The Last of Us Part II: One Year Later
Our epic, two-part exploration of the controversial story a year later. This is part one of two.
Is The Last of Us Part II the narrative masterpiece critics claim it to be? Or is it really just a constant barrage of depressing events that trick the player into thinking it is? The answer lies in a bit of both.
In 2020 Naughty Dog released what would become one of the most talked-about games of the year. It was such for a variety of reasons: the controversy surrounding its launch, the leaks from earlier in the year, and the narrative choices that the writers made, among a slew of others. Now that a year has passed, the controversies have somewhat died down and Naughty Dog added a 60fps mode for PS5. Thus, I decided to pick up and play The Last of Us Part II for the third time.
This will be a full examination of the entirety of the game, so be warned that massive spoilers lie past this point. Due to the length of the game and narrative, I’ll split this into two pieces so as not to overwhelm the audience. There’s a lot to take in and digest with this epic and it’s best to not rush it. So without further ado…
In The Beginning
The story picks up within a few months of where the previous game left off. Whilst Joel may have accepted Ellie as his daughter, it’s clear that something isn’t jiving between the two, and the feeling may not be mutual. So we see a conversation play out between the two in which Joel is trying to establish a father/daughter dynamic with Ellie. Having previously promised to teach Ellie the guitar, Joel shows her one that he found while out on patrol and proceeds to play the song “Future Days” by Pearl Jam, thus fulfilling his promise.
This is the point where Ellie understands how much she means to Joel. She realises that if Joel was to ever lose her, he would probably go back to what he used to be — a man with few moral lines left to cross. The extent of the bond this creates between the two is not fully realised by the player at the start of the game but it will become more evident as the game progresses.
The game cuts to four years later where we now play as a 19-year-old Ellie. Apart from some mild homophobia on the part of an older member of the community (as shown in a scene that also sheds further light on the fraught relationship between Joel and Ellie), we are lead to believe that life in Jackson has been relatively safe and calm. We are also introduced to characters both new and old, notably Jesse and Dina. We find out from Maria that Tommy and Joel have already left for patrol (due to horde sightings) and that Jesse is to replace them, so Ellie is to join Dina on the creek trails.
Ellie and Dina make their way through the creek trails and ultimately end up sheltering from a blizzard in the library hideout created by a member of the Jackson community, since deceased. As the player, we’ve only known Dina for a couple of hours, but it feels like we’ve known her for years. The amount of trust she and Ellie share and the way they talk to each other show that their friendship has a long history. To top it all off, the writers chose to make her Ellie’s primary love interest. For anyone who didn’t have a reason to be invested in Dina, knowing how Ellie would be affected if something happens to her should give plenty of reason.
It is at this point where the game introduces us to its other protagonist, Abby Anderson. For the moment, we don’t know much about Abby, apart from the fact that she clearly has a history with another character named Owen and that the group that she is with is looking for someone within Jackson. After seeing what Jackson looks like, Owen wants to turn back to their hideout in a nearby abandoned mansion.
But Abby is determined to find their target, so she heads off towards a potential outpost building. On her way there she encounters an infected horde and gets caught in a vulnerable position that looks inevitably like the end of her. However, she is rescued by Joel and Tommy, who happen to be passing through that area. They escape the outpost and take Abby up on her offer of shelter at the mansion.
We briefly return Ellie and Dina who get interrupted in the library by Jesse. He reveals that Joel and Tommy didn’t show up at the lookout where he was supposed to meet them. The game cuts back to Tommy, Joel, and Abby, and this is where the group’s true intentions are revealed. Once Tommy and Joel introduce themselves, Abby shoots Joel in the leg with a shotgun, and Tommy is knocked out. She then proceeds to have a tourniquet put on Joel’s leg before asking if he knows who she is.
