‘The Last of Us’ Season 1 Finale Recap: My Sacrifice

In fiction, “Would you sacrifice a loved one to save the world?” is functionally the same as “Would you torture someone to stop a ticking time bomb?” Both take a moral dilemma that has never happened, will never happen, and demand you treat it as the ethical question worth asking. 

The deleterious effects of the latter question are obvious enough. Stories that construct a hypothetical in which torturing one person saves the lives of countless others put the onus not on supporters of torture to explain why such a deeply immoral and cruel act is justified, but on opponents of torture to explain why it’s not worth it — under the wholly fantastical circumstances delineated by the story, which have no chance of occurring in real life. It’s a question with only one answer, and it conveys the false idea that torture is an answer for anything at all.

The harmful impact of the former question takes a bit more unpacking. From a utilitarian perspective, “Would you sacrifice a loved one to save the world?” appears to favor an answer in the affirmative. Damning all of humanity in order to save a single person, however dear you hold them, I think strikes most people as selfish, at first glance anyway. 

But what the question ultimately does is cultivate, in the brain of the viewer or reader, the feelings of intense emotional anguish and desperate frustration that such a circumstance would undoubtedly trigger. After all, it’s not as if any of us have ever been in a global savior’s position, but all of us know the pain of losing someone close to us, and how desperate we’d be to save them if we could. We may know the “right” answer to the question intellectually, but that’s all theoretical. The desire to see those you love spared pain and death is emotional and immediate and universal, and it’s that desire, not the reverse, upon which this trope plays.

What’s more, the concept obscures, not elucidates, the matter for which I believe it is a metaphorical stand-in, i.e. whether it’s right so sacrifice some of your own security and well-being so that others can benefit. That’s a pressing question at all times, perhaps never more so than right now. It’s also not the question The Last of Us is asking, not really. The Lone Wolf and Cub plot structure embodied by Joel-as-protector and Ellie-as-precious-cargo reduces everything to too simple and individualistic an issue. To be as clear as possible: I understand that it’s a metaphor; I don’t think the metaphor works.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have little doubt The Last of Us intends us to see Joel’s killcrazy rampage through a Firefly research facility in order to rescue Ellie from a sure-to-be-fatal surgical procedure en route to a cure for cordyceps as bad. Understandable? Sure. The right thing to do, all things considered? No, or as the show might put it, sadly, no.

And the same has been true of all of the season’s big what-would-you-do themes and moments, many of which I’ve decried at length in these reviews. Do I really think Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann think tyranny is preferable to the alternative, as they appear to be implying with the behavior of the bloodthirsty, incompetent revolutionaries who overthrew FEDRA in Kansas City? No. Do I really think they’re knowingly, deliberately arguing that only fascism can keep the infected hordes at bay? No. Do I really think they believe society is a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which torture and murder are required to keep your children safe from pedophile cult leaders? No. Mazin and Druckmann may be many things, I dunno, but I doubt they’re QAnon. 

But what they think intellectually is of limited utility when evaluating the art they’ve made together overall. The Last of Us isn’t a prose essay about what’s right or wrong to do in a post-apocalyptic fungus-zombie scenario, whether that setting is literal or metaphorical. It’s a television show, a drama, a visual narrative, a work of fiction. If it weren’t so, we could just watch those lamentable after-the-episode interviews HBO makes its showrunners do, where they explain all the things we’ve just seen as straightforwardly as possible, and we wouldn’t be missing anything.

But of course we’d be missing almost everything! The performances, the writing, the music, the cinematography, the editing, the pacing, the flow from episode to episode — all the things that make television television. Ever since Game of Thrones popularized the concept I’ve said that those post-game interviews are hugely unfair to the creators; as David Lynch once put it, the film is the talking.

In that case, what is “Look for the Light,” the season finale of The Last of Us, saying to us?

Well, in part it’s saying that Ellie is immune because her mother was infected while giving birth and almost immediately cut the cord, exposing Ellie to just enough cordyceps to dissuade the fungus from attempting to re-infect her but not enough to infect her for good. You might prefer, say, the Children of Men/28 Weeks Later “well, she’s just immune” approach, but it’s as good a pseudoscientific explanation as any.

And in part it’s undeniably saying that Joel is wrong to slaughter a whole Firefly HQ — including Marlene, the Boston-area rebel leader who managed to make it across the country before Joel and Ellie did. You certainly can’t feel all fuck yeah about it the way you could when he was killing infected, or war-criminal Kathleen and her goons, or psychotic Pastor David and his starving minions. All these people are trying to do is hold up their end of the bargain and extract a cure from Ellie. It sucks that Ellie wouldn’t survive, but that’s different from killing her in cold blood because Joel killed your buddy while your buddy tried to kill them, or carving her up and eating her because she won’t touch your middle-aged hog. 

But that’s just it: Up until this point, Joel hasn’t been wrong to kill everyone who threatens them, not within the world of the story anyway. Again, I don’t think the show is celebrating his role in the collapse of Kansas City society or his execution of unarmed prisoners he’d been torturing for information. It’s just that the narrative logic and emotional logic of both storylines only point you in one direction: Joel’s gotta kill these dudes to save Ellie, and that’s what matters.

What happens in that Firefly hospital, then, isn’t a material break with the past, but rather a palette swap. Marlene is a more sympathetic figure than either Kathleen or David, she has her eyes on a much bigger and legitimately noble prize, but in the end she’s still just a person other than Joel who thinks she knows what’s best, and “what’s best” involves killing Ellie. Again and again we’ve been conditioned to believe that when faced with such a person, there’s only one right move for Joel to make.

A more charitable critic than I might say “Yes, and that’s the point: after zigging and zigging and zigging for eight episodes, The Last of Us has finally zagged. It’s meant to be confounding. It’s meant to be challenging.” To that I can only reply that the show doesn’t have the chops to pull off such a complicated maneuver, not after the season of rehashed The Walking Dead/The Road/The Mandalorian that it offered us up until this point. Hell, much better shows than The Last of Us couldn’t do it either! Halt and Catch Fire is one of the ten best television dramas of all time, just to name one example, but its turn for the nuanced and sophisticated at the end of its flawed first season didn’t erase the earlier episodes’ sins, nor did it guarantee the show’s future successes.

To put it in terms The Last of Us, which after a full season I think we can safely declare a big nothing, itself would understand: If you held a gun to my head and asked “Which is it: Should what the show does in the finale color our perception of what it did before, or vice versa?”, I’d go with “vice versa” without hesitation. After all, the New Golden Age of Television has given us series after series in which protagonists make practical but gravely immoral decisions, the immorality of which is crystal clear even if the show does nothing to flag those decisions as such Goofus & Gallant-style. What The Last of Us gives us is effectively a season of Breaking Bad in which Walter White really is justified in doing what he did, until the finale, but with none of Breaking Bad‘s brio, innovation, exciting and surprising characters, or willingness to undermine Walt’s saccharine bromides about family.

It’s too little, too late. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.