-of-their-lives
at the mall where the two experience some rare moments of levity and share their true
feelings for each other.
"You're my best friend, and I'll miss you."
Riley intends to say goodbye, but Ellie, who's less hostile to FEDRA and unsure of how to
feel about the Fireflies, asks her to stay.
Best laid plans rarely work out in "The Last of Us," and Ellie and Riley are both bitten
fighting off infected in the Halloween store.
They decide to live out their final moments together, but — as Ellie later recounts
to Joel — this is when she discovers that she's immune.
Riley succumbs but Ellie doesn't, leaving Ellie no choice but to kill her crush and
best friend.
Season 1 of "The Last of Us" ends on a note that's both heartwarming and unsettling.
Joel and Ellie look out over the pristine Wyoming landscape, about to head off into
an uncertain but somewhat hopeful future together.
Then, she asks him to swear that everything he said about the Fireflies was true.
Though Joel and Ellie have been hiking for hours, only moments ago, viewers witnessed
what really happened.
The Fireflies fully intended to sacrifice Ellie — the only known person with immunity
— in order to work toward a possible cure.
They attempted to escort Joel out, but Joel fought back, systematically gunning down Firefly
after Firefly until he reached Ellie unconscious on her hospital bed.
When Marlene tried to convince him to hand her over, he shot her with a gun hidden under
Ellie's limp body.
Of course, that's not the story he tells a confused Ellie, still in her hospital gown.
Joel explains that there were dozens like her and that the Fireflies were merely doing
some tests to determine if a cure could be produced.
When their immunity couldn't be replicated, they gave up on their research.
Then, according to Joel, raiders swarmed the building, and he just barely got her out.
He admits that people died, including Marlene.
Joel swears that his fabricated version is true, because his new personal mission is
protecting Ellie at all costs.
Ellie's response ends the season, just like it ended the game.
The finale started with Anna lying to Marlene, and ends with Joel lying to Ellie.
"Okay."
Is Ellie saying "Okay" her believing the lie, accepting the lie, or something else?
It's open to interpretation, but fans of "The Last of Us: Part II" know that their relationship
is forever changed.
Co-creator Craig Mazin, in an episode of the official "The Last of Us" podcast, said the
ambiguity of the ending is the, quote, "correct" way to end the story, which is why he kept
it intact from the game.
"It can be any of those things."
"Absolutely."
"But that's why I love it."
So what's ahead for Season 2?
Mazin and showrunner Neil Druckmann aren't saying much, but they did reveal on the podcast
that fans can expect Season 2 to have a similar feel.
Druckmann said,
"You can expect us to repeat the same process [...] The moment-to-moment beats and characters,
they might stay the same, they might change.
We will do what needs to happen to that story as it transfers from one medium to another."
And Mazin hinted that Season 1's expansion into storylines not found in the game, like
the Episode 3 tearjerker, will continue.
Mazin said,
"We will also take advantage of the freedom we have in television that wasn't there in
the game.
Specifically, the advantage of changing perspective."