The game returns to Ellie who is making her way into the mansion where she hears pained grunts coming from the basement. Upon entering the basement we see a nearly dead Joel being beaten by Abby with a golf club. Ellie is immediately wrestled to the ground and starts pleading with Joel for him to get up. Abby delivers the final blow and at this point if you were anything like me, you wanted revenge (after all they did just kill Ellie’s father figure). Just as importantly, Ellie’s famous quote from the game’s first trailer rings back across the years:
“I’m going to find, and I’m going to kill, every last one of them”
For many people (myself included) killing Joel off in this manner felt cheap and it felt like it didn’t do his character justice. What I came to realise is that this is the world of The Last of Us, cruel and unforgiving, and not everyone goes out in a way befitting who they were. So for a character like Joel, whilst his death wasn’t what we wanted as fans of the series, it was a death that he would have expected for himself, his past deeds catching up to him. And for those who thought that it was unlike Joel to give his name out to complete strangers you’ve got to remember time changes people. Add in the fact he was living in a somewhat secure place and you’ve got a recipe for being less cautious and lowering your guard more often.
After returning to Jackson, Ellie finds out who the group was, and where they are based. She decides to go to Seattle, with Dina refusing to be left behind, beginning her quest to seek vengeance for Joel.
The next sections of the game take place across three days in Seattle, mapping out Ellie’s devolution into the revenge-obsessed monster she sought to destroy — Abby. It becomes apparent as events unfold that Abby and Ellie’s stories are fundamentally the same, just taken at different snapshots in time, with Ellie’s ending where Abby’s begins.
Seattle Day 1
The beginning of the story in Seattle finds Ellie and Dina in a semi-open-world area of downtown Seattle. You can find a music shop in this area, where Ellie can find a guitar in one of the rooms. She plays a tiny bit of “Future Days”, emphasising the idea that she is going to use it to keep a connection to Joel. Ellie then reminds Dina of a time in Jackson by playing “Take On Me” by the 80s band A-ha.
Given Naughty Dog’s insane attention to detail it would be safe to say that like “Future Days”, this song foreshadows the outcome of our characters, with the line “I’ll be gone in a day or two,” emphasising the fact that by the end of their time in Seattle, Ellie will be a shadow of her former self.
We see this slow transition of Ellie begin when she and Dina are looking for Leah (a member of the Salt Lake crew who went to kill Joel) at the TV station. Unfortunately for them, they arrive too late finding that an unknown group has already been there and killed Leah. They do find useful information in Leah’s belongings, though Ellie makes it quite clear that she wanted to talk to Leah herself.
Dina
Well… she’s dead. How do you feel?
Ellie
I’m pissed we couldn’t talk to her.
Dina
Yeah, but she didn’t hurt Joel. It would have been pretty fucked up to make her talk.
Ellie
She travelled hundreds of miles to torture him. I don’t care if she held the club or not.
It’s clear to the player that Ellie would have tortured Leah, is she was alive and Dina wasn’t present — due to Dina acting as the voice of reason in their relationship. Only a couple of hours earlier at the Serevena Hotel were the thought of torturing someone for information seemed absent from her mind — Ellie is clearly beginning to change.
Dina and Ellie get chased out of the TV station by Leah’s fellow Washington Liberation Front(WLF) soldiers and into the abandoned subways of Seattle. Here we are introduced to a new type of infected — Shamblers. More importantly, Ellie’s mask breaks leading Dina to offer to share her mask and Ellie refusing, as she is immune. Dina is obviously overwhelmed by this information, so after being chased by a horde they decide to camp out in a theatre just outside of the subway station. This is where we learn that Dina is also pregnant, which creates parallels between Dina and a member of Abby’s group, Mel.
Whilst this may seem like the game is turning into a teen drama, it does create an interesting problem for Ellie. Her partner is in a compromised health condition, in an unsafe city. In the end, it’s Dina who tells Ellie to keep at it, showing us that whilst Dina may not fully know the pain Ellie is in, she understands that it’s what Ellie wants to do.
