The first season of The Last of Us was truly a marvel. It earned an 83 rating on Metacritic, which is tremendous for any television or movie property (Everything, Everywhere All At Once won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has an 81 rating), while earning 24 (!) Primetime Emmy nominations. It is a standard ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ story with Pedro Pascal’s character (Joel) being a father figure to Bella Ramsey’s character (Ellie). It is a post-apocalyptic road trip with the two that goes deep into their individual characters, their relationship, as well as the world around them – the third episode with Bill and Frank, two older men who find love with each other in this utter hellscape, is one of the best episodes of television this decade.
For all those reasons, expectations were high for Season 2 and a large part of the season delivered extremely well. The second episode – the attack on the town of Jackson – is a breathtaking 60 minutes from start to finish. The fifth episode – which shows the depths of Ellie’s descent – is a wonderful performance from Ramsey. The sixth episode – the flashback with Joel and Ellie – is both crushing and darkly hopeful.
Despite the few great-to-incredible episodes in the second season, the finale felt like a letdown. For a series that went through painstaking lengths to develop inter-personal relationships and take its time with critical set pieces, it felt rushed. There were also some puzzling decisions from Ellie, who is now our main character. A lot of it felt grating, and it took me a couple days to figure out why that was, and then it hit like a lead pipe to the knee: This is a video game adaptation.
Violent video game adaptations like The Last of Us bring a problem specific to that genre of movie, and it’s that the main characters can’t die. Well, they can, and Joel has a golf club sticking out of his neck to prove it, but all the characters can’t die, because that just ends the show. In a video game, if you die, you restart at a checkpoint or, at worst, at the beginning of the game. Unless your television show involves some magical elements, which The Last of Us does not, then your main character can’t die. It changes the equation. In a video game, you may die a handful of times trying to beat a particular level. You make uninformed or stupid choices, get your throat ripped out, start over, and try to advance a little further the second time. That process is repeated until you beat the level, and you start again at the next one.
Television shows like this cannot operate like that. Every decision is life-or-death for the characters because there are no continues, there are no revivals, and there are no time rewinds. While video game players need to continually learn to advance in the game, they can play the characters in a way completely different from how characters in a TV show.
And that brings us to Ellie. By this point in the story, she’s 19 years old. While we shouldn’t expect optimal decision-making from a 19-year-old, it isn’t as if people that age are incapable of learning lessons. In fact, that’s one of the most important aspects of being that age. And it also isn’t as if the fungus-fueled apocalypse just happened a month ago – Ellie has lived her entire life under these circumstances. She had to grow up a lot faster than most 19-year-olds in TV shows, and she also had a mentor in Joel (as well as some others around Jackson).
That is why writing Ellie as just a bumbling dumbass was unbelievably frustrating to watch throughout the season. Once Joel is killed by Abby, here is what Ellie does:
- Lies in her plea the Jackson council to send a group of people after Abby to get their revenge. This plea comes after the town of Jackson has been decimated by an attack by the Cordyceps.
- Is ill-equipped and without a plan to get to Abby in Seattle, both of which are supplied by Dina.
- After finding out Dina is pregnant, she continues with Dina rather than just leaving Seattle altogether.
- Agrees to take a shortcut to the hospital with Dina through an area they know will have infected inside rather than taking time to look for a long way around. Mind you, this is after she finds out Dina is pregnant.
- Wants to try to save a Seraphite boy from six armed WLF soldiers in the middle of a warzone.
- Jumps into a small boat during a low-grade hurricane to navigate her way to the Ferris wheel (Abby’s supposed location). After her boat flips, and Ellie barely makes it to shore, she’s kidnapped and about to be murdered by some Seraphites. One deus ex machina later, and Ellis is freed. She then finds another boat and gets right back on the water.
- She gets the drop on two of Abby’s co-conspirators in Owen and Mel. Owen makes a movie for a gun, Ellie shoots him dead, but the bullet goes through him and strikes Mel in the neck, and she slowly bleeds out as we and Ellie find out Mel is pregnant. This leads Abby back to Ellie, and Abby kills Jesse.
All that is the problem. Yes, Ellie is 19 years old and immune to infections. In a way, she’s designed not to die in this kind of show. And making bad decisions that hurt people around you while on a revenge quest is a very common trope. None of that is the issue with Season 2, and the finale specifically.
It is the sheer volume of monumentally stupid decisions that is the problem. It isn’t that Ellie is an unlikeable character (those are some of the best characters on TV) or that she’s hell-bent on revenge (that is a tried-and-true genre). It isn’t as if she lacks training because she got that both with Joel and other people around Jackson. It is that Ellie repeatedly makes idiotic choices as if she’s a person controlling a character in a video game and not a young adult who has lived her entire life in an apocalyptic hellscape where any number of things can kill her, or the people she cares about, at any given moment. It is truly some late-season Game of Thrones ‘Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet’-type of writing that torpedoed what is otherwise a tremendous television show.
Cliffy's hell-hole 