This is the finale for Season One of The Last of Us.
ONE
Someone is panting and running through the woods. A woman. She’s last-trimester pregnant, and she’s having contractions. Sounds of pursuit keep her moving. Ahead, a ramshackle farmhouse. When entering, she calls out, “It’s me,” so she knows this place.
Her water breaks. In what was once a child’s bedroom, she pushes a chair under the doorknob and squats against the wall. She’s in advanced labor now. From her pocket she takes a switchblade, ready just in case. Something attacks the outside of the door. An infected breaks in and scrambles at her, rushing right up to her face.
She stabs him and goes back to giving birth. A small human, delivered onto the floor, starts crying. As mother looks down at the baby, she notices the bite mark on her leg. She quickly cuts the cord and ties it off.
A very precious and unhappy newborn infant (a squirmble!) gets a close-up. Mama cradles it and says, “Ellie”. Roll credits.
TWO
People with flashlights, one of them Marlene, approach the farmhouse. Carefully, they come in through the kitchen. Upstairs, gentle singing can be heard. “Anna?” Marlene calls. She enters the bedroom and her flashlight reveals the dead infected to one side, and mother and baby rocking on the floor. The wound on Anna’s leg is spreading. Assuring Marlene she hasn’t been nursing, she bald-face lies that she cut the umbilical cord before she was bit. Anna puts the swaddled infant on the floor, passing it to Marlene, and tucks the closed switchblade in the blanket.
THREE
Marlene, sad, doesn’t want to do what needs to be done. Anna insists. Marlene takes the baby and shoots Anna.
FOUR
Dissolve from the crying infant to our Ellie.
Silent, Ellie is lost in her own thoughts. When Joel calls to her that he’s found Chef Boyardee, she doesn’t hear. (His over-cheerfulness and her silence remind us that she’s traumatized from the last episode when she fought off and killed the psycho preacher.) As they walk, Joel tries to entice her with a promise of guitar lessons. She’s still distant.
In the city they head up a skyscraper for a look around. Joel asks Ellie if she’s ok and she says fine. (We can all see she’s not herself.) He boosts her to drop a ladder for him, but when she lifts it she becomes distracted. It drops and she runs to look at something. She’s excited, running and calling to him to follow, which he does. Through an opening in the building, they’re at eye level with a giraffe. Joel shows her how to feed it green shoots, and she giggles. At the top of the skyscraper they can look down on a herd of giraffes.
During the quiet moment, Joel offers to take Ellie back to Tommy’s and forget about the whole damn thing. She says she’ll follow him anywhere — when they’re done. They will finish what they started.
They find the hospital, rusted stretchers and deteriorating field tents abandoned outside. Joel explains they were Army camps set up in the first few days after the outbreak. He was in one himself for his temple scar. He admits that when Sarah died he attempted suicide, but he flinched.
Joel tears up as he credits Ellie with healing him, rather than time.
As they continue onward, Joel asks for some “shitty puns”, and Ellie happily breaks out the book. While they’re rating the bad jokes, someone behind them tosses a smoke grenade at their feet. Joel, covering Ellie, dives. Men with rifles cautiously approach while Joel and Ellie squint and gasp. Someone grabs Ellie. Another person slams their gun butt into Joel’s head, and the world goes white.
SWITCH
Joel wakes to Marlene welcoming him to the Fireflies. She asks how he made it across country when she and her team barely did. All Joel wants, though, is to see Ellie.
FIVE
Marlene says no. Ellie is being prepped for surgery.
Reluctantly, Marlene explains. Cordyceps has been growing in Ellie’s brain since her birth. She’s immune because cordyceps sees her as part of the organism. The doctor will take her brain cells and reproduce them in a lab. It’s a cure for humanity. It’s a death sentence for Ellie, although Marlene didn’t tell her that.
Marlene casually steps closer to her guard with the gun as Joel understands what she’s said. He demands to be taken to Ellie. The guard stops him with the rifle butt to the gut. Marlene, who promised Ellie’s mother she’d protect her child, sympathizes with Joel’s love, but she has no choice. She tells her guards to lead Joel out to the highway. If he’s trouble, shoot him.
