THE LAST OF US Ending Explained: Was Joel Right Or Wrong

Alright, so The Last of Us comes with an ending that I think will stick with everyone long after they experience it. Whether you watched the events play out in the game or show, I think that it leaves a lasting impression due to the situation that the two protagonists find themselves in.

Towards the end of the story, Joel finally reaches the fireflies with Ellie, but he discovers that in order to make a vaccine, Ellie has to die. Joel is someone who lost his daughter, and rather than go through the pain of this again, he decides to murder all of the fireflies and take her back to his brother in Jackson.

Joel lies to her about what really happened, and he makes Ellie believe that everything was for nothing.

Well, not for nothing, as he now has a surrogate daughter, and she has the father figure that she’s always wanted in her life. He tells her in the show that raiders arrived at the hospital, and though he leaves out this detail in the game, he makes her believe that they’ve given up on finding a cure.

The game and show close out on the exact same scene, with Ellie asking Joel to swear that everything he’s said is true.

Joel’s Choice In The Last Of Us

Now, was Joel right or wrong?

Well, firstly, I think we have to discuss the two sides of the argument and how Marlene and Joel are actually pretty similar.

Both were tasked with guarding Ellie, and they made a promise to protect her. Both knew that she was immune, and both were told that there was a way to manufacture a cure from her.

However, where they differ is that Joel is not willing to kill her for this, whereas Marlene is. Joel is a lone wolf who’s seen the worst of humanity, and he’s been a closed book since the death of his daughter. He knows what it’s like to lose a child and doesn’t think that it’s worth sacrificing a kid like this for a cause. Marlene, on the other hand, is looking at the greater good, and whereas Joel tended to work on his own, she’s been part of a group. She sees Ellie’s immunity as something that could help humanity and believes in the best of us as a collective. Joel believes in the best of us as individuals, and he refuses to give up the needs of the few to help the needs of the many.

Joel throughout the series and game was a very closed-off man who refused to open up to anyone because he knew what true loss was. As a parent, I can’t imagine how painful it would be to lose a child, and going off what I’ve heard from other people, it’s the most difficult thing you can go through. He simply refuses to do this again and views taking Ellie to the fireflies as throwing her to the wolves.

It’s safe to say that Ellie also brought something out of him that he thought was long gone. Throughout the series and game, we watch Joel glance at his watch from time to time, and this is a reminder of the life he had with Sarah. Given to him as a birthday present it broke during the fall in which Sarah was shot and since them it’s been frozen in time like he has.

However, he has started to grow with Ellie, and whereas he refused to talk about his past, we see him opening up about it in episode 9.

Now they do things differently in the episode and game, but they carry the same meaning. In the game during the Jackson chapter Tommy tried to give Joel a photo of him and Sarah. He refused to acknowledge it, but Ellie ended up stealing it and taking it on their journey. She presented it to him at the end, and he finally acknowledged that you can’t outrun your past. In the show, he says that Ellie has very much helped him move on finally, and to put it plainly, he doesn’t want to go through this again.

Joel knows how bad a loss like that can be and what it can do to a person.

Little is known about the twenty years between the outbreak day and when we catch him in Boston, but we know bad things happened. Due to what he says about Bryan, he has clearly killed people like him before, and his run through the hospital shows just how merciless he is.

He is very much sparing himself from becoming this person again or something even worse.

Going through this twice in one lifetime would break him, and he sees Ellie as a way out of the darkness. The fireflies saying is look for the light,” and that is very much what Emily represents. Sarah’s ghost still haunts him in many ways, and even just seeing a woman with the same hair as her is enough to set him off.

He can instantly get lost in a daydream imagining the life she should’ve had, and this is why he’s so dead set on saving Ellie.

She’s a new chance, the life that he and Sarah should’ve had together, and that’s all he cares about.

Joel very much represents individual needs and how one can justify putting themselves above all else. Throughout the pre-podcast show, they’ve constantly talked about how love is a constant theme in the show and Joel represents the positives and negatives of it.

