Did Joel do the right thing at the end of The Last of Us season 1?
[Ed. note: This post discusses the finale of The Last of Us, so it definitely contains spoilers for the end of The Last of Us season 1 and The Last of Us Part 1.]
HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation takes some liberties with the source material, but throughout season 1, it’s followed all the most important story beats from the game. The finale is perhaps the most faithful adaptation out of all nine episodes, re-creating famous scenes down to the grisly specifics of its oft-discussed ending.
In both the show and the game, the entire purpose of Joel’s trek across the country is to deliver Ellie, with her mysterious immunity to Cordyceps, to a Firefly hospital so doctors can start work on a cure. But upon arriving, Joel discovers that the doctors will have to operate on Ellie’s brain, killing her in the process. So Joel does what Joel does best: He grabs a gun and shoots his way through the hospital, killing nearly everyone present, to “save” Ellie from surgery.
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This ending sparked a lot of discussion after the game’s original 2013 release, in part because a lot of players very willingly went along with Joel’s rampage. After spending hours bonding with and protecting Ellie, fighting through clicker-infested buildings and universally antagonistic humans alike, rescuing her from certain death once again was an easy sell. But in the show’s version of this world, does it make as much sense? We assembled a roundtable of Polygon’s The Last of Us fans to discuss whether Joel made the right decision — in the show or the game.
Austen: I’ll kick things off with what might be an unpopular opinion here and say that the decision almost makes sense to me for the character Joel is in the show — and it’s worth noting that I haven’t
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