We are two weeks away from the premiere of The Last of Us’ second season. The HBO live-action adaptation will be based on The Last of Us Part II, and anyone who’s played it knows it builds heavily off the first game’s ending. As such, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are doing promotional interviews for the new season and were naturally asked by IGN about the moral conundrum presented at the end of the first game. And y’all, I think it’s bizarre that someone who led two of my favorite games of all time manages to make them less interesting every time he weighs in on their characters’ actions.
At the end of the first Last of Us, blue-collar dad turned post-apocalyptic smuggler Joel goes on a rampage through a hospital, killing high-ranking members of the resistance group known as the Fireflies. He does this to save Ellie, his cargo-turned-surrogate-daughter, who was nearly killed in order to salvage the mutated cordyceps fungus in her brain that could help to make a vaccine. It’s a difficult situation, the morality of which fans have debated for over a decade. Was Joel right to save someone he cared about from certain death and, in so doing, doom humanity? Did he have any right to make that decision without Ellie’s consent? Did the doctors who were ready to kill her without asking what she wanted have the responsibility to do what they thought was right for the greater good? All of these are good questions. The Last of Us Part II explores them through shifting perspectives, and the sequel manages to end on a note that acknowledges all of them with equal weight.
Meanwhile, Druckmann and Mazin have expressed to IGN that they see Joel as in the right, even if Mazin is unsure if he could follow through on such a plan.
“I believe Joel was right,” Druckmann said to IGN. “If I were in Joel’s position, I hope I would be able to do what he did to save my daughter.”
“That’s so interesting, because I think that if I were in Joel’s position, I probably would have done what he did,” Mazin said. “But I’d like to think that I wouldn’t. That’s the interesting push and pull of the morality of it. And that’s why the ending of the first game is so provocative and so wonderful. It just doesn’t let you off the hook as a player.”
I could drag Druckmann and Mazin for trying to definitively weigh in on the foundational debate that has been the lifeblood of The Last of Us for a decade, but I will at least couch this all as them being asked about their personal belief, rather than arguing that the text is explicitly making one case or the other. (I would argue, however, that the TV show tries real hard to shift us away from condemning his actions entirely.) However, after following this series for so long, I always leave Druckmann interviews feeling like what I find profound about these games is just a series of happy accidents. The Last of Us Part II can’t just be a meditation on grief that uses violence as a language when Druckmann is talking about it as if the game is meant to scold the player for taking violent actions they have no say in, or when he’s citing the Israel and Palestine conflict as an inspiration for the game’s cycle of violence in a comparison that has only gotten more fraught since the game launched in 2020. Or what about the time that Joel actor Troy Baker tried to justify the actions of David, the predator who attempted to make Ellie a child bride? The Last of Us is the kind of story that, in a perfect world, would just be allowed to speak for itself. But we live in a world where marketing multi-million dollar projects requires interviews, and some audiences need to be told how they’re supposed to feel about something by the person who made it.
That’s not a Last of Us-specific problem. The modern Wikipediafication of art means everyone’s looking for definitive facts to point to and regurgitate in order to justify everything they feel with cold hard evidence. Sometimes, it feels like modern pop culture discourse is uncomfortable with questions that can’t be easily moralized. We’re seeing it right now with the ending of Severance’s second season. I’m curious to see how a much larger audience reacts to the complexities of The Last of Us Part II’s story when season two premieres on April 13.