When you love someone, you can do lots of great things, but you can also do bad things in order to keep that love. Joel is the embodiment of this, with him murdering an entire group of people who, in their hearts, just wanted to save humanity.

On paper, Joel is the bad guy, and when people are discussing the game, there’ll always be the idea that when you’re playing as Joel, you’re playing as the bad guy. However, the last of us is never as black and white as that, and because we’ve played as him, we can completely see things from his point of view. Like him, we’ve grown a bond with Ellie, and therefore we want to save her and ride off into the sunset.

He lies to Ellie not only for himself but also because he doesn’t want to destroy the image she has of herself and of him in her eyes. Ellie carries a lot of survivor guilt due to the deaths she’s seen happen. Riley, Tess, Henry, and Sam all died whilst she lived, and it would crush her further learning what Joel did.

In the end, she is also consenting to this idea as she accepts his version of events, even though they sound suspect. They are both living this life with each other in which they can go off and be father and daughter together, even though they both probably know that things aren’t that cut and dry. They have to constantly keep lying to themselves because the truth is too difficult to even face up to, and Ellie saying Okay carries a lot with it.

It’s not an acceptance that that’s what actually happened; it’s an acceptance of Joel’s version of it, and deep down, Ellie might even know that something bad could’ve happened, which she was spared from.

On the other side of this is Marlene.

Was Joel Right In The Last Of Us?

She’s very much the opposite of Joel in both ideology and personality. Whereas he was someone who tried to keep himself to himself, Marlene did the opposite. She actively sought people out to build a following, and as the leader of the fireflies, she’s rallied hundreds to her cause. Oppressed by Fedra, these downbeaten and overlooked people have managed to escape the confines of the fascism they were subjected to, and though they’re labeled terrorists, they can also be seen as being freedom fighters too.

Marlene sees Ellie as a way to lead humanity out of the darkness and into the light, much like Joel does. However, while that’s for his personal life, Marlene sees it as something that can help humanity as a whole. Creating a vaccine will stop the grip that the Cordyceps have on the planet, and it means that the species can recover.

This entire part of human history could be looked back on like we look back at the black death, and in hundreds of years time, it’s possible that we could at least get back to where we were.

Marlene sees this as a possibility, and she believes that the fireflies will distribute the vaccine fairly to everyone. She thinks that Fedra would hold people ransom because, again, it is fascist, whereas the fireflies having it would be for the better.

But is that really the case?

Well, I actually think that’s pretty unlikely.

Kathleen is the perfect example of what happens when the Fedra are overthrown, and the alternative is often just as bad. I feel like the fireflies would be like this too, as they’re happy to bomb civilians and create warfare in the street just to get their point across. Marlene’s heart is in the right place, but whether things actually happened the way she imagined is unlikely.

What would probably happen is that the fireflies would require people to join them in order to get the cure, and then there would be a power struggle created. Now, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I also don’t think that the fireflies have the facilities to mass produce a vaccine like this. If we look at our own world there were shortages in them after the pandemic and that was with a worldwide effort to create them. So I really don’t think that the fireflies would be able to carry this out either, and in the waiting times, people would get frustrated.

Those in Fedra camps would likely hear of the cure, and then tensions would start to flare as Fedra tried to keep them in check while the fireflies spread it. This would take a while and likely cause further conflict in the zones, leading to more deaths.

People would eat themselves just to get a hold of this thing, and the fireflies could run out of resources when trying to mass produce it. Fedra could also spread information and say that the cure doesn’t actually work and then they may rally people to their cause which would cause further fighting and war.

However, Marlene’s heart is in the right place, even if things aren’t practical.

Where the morally grey area comes from this though is whether it’s ok to kill a child in order to do this.

Marlene is okay with killing someone else’s kid, but whether she would do it for her own child is another thing entirely. If you’re a parent, then you should ask yourself, “Would you kill your own child to give a group like the fireflies the chance to mass produce a cure?

