Joel in The Last of Us Finale: People Still Don't See the Villain

Joel in The Last of Us finale explained: the ending nobody expected

The season one finale of HBO's The Last of Us divided fans, and newcomers to the series in particular did not seem to expect that ending. Ben Travers of IndieWire went as far as to call it an inversion of expectations. Look for the Light aired on March 12, 2023, was written by series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, and directed by Ali Abbasi. It is the ninth episode of the first season, and it runs about 43 minutes.

The show differs from the game in ways that make it more grounded. HBO's version focuses less on the violent ways people survive and more on the bonds the characters form and on their emotional lives. In that sense the ending stayed surprisingly faithful to the video game. With the lighter, likable Joel that Pedro Pascal has played so far, it was reasonable to expect a change. Anyone who types joel the last of us into a search bar is usually after one answer: whether the man at the center of the story was ever the good guy.

A softer version was easy to imagine: skip to the operating room, let Joel shoot the doctor with a last-second hesitation, and escape with Ellie. The Fireflies and Marlene could have been left up in the air. Instead the finale delivers the full, cold sequence, and Joel is exactly who the character has always been: a man hardened by what it takes to survive, defined by personal trauma.

From a games-industry angle, Joel is the product of a deliberate choice. Naughty Dog, known for the Uncharted action hero, built a character who looks like a good-humored survivalist and then turned him inside out. The original question was simple: what if the studio's new character was not a hero? The label depends on how far a person will go to protect family, and the theme is less right and wrong than endure and survive, at what cost to humanity.

A familiar trope, a different trap

The tortured survivor is a popular trope in survival horror, and a decade later it can feel exhausted. There have been many post-apocalypse adaptations since the game appeared in 2013. What sets The Last of Us apart is that it was built to make the player root for Joel. You play as him, bond with him and travel with him the whole way, and only at the end does the story ask who you were with.

He was the bad guy.

Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey and a likable Joel

Much of the surprise comes from casting. Pedro Pascal gives Joel a charisma and a gentleness that the early episodes lean on, and Bella Ramsey plays Ellie as a sharp, wary kid who slowly lets him in. The pair are easy to love together, so when the finale reveals what Joel will do, it lands as a betrayal of the audience as much as of Ellie.

That is the trap the story sets, and it works in both versions. The more the viewer wants Joel to be good, the harder the ending hits. Merle Dandridge, who plays Marlene as she did in the games, supplies the counterweight: a woman asking a very large question, in a quiet voice, and getting a bullet for an answer.

Did Joel make the right decision?

Whether Joel made the right choice has been a hot topic since 2013, in an era when Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead dominated and moral ambiguity was a favorite theme. On a Thanos-style scale of lives saved against lives lost, the answer is plain. Joel is the bad guy, because he destroys humanity's last hope and leaves millions of deaths behind him.

It is not only the doctor. Joel goes out of his way to kill several Fireflies, including their leader, and he does it coldly and with calculation. That is the monster the story has been hinting at all along, in something the TV version seemed afraid to depict until now.

Measured by how far people go to save family, the answer does not improve. Joel is not really acting for Ellie. He is acting for how Ellie makes him feel, like a father who did not fail to protect his daughter. The act has less to do with her than with him, and in that way he resembles other understandable bad guys of the last decade of television, such as Walter White in Breaking Bad.

It is worse because the choice was never Joel's to make. Ellie would clearly have wanted to decide for herself. His answer is to lie to her about it, preserving the thing that makes him happy: having a daughter again.

The game versus the show

The two versions differ in important ways. In the game, the player experiences everything through Joel and is forced to make violent decisions, killing infected and a long list of humans. That is the philosophy of endure and survive, and it is the reason the ending hurts: it breaks trust in Joel, and all that violence proves to have been for nothing.

The television adaptation focuses on the bonding moments between father and daughter. By the time Joel is out of commission, Ellie holds the narrative torch, even though the audience does not realize it. From that point the story belongs to her, and to who she has become after the journey.

This is also where the show can be questioned. By pulling back from the violence, which is easier to stage in a game than on a budget, HBO makes Ellie's later actions look more like a choice and less like a lesson. In the game, Joel teaches her the horrors of surviving against other humans, through many close calls, and the audience accepts a child using violence because Joel is the teacher. The show does less of this. Cutting away from those survival moments weakens the idea that Ellie leaves the road as a smaller Joel, and it is a significant change for the long-term themes. Joel in the show has not taught Ellie much of the series' harder lessons, which will matter when the story reaches The Last of Us Part II, the 2020 sequel. That game goes full Count of Monte Cristo in theme and grows more violent.

Seen this way, The Last of Us is a story about bad parenting as much as about the end of the world. A father who protects his child by any means teaches her that violence is the answer, then hides the truth to keep her. The finale asks the audience to see the love in that and the harm in it at once, and it refuses to say which wins.

The finale at a glance

• Title: Look for the Light, season 1, episode 9.
• Air date: March 12, 2023, on HBO.
• Writers and director: Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wrote it, and Ali Abbasi directed.
• Marlene: Merle Dandridge plays the Fireflies' leader, reprising her role from the games.
• Joel's choice: he kills the doctor and several Fireflies and lies to Ellie about it.
• Search intent: readers asking about Joel The Last of Us usually want to know if his choice was justified; this piece says it was not.

If Joel is the villain, Ellie is the hero

For anyone who knows what comes next, Joel's actions have consequences, as they always have. The games are about a history of violence, and about the violent legacies parents hand to their children to preserve love and family, which carry on as inherited trauma and PTSD. That is the case for Joel in The Last of Us, and the show's last scene supports it.

What the games do well is not the violence but the hope found beyond it. The core theme is finding a reason to live, not only to survive, and to build a life of your own. That is why Joel is something like the series antagonist: his philosophy leads to a legacy of violence. Ellie is where the hope sits. Her journey is one of self-discovery, taking what Joel taught her, finding a place to keep it and, more importantly, finding a place for herself.

The theme feels relevant. In a world of pandemic, war and a nuclear conflict that feels all too real, the audience is much like Ellie: children inheriting a violent planet and trying to make the most of it. The finale does not tell them how. It shows them the cost of the easy answer, and it lets Ellie decide whether to believe what Joel says. Whatever the reading, Joel The Last of Us fans will agree on one thing: the ending is the point.

Reading the finale this way is not a verdict on the show's quality. It is a case that the story always worked best as a tragedy about a man who cannot let go. Ten years after the game, the ending still divides people, which is a sign that it is doing its job.

Sources

• The Last of Us (TV series), Wikipedia — cast, season 1 episode list and finale