5 best moments from HBO’s The Last of Us (and the 5 most devastating)

Third best moment from The Last of Us: Joel and Ellie’s argument in Jackson

Over the course of the series, Joel and Ellie go from unwilling traveling companions to surrogate family members. Joel and Ellie’s bonding moments are some of the most heartwarming in the series, as well as crucial to the overall arc of the story; take out their gradually changing relationship, and the entire show falls apart.

It’s difficult to home in on any one specific Joel-and-Ellie scene and dub it the “best.” Was it when they were camping in the woods outside Kansas City? When Ellie finally gets Joel to laugh later that same episode? When they hold up with a reclusive married couple near Jackson, or when Ellie is nursing Joel back to health following his injury at the University of Eastern Colorado? How about that beautiful run-in with the giraffe in Salt Lake City?

Really, you could pick any of those and I wouldn’t judge you. But if you forced me to choose a favorite scene for these two, it would probably be the argument they have in Jackson, when Joel is trying to push the responsibility for watching over Ellie onto his brother Tommy and Ellie calls him on it.

That scene, where Joel tells Ellie “You’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad,” might be the most famous scene from The Last of Us video game, and the show adapts it with incredible attention to detail; they literally had the same wallpaper in the room where the argument happened. At the same time, they gave Pascal and Ramsey room to interpret the scene in their own way. It’s a top notch scene and performance, built off a top notch script, drawn from a top notch moment in the source material. I doubt I’m the only one who heaved an enormous sigh of relief when I saw how well it all turned out.

Third most devastating moment on The Last of Us: Joel’s rampage against the Fireflies

A few episodes after Joel tells Ellie she isn’t his daughter, he promptly turns around and protects her like only a parent could. After finally reaching the Fireflies in the season finale, Joel is told that the only way to create a cordyceps cure is to cut out the part of Ellie’s brain that makes her immune, killing her. Rather than accept this, Joel decides he’s going to rescue her one last time.

Throughout the show’s first season, we hear time and again how Joel is a dangerous person. Maria (Rutina Wesley) tries to warn Ellie, Tess reflects on the bad stuff she and Joel did together, and even Joel himself hints that innocents have died at his hands. Yet the real horror of what he’s capable of doesn’t crystallize until his rampage through Saint Mary’s Hospital.

In the game, this is more of an action scene that lasts long enough for the player to realize that Joel may be doing the wrong thing. The show, on the other hand, makes it very clear that what we’re watching is a tragedy. Joel kills people after they’ve surrendered. He stabs a soldier to death after the man has already been incapacitated. He shoots the doctor in Ellie’s surgery room so quickly that I didn’t even see him pick up a scalpel the first time I watched. It’s bloody, and brutal, and horrific. And in the final stinger, Joel kills Marlene in cold blood so that she can never come searching for Ellie,.

When faced with the question of whether he could lose a daughter again for the sake of saving humanity, Joel chooses Ellie. We’ll see the fallout of this choice next season, but for now we’re just left rocking back and forth and wondering whether life will always be this awful.