The Last of Us – Look for the Light

By: Kelly Kearney

After a season of heartbreak and fungus freaks the finale for the HBO’s highest-rated drama, “The Last of Us” is here and it was, as usual, a rollercoaster of emotions. Still searching for the relocated Fireflies’ medical base, Ellie and Joel navigate the streets of Salt Lake City and come across a few unforgettable surprises that lead Joel to make a life-altering decision that could change the course of humanity’s fate forever. So, let’s dive into this recap because so much happens in this forty-five minute episode that you won’t be able to take a breath until the credits roll.

Ellie’s Origin Story

We open with a pregnant woman (Ashley Johnson) being chased by an infected runner through the woods. She’s in labor and somehow manages to stumble into an empty house she’s definitely familiar with. When she sees that nobody’s waiting for her she makes her way upstairs to one of the bedrooms and barricades the door. The aptly named runner is right behind her and in seconds it’s clawing at the door. She pulls her knife and debates her next move, but babies nor the Cordyceps wait for her to be ready. She knows it’s only a matter of who gets to her first. The infected wins out and comes sprinting through the broken-down door and straight at her. She fights off the gnashing-toothed maniac but the hungry fungi is relentless. After a few attempts she eventually manages to get the upper hand and drive her knife into the thing’s skull. But is it too late? In the middle of the chaos unfolding, her baby had been forced out of her womb and onto the bedroom floor. She also hadn’t realized she was bitten on the thigh and now the new mom’s panic kicks in. The cord connecting her infected blood to her baby’s body is still flowing! She immediately takes her knife and cuts the umbilical cord hoping she can prevent the infection from spreading, having no idea the timing of these things. As the infant wails she smiles and clutches her to her chest and gives her a name. This is the story of Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) birth and how she gained immunity from the fungal disease that killed off most of humanity, but most importantly why it could mean she’s the cure.

From the moment Ellie was born she was a talker – although the puns and foul language came much later. Her tiny hungry screams echo throughout the house until Marlene (Merle Dandridge) and her fellow Fireflies find her in the arms of her dying and desperate mother. It’s clear the two women know each other when Marlene fondly refers to the woman as Anna and follows it up with an apology for not getting to the house on time thanks to a delay at the QZ. Now that she sees what happened to Anna during that delay, Marlene is even more regretful. First things first; the newborn needs to eat. Anna attempts to put Marlene’s mind at ease by lying about how she cut the cord after she was bitten. She explains this is why she couldn’t nurse Ellie yet. Marlene is skeptical of Anna’s timeline with the umbilical cord but she has known Anna her whole life and if she is lying then Marlene can’t even think about what comes next. Anna sees her friend’s skepticism and grabs the knife she used to kill the runner and tucks it into the jacket she’s turned into Ellie’s makeshift blanket. She begs Marlene to take Ellie back to Boston and find someone who can raise her, but the leader of the Fireflies refuses. Anna is running out of time and slides the baby towards Marlene pleading with her to do this last thing for her in honor of their lifelong friendship. That’s not all Anna wants though. She also asks Marlene to kill her before she turns. It’s an emotional moment between the two women, but when Marlene realizes there is no hope for Anna she hands the baby off to one of her guards outside of the bedroom with strict orders to cover her ears while she ends her tormented mother’s misery. Anna’s last moments with Marlene mirror those of Ellie’s years later with Riley (Storm Reid) and it’s a pain neither of them has ever fully gotten over. Loss doesn’t get easier the more you experience it, as Ellie is slowly finding out. She was born into death and subsequently cursed by it; it came for her mother, Riley, Sam (Keivonn Woodard) and Henry (Lamar Johnson) and one day might even come for Joel (Pedro Pascal).

Speaking of Joel, that guy is not dying anytime soon – not now that Nurse Ellie’s surgical skills are unmatched!  Now the two travel buddies are navigating a highway outside of Salt Lake City and Joel’s mood has lifted from the grumpy and lethal guy we met at the start of the season into a much more chipper, yet still lethal, guy today. It’s a new combination for him and it’s all thanks to Ellie and that RV full of supplies he just found. Ellie doesn’t share his enthusiasm for Beeferoni or the board game Boggle. She is stuck in her thoughts while trying her best to act happy about their next leg of the trip. The truth is that the endgame of this journey is as scary as the deadly moments she’s already encountered on the road to get there. One can’t help but wonder if Ellie is worried about what this cure means for her and for her newfound surrogate father, Joel. He only adds to her gloomy mood when he says Fireflies’ research doctors probably relocated from one Salt Lake City hospital to another. They are right outside the Utah capital, so it won’t be long until they can start working on that cure. For his sake Ellie smiles and goes along with Joel’s good mood, but he can tell something is off with her even if he doesn’t mention it.

