For those who don’t want to be spoiled on the story and characters, turn back now, because from here on out will be massive spoilers for the entire game. This is your last warning!
****SPOILER WARNING****
The Last of Us told a simple but effective story with the overarching premise of “What would you do to save your loved ones?” Would you kill a young girl to save humanity, or condemn humanity to save a young girl? How many atrocities would you commit to keep others alive? The Last of Us Part II takes this premise to its logical extreme and asks “What would you do to avenge the ones you love?”
Joel was not a good man. He admitted as much himself. And yet through the intimacy of his growing affection for surrogate daughter Ellie, we came to understand his worldview. It put in stark contrast the warring philosophies of sacrificing one for many, and saving one at the expense of others. TLoU was an elaborate Trolley Problem, and Joel chose to let humanity suffer in order to save his newfound family. Whether his decision was right or wrong was for the player to decide, but it was his decision.
That decision comes back to kill him about an hour into The Last of Us Part II, when Abby comes for her pound of flesh. Joel sacrificed humanity and killed her father, and in her mind, he deserves to die. As the player, who grew to love Joel despite his faults, we don’t see it the same way. We understand his reasons. But us understanding can’t save Joel from death. It’s brutal, and sudden, and puts us exactly in the mindset for our own vengeance. TLoU2‘s revenge plotline is neither new nor subtle, but it is powerful.
The story’s most effective conceit is actually the one I hated at first. Joel’s death upset me. I hated it. I hated that Abby could turn around and torture him after he and Tommy saved her life. I was absolutely on board with Ellie’s hatred and pain and wanted nothing more than to get back at the group who took Joel away. Then the midpoint switch hit and I was put into Abby’s shoes, and I hated it. It felt pointless and hollow, especially when the game tried to characterize her friends – whom I’d just killed in the aquarium half an hour earlier. It was dumb; I couldn’t relate to these people. I knew their fate, why should I care?
And yet, by the end, I had no interest in killing Abby at the Rattler compound. The game forced to me try, relentlessly pushing me toward exacting a revenge plot I’d seen destroy every other character, and I wanted nothing to do with it. It’s a feeling I don’t think I’d have had if the game had played out differently. It wouldn’t have worked had I not been in both Ellie’s and Abby’s shoes and seen the toll revenge took on both of them.
Ellie’s determination to get back at Abby nearly destroys her. While her one-woman-killing spree through Seattle is initially cathartic, by the time she tortures Nora to death, it’s hard to see how she’s any better than Abby herself. It has a visible effect on her and, like Owen, Dina begins to turn away from the idea of vengeance at all costs, even while Ellie continues. It’s the same distance we saw grow between Abby and Owen, and their relationship dies with him on an aquarium floor. In TLoU2, revenge, in no uncertain terms, leads to ruin.
We see this mirrored in an assortment of ways throughout the game, the most obvious being the civil war between the WLF and the Seraphites. The WLF already had a rough start when they supplanted the government 20 years earlier, replacing one fascistic regime with another. Seattle is scarred by the remnants of that war with bombed out buildings and blighted landscapes. Corpses of soldiers who tried to get away mark the totality of the WLF’s vengeance against the government. Those corpses are later replaced with the Seraphites, a cult-like group determined to live off the land who also gut and hang any WLF they find. No one can say definitively who threw the first proverbial punch, but no one is willing to stop throwing them, either, escalating until the WLF literally set the Seraphite’s island on fire in an all out march to their own doom.
Both Ellie and Abby are ultimately saved from the same fate, but not by themselves. After Ellie kills Owen and his pregnant girlfriend Mel, Abby continues the cycle of vengeance, killing Jesse. She’s only stopped from also killing Dina by Lev, a Seraphite whom Abby saved in a too-late moment of conscience. A runaway who defied Seraphite will, he’s the only character we meet who didn’t choose which side to be on – he was born into it, and he chose to reject it. He’s the one who keeps Abby from continuing the killing, and he’s the one to whom Abby turns at the end when Ellie finally comes for her pound of flesh. She doesn’t want to fight anymore, and neither did I, but the game wouldn’t let me walk away. Up until this point, Ellie has pushed away anyone who tried to help her, including Dina. She’s trapped in this cycle and as the player, we are trapped with her. We’re forced to bear the burden of unending violence.
The thing that pulls Ellie back is Joel. Despite the rift that had formed between them from years of lying and Ellie’s survivor’s guilt, his memory is what keeps Ellie from following through. Killing Abby wasn’t going to bring Joel back and it wasn’t going to heal the festering wound inside her. But, like with Joel, forgiveness might. The night before he died, Ellie was willing to bury the hatchet she’d carried for four years following Saint Mary’s Hospital. She was willing to forgive. Letting Abby go was an extension of that.
It’s telling that only after Ellie relents on her quest for vengeance can she draw Joel’s face. Sometimes mending what’s broken isn’t the easiest choice, but it might be the best one. At the end of the game, in the empty farmhouse she’d once shared with Dina, we’re left with the tatters of a life Ellie almost threw away. Whether she can repair it or not is left up in the air, but I’d like to believe there’s something worth saving.
How far would you go to get revenge? How much would you sacrifice for forgiveness? How do you deal with guilt when it eats you from inside? Is there a line you won’t cross, or is everything fair game to make someone else pay for your pain? None of these are easy questions with simple answers, and The Last of Us Part II doesn’t really offer a definitive answer, either. It can’t, and if it did, it would ring hollow. Instead we’re left with the wreckage of two lives spurred on by vengeance and the hope that, maybe, there is closure for the worst of us.
The Last of Us Part II is available for the PlayStation 4 for $59.99 USD.
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Review copy purchased by author.
