The ‘Last of Us’ Finale Is a Faithful and Agonizing Conclusion (2024)

It takes somewhere in the vicinity of six to seven hours to watch a cinematic playthrough of The Last of Us and its downloadable story expansion, Left Behind. It takes almost nine hours (counting the title sequences and credits) to watch the HBO adaptation. Within those extra hours are the additive digressions that cocreators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wove into the TV version to flesh out the journey of Joel and Ellie: the decades-long romance of Bill and Frank, the character of Kathleen, and the backstories of Sam and Henry. Those studies of the one-time NPCs in the leading duo’s orbit turned TLOU into a must-see series, even for fans who had the game memorized, bolstering the beats of the existing story without making the show miss the marks it had to hit.

It’s telling, then, that the finale runs a relatively trim 43 minutes—the same length as the last episode of a Druckmann-approved cinematic playthrough. It’s rare for the finale to be a season’s most succinct episode, but by the conclusion of Joel and Ellie’s cross-country road trip/killing spree, there are no more detours to take and no more supplementary stories to tell. At the end of the short and bittersweet “Look for the Light,” only three things matter: Joel, Ellie, and the monstrous—yet entirely fathomable—lie that lives between them.

Cocreated by the writer of the game and one of its fans, The Last of Us has always known when not to mess with its source material, which was uncommonly well-suited to TV. That’s never been more true than in the series’ faithful last act, which preserved the game denouement’s moments of joy and despair, connection and schism, and catharsis and discontent. The ending of the series, Bella Ramsey predicted before the finale, would “divide people massively—massively.” That was a safe bet because the game’s ending already divided its audience a decade ago. Its potential to provoke and dissatisfy is precisely what made it indelible in 2013, and it’s just as ambiguous and agonizing in 2023.

Let’s back up a bit from Joel’s decision to save Ellie at humanity’s expense—and his even-more-devastating decision to deceive her about what he did, at the possible expense of their relationship. In addition to recreating some of the game’s most memorable moments, the finale confirms a couple of character details that the game only hints at in optional readings and dialogues that many players never encountered. The first comes early on, when we witness Ellie’s birth. Ashley Johnson, who played Ellie in the game, plays Ellie’s similarly foul-mouthed mother, Anna. Her appearance, following original Joel actor Troy Baker’s turn as James last week, is a fitting tribute to an actor who had a huge impact on not only Ellie’s look, but also her personality. As Druckmann said in 2013, “Through Ashley’s input, Ellie became much more capable than we initially conceived.” Just as Johnson helped give life to digital Ellie, she brings TV Ellie into the world. (If you thought Joel’s recovery from an infected stab wound was quick, time Anna’s labor; I’m pretty sure my wife would’ve opted for the farmhouse-floor delivery—even with the Infected midwife—when our daughter was born if she knew it would be over that fast.)

In the game, Ellie carries a letter that her mother wrote to her less than a day after Ellie was born. By then, Anna had already been bitten, which fueled fan theories that Anna had been infected just before Ellie’s birth, leading to Ellie being born immune. This week, we saw that happen: Evidently, the few seconds between the bite and the cutting of the umbilical cord were enough for Anna to make antibodies that imparted protection to Ellie. The science seems dubious (nothing new for this show), but the origin story lends the episode a sad symmetry. Just as Anna lied to save Ellie’s life shortly after it started, telling Marlene that she had cut the cord before the bite, Joel lies to keep Ellie from insisting on sacrificing herself—and from knowing what he’d done to once again keep Marlene from reluctantly killing her friend’s daughter. A lie gives Ellie the chance to be the basis of a cure, and a lie takes that opportunity away.

Speaking of Joel: We also learn something significant about him. In the Pittsburgh sequence of the game (which was replaced by Kansas City in the series), Joel and Ellie come across corpses in a bathtub, and Ellie remarks that the people they once were took the easy way out. “Trust me,” Joel says. “It ain’t easy.” He sounds as if he’s speaking from experience, and now, we know he was: When Joel told Ellie in Episode 3 that he’s scarred and hard of hearing because “someone shot at me and missed,” he was referring to his own attempted suicide after Sarah’s death. Like the glimpse of Ellie’s birth, this revelation isn’t included to call back to the game; it’s there to lend a greater weight to Joel’s decision. Joel didn’t want to live in a world without Sarah—just like Henry didn’t want to live in a world without Sam—and now that Ellie is Joel’s surrogate daughter, he’d take her death just as hard, if not harder. By saving Ellie’s life, then, he’s also somewhat selfishly saving his own.

In Episode 6, Joel shut down a discussion as soon as Ellie brought up Sarah for the first time, growling, “Don’t say another word.” In Episode 9, he and Ellie discuss his daughter freely. No picture of Sarah is exchanged, as it is in the game, but it’s clear that Joel is no longer repressing his past. If life stopped for Joel, as Tommy suggested in Episode 6, then it has finally fully restarted. “So time heals all wounds, I guess,” Ellie says. Joel, vocalizing what we and Ellie already know, responds, “It wasn’t time that did it.”

