Joel lies to Ellie about it after the fact, telling her that it didn’t work, she wasn’t the answer. Certainly in our own fraught times we should understand just how tricky coming up with a vaccine is-and killing the one specimen that may hold the answer is not only cruel and immoral, it’s magnificently stupid. And a doctor, above anybody else, should realize this. He had no other ethical choice.Įven if-and it’s a very, very big if-her death would have resulted in a vaccine, allowing it to happen would be cruel and immoral. It’s unfortunate that he is forced to kill, but he couldn’t stand by and let it happen, either. So Joel takes lives in order to save an innocent. It’s one thing to take life in order to save someone it’s another to sacrifice an innocent in the hopes that you’ll save someone. There is only one correct answer to the question “How many lives would you sacrifice to save humanity?” He does what every father would do in this situation-and what every ethical human being ought to do. Joel decides that sacrificing a young girl to save humanity is absolute crap and rescues her instead, killing some of the guards and doctors in the process. The doctors are unethical murderers who decide that it’s just fine to sacrifice the one living person who is actually immune to the disease in order to create a vaccine (a completely absurd, anti-scientific, anti-medicine decision that exposes the Fireflies for the atrocious bastards they really are). In the end, when Joel and Ellie finally find the Fireflies, it turns out that the group isn’t all they were cracked out to be. She’s spunky and funny and tough, and she awakens a new sense of purpose in the burned out, grizzled survivor. It’s not an easy road, but they manage it together and in many ways Ellie becomes the daughter Joel lost, dragging him out of his long malaise and giving him something to believe in and to fight for. Or so we’re led to believe.Īlong the way, throughout the course of the game, Ellie and Joel become like family. Joel, who lost his own daughter tragically at the outset of the apocalypse, is tasked with bringing Ellie to the Firefly scientists where they hope to use her to find a cure. Unlike every single other human, bites and spores don’t turn her into a monster. In the original, Ellie is a teenage girl who is the only person immune to the strange virus that’s caused this spore-based zombie apocalypse. At least then it wouldn’t have so badly damaged the characters we came to know and care so much about in the original. In every other sense, it may as well be a completely new franchise. Chronologically, it comes after the first game and it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic America. Unfortunately, The Last Of Us Part II only follows in the original’s footsteps in the most generic ways. The Last Of Us Part II Screenshot: Erik Kain Unless you get off on that sort of thing, of course. It masquerades at depth and meaning but fails to deliver either.īetter to leave us hanging than take us down this wallowing, nihilistic path of despair and misery porn. What follows is a too-pretentious-by-half story of nonsensical revenge and relentless violence. That same lie kicks off the events in The Last Of Us Part II, but it quickly runs roughshod over everything we loved about the first game, trampling even our high opinions of the protagonists in the process. Because he couldn’t stand to lose his daughter. He kept that secret for the same reason he rescued Ellie from the Fireflies. Joel’s was a lie told out of love, but it was still a lie. A happy ending in many ways, but an unsettling one, too. Brittle and precarious and powerful all at once. It was an ending that deserved to be just that-the end of Joel and Ellie’s story, unresolved and bittersweet. It didn’t hurt that it also had one of the best endings in video games, period. But the first game’s lackluster gameplay was more than made up for by a compelling story filled with complex characters in a gritty, intriguing post-apocalyptic world.
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