Ellie finds a guitar whilst checking the theatre, then sits down and begins to play “Future Days” again. This results in her having a flashback of when Joel took her to the Wyoming museum for her 15th birthday. The scene opens with Ellie learning to play the song, waiting for Joel to return from whatever surprise he has in store for her. This is Naughty Dog really hammering home to the player that this song is what defines the relationship between these two characters.
The flashbacks in this game explore the best of times and the worst of times for Joel and Ellie's relationship and this particular one could very much be described as the best of times. In it we see Joel allowing Ellie to live out her dream of becoming an astronaut by taking her to the space exhibit at the museum and giving her a tape of the Apollo 11 launch, an item that is not easy to come by.
This scene is in the same vein as the arcade scene in The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC. There is hardly any audio apart from the tape, and all the emotions and conversations between characters are displayed through facial animations. It is a simple but effective scene, showing the true depth of the relationship that they share. This scene will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most moving scenes in the game, and perhaps in the whole of PlayStation’s catalog.
The flashback continues into an unexplored part of the museum where we are shown the outcome of Joel’s decision in the previous game. We are left with a sour taste in our mouths as Ellie wakes up in the theatre.
Seattle Day 2
The next morning, Dina and Ellie find out over the radio that an armed trespasser has been spotted in a nearby area. Presuming this trespasser is Tommy, they make ready to set off in search of him, but Dina is forced to stay at the theatre due to her rapidly deteriorating physical condition. Once Ellie has powered her way through the infected and WLF soldiers to reach the trespasser, she finds it isn’t Tommy at all, it’s Jesse. In a sequence reminiscent of Uncharted, she and Jesse escape the area and return to the theatre. Jesse and Dina reunite, with Ellie feeling slightly awkward given that the father of her girlfriend’s surprise baby has shown up. She goes for a walk around the theatre, which triggers another flashback.
Ellie has always suspected that Joel wasn’t telling the full truth she has kept that to herself — as she knows what she means to Joel. By constantly burying those thoughts Ellie appears vacant when talking to Joel and this is clearly affecting their relationship. It’s also shown that Joel could be overly protective and wants to keep her immunity secret. Joel is afraid of losing her, though this is actively pushing her away from him, with Ellie’s absent nature further increasing Joel's behaviour.
However, this flashback does imply that Joel is willing to let Ellie have more freedom and that if she thinks she is ready for something (in this case paired patrols) she can do it. It shows that Joel has taken an interest in some of Ellie’s interests (the savage starlight comics), and whilst this was shown in the previous flashback with the tape recording it emphasises Joel’s want to make this Father-Daughter relationship work. Like the previous flashback, this one brings it back to Joel’s choice and what he said to Ellie about the number of immune individuals.
This flashback is also the first time we see Ellie’s tattoo, of a moth on a fern leaf, the same moth that’s on Ellie’s guitar. The moth motif represents her desire to look for the light — linking her back to the Fireflies, but it also represents Ellie’s obsession with fulfilling revenge.
Back at the theatre, Ellie and Dina find out that Nora (a member of the group who killed Joel) is stationed at St Mary’s Hospital. Ellie is still hell-bent on revenge, so much that she doesn’t do the sensible thing in waiting for Jesse to wake up. She instead decides that she needs to go by herself and ask Nora where Abby is — backing up the symbolism of the moth representing her obsession. We also see Dina’s attitude toward revenge changing as she starts to see how it’s affecting Ellie.
Ellie arrives at the hospital and stealth’s her way into a room with a WLF soldier playing on a PS Vita. After holding her at knifepoint and asking where Nora is, Ellie stabs her in the neck in a scene that made me positively sick, then makes her way through the hospital to find Nora. Upon finding her, Nora initially tries to appeal to Ellie’s humanity, ultimately turning that appeal on its head when Ellie doesn’t follow.
Nora
You still hear his screams?
Ellie
What?
Nora
I hear them every night… Yeah. Yeah, that little bitch got what he deserved.
