The end of the first season of The Last of Us showed the two faces of Joel Miller (Peter Pascal). Although during the HBO adaptation his duality was made clear, the ability to make questionable decisions along with others that could be celebrated, this time that contrast was more explicit. It is valid to even think that he was represented in a more compromising and controversial way.
Joel Miller, like most of the main characters in The Last of Us, is marked by his past. The death of his daughter was joined by a series of decisions and situations that transformed him. It is a life or death context. Joel adapts pragmatically in most cases, setting aside ethics and morality in several of them.
However, something happens that changes the logic: his relationship with Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey). This approach to Joel a kind of passport to be able to go further and find his brother. But as the series unfolds, his connection to Ellie ceases to be bureaucratic, just another responsibility. He becomes a bond that allows him to redeem part of his past. Does this justify his conduct?
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The Last of Us:
fighting past traumas
During the first episode of The Last of Us, the HBO series plants the key event in the development of Joel’s character: the death of his daughter. Together with his brother, the three try to escape the origin of the apocalypse. The death of the girl leaves Joel a void within the family, which is now only made up of his brother.
When the two must separate, a need arises in Joel: to find his brother again at some point. That possibility opens up when he meets Ellie. Enjoy ‘free transit’. With the excuse of taking the girl to a place where they can test her to find a cure, he can move. The protagonist is a harsh being, little interested in Ellie’s searches and curiosity. He could be recognized as an official who has to fulfill a task, deliver a package.
After several events that emotionally bring Joel and Ellie closer, when he finds his brother he is no longer the same character. He has become warmer and has had to go back over his fears to begin to face them: the girl’s responsibility reminds him of the one he had with his daughter. Ellie, progressively, is ceasing to be a strange girl, an acquaintance, a friend. She is becoming someone who fills a void in Joel’s life.
Without that transformation of his relationship with Ellie, his fear at the moment of taking her to unknown lands, to which it is said that no one returns, cannot be explained. So, once Joel has found her brother and has realized that he has already remade her life, she raises the possibility that he is the one to take her. The protagonist no longer fears so much for himself, but for the girl’s and the possibility of seeing himself, once again, having to go through a heartbreaking loss.
It’s the girl’s trust in him that clears up any doubt: they’re going to move on. No longer as two people accompanying each other, but as a small team that must fulfill a mission and intends to be united until the end of it. It is a moment in which the father-daughter bond, which begins to suggest itself, is not stable. The Last of Usthrough other characters and details, makes it clear: it is a story in which the different ways of loving act as the driving force.
Lie and deceit:
Does the good of one justify the horror for all?
This bond is strengthened in the last two episodes. In them, Ellie must take care of Joel and then he has to go to her rescue. But all is not so simple. She is also transforming. Through the chapters, progressively, she has been losing her ingenuity and her human side has been contaminated due to the corruption of the environment. In opposition, Joel has been humanized, to a point that those who have only followed the HBO series (without going through the video game) may never have thought.
In chapter 9 of The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie abruptly find the future they’ve been looking for. Both are kidnapped and separated. Waking up from her after a blow to her head, Joel learns that the plan is to open her skull to find a cure. It is a high-risk surgery. This is not explicitly stated, but is interpreted by Joel’s look upon hearing the plan: the girl will not survive.
Then, Joel, who had already fully assumed the fatherly role, finds himself, once again, in a scenario in which he must lose his daughter. But between one moment and another there is a differential detail: this time, he can do something more and oppose. This opens another moral debate in The Last of Us: Is the good of one above that of humanity?
Ellie is one of the keys to a better future. But, without her, Joel doesn’t want any of those days. The Last of Us told part of Ellie’s past, the one that Joel has been discovering little by little. Why is this relevant? The protagonist doesn’t just have a bond with someone who is filling a void. But She also thinks about her traumas, about the life that Ellie never had and that now she must give up for the common good..
Joel is at a personal and collective crossroads. One or the other decision is the difference between being a hero for humanity or a villain who put a personal desire, his own love for himself and his relationship with Ellie above the common good. On the other hand, How can you not sympathize with that individual search, after having seen the protagonist of the story go through so much pain and horror? It’s special, considering that together they represent one of the few love ties left in such a perverted environment.
The notion of hero
Joel bets on himself before humanity, on his relationship with Ellie and the possibility that she lives some of the issues that remain to be discovered. Even in a corrupt, post-apocalyptic context, that desire is justified within The Last of Us. However, if interpreted beyond the series, it makes the protagonist a villain.
Moved by his emotions, Joel crosses a border that sooner or later he will have to return to: he deceives Ellie, lies to her to omit that he has killed a handful of people for fear of losing her and that, perhaps, he is taking away humanity’s humanity. possibility of a cure. She, in that saga of measures taken in a hurry, with the speed of the bullets coming and going, had no voice, no decision-making capacity.
If all of the above is looked at from another place, Joel, by acting this way, is giving Ellie a choice.. Perhaps this was the only possible option so that the future of the girl, and perhaps that of humanity, was in her hands and not in that of adults who respond to different interests and have multiple traumas that condition the behavior of she. This makes Joel’s role, as the hero of the story, difficult to measure. Is it for saving Ellie, using methods that will come back at him like a boomerang? Can he be considered that way, for saving his reunion with his more human side? Is he a villain for not handing over a girl so that the rest of the population can be saved?
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In this sea of questions that can be asked, his figure is that of the anti-hero, the guy who looks out for his own interests before those of the collective, without these being totally ruled out (the possibility of a cure is still on the table). Joel, defending an idea of love, the paternal one, is also leaving the door open to a future conflict: the one he will have with Ellie when he finds out what has happened. Then, later, in the next few seasons, this whole debate may turn on her. What will she do when she has to decide?