The season finale of HBO’s The Last of Us is finally here, and with it the end of all our hopes and dreams for a happy, neat ending for Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal). After surviving all sorts of terrifying ordeals on their journey across the ruined United States, they finally found the Fireflies…but things didn’t work out the way any of them expected.
Let’s break down how “Look For The Light” compared to the bestselling The Last of Us video game by Naughty Dog. As always, there will be SPOILERS ahead.
Was Ellie’s mom in The Last of Us game?
Starting right at the top, the cold open shows Ellie’s mother Anna giving birth to her while fighting off an infected. This is a brand new sequence created for the show. We never see Anna in the video game, although we learn that she and Marlene were close through several of Marlene’s journals which Joel can stumble across while he’s fighting his way through the Firefly base.
The Last of Us: American Dreams comic book miniseries revealed more details about the relationship between Anna and Marlene, including how Marlene took care of baby Ellie and eventually passed on Anna’s switchblade. But it stopped short of ever actually showing us Ellie’s birth or Anna’s death.
By contrast, the series reveals the source of Ellie’s immunity: her mother was bitten by an infected during labor. This is a huge reveal; neither The Last of Us game nor its sequel ever explored how Ellie’s immunity worked or where it came from.
And of course, we have to mention that Anna is played by Ashley Johnson, the same actor who portrayed Ellie in the video game series. Considering that Marlene is played by Merle Dandridge in both the show and game, it adds a whole extra meta layer to when Anna and Marlene talk about how long they’ve known one another.
Topping it all off, this wonderfully layered scene takes place in an abandoned farmhouse. Golden fields surround it, with a broken down tractor just outside. A very similar setting plays a pivotal part in The Last of Us Part II.
Was Salt Lake City different in The Last of Us game?
That brings us to the present, where Joel and Ellie arrive in Salt Lake City to look for the Fireflies. This scene starts in the exact same way in the game, with Joel trying to speak to Ellie and her hardly hearing him because she’s in her own head. The flip in their personalities, with her acting withdrawn while Joel runs his mouth in an attempt to cheer her up is pretty much the same. There are minor differences, such as the inclusion of Boggle in the show, but on the whole this part hews pretty close to the game.
This includes the part when Joel and Ellie get an up-close look at a giraffe. This is an iconic scene from the game and the show adapts it beautifully. From the moment Joel finds the ladder and boosts Ellie up to the bit where they decide to carry on with their mission as they watch the herd…it’s all almost exactly the same as the game, with only a handful of minor dialogue differences.
Once the duo head back down to the streets, we get hit with perhaps the biggest deviation of the episode. In the game, Joel and Ellie travel through a system of underground tunnels on their way to Saint Mary’s Hospital, evading infected and clambering across vents suspended above a raging river. Joel eventually falls into the water, getting trapped in a sinking bus. Ellie tries to rescue him despite the fact that she can’t swim, leading to her falling in the water and nearly drowning. As Joel administers CPR, the Fireflies arrive and knock him out.
In the show, we skip the tunnels, the infected, and the river. Instead, a Firefly patrol drops a smoke bomb on Joel and Ellie shortly after they see the giraffes. They still knock him out just like in the game, but Ellie is conscious when it happens.
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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