What did The Last of Us finale change from the video game?

Does Joel kill the Fireflies in The Last of Us game?

That brings us to the point of no return. Just like in the game, Joel wakes up in Saint Mary’s Hospital to find Marlene and her soldiers at his bedside. Her explanation of the vaccine and Ellie’s surgery is very similar, with one significant exception: in the show, Marlene explains how a cordyceps vaccine would actually function. The mutated cordyceps in Ellie’s body essentially fools the fungus into thinking she’s already infected, so it doesn’t spread and take over her body; something the Firefly scientists believe they can replicate. This ties into the opening scene with Anna, since we saw how Ellie was infected with a trace amount of cordyceps at birth.

In both the show and game, Joel and Marlene’s conversation ends on a bitter note, with her ordering her soldiers to bring him to the outskirts of the city and send him on his way. The way Joel gets free is similar in both versions, with only some minor differences in the setting and way he retrieves his backpack. In the game, he also tortures a soldier by repeatedly shooting him in the stomach until he reveals where Ellie is being held, while in the show he just claims he “doesn’t have time for this,” shoots the guy and then gets moving.

Joel’s rampage itself is portrayed slightly differently in the game, where it’s more of a visceral, extended fight sequence as Joel makes his way through the hospital. The horror of what Joel is doing is leavened (at least in the immediate moment) because the player, having been controlling Joel and saving Ellie this whole time, understands why Joel would fight a bunch of seemingly good people to save Ellie’s life. The show leans hard the other way, portraying Joel’s actions as tragic. The overall feeling of conflict is the same, but the approach is different.

There are some fun little easter eggs, such as the fact that Joel keeps using up all his ammo and picking up new guns from fallen soldiers, similar to how he scavenges for supplies in the game. In particular, the assault rifle that Joel picks up is a weapon he also gets during this climactic section of the game in basically the exact same manner.

And then of course there’s the fateful moment where he guns down the surgeon who is about to operate on Ellie. The show makes this man seem slightly less threatening than he does in the game, but the end result is the same. The camera lingers on his corpse for a moment as well, foreshadowing his future significance from The Last of Us Part II, which we’ll see adapted next season.

Does Joel lie to Ellie in The Last of Us game?

After the rampage, the show and game once more line up almost exactly, from the cross-cutting during Marlene’s death scene to Joel lying to Ellie about how the Fireflies couldn’t make a cure to Joel and Ellie’s final hike to Jackson. As with many of the other scenes in the episode, the only real differences are minor changes in the dialogue, such as Joel saying the hospital was attacked by raiders and talking even more about his daughter Sarah during the hike to Jackson.

The final stinger, and last big change in The Last of Us season 1, is that Ellie actually reveals that she was the one who killed Riley after she succumbed to the cordyceps infection in the Boston QZ mall. In the game we never got an actual confirmation whether it was Ellie, Marlene, or someone else who ultimately killed Riley. All we get is Ellie’s iconic line that “her name was Riley, and she was the first to die.” The fact that the show added this information is just one last twist of the knife as we settle into the long wait for The Last of Us season 2.

But hey, we’ll have plenty to talk about in the meantime. It’s been a lot of fun to dissect how The Last of Us show and video game line up, and now that the season’s over, we’ll be looking back to dig even deeper into this fascinating adaptation.

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