Spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II.
One of the main themes of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II is the cycle of revenge. The idea that targeted violence only leads to more violence in a vicious cycle that brings only pain and hardship for the parties involved, not fulfillment. First Joel kills Abby’s dad, then Abby kills Joel, then Ellie kills Abby’s best friends, and then Abby kills Jesse, and finally, Ellie has the chance to kill Abby, but she doesn’t. Instead, she spares her and thus ends the cycle.
When I first played the game, the ending hit me quite hard. Ellie returns home to find her partner Dina had gathered her belongings and left with their adopted child. Then Ellie realizes that, due to losing two of her fingers fighting Abby, she can no longer play Joel’s guitar.
It’s emotionally crushing, and if a game manages to make you feel a particularly powerful emotion, then it’s at least doing something right. However, I remember feeling, as I watched Part II’s ending play before me, a different emotion mixed in with the sadness. One that told me that something wasn’t adding up.
Over time, I understood that I’d felt unsatisfied, and recently I realized why. It didn’t feel right to see Ellie having lost everything, even her symbolic connection to her late father figure, when she was the one who had spared Abby. She was the bigger person in the end, she was the one who ended the cycle of violence. Not only did she spare her, but she actually saved her and Lev from starving to death on that beach.
It felt like she had done the right thing, yet was being punished for it. I understand all of this could be argued away by simply stating that not every story needs to have that perfect bow on it, where everything happens for a reason. Sometimes life does give you a shitty hand, even if you don’t deserve it, and this can be represented well in fiction, but often a bit of thematic cohesion can lead to a more impactful and satisfying story.
And I think that would have been the case here. Now, you could hypothetically make it, so Ellie gets ‘rewarded’ in the sense that she simply gets home to see that Dina had changed her mind and had stayed in the house waiting for her, greeting her with open arms. You could even still keep Ellie losing her fingers, to make it a more bittersweet ending, and represent that she did lose something for trying to go kill Abby in the first place. It’s a reasonable adjustment to the story, though you could argue that it would go against Dina’s character, given how broken she seemed over Ellie’s departure.
Dina’s reason to leave is completely understandable, so I believe that an even better ending, one that matches The Last of Us’ obsession with emotionally breaking its audience, is for Ellie to have killed Abby, and not just Abby… but Lev as well. You might think that’s just gratuitously dark, but it really makes a lot of sense in the context of the story.
Ellie never let it go all this time since first crossing Abby’s path, risking her family and the one person she loves most just to go kill Abby. So let’s say she does, and keeps on feeding into the cycle of revenge. She plunges the knife into Abby’s chest. Ellie was likely smart enough to see the cycle playing out before her. She would have understood that Lev could have gone to avenge Abby, just like she did with Joel. So, justifying it to herself that Lev was likely to die anyway, alone and starved on this beach, she walks to the boat and kills him as well.
In a logical sense, she would have ended the cycle of violence like this too, as there would be no one left on Abby’s side to avenge her. So then, what happens? She gets home and realizes her family is gone. They left her and she is now totally alone. That was the result of her completing her quest for revenge, she got what she wanted, but lost everything else in the process, she even lost the one thing she still had that symbolically connected her to the person she’d done so much to avenge.
With such a change, Ellie’s final situation would be no less dire or depressing, in fact, in a way, it would be even more so, because her consequences would feel fully earned. It would feel like she had chosen an inescapably dark path for herself where there was no love or peace to be found, echoing Joel at the end of the first game. I feel the story’s darkness would still hit, but it would be so much more powerful, because the audience would be crushed by the weight of Ellie’s actions and what they led to, as opposed to feeling nagged by a feeling of unevenness.
When speaking to IndieWire back in 2020, Game Director Neil Druckmann revealed that for a majority of the game’s development cycle, Ellie actually killed Abby at the end, and I think that’s clearly observable in the story. It makes much more sense for Ellie’s final situation to match said unpleasant deed, instead of following after an act of mercy. Druckmann wanted Ellie’s future to be more hopeful, but it feels like other aspects of the story weren’t adjusted to match that. As it stands, there’s a noticeable themat dissonance.
If engaging in the cycle of revenge is bad, then shouldn’t Abby get consequences for it as well? I mean, Ellie does kill the love of her life… that’s a pretty big deal, but in the end, Abby ends up free to live her life with her surrogate son, even possibly meet up with her fellow Fireflies. She never shows or expresses any remorse for her actions, yet, Ellie, who spared her, ends up alone and maimed?
Having Ellie actually do the deed would make those final scenes that much more haunting, but also more satisfying, because the audience would feel that she completely deserved what she came home to, and it would match the themes that had been building throughout the entire story. It would even harken back to the song we heard when we first found out about the game. “I can’t walk on the path of the right, because I’m wrong…”