What follows is straight out of one of the game’s most timeless and uplifting scenes: Joel gives Ellie a boost to a landing, where she sprints ahead, having caught a glimpse of something wondrous. When Joel catches up, the companions have a close encounter with a tower of grazing giraffes. Like the monkeys on the University of Eastern Colorado campus in Episode 6, these giraffes are roaming free, literally above it all and unconcerned by the apocalypse. Nature is reclaiming land that humanity has ceded—and given how the humans in this series act, maybe the world would be better off without them. As in the game, this idyllic interlude ends with an echo of an Ellie line from early in her travels: “You can’t deny that view.”

Even as she says that though, the outlook for her future is fraught. There’s a reason Ellie is quiet and distracted as she and Joel stroll through Salt Lake City, even though they’re coming close to their destination and, perhaps, to saving their species: On some level, Ellie knows that developing a vaccine or cure won’t be as simple and painless for her as giving blood and then returning to Tommy’s town in Wyoming as a savior. No number of giraffes or puns can totally take her mind off what she’s been through and what may lie in store for her—and, sure enough, when she and Joel finally find the Fireflies, they’re greeted not with hero’s welcomes, but with flash-bangs and rifle butts.

It took months of travel time, and hours of screen time, for Joel and Ellie to reach the hospital, but once they’re there, everything unfolds (and unravels) quickly. When Joel regains consciousness, Ellie has already lost hers: She’s being prepped for a surgery that will supposedly lead to a cure but—because it entails removing and replicating the Cordyceps that has been in her brain since birth—will kill her in the process. In lieu of the promised payment that originally enticed Joel into escorting Ellie, Marlene gives him Ellie’s knife—the same knife Anna gave Marlene when she charged her friend with protecting her newborn daughter—and sends him away with an armed guard. In condemning Ellie to death, Marlene is taking a calculated, unsentimental, utilitarian stance, but by letting Joel live, she’s not being ruthless enough. She has some idea of what it must have taken for Joel to shepherd Ellie safely from Massachusetts to Utah, so she should know that he’s not going to turn around and leave Ellie to die. But the Joel she knew in Boston would have done exactly that.

Joel’s very video game-y rampage through the hospital takes two minutes at most. For most of the season, the series has elided long combat sequences for a few reasons: They would have been less entertaining to watch than to play, they might have seemed unrealistic, and they might have made Joel less sympathetic. The second concern rears its head here—one banged-up man gunning down a platoon of seasoned, well-armed Fireflies is the sort of slaughter gamers take for granted but TV viewers may not buy—but a possible loss of sympathy isn’t such a problem. Joel’s actions aren’t supposed to be purely sympathetic because his motivations aren’t purely (or even mostly) selfless. Like Henry, he’d do anything for his family, though Henry, at least, seemed to have Sam foremost in his mind.

In keeping with the series’ commitment to presenting ethical choices in shades of gray—save, perhaps, for last week’s less complicated portrayal of David’s villainy—no one’s fully in the right or wrong here. On the Fireflies’ side, the decision to send Ellie into surgery seems hasty; wouldn’t you want to try for more than an hour or two to develop a cure nonlethally or at least observe her for a little longer before killing the only person who’s known to be immune? How confident can the doctors even be that the cure will come to fruition? Is the murder of an innocent ever justified, even if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one? Marlene, who’s betraying both Anna’s and Ellie’s trust, tries to persuade Joel that Ellie would be willing to lay down her life for everyone else’s, and she may well be right—but she doesn’t give Ellie the chance to make that choice for herself any more than Joel does. (Despite having assured her in Episode 6 that “You deserve a choice.”) Each of them wants what Ellie can give them (a cure for Marlene and love and purpose for Joel) more than they want Ellie to determine her own destiny.

The game didn’t give players a choice either; one way or another, Joel (and, by extension, the player) had to kill the doctor and escape with Ellie or be killed. Some players resented that lack of agency; others celebrated the way it elicited an emotional response and forced players to confront who Joel really is—and, perhaps, whether rooting for him made players complicit in his killings. TV viewers don’t expect a say in scripted proceedings, but those whose hearts melted at the sound of last week’s “baby girl” may resent what some may perceive as a season-ending heel turn. Of course, that would presume that Joel wasn’t a heel all along. Hadn’t we seen him be brutal before? Hadn’t he told Ellie who he was and what he’d done? Hadn’t his violence and cruelty scared off his own brother? This isn’t the first time that The Last of Us has examined the lines its characters cross for love.

As my colleague Alison Herman noted in January, “This isn’t a story about humans versus zombies. It’s a story about humans versus humans, and even their own impulses.” Sure enough, there are no Infected in the finale, aside from in the flashback to Anna’s delivery room. There are only wayward souls with an incurable case of the human condition.

