The Last of Us finale is devastating but rushes the big finish

Joel faces an impossible dilemma, and chooses violence

Despite seemingly achieving their objective, Joel wakes up to find himself in a whole new nightmare. Marlene has arrived in Salt Lake City and reveals the awful truth: Ellie’s dormant infection can be used to create a cure, but the surgery to extract the infected part of her brain would kill her. That’s right, this entire series has been one huge setup to force Joel into the ultimate Trolly Problem scenario: let the girl he’d come to think of as a daughter die, or create a vaccine to potentially save the human race.

The Last of Us is all about messy, relatable human choices, and in that moment Joel makes one that is sure to prove as controversial with viewers as it was with gamers all the way back in 2013. He chooses Ellie, his new “daughter,” over the rest of humanity.

The show makes an interesting choice here, portraying Joel’s subsequent killing spree through the Firefly base as an almost tragic fever dream rather than a visceral fight scene. It’s awful and sad…but if I’m being totally honest, I don’t think it quite pulled me in the same way the sequence did in the game, where you become an unwilling participant to Joel’s bloodiest acts.

In the game, when Joel finds out that Ellie will be killed for a cure, it’s so easy to fall into an almost physical reaction to go save her. After all, that’s what he (and you, who’s been controlling him) have been doing all along, and here at the finish line he has to do it one more time, except he’s fighting allies instead of enemies. Changes have to be made to bring this story onto the television medium, but for whatever reason this one just didn’t quite land as well as I wished, which is a shame considering that this beat is one of the most crucial in the entire story.

Joel ends The Last of Us with murders and lies

That brings us to the final sequence, which crosscuts between Joel killing Marlene and him lying to Ellie about what happened as they leave Salt Lake City. This part, the show completely nailed. The slow realization that Joel killed Marlene in cold blood, which is only revealed after he and Ellie have already left the city, is brutally well delivered.

The Last of Us season 1 ends with Joel and Ellie hiking through the wilderness toward Jackson to begin their new life. As with the beginning of the episode, we finally get something we’ve wanted, which is Joel openly confiding in Ellie about his daughter Sarah, and once again it feels so wrong. Joel’s possessiveness of Ellie as a daughter comes off as all the more eerie after David’s speech about whether or not she needs a father in the preceding episode. Joel isn’t harming her in the same way, but it still feels terrible that he made such big choices about her future while she was unconscious, lied and basically told her she’s not special in the way they thought because there are “dozens” of other people who are immune. He did what he did from the selfish place of not wanting to let her go in spite of the fact that he knows it’s probably what she would want.

Topping it all off is the final stinger. As the pair stands on a bluff overlooking Jackson, Ellie gives Joel a chance to come clean. She asks him to swear that everything he’s told her is true…and he does. The episode ends with Ellie’s blunt “okay,” as she gives him a look that makes it clear she knows on some level she’s being lied to. And so concludes what has been a fantastic season of television.

As a whole, the finale of The Last of Us is yet another excellent episode. At the same time, I wasn’t quite as blown away as I expected. My biggest gripe is that it feels like the show rushed its big finish. “Look For The Light” is the shortest episode in the entire season, and I can’t help but wonder why the production made that choice.

In the game, Joel and Ellie have a significant journey through the tunnels beneath Salt Lake City, evading infected before Ellie is forced to dive into a raging river to try and save Joel from drowning in spite of the fact that she can’t swim. This only makes it hit harder when Joel finds out the Fireflies plan to kill her mere hours after she nearly sacrificed her own life for his, and considering that we haven’t seen an infected outside of flashbacks since Episode 5, having that extra layer of danger would have been nice moment to adapt as our heroes neared their final destination.

Instead, it felt a little bit like “Look For The Light” skipped from beat to beat in the most expedient way it could without allowing those moments much time to breathe. I enjoyed it immensely, but in many ways I feel as torn about the episode as I do about Joel’s choices.

The Last of Bullet Points

• The episode title “Look For The Light” is the back half of the Firefly mantra, “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.” It creates a nice mirror effect with the premiere (“When You’re Lost In The Darkness”), which also featured the Fireflies at the start of Ellie and Joel’s journey. Ah, symmetry.
• The show made a small but very important change during Joel and Ellie’s final conversation, which is that it revealed that Ellie was the one who killed Riley after she turned. The games never confirmed that.

Verdict

The season finale of The Last of Us was another fantastic episode that is sure to have people talking, albeit one not without some minor issues. It brought the season to a close in an explosive, complicated fashion that will have major ramifications moving forward. This show is easily one of the best video game adaptations ever made for television, as well as just an incredible series overall. It’s been a hell of a ride, and we’ll be eagerly waiting for season 2 to see how the truth will come out…and what Ellie will do when she discovers it.

Episode Grade: A-

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