Personally, I don’t think many would, and I know for a fact that if it came down to it, in the heat of the moment, I’d say no.

This is something that really struck me when making this video, and over the years I’ve often been someone who was rooted solely in the idea that Joel was in the wrong.

I was an idealist who thought that the ends justified the means and that killing one person was worth it. In my head, I was Marlene, making the tough choice in order to carry out the greater good.

Sure, I’d played as Joel, and even though I could definitely see things from his point of view, I thought that he was the bad guy.

However, since having children myself, I’ve now begun to ask myself, “Would I hand them over like this, knowing that they’d die just so that the fireflies could carry out their goals?”

Add to this the fact that Joel has already gone through something like this, and I really started to see why he did what he did. This is a man who’s already lost his daughter, and faced with the prospect of losing someone else he cares about, he simply refuses to do it again.

Now in all of this, the one person we haven’t talked about is Ellie.

In the finale, they make a big point of talking about what she would have wanted.

Using the ending as hindsight, it seems like she’s just happy to go along with whatever Joel tells her; however, Part 2 does expand on her feelings quite a lot.

In that, she goes back to St. Mary’s hospital herself and discovers the truth about what really went down there. Horrified, she decides to cut Joel out of her life, and later on we learn that she’s devastated because her life could have meant something. In this moment, we see that Ellie was happy to die if it meant that a cure could be manufactured. She wanted all the deaths that happened to get her to the hospital to mean something, but because of Joel’s actions, they no longer did.

I think Joel knows this too, which is why he decides to lie in the end.

He knows it will break Ellie’s heart and is doing it to spare himself even more than he’s trying to spare her.

So in the end, I think that if we look at this as being black and white, then yes, Joel is in the wrong.

He went against Ellie’s wishes and also doomed humanity to eventual extinction. The species in the show is on its last legs, and being pushed further down this road will only lead to more death and division. There’s a reason that all of the kid characters in the show outside of Ellie end up dead and that’s because it’s near impossible for a child to make it to adulthood in this world.

So the species will die out eventually due to kids not growing old enough to have them themselves, and we’ll slowly dwindle into oblivion.

Therefore, I think that when looked at like that, Joel is on the right.

But.

And it’s a big but, as a father, I can also see why he did the right thing, and honestly, if I were in the same position, I’d probably do that too.

We would like to think that we are Marlene, but when pushed into a situation like this, I imagine that most people will react exactly the same. Whether it’s your mother, father, grandparent, sister, brother, or child, when it comes down to making that choice, it’s impossible to say you’d happily hand them over.

So I can totally see why Joel did what he did, and why I think I’d do the same thing.

Now going back to the question of whether Joel is right or wrong,

Well.

I honestly can’t say.

Though I’m like, 90% or 70% sure he was because of what we’ve discussed, there’s still that little bit of doubt in the back of my mind, and that might be enough to have me side with Joel. I think when we think about this situation theoretically, we’d all like to believe we’d do it for the greater good.

However, if it actually happened and I was forced to make the choice between my kids and helping out these a**holes, I think I know deep down what I’d do.

What Do Neil Druckmann And Craig Mazin Say About Joel’s Choice?

Now, I actually wrote and recorded this video before the season finale aired, and after listening to the podcast, I decided to hold off on its release so we could add in this extra bit about what the show runners said. They actually bring up some of the points that I made about being a parent and also give their thoughts on the choice at the end.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that Joel saved Ellie, but in many ways Ellie saved Joel. He’s not going to abandon her to die, even if we think that he should, because he’s acting like a parent who thinks he knows best. However, there is still a cost that comes with this, and it shows that no decision is without its consequences.

So it’s a morally gray area in which there’s no real right or wrong answer.

And I think that’s what gives the story of the last of us its staying power. We can argue over it forever and really go back and forth over what we would do.

So that’s what I’m going to let happen. In the comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ending, so make sure you let me know.

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