This is obviously going to spoil the show and to a lesser extent the game The Last of Us, so if you want to avoid being spoiled, you should stop reading now.
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SPOLIERS!
First, I want to make it absolutely clear that I liked the show a great deal. This is not a complaint that the show runners ruined my favorite game, or messed up my favorite characters, or didn't include my favorite bit of gameplay. I did not play the game, though I have watched family members play pieces of it, so this is a critique only of the show and primarily of the ending.
Nor is this a comment on the production values or the acting. The score and the directorial choices in the pivotal final scenes all worked extremely well. And Pascal and Ramsey both did terrific work (all the actors did, really.), especially in the denouement. In the moment, I was caried along with the story. The problem came after the screen faded to black.
The Last of Us's ending, for those who don't know, is meant to be a moral quandary. Pascal plays a survivor, Joel, of a fungus plague who watched his daughter be killed by US soldiers trying and failing to contain the outbreak twenty years earlier. Ramsey plays a young teenager, Ellie, who the only person known to be immune to the fungal infection in the world. The show follows the two across the country as they try to get to a rebel base where doctors hope to use Ellie as the basis for a cure. The show can be brilliant in places and is engaging almost all the time even if it does suffer a bit from the "people are only one luke-warm dinner away from chaos!" theory of societal development. (A theory that is demonstrably wrong). And then comes the ending.
After a harrowing journey, they arrive at the rebel's base. It turns out that Ellie can save the world, but that they will have to use the material in her brain to do so, killing her. Joel won't have that, so he slaughters a hospital full of soldiers -- and the last medical people who could stop the fungal infection in order to save Ellie. He then lies to Ellie, who had made it clear that all of the trauma she has endured to this point only matters if her immunity can be used for the greater good, about what he did. The show ends with Ellie making Joel swear he is telling her the truth, Joel lying, and Ellie apparently accepting the lie even though we are clearly meant to know she knows he is lying.
The ending is clearly meant for us to argue about selfishness versus community. What would you do if that was your daughter? How would you feel if Joel's actions condemned your loved ones to a life of horror and death (the fungal infection, if I have not been clear, is a certain death sentence and has led largely to the collapse of civilization)? What is the right choice? All compelling questions and largely what people who have seen the show and played the game have been asking. Except I don't think the show really earns the conversation.
The show did not place the pieces properly, in my opinion, for their ending to justify the moral quandary it wants to put the characters in. First, it wants you to think that Joel might be acting irrationally, in part. The denouement scenes spend at least some time where the formally taciturn Joel is chattering away at Ellie, telling her all the things about his daughter that she, Ellie, reminds him of. Is he projecting his love for his dead daughter onto Ellie? I don't think the show makes that case. Each time he brings up a comparison, he stops, thinks for a moment, and then corrects himself. Ellie is not like his daughter. She is her own person, and he recognizes that. When Ellie presses him on his statement about why his daughter would have liked Ellie, he has reasons that actually fit Ellie's personality. If the show wants us to think Joel doesn't love Ellie for who she is but rather as a stand in for his lost original daughter, it has a poor way of showing us.
Then there is the slaughter in the hospital. We are mean to think that Joel acted against Ellie's wishes. Moments before, in screen time, Ellie monologued about how the trauma of the trip (and, oh man, is there a lot of trauma. This is not a happy show -- be warned), of her life, in fact, would only be meaningful if the rebels could generate a cure. But the rebels didn't tell Ellie that the cure involves her death -- they didn't give her a choice any more than Joel did. And the show makes it clear that the rebels don't know if their solution will work, making it unclear if the sacrifice is actually the choice the show wants you to think it is.
So we have neither the sure contest between the needs of the community versus the needs of the one, nor the question of selfish love versus unselfish love, nor even the question of how much autonomy do we give those we don't yet deem adults. All we have is the question do we kill a child without her consent on a small chance we might come up with a cure. That, frankly, is not a question any philosophy class in the universe would spend five minutes on.
The show itself elides a lot of this under very good production and excellent acting. It clearly wants you to be thinking about these questions, and they are good questions to consider. A lot of damage has been done to the world by people who prioritized protecting their family, their tribe, their people. And a lot of damage has been done by people who treated others as a means to an end, as pawns for the greater good. These are not easy questions, and they do not have easy one size fits all answers. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the limitations of the shooting game genre (the trope of a quest to protect someone is well established), perhaps because they also wanted to explore themes of trauma and parent-child bonding, the show did not build to those questions properly.
The Last of Us is a good to great show with a lot of interesting things to say about trauma and family, some less interesting things to say about the veneer theory of civilization, and one great big question at the end that it doesn't realize it has asked incorrectly.