The Last of Us – Joel’s Lie
Dystopian themes are writ large in many video games, but few are as good as The Last of Us at illustrating that, in times of strife, no one hews high moral ground. Even the good guys.
Joe is that good guy, a doting dad who loses his daughter when a parasitic fungus turns people into mindless zombies. Twenty years later, Joel’s living in the midst of the crumbling ruins of civilization as the last surviving humans pick at the scraps.
Then he meets the young and street smart Ellie, a girl roughly his daughter’s age. Joel, hardened by the wounds inflicted by his daughter’s passing, is curiously unwilling to see Ellie as a surrogate child, try as she might to foster their bond. Yet slowly they begin to grow close and Joel tempers his animal survival instincts with a softer side.
That’s until we realize that Ellie is immune to the plague and could contribute a cure. A resistance group known as the Fireflies capture Ellie and determine that the cure is housed in a deep part of her brain, which means she’ll die in sacrifice to the good of humanity at large, killing Joel’s last hope at a better life in the process.
Joel isn’t prepared to help humanity. Having already suffered so much heartache, he takes the surprising step of storming the operating theatre and laying waste to the Fireflies before carrying Ellie to safety. Here, he’s interrupted by the Fireflies’ leader, Marlene, who begs him to hand Ellie over. We cut to Joel driving from the scene with Ellie on the backseat as we witness a flashback of Joel murdering Marlene.
Ellie regains consciousness and Joel invents a story whereby there are many other Ellies who are similarly immune to the disease, but the Fireflies are unable to extract a cure. Ellie senses he’s fobbing the truth and asks Joel to swear by his story. Just as we believe Joel will come to terms with what he’s done and come clean with the truth, he looks at Ellie and says, “I swear.”
The denouement is uncharacteristically bleak in a medium preoccupied with T&A, yet an exceptionally accurate portrait of what a man like Joel might do to protect the sole remaining light in his life.