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Written by Bryn Gelbart.

a disclaimer 

This essay is about working through the ambiguities of The Last of Us Part 2. To do so, I must discuss the game and its plot in any amount of detail I find relevant, which is to say all of it. This piece will not be spoiler-free, a statement I make only because I sense so much of the conversation about this game that’s been had in public has been done in hushed tones. With a new re-release on store shelves, there will be a concerted effort to shield fresh eyes once more. I say it’s time we look the beast in its face.

Part I

The Last of Us is a series about our choices, about living with them and dying with them. Each character you play as makes a choice, sees its consequence, and actively chooses not to change. It makes sense, then, that after choosing to play the game on “Hard” difficulty in The Last of Us Part 2 I never once turned it down. Despite all the fine-tuned difficulty and accessibility adjacent settings Naughty Dog developers so graciously spent their time putting together, I found my own stubbornness in line with Ellie’s. Unlike the protagonist of The Last of Us 2, I learned things. 

For starters, I learned that the checkpoints in the Last of Us Part 2 were pretty excellent. That is the honest reason I never had to turn down the difficulty, because I never felt like a significant amount of progress was lost. If anything, I felt they were too generous, despite my struggles. I learned that you can pretty much stumble your way through all combat encounters, as I often did, making up for your sloppiness by being an extra resourceful scrounger in the non-combat sections. I learned that this is the cycle of life in the Last of Us. A new cycle, but one recognizable as the evolution of something I played (I was) a decade ago. 

The Last of Us Part 2 is a game about cycles. Cycles of violence, yes, but also of fathers and daughters, of mothers and sons. After her surrogate father Joel is murdered by a pack of intruders, Ellie chases after his killers to Seattle on a quest for blood – a similar thirst to the one that sent Abby to Joel in the first place. 

The despair and anger of these women who’ve lost fathers is the bond that makes them parallels. Ellie and Abby are both grieving daughters who will become, each in their own way, mothers. Naughty Dog’s technology (a product of the Sony money pit) allows every performer to bring life to its characters in a way few video games accomplish. Naturally, a game about women performed by women will endear women. It has enraptured female critics, I know this, in a way the original never did and there is a great deal of credit to give. That credit, however, does not belong to Neil Druckmann, as it’s still his world, and a mannish one at that.  

In The Last of Us, the fate of all human existence was on the line. Joel fucked that all up. The man sold the world, what’s left is purely personal. No one is getting out of here, not anymore. So they start the cycle over time and time again. So do we, grabbing the controller and diving – reluctantly or gleefully, it matters not – into the brutality. 

People find it surprising when I say that the violence that disturbed me the most in The Last of Us Part 2 was what’s done to dogs. There is no shortage of horrors on the ride. Not torture, nor the murder of a pregant woman, nor the beating its most sympathetic characters within an inch of their lives could get me to truly hate my time with the game. No, that rare extremity was reserved for the repetitious massacre of canines that left me feeling responsible. 

Dogs are introduced as enemies when Ellie reaches Seattle and starts waging war on WLF territory. Her pursuit has already left a dozen bodies behind before they send in the hounds. Because dogs can smell Ellie’s stink, it’s beneficial to take them out quickly. These deaths are merciful but rendered in exquisite detail. Of course, that’s when things go according to plan. Knowing my nimble fingers, it wouldn’t be long before dogs become victims to explosives, or worse, get their heads clobbered by the rusty nails of a hastily cobbled together weapon. Regardless of how I was disposing of the enemy dogs, I always wanted it to be over. It was a desperate, pleading feeling more persuasive than any narrative beat in letting me know that this girl is all growed up. 

At her most monstrous, Ellie tortures and kills a black woman, Nora, to get information about Abby’s whereabouts. It’s a moment where the game implicates its player, asking you to participate in the torture with a button prompt. The scene itself works, but the moment doesn’t. This is the first time you see Ellie as a monster, descending down upon her prey like some kind of inhuman thing. The scene does something rare for The Last of Us 2 and creates drama from Ellie’s immunity — and in a much darker beat than anything from the first game, turning the very thing that made her special in the first game into what makes her a monster. She corners Nora in a spore-filled tunnel and you finally see so clearly what Ellie is to anyone, to everyone else in this world — and crucially what Joel was too. And then, you must press square to torture. 

In trying to make Ellie’s cruelty your own, it only becomes clearer that it never was. This sequence should be about putting space between Ellie and the player, not uniting them. The moment doesn’t work because one moment can’t be as powerful as the killing of a hundred dogs. Nothing can hit like watching Ellie’s face contort and make itself ugly as she snuffs out another human life, and the knowledge this is what she wants. You are the engine and what you want is immaterial, she is driving you. The tension of The Last of Us, what makes the whole thing go, is being the passenger. 

Ellie’s destructive actions are juxtaposed plainly with creation. Inside her lover Dina, something new grows. Ellie’s response to the news of Dina’s pregnancy is selfish and vile, but is forgiven. Ellie takes advantage of Dina’s compassion for the first time here and gets away with it. That won’t happen again. 

