a jumbled incongruent mess

The Last of Us Part II frames Ellie’s journey to “find and kill every last one of them” as that of an addict. We watch as the girl we know and love from Part I become consumed by this need to avenge Joel’s death to make his passing matter. That spiral, of life mattering in world that does not care about you, didn’t start with Joel’s death, her need to have her life matter (after being told at the age of 14 that she was humanity’s key to a vaccine) started when Riley turned and she didn’t. To get to that point on the porch you have to look at Ellie’s history of trauma.

Surviving a life or death situation is brutal, you have moments when you feel happy and suddenly your laughter turns to overwhelming guilt and pain because you’re still alive and that person or group of people aren’t and in your mind it becomes and it should have been me cycle. Over and over. You can push your survivor’s guilt aside for a time, but it always comes back. Imagine going through that, and then to weeks later being told that your immunity means something you mean something. Now Ellie has a reason to make the loss of Riley’s life worth something. Her death and Ellie’s continued living isn’t for nothing.

Through Part I we follow Ellie and Joel as they fight and lose so many people whom Ellie forms quick bonds with. Tess, Sam, Henry, even her own mother died shortly after giving birth to her. She continues to live while everyone she cares about around her dies or leaves. You would probably feel a little bit at fault after this pattern repeats and repeats. Ellie has a way to make things right to have all that pain matter. To right what in her eyes, is a great injustice that others die while she lives.

Ellie changes after David, she’s had to kill someone she made a tenuous connection with to survive an encounter only to have him prove to her she was right to distrust him. Up until then she trusted people easier, wanted to help Sam and Henry when Joel would rather cast them aside. Joel is not there to distrust David and so she does and, his actions as well as some dialogue shows, he’s demonstrably evil. Joel is right to distrust others and that loss of trust in the world festers in her for a while. We see it in spades in Part II. 

Getting into Utah, Ellie isn’t herself. Shes distant, off. Joel has to pry answers and it’s only at the giraffe scene do we see a glimpse of who she was before. Even in that moment she wants to get the Firefly journey over no matter the cost. Joel wants to be selfish and go back to Jackson but she has to see it through. Because it can’t be for nothing. The loss of everyone weighs on her and she’s a kid. There is no one to help her process her trauma. Joel for all his love is a broken, imperfect man, trying to do right by himself after failing his own daughter.

The choice to sacrifice herself is one she wanted to make, but she nearly drowns and instead of waiting (I mean, really y’all waited 20 years you could  wait a week for the kid jesus) she loses the one choice that she had left. The one choice she could make. She wakes up on the way to Jackson, everyone she’s cared about is still dead and now, there is no cure. That alone is devastating enough. She’s in a community of people she can’t tell anyone about her immunity, that’s isolating. We see how hard it’s been for her through the reveal of her immunity with Dina, both in the weed den in the theater.

Years pass and this thought that the person you trust more than anyone else lied to you eats away at the back of your mind. She can’t escape that guilt either, not trusting someone who risked his life for her the way Joel did, but he dismisses her questions, acts defensive when there are two bodies that her cure could have prevented lying at their feet. Finding out the truth? That not only Joel lied, but that in trying to “save her” he killed the only person who could make a vaccine? Not only would her death have meant something, in doing so she could have prevented more death, but now no one is saved. No one lives, except her. And she can’t get infected.

In Utah she finds out the truth from a recording. Not the man she’s trusted. She then has to force Joel to tell her the truth, threatens to leave him and Jackson and the life he had for her to get him to do so. Because to have something so monumental to your personal redemption stripped away like that by the one person who cared enough to stay? That’ll fuck anyone up.

That moment on the porch is a culmination of all that, with the added pain of having lost Joel, emotionally, as someone she could trust over a short period of time. Joel stood up to Seth for her and Dina, but in her eyes, she had control of the situation and Joel took it from her. She can’t fix the world, but she has one choice she is in control of in this moment. She can choose to try and forgive Joel. She can choose to give him a second chance.

Maybe that is self-obsessed to some. Maybe to others its a Joel’s actions are a more egregious motivation of selfishness to save one life when he couldn’t save Sarah’s. To Ellie her life doesn’t matter, but to everyone who has ever cared for her, ever loved her, it does.

That’s the thing with humans, we don’t matter in the grand scheme of the universe. We’re less than a blip trying to be a wave in an ocean more vast and deep than we can ever comprehend. To everyone around us in our individual lives however, we’re capable of being a wave in a puddle at times. We don’t always know that though. People are wired to believe they don’t matter to others as much as those people matter to them. That’s why sometimes dying on a slab seems like the best option.