An Oasis in Salt Lake

As they make their way through downtown Salt Lake City, Ellie proves she’s been paying attention to Joel’s techniques when she rattles off his usual plan to find the tallest skyscraper and get a view of what they’re up against. He’s thrown off by how right she is and jokes about his better plan of blasting through some rubble with the dynamite he conveniently forgot to mention he found in the RV. Once inside they’re in awe of more than the view when Ellie stumbles upon a family of hungry giraffes munching on vines and weeds growing alongside the building! Joel delights in watching Ellie’s inner child come giggling out of her as she feeds the gentle animal. It’s a beautiful moment made more special by the fact showrunners Mazin and Druckmann skipped the greenscreen for a real-life giraffe so those smiles are real and they are infectious, as we see Joel light up in wonder at this cool kid he’s grown to care about. Looking out at the cityscape Joel asks Ellie what she thinks and she jokes, “It’s got its ups and downs but you can’t deny that view.” Her mood is improving but Joel can still read the worry on her face and offers up an alternative plan to the hospital idea. The path forward comes with risks that he isn’t sure either of them is ready and willing to take. He proposes they abandon Marlene’s cure plan and head back to Jackson to live with Tommy. He’s as worried about the unknown as she is, but unlike Joel we see Ellie has already resigned herself to whatever her fate is. “After all we’ve been through…everything I’ve done…it can’t be for nothing,” she says, trying to ease Joel’s mind knowing he just wants to protect her. She wants to keep going but she also promises that after she does her part they can go wherever he wants, “Tommy’s, sheep ranch, the moon, I’ll follow you anywhere you go, but there’s no halfway with this. We finish what we started.” Joel agrees for now and they make their way down to the streets below where Ellie questions if all of the abandoned military vehicles and Red Cross tents were relics from FEDRA. Joel explains how Emergency Medical Camps were pre-FEDRA and then lets it slip that he was once in one and points to the scar on his head. Earlier he had told Ellie that mark was from a raider with bad aim, but now he’s admitting, “It was me. I was the guy who missed.” After Sarah died Joel didn’t think he had a reason to go on, but when he went to pull that trigger something in him made him flinch and he missed. Maybe it was fate stepping in, but the bullet grazed him and he ended up in a similar medical camp. “So, time heals all wounds, I guess,” Ellie says, and Joel looks right through her and says, “It wasn’t time that did it.” She holds back her tears because at that moment she realizes that as many times as Joel saved her on this trip, she saved him too. After a few tears, both of their moods are looking up making it the perfect time for Ellie to pull out her pun book as they walk in the direction of the hospital.

One Life for Many!

