The Last Of Us: and why I hated the ending I saw.

Ellen...I mean uh, Ellie from The Last of Us

I'll be honest with everyone reading this: I enjoyed playing The Last Of Us, although I confess to not really liking the full ins and outs of the combat, stealth and so forth of it. This isn't the main problem I had though, It was the sloppy writing and the terrible decisions made by the developers, especially towards the end of the game. I don't know all that much about the inner workings of the video game industry, I know enough about writing and enjoying effective drama to feel really cheated and underwhelmed by the ending we were given.

To start with the very basics of good, effective writing of a story, every single story needs conflict, without conflict, you have nothing: boring people in limited situations that never change or grow and remain trapped in a stasis of arrested development. If characters don't face their inner and outer conflict, we have a story where nothing happens and you end up with a whole load of nothing. Conflict creates drama, and drama a good story makes.

Our main character, Joel, does experience plenty of conflict throughout his journey in TLOU: we see him lose his daughter and get separated from his brother, all in the middle of a zombie apocalypse - technically they're not actually zombies, they're inspired from a type of fungi that finds itself in insects, deranges them, makes them climb into a high place such as a tree and then, quite literally, grow out of the insect's corpse to release its spores and start the process over again. It's an interesting premise for an pandemic and apart from the somewhat repetitive gameplay, it seems to play well and has been praised by many critics as the game of the year.

That doesn't, however, let it off from having a really poor ending.

Back to Joel. He meets with Ellie (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Ellen Page, even more so in pre-release screenshots but yet fail to have anything to do with the actress and even though Ellen Page has since spoken publicly about it and forgiven NaughtyDog for this discretion, it's still painfully embarrassing as I'm sure most of us were hoodwinked into believing Ellen Page had something to do with Ellie's design, motion capture and voice), a young girl who has been infected but has failed to mutate. She has been hailed by those that know as a walking cure for the pandemic and Joel is reluctantly enlisted as her guardian to get her to safety to a group known as the Fireflies. A whole game later, Joel and Ellie find themselves at the Fireflies headquarters and against Joel's wishes, Ellie has been taken away from him to be prepped for surgery in order to remove the mutation in her to create a vaccine, killing her in the process. Joel, having become more than a little attached to Ellie, busts her out of there and drives away, lying to Ellie when she awakes that there were dozens of others like her and it turns out the Fireflies didn't need her anyway. Right at the end it seems Ellie doesn't quite believe him when he swears his story is the truth, and then...

...it just ends.

Woah, woah, woah, let's back up a little here. At the beginning of this article I accuse the game of leaving the characters in arrested development and not letting them grow through the various inner conflicts they experience, and indeed Joel was at first reluctant to take care of Ellie, he does indeed grow to love and need her and eventually risks his life for her ultimately; but let's look at this objectively for a moment. Ellie is never given a choice about whether she wants to sacrifice herself by the Fireflies, but by rescuing her, Joel automatically takes that choice away from her, and does the worst possible thing by lying to her about it, despite her concerns and doubts that his story is the truth. Joel acting in this way makes him an incredibly selfish character. Perhaps she would have seen the Fireflies reasoning and been totally ok with it. We'll never know of course, but the ending seems to suggest it might have been something Ellie would have wanted. She regards Joel with a sort of "I'm not sure I believe you" look when he swears his story is the truth, and looks very uncomfortable. I got the impression by her expression she would find out eventually and/or their relationship would fall apart anyway soon after.

"But he's grown!" People protest. "He's changed to love and open his heart to Ellie, who has become like a surrogate daughter to him!". It's true she cared for him in the harsh winter after a slight impaling put him out of action for a while and would have certainly killed him if not for Ellie, that still doesn't make me empathise with his decision to take her choice away to engineer a vaccine that would potentially save the entire human race. Whoever coined the phrase "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (verbatim, it's Mr. Spock, but there are countless others in history that have expressed the same philosophy) is played with at the ending of TLOU, and then totally crapped on as Joel within 5 minutes of getting her to the Fireflies, decides because they pushed him around, that it isn't right and must save Ellie from the clutches of the evil Fireflies!

Let me remind you that the whole game, Joel has been aiming to get her to the Fireflies. It's literally the entire motivation that keeps him going. Sure Joel and Ellie bond over the year or so they're together, but if he cared about her so much, why did he keep travelling towards the Fireflies' headquarters? He's depicted as a wise-beyond-his-years, tired guy that trusts no one, so why did he not think the Fireflies would not do a thing like kill Ellie to create a cure?! Surely it must have been in his mind that to create a vaccine for the pandemic, Ellie wouldn't have got off easy: Throughout the game I had theories she would either become a baby factory or cut open for scientific reasons or to try and create a vaccine. Joel being this stupid about what would happen to Ellie angered me greatly, and again goes against his established character trait of trusting no one.

Something else about this whole surrogate daughter/interdependent relationship Joel and Ellie establish throughout the game: even after about twenty freaking years to grieve for his daughter, Joel can't talk about her and everytime she's brought up he gets all mad and bitter. Having suffered loss and grief myself, as most of us have, twenty years is more than enough time to accept one's past, and so it simply doesn't make sense to me on an emotional level that he's still so bitter and twisted about something that has happened to most people in his world, especially considering how quickly he gets over other people dying around him that he becomes close to. Joel seems to have transplanted his daughter onto Ellie, which may explain why he does what he does because "Oh I can't lose her again" kind of thinking, but it yet again hails back to his arrested development, and even after twenty years, he hasn't changed at all.

Which brings me onto my final point that bugged me about TLOU, it's a general point really, but it's worth noting. Joel is one of the most forgettable characters in media I've ever come across. He seems to tick all the boxes to make him as generic as possible: he's a white middle-aged American dude who's gruff and world-weary with a sorry past and a plaid shirt. Do we really need to play as this white American dude again? The script written for him is direly cliché when I played through there were several occasions where I managed to correctly guess exactly what Joel would say to a given situation. It's just sloppy, bad writing and given the money that was pumped into it, could - and should - have been better.