It isn’t many hours after this that Ellie kills Mel, Owen and their unborn baby in a brutal moment — one where Ellie has the stomach pain inducing realization she has gone too far. She won’t stop, not yet, but she is now a woman fully aware of the consequences of her actions. There isn’t much rage left after the slaughter. 

To this end, it is not enough for Ellie to fail, lest it not feel like the story failed you. She must be decimated for the player to realize the point was the failure of revenge, and that its only replacement is compassion. These are the ideas of the games writ large, reinforced by Abby and Lev’s ending as well. When she returns home to Dina in Jackson, Ellie is a ghost of herself. It’s hard not to think of John Marston at the end of Red Dead Redemption, a dissatisfaction that The Last of Us 2 tries desperately to make us feel too. In both, the character’s find returning to a domestic life impossible after what they’ve been through. Ellie is bereft and distant, but she’s also a mother. It’s what she loses in her final choice that makes The Last of Us Part 2 feel like such a masculine story. 

Part II

Abby is the opposite of Ellie in every way, but one. Her muscles a far cry from Ellie’s scrawny arms, and her ability to make human connections is an orchestrated thematic response to Ellie’s increased isolation. What they share is the trauma and loss I mentioned earlier — the rage it creates. Abby, however, is on the other side of a successful revenge tour. And she feels nothing from it. 

In this way, Abby’s character journey is much less challenging than Ellie’s. In the broadest terms, Abby turns from grizzled vet to white savior ala a Vietnam war movie. Her body count is higher than Ellie in all meanings of the phrase, but in a “she’s seen shit” kind of way. Unquestionable she has, but Abby is defined by more than her scars. 

Scars are what Abby and her crew at the Washington Liberation Front call the members of the local they are warring with. The Seraphites call them Wolves. In a game so deeply about the lasting impact of loss, it’s hard to not read into these names. A scar is what happens after closure. Abby gets hers by meeting one. 

Lev is a trans man, a teenage Seraphite, a brother, a son, and eventually a son again. The Seraphites do not get to be a neutral force. There are some good ones, sure, but it’s a jungle out there buddy, and Scars are evil. No matter how much humanity is given to Lev and Yara, the cult-like faction is just short of a cliche of a baby-sacrificing indigenous tribe. We have, on the other hand, the Wolves, a terrifying militarized group pushing them off their land. 

The WLF is compromised. It’s rotting. The faction’s decline into fascism so clearly echoes FEDRA the militarized force it won control of Seattle from that it hurts. The Israel comparisons are far too on-the-nose given Druckmann’s statements and frankly far too painful at this specific moment in my life. But The Last of Us is a frustratingly apolitical work, and the structural rot of the WLF is not given faces or names. Instead, we get a group of well meaning individuals caught in an endlessly perpetuated war. One of the first things we do in Abby’s section is play fetch with one of the dogs we inevitably killed hours ago. Talk about some bullshit. Emotional manipulation aside, this is another zoomed in look at The Last of Us Part 2’s mess. Why is it trying so hard to make you, the player, feel so bad for participating in a story about bad people? Aren’t we allowed to do that anymore?

Abby and Lev escape the factions they once called home and find family in each other. While she might not quite be old enough to actually be his mother, by the time he has lost his own mom and sister Abby has also lost Mel and Owen’s unborn child. Lev is the one thing Abby has left, the one thing that truly gets her to let the rage go.

At the end of Seattle, Lev is the reason Ellie and Dina live. It is unquestionably not a mistake. With all her virtue, Dina’s death would be a cruelty too far. As for Ellie, we will get her. In the confrontation between the two parties, Abby thinks she kills Tommy. Through the blood red she thinks of killing the pregnant Dina as poetic revenge, of Ellie as finishing what she started. Lev tells her no. It’s Lev’s compassion that ultimately lets them live, surrogate mother and son, and get their happily ever after. 

In the epilogue, Lev and Abby seek the Fireflies, chasing signs of the group all the way to California. There is an emotional weight to this choice that masks the true absurdity of it all. Abby is following up on a hunch from Owen who, despite his commitment to Mel, was still very much still in love with Abby. Their star-crossed tragedy of a romance lives on in the moment when Lev and Abby discover that Fireflies are indeed nearby, just a boat ride away on Catalina Island. 

I mind the flimsy romance less than the conceit itself. After almost losing themselves and each other to the factions that indoctrinated them, you would think Abby and Lev would find their faith in the Fireflies shaken. In light of hours spent humanizing and demonizing the WLF and Seraphites, little is made of the compromised position of the Fireflies by the end of the first Last of Us. Presumed dissolved for most of the game, the reasons for the group’s dissolution are never questioned and when it reappears, it becomes the de facto paragon of The Last of Us 2’s moral universe. There is a thoughtlessness in how little time is given to any of these events. It happens to be right about then that the wheels fall off entirely. Abby and Lev are then knocked out cold by two dudes whose coding screams “white supremacist!”, and our morally compromised hero must set off to rescue from imprisonment the person whose life they have ruined. You know what that sounds like? It sounds like fucking “Felina.”

