Revenge and Redemption
This piece contains spoilers on 'The Last of Us'
HBO’s The Last of Us is best known for its aggressive foray into the culture war, but beneath its surface-level agenda the show is an occasionally poignant character study on parent-child relationships. The gruesome Season 2 finale somewhat unexpectedly leaned into the latter last weekend, delivering a nuanced evolution to one of TV’s most obnoxiously jaded characters. And while the season attempts to paint Ellie as a “bad guy,” it perhaps inadvertently gives her a path to redemption.
Season 2 picks up five years after the Season 1 finale, where Joel saves Ellie from scientists searching for a Cordyceps cure in her brain. The duo ride back to their fortified Wyoming commune and settle into a homey father-daughter relationship, so much so that Ellie, now 18, pretty much hates his guts. She senses he lied about what happened that day — that he killed dozens of people and thwarted humanity’s salvation — all to save her life, and it’s created an emotional rift between them. She moves into the garage and only stops ignoring him if it’s to briefly abuse him.
What’s initially set up as Joel’s atonement arc comes to an abrupt halt in S2E2, when he’s savagely murdered by survivors of the lab massacre. Still furious at Joel for what he did, Ellie nevertheless sets out to track and kill those responsible. The rest of Season 2 morphs into a revenge arc, as Ellie both comes to terms with the truth about Joel and becomes every bit the bad guy herself. At least that was the showrunners’ intention.
“We’re used to telling ‘good-guy/bad-guy’ stories in Hollywood,” said showrunner Craig Mazin, but TLOU “tells ‘people’ stories.” By this he means moral ambiguity, a supposed uncomfortable but permanent truth that our happy little narratives choose to avoid: everyone’s bad, everything’s gray, it’s “the fundamental injustice of life.” Nevermind that this is certainly a fixture in Hollywood storytelling at this point, and it’s no longer as gritty or edgy as creative types like to imagine. Yet it’s still better than the other common alternative.
At the beginning of Season 2, Ellie has all the trappings of an insufferable “girl boss.” She’s training to be a ranger with the boys, to fight and kill “infected” outside the commune. She’s arrogant about her abilities, even when she falls short, and scoffs at the idea she has anything to learn or should be expected to subordinate her whims to the greater good of the community. “I’m an adult, people can’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” she says in S2E1, lacking all self-awareness. However, rather than endorse this conceit on its face as Hollywood often does, the show depicts her willfulness leading to her moral demise through the season.
Insistent that she’s on a moral crusade, Ellie refuses to give up on her revenge journey — even when the community wisely prohibits her, even though she’s putting more than just her life in danger. She sabotages any hope for a normal life back in Wyoming (the cringeworthy sub-plot where she gets to “be a dad” to her girlfriend’s love child) and gets her friends hurt and killed in the crossfire. And it’s all for nought: instead of killing the person responsible for Joel’s murder, she accidentally kills a tangential associate, a heavily pregnant woman. Unable to save the baby, Ellie’s moral self-understanding comes crashing down in the season finale.
The point is to highlight moral ambiguity: The cruel world doesn’t allow anyone to “be good,” let alone find justice, and that despite Ellie’s good intentions she becomes an even worse person than she felt Joel was. If Joel deserved his fate, then what does Ellie deserve? We’re left with a cliffhanger suggesting she may have been killed for her sins, another casualty in the cycle of injustice.
There’s no denying Ellie did a terrible thing, and the pregnant woman’s death is one of the most horrifying and heart wrenching scenes ever depicted on television. She certainly knows it, and in her grief, attempts to sacrifice herself to save her remaining companions — abandoning her quest for revenge in the process. But far from blurring the distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” the finale shows Ellie actually has a pretty solid grasp of right and wrong.
The driving force of the season is whether Ellie can reconcile Joel’s devotion to her as a quasi-father with his sins as a man. Self-righteously immature at the beginning, she can’t make that moral distinction and hates Joel as teens across time hate their parents for any number of infractions.
Yet a flashback in the penultimate episode reveals Joel finally coming clean: He killed the scientists “because I love you . . . in a way you can’t understand . . . unless you have one of your own,” he says tearfully. “I don’t think I can forgive you, but I would like to try,” Ellie responds.
With the flashback, it’s clear her journey throughout the season became increasingly less about revenge and more about finding room for this forgiveness. As she comes to see her own sins in Joel and loses her own sense of moral self-assuredness, she once again finds love for the father while still judging the man as harshly as she judges herself. Giving up on her revenge serves as much as her own personal atonement as it reflects a willingness to finally accept what Joel did.
Sure, there’s moral ambiguity here, as there indeed is in the world, but it doesn’t show that everything and everyone is hopelessly corrupt. Rather, it shows that all good intentions can go bad — but what separates good people from bad people is a willingness to reflect and atone and afford the same grace to others as we’d hope to be given ourselves.
There’s no path open for Joel’s redemption, other than the grace Ellie is willing to afford him. But despite the cliffhanger ending, Season 3 still leaves plenty of room for Ellie “to be the better man.” Let’s just hope the showrunners decide to keep it metaphorical.
Gage Klipper is a writer based in New York. Previously, he was the culture critic at the Daily Caller and an editor at Pirate Wires.