Those good times don’t last long when a flash grenade goes off in the streets and the last thing Joel hears before he’s knocked out is Ellie screaming for help as she’s dragged away. The screen goes white and the next time we see Joel he is waking up in a hospital with Marlene standing over him apologizing for her patrol mistaking them for a threat. He skips the pleasantries and asks to see Ellie, who according to Marlene doesn’t have a scratch on her but is equally worried about him. She deflects his request by complimenting him on his ability to deliver Ellie alive but admits she hates owing him any sort of debt. He could care less about what she owes him, he just wants to see Ellie, but according to Marlene, the girl is being prepped for surgery. Surgery? That word changes Joel’s entire demeanor. Like a tide rushing and raging inside of him begging to break free, he is drowning in his panic over what this cure could mean for Ellie.  Marlene recognizes his fear and tries to calm him down by explaining how the procedure might work. The doctors think the Cordyceps has grown inside Ellie since the day she was born. That infant infection has somehow created an immune response acting like a chemical messenger that tricks normal Cordyceps into thinking Ellie has already fully turned. The surgeon will remove the infection and reproduce it in a lab so they can infect everyone with this innovative vaccine. All of this is based on one doctor’s hypothesis and, considering they have to remove the Cordyceps from Ellie’s brain, Joel has every right to panic, removing it means her death! Not that Ellie knows this, Marlene made sure not to tell her before she was sedated for the surgery. She will die peacefully unaware of what happened. That’s all Joel needs to hear for his fight-or-flight response to kick in. He instantly goes into attack mode, but one of her men stops him with the butt of his rifle to the gut. The fate of the world hangs in the balance of this cure working but Joel will allow them to save mankind at the expense of Ellie and if Anna knew her friend was considering it, she would be team Joel too. Marlene knows exactly what Joel is feeling as it was her job to protect that kid too, but now she is focusing on the greater good and she thinks Ellie would understand that. She did say she wanted her tragic life to mean something. However, Joel isn’t the type to give up, so Marlene hands Anna’s knife to one of her guards and tells him to escort Joel out of the city with just that knife and his backpack. If he tries anything, her orders are to kill him. So much for being indebted to him and this cure! On his way out of the hospital, Joel manages to disarm one guard and kill the other and then takes off on a murderous rampage to find Ellie. No life is spared and everyone is a means to his end as he mows down every last Firefly he crosses. John Wick has nothing on Joel when it comes to the body count in this hospital. He is remorseless and brutal with his executions and never thinks twice about pulling the trigger. He leaves nothing but carnage in his wake, right up to the doors of Pediatric Surgery where he finds two nurses and one doctor just about to begin the procedure. Ellie is unconscious when Joel casually walks into the room and says “unhook her.” The surgeon doesn’t even get the chance to respond before Joel shoots him in the head and turns his gun to the nurses repeating the same calm order to “unhook her.” The women quickly disconnect Ellie and Joel clutches her chest sparing the nurses’ lives. As he’s carrying Ellie out to the parking garage he walks directly into the crosshairs of Marlene’s gun. She orders him to let Ellie go, claiming he can’t keep her safe forever. She reminds him of his own mortality and how he will die one day and then Ellie will be left behind to navigate this cruel world alone. An existence led by raiders and the diseased that she could’ve cured if he never interfered. Joel says it isn’t her decision to make, but it isn’t Joel’s either. Itis Ellie’s and she already chose. She wanted to do the right thing and Marlene can tell by the look on Joel’s face he knows she was right. Thinking she might be getting through to him, Marlene lowers her gun just as Joel lowers his eyes to the sleeping child in his arms. She looks peaceful and helpless and that is enough for Joel to know what is the right choice for him.

Going Home

When we next see him he’s driving away from Salt Lake City with Ellie sleeping in the back seat. When she wakes up confused he tells her that she wasn’t the only one immune to the fungus. After the doctors ran a few tests it was determined that they couldn’t make a cure and now they’ve decided to give up trying. The entire time he’s lying to Ellie about what really went down in that garage. After looking down at the innocent girl he just saved, Joel shoots Marlene with a gun he had hidden underneath the blanket Ellie was wrapped in. As she begs to spare her life, he coldly shoots her in the head–knowing she would never stop looking for “the cure.” Now he’s determined to live this lie and even says the reason Ellie doesn’t have her clothes is that they had to flee the hospital from an attack by raiders. All of this seems so far-fetched and even a groggy Ellie doesn’t look like she is totally buying his excuses – not that Joel cares. He saved her life and in the process, he saved himself from more heartbreak. It’s the world he’s condemned to death and some might say he did so for selfish reasons. but Marlene’s cure was just a guess and he wasn’t willing to let Ellie be her failed test subject. “I’m taking us home,” he tells Ellie before quietly apologizing because he knows she doesn’t fully believe him.

After an undetermined amount of time on the road, the car Joel is driving makes it to Wyoming but breaks down about a five-hour hike away from Jackson. Ellie is still in a mood but smiles and plays along as Joel talks about Sarah comparing the two girls and pointing out their differences. Talking about Sarah is a huge step for Joel and now it seems like he can’t stop. Everything is “Sarah this,” and, “just like you, Ellie” that, so right away we know what kind of mindset Joel is in, his Daddy vibes cannot be missed. After hours of walking, they eventually make it to the outskirts of Jackson but Ellie stops Joel from going any further until she can tell him about the first time she killed someone. It was a question he had asked her back in Kansas City and at the time she didn’t feel comfortable enough to tell him about it. She explains what happened with Riley and how they both got bit and Ellie had to put her best friend down.“She was the first to die,” and since then everyone Ellie has come in contact with has, too. Then, she makes Joel swear that everything he said about the cure and what happened at the hospital was true. Joel looks her right in the eyes and says “I swear” and Ellie, who isn’t sure of anything but the fact this man is all she has in the world, nods her head and says, “Ok.” Whether or not that “ok” means she knows he is lying or it means she has chosen to risk it and trust him, we will have to wait for season two to find out!