If that rings a bell, you may have seen the final episode of Breaking Bad. In its final moments, a work so deeply invested in the flaws of its characters has got to give them someone to remorselessly face-off against – to remind you these aren’t real real bad dudes, them’s the Nazis. It works better, dramatically, for Walt and Jesse than it does for Ellie and Abby. There, at least, we do not have the baggage of Ellie being the sole reason that Abby and Lev make it out alive, just because she wants to kill them later. And then she doesn’t. 

As the climax draws to a close, Abby and Ellie reach the California coast having escaped the compound. There are two boats for each party to go its own way. There is a tidy ending right in front of her eyes and Ellie can’t take it. Sunk cost fallacy. Ellie beats an emaciated Abby almost to death. She drowns her, despite having every reason not to. Then, the job three quarters of the way done, she decides against it. By forgiving Abby, Ellie begins to forgive Joel. As a narrative beat, it is sudden, forced, and beyond patronizing to everyone involved, player included. The ending that follows would almost be beautiful if this single moment didn’t suck so hard. Instead, I still hated Ellie. I still do, even if all the destruction she causes in the game isn’t really her fault. Not entirely. 

Coda 

There is a third character, who doesn’t get as much screen time or mention in the discourse, who I must confess baffles me still. Tommy is Joel’s brother and yet his actions seem immaterial to any considered reading of the text. Yet, there he is, the driving force behind everything that happens in this story. 

As we learn through playing Abby’s side of the story, Tommy was as much of a wrecking ball in Seattle as Ellie. He sought out rage-blind revenge and took names along the way. We hear about him more than we see him and see what his handiwork has wrought more than we meet people who have survived him. Absent Joel, Tommy leaves for Seattle. Ellie, perhaps a girl still, knows nothing else and follows. Tommy is doing what he believes Joel would want. It takes Ellie the entire journey to realize that Tommy was wrong about that. And not before his final twist of the knife. 

It’s in the return to Jackson that we see what Tommy has become, a broken and unloved foreshadow of what Ellie will become – is becoming. He is no longer in good enough physical shape to pursue his woebegotten revenge, but he knows Ellie can. Importantly, he knows she will. Abby is in California and even though she refuses his request, once the idea gets planted in Ellie’s head it won’t be silenced. 

Tommy clicks into focus as Joel’s brother in his final scene. If any of the character writing in The Last of Us Part 2 rings true at all, it’s the way Tommy’s cruelty so poetically echoes Joel’s. The brothers are cruel in ways that smart men could never be – the selfishness of their actions so transparent to anyone but them. Joel made a choice to save Ellie by taking away her ability to choose. Tommy gives her a choice, but it’s a false one. It is a choice that preys upon the tortured part of her soul that Tommy knows is still alive and waiting dormant. This is how Tommy becomes the villain of the Last of Us Part 2, by pretending to beg Ellie to complete their revenge tour and ultimately knowing her answer doesn’t matter. He has already won. Until, of course, he loses. 

The central question The Last of Us 2 asks of its players is often mistaken as “who deserves revenge?” Nobody, the game says, since the truly deserving overcome the desire for vengeance. It is compassion we must seek, for vengeance will undo us all. Who, then, deserves compassion? Everybody, the game answers, even the sinners. The central question then becomes “what do we deserve for our choices?”

Ellie does not die, but in the moral universe of The Last of Us she gets something more fitting. She gets her future snatched away, like Joel snatched humanity’s. She loses parts of herself, her two fingers and with them the deeper connection with music — with Joel. Dina and the baby are gone Ellie and is left with no family. No future. Some semblance of hope of starting anew is the most she is offered as the credits roll, but the specter of another sequel looms overhead. If Naughty Dog is kind, they will let Ellie lie. 

The biggest failure of imagination in this franchise is its vision of peace. A house to call your own, an electric fence to keep out the hordes, and a family to bring into the world. This is what Ellie loses, materially and metaphysically. The dream is over. 

If we must read The Last of Us Part 2 as the daughter-game sequel to the ultimate Dad Game, this is the reading that makes the most sense to me. It is cynical, but inevitable. Ellie’s fate is to be unmade a parent, like Joel before her was unmade at the start of this whole damn thing. She has the choice to live the simple life, the Good American life, and she chooses violence instead. 

There is potential in all of us, The Last of Us Part 2 argues, to show compassion. But there is also such a thing as too little too late. Not all of Ellie’s suffering is self inflicted, but this last bit of damage cannot be anything but. The text is a harsh mistress. This moment, invariably bleaker than any of the game’s most violent moments, leaves me only one way to read the final moments of the Last of Us Part 2. For Ellie’s suffering has not ended, but just begun.