After killing the man who may be humankind’s last hope of a cure—or at least the leading vaccine specialist in the Fireflies’ network—Joel emerges from the elevator cradling Ellie, just as he held Sarah at the story’s start. In the beginning of the game and show, Joel failed to save Sarah from a man with a gun—a man who was following orders to protect the many at great cost to the few. This time, Joel shoots first. A wounded Marlene begs for her life, but Joel won’t make the same merciful mistake she did. “You’d just come after her,” he says in both the game and the show, and he would know; it’s what he has done repeatedly and would do again.

At the very end, as Ellie and Joel are poised to reenter what passes for civilization—following a five-hour hike that hearkens back to their trip to Bill’s in Episode 3—Ellie finally questions his improbable tale of many immune survivors, doctors abandoning hope of a cure, and a raid on the Firefly hospital that forced Joel to whisk her away in a surgical gown. (That last part is true, from a certain point of view, though Joel was the one doing the raiding.) “Swear to me,” she says. “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.”

Joel could come clean: Marlene and the doctor are dead, the Fireflies are scattered, and Ellie may not know how or where to sacrifice herself even if she wanted to. But he doesn’t—possibly to prevent her from getting herself killed, possibly to spare her from survivor’s guilt, or possibly to spare himself the pain of losing a second daughter. “I swear,” he says, and before the screen cuts to black, Ellie answers, “OK.” Joel’s lie could doom their relationship and cost him his adopted daughter in a way that Cordyceps couldn’t: Ellie is immune to the fungus but not to treachery, no matter how well-intentioned. However, it takes two parties to preserve this fiction. Ellie is too smart not to see through the thin story, but she wants to believe it—because part of her would like to live, because she wants to trust Joel, and maybe because she sees herself in him and doesn’t want David to be right about her “violent heart.”

Although the ending of The Last of Us hasn’t changed since 2013, the audience’s experience of it is bound to be different 10 years later. When digital Joel first swore to digital Ellie that he had told the truth about the Fireflies, The Last of Us Part II hadn’t yet entered development. No one knew whether it would: Just before the first game’s release, Druckmann said, “I think the world is ripe for more stories, but as far as the journey Joel and Ellie goes on, it ends with this game. We were very conscious that we didn’t want to leave this story dangling. If we never do a sequel, we’re OK with it, because we told the story we needed to tell.”

Some players wanted Naughty Dog to extend the story; others valued its ambiguity and opposed a sequel, fearing that turning TLOU into a franchise would undercut the first game’s resistance to a tidy resolution. Regardless of how everyone felt, it took seven years for the follow-up to arrive. Fans who watch the HBO finale won’t have to (or get to) wonder whether that’s all there is to the story. The show has already been renewed for a second season, and anyone who doesn’t want to wait for that continuation can play, watch, or read about The Last of Us Part II today. Even those who resist that temptation are aware that this isn’t the end. Against that backdrop, the show’s wallop of a last act can’t help but hit differently than it did when “OK” could have been the last line Ellie ever uttered. Even so, it still hits hard.

The ratings success of The Last of Us and the think pieces its finale is sure to spur may shape how non-gamers see the medium that gave rise to its story. For HBO, The Last of Us was one more entry in a long line of Sunday prestige dramas, a House of the Dragon–level sensation that followed both the Game of Thrones prequel and the semi-sensation of Season 2 of The White Lotus. The network’s subscribers will soon move on to the next weekend conversation drivers—such as the fourth and final seasons of Succession and Barry—putting Joel and Ellie out of their minds until Season 2. But the long-anticipated arrival of a widely viewed and critically acclaimed live-action video game adaptation comes at a time when perceptions of gaming are undergoing a gradual metamorphosis in other mainstream media.

On Sunday night, The Last of Us aired opposite the Oscars, and the Oscars cowered. That a video game adaptation could steal some attention from the signature showcase of the industry most associated with the so-called video game adaptation “curse” is one sign of the times; another, perhaps, is the differing ways in which two films that were up for awards regarded gaming. One Oscar nominee, Glass Onion, prominently featured—and was seemingly inspired by—the online multiplayer game Among Us. Yet, a movie nominated for Best Picture, Tár, ended with what could be construed as a shot at the cultural value of video games. (Tár’s conductor protagonist, at least, would likely view a video game gig as a massive step down in artistic merit.) The same dichotomy can be seen in other industries. For the first time ever, this year’s Grammys included a category for video game music—yet the presenter butchered the winning game’s title. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel about game developers, was named as Amazon’s Best Book of the Year for 2022—yet during the run of The Last of Us, the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post shut down its video game vertical, Launcher, the latest example of legacy media’s longtime neglect of video games.

The original The Last of Us was better suited to adaptation than most of its ilk, but HBO’s take is likely less of an apotheosis or outlier and more of a herald of hit adaptations to come. Although there will be a lull in The Last of Us, there won’t be a break in scripted content derived from video games: Just in the next month, Tetris and The Super Mario Bros. Movie will premiere on Apple TV+ and in theaters, respectively. “I’ll follow you anywhere we go,” Ellie tells Joel in “Look for the Light.” After the finale, millions of spectators are certainly saying the same about the series. And almost as many makers of TV shows and movies must be aiming to follow TLOU’s lead.