Ellie chases Nora through the hospital and into the basement where there are spores. Nora realises that Ellie is ‘her’ and still tries to appeal to Ellie, asking her to think about what he’s done. Ellie however does not care and continues to ask Nora where Abby is. She refuses, making the argument that she’s already dead, why would she give up her friend’s location. The next words Ellie speaks mark a defining moment in who she is and it demonstrates a clear departure from the person that arrived in Seattle a day earlier.
Because I can make it quick. Or I can make it so much worse.
The game then makes you, the player, torture Nora, by repeatedly hitting her with the metal pipe. Ellie making Nora talk is an action, that we as players have to deal with because the game makes us do it. We can’t opt out of it and choose to skip the cutscene — we have to go through with what Ellie wants to do. Not only does this take a toll on Ellie, but by forcing the player’s hand into being part of such a traumatic event, it’s going to take a toll on them as well. This particular scene was a major talking point in the discussion about the level of violence and why people disliked the game.
When we see Ellie again at the theatre she is covered in Nora’s blood and visibly distressed over her actions. She succeeded in making Nora talk, but at what cost? Dina being the loving partner cleans Ellie up and tries to comfort her. It’s here that we see the physical tolls this is taking on Ellie: the cuts, the bruises, and the tightness of the skin. From this, we can assume that she’s not drinking, eating or sleeping, all things that will quicken the decline of her mental state.
In the final flashback with Ellie, we are at the hospital in Salt Lake City. Whilst Ellie has always suspected that Joel wasn’t telling the truth she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for the sake of their relationship. But it has gotten to the point where she can’t deal with Joel’s lies anymore and she goes to find out the truth.
Ellie gives Joel an ultimatum
Tell me… what happened here. If you lie to me one more time, I’m gone. You will never see me again. But if you tell me the truth, I’ll go back to Jackson. No matter what it is.
You can tell from Joel’s facial expressions in this scene that he doesn’t want to tell her, that in fact, her immunity meant something. But he knows what he’s got to do to keep Ellie, and so he tells her the truth, causing her to have a breakdown, telling Joel that she’ll go back but they are done. So evidently between then and when the game takes place something happened that caused Ellie to change her mind and let Joel come back into her life.
Seattle Day 3
As Day 3 in Seattle begins, we see Ellie is allowing her thirst for revenge to make decisions on what’s more important, going after Abby or getting Tommy. Ellie decides that Tommy can take care of himself, whilst Jesse decides that they should go after Tommy. By doing this Ellie is putting Jesse and Tommy in more danger than they should be, all in the name of revenge.
Ellie arrives at the aquarium and finds that Abby isn’t there but she does find two of Abby’s friends, Mel and Owen. She decides to use them against each other to get them to tell her where Abby is. Ellie lets her emotions get in the way and ends up killing them. Ellie learns from Owen just as he’s about to die that Mel was pregnant, which causes deep distress for Ellie as she tries to reconcile this horrific act with Dina’s pregnancy. Ellie starts to have a panic attack before Tommy and Jesse walk into the aquarium and find her.
At the theatre, the group makes the collective decision to head back to Jackson for the sake of Dina’s health. By this point, Ellie has completed her transition to becoming more of a monster than some of the actual monsters within the game. We see that she has become obsessed with revenge to the point where everyone around her questions if that revenge is worth it. Most importantly, it is the player who should be questioning if the cost for the revenge is worth the reward.
Ellie and Jesse hear some muffled shouting coming from the foyer, rushing out only for Jesse to be shot and killed and Ellie to see Tommy being held on the floor by Abby. Ellie explains that she knows why Abby killed Joel and that it was only done to protect her. Ellie offers herself and begs Abby to spare Tommy. The first half of the game ends with these words from Abby:
“You killed my friends. We let you live and you wasted it!”
Perhaps one of the most consequential cliffhangers in gaming memory, players are left wondering what has happened to Tommy and Ellie. In what many consider to be a jarring and unwelcome switch, players are launched into Abby’s campaign to play for another dozen or so hours. In Part 2, I will cover the rest of the game and the implications for all of it on the legacy of one of PlayStation’s most important releases.
