When HBO announced that it was making a TV series out of massively successful gaming phenomenon The Last Of Us, those of us who’d played the games knew we were in for a couple of different discrete discourse storms that’d be breaking over the pop culture world in the coming years. Several of these were going to kick in when the show got to the events of The Last Of Us Part II (and, lo and behold, they certainly have), but one was going to come a lot earlier: I.e., how were TV audiences going to respond to the choice the show’s protagonist—tricky to say “hero”—Joel Miller makes at the end of the first game/season of this story?
As players/viewers know, Joel ends The Last Of Us with a monstrous act of love, murdering a crew of people trying to save the world from a fungal zombie apocalypse because their long-sought cure would involve killing his newly forged surrogate daughter, Ellie. (Bella Ramsay, in the show.) But while this ethical dilemma is presented about as clearly as it can be in both versions of the story—”Would you sacrifice the whole world for someone you love?” is a very simple emotional carb, honestly—the debate has long been complicated by people getting in the weeds of the logistics. Basically, these folks argue, there’s no way the Fireflies could have actually synthesized, and then distributed, a cure for the cordyceps plague from Ellie’s harvested brain, so Joel was actually just preventing a needless and stupid child sacrifice. A stance that franchise co-creator and writer Neil Druckmann has now pretty definitively shot down.
Druckmann (who’s also a major creative voice on the show) dipped into this topic while in the process of giving a wide-ranging interview on the Sacred Symbols podcast, touching on many aspects of the game’s adaptation. (Including questions about the reveal of the character Abby’s motivations, which comes much earlier in the show than in the game, and moments when Druckmann pushes back on the idea—inspired by his own comments to the Washington Post several years back—that the game’s warring groups are intended as an allegory for the Israel-Palestine conflict.) Referencing a previous conversation he’d had with host Colin Moriarty, Druckmann made it clear that the intent of the creators was always that Ellie’s death would have allowed the Fireflies to create a cure for the fungal plague. “Is our science a little shaky, that now people are questioning it? Yeah, it was a little shaky,” Druckmann admits. But the more important element, story-wise, is that the “Joel was right, actually” argument completely undercuts essentially everything The Last Of Us tries to do with its story; you can dislike some of Druckmann’s philosophical stances with these games, but they make no sense in a universe where this is a game about a guy making an unambiguously correct choice in a horrifying situation.
The Last Of Us airs its season two finale on Sunday, May 25.