Suspense builds as Joel is walked through the corridors and down the stairs. When he’s pushed, he attacks, stripping away the guard’s rifle and shooting them in the stairwell. Taking the guard’s ammo, Joel moves methodically back into the facility. Along the way he shoots everyone, even the ones who surrender. The sound effects are muted, and the music takes over.
He finds the pediatric surgery wing. The operating theater has a doctor and two nurses administering anesthesia to Ellie. When the doctor protests, Joel shoots him between the eyes.
SIX
After the nurses unhook Ellie, he has them face the wall as he picks her up, cradling her, and leaves the room.
SEVEN
Holding the unconscious Ellie, Joel takes the elevator down to the parking garage. Marlene steps from behind a pillar, handgun pointed at him. When she challenges him that Ellie would’ve wanted to do what’s right, Joel knows it’s true. He looks down at Ellie, deciding something.
EIGHT
Cut to Joel driving a highway. He gives a small head shake, and then he looks at Ellie in the rear view as she wakes in the back seat. As he explains what happened — his version — the confrontation with Marlene plays in crosscut.
In the garage, Marlene lowers her gun.
In the car, Joel explains to Ellie that she’s not the only immune person, but the doctors couldn’t make a cure that worked and gave up.
In the garage, Joel shoots Marlene.
In the car, Joel lies. Raiders attacked the hospital and hurt everyone there.
In the garage, Joel holds the handgun from under Ellie’s draped legs and shoots. While he puts Ellie in the back seat, gasps from Marlene can be heard. She begs. Joel shoots her in the head. Fade to black.
NINE
A montage of beautiful mountain scenery and the driving car. Just inside Wyoming, the van breaks down. That leaves them with a five hour hike.
Ellie seems contemplative. Joel babbles on about Sarah.
From a rise they see Jackson in the valley below. Ellie stops him and tells him about Riley. She had to kill her best friend. Joel tries to perk her up, to tell her that you just keep going. “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true,” Ellie says.
He swears and she nods, but her face conveys a dozen possible emotions. Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
Although we know he’s been a raider in the past, this is our first time seeing Joel’s brutality. It can be a tough watch. He’s a broken person who just admitted that his daughter’s death almost killed him. It’s believable that he would do anything to save Ellie, and this episode goes all the way with that motivation. He wipes out the Fireflies, including a doctor; he kills Marlene, and he lies (badly) to Ellie, who is like a daughter to him.
For me, the scene in the hospital is framed so much like a video game that it didn’t bother me. Clearing an area is very common in gaming. The pacing of the editing, the blurring of the sound effects, the focus on a quest — it felt like a nod to the story’s origins. Joel is efficient and skilled, which is what every gamer wants their avatar to achieve.
However, the show continues beyond the gaming experience. And it carefully uses its structure to round out the beats. At first glance, the One feels like a Leftover Nine. It’s Ellie’s backstory, something we need to know in order to appreciate her immunity. But then we get Marlene. She doesn’t just take over responsibility for an infant, she must shoot her friend. The Two Trouble is the moral rules of this world. Cordyceps grants people a reason to kill other humans, regardless of how personally difficult that might be. At the Three, Marlene lifts Ellie the baby in her arms and does what needs to be done to keep her safe. At the Six, Joel does the same for teen Ellie.
With a Two like that — the conflict of a child and a killing — the Eight had to go big. Structurally, it’s demanded. The difference is that Marlene, if she chose, could look Ellie in the eye and explain why she’d killed someone dear. Joel can’t. Left alive, Anna the mother would’ve killed Ellie the baby. For different reasons, the same is true of Marlene and Ellie the teen. For Marlene it’s couched in terms of healing humanity and the needs of the many, but for Joel the parallel is the same. He’s saving Ellie and stopping the person who would kill her, just as Marlene did with Anna. It’s horrible of Marlene to deny Ellie the chance to decide for herself, and it does fuel some of Joel’s ruthlessness. If he felt completely in the right, though, he would be able to tell Ellie the truth. He can’t, and the season ends with everything unsettled and uncomfortable.