Finding Family Through Loss: Ellie’s Journey in “The Last of Us”
Family may be the strongest thing which bonds human beings together. As families, we care for one another. We experience belonging and acceptance. We love and we are loved.
But what do we do when the people we care about die or become separated from us? How do we deal with a prolonged sense of isolation?
And in a post-apocalyptic world, how long can we survive on our own?
This is the struggle Ellie faces in The Last of Us.
Orphaned at an early age, Ellie only has distant memories and a single hand-written letter from her mother. There is no mention of her father. Her surrogate mother is Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies, who has been branded a terrorist by what remains of the government after the cordyceps infection outbreak.
Ellie grows up in a military-run school. She grows up being told that the one person she considers family is an extremist and a terrorist. She grows up being trained to fight people like the Fireflies.
And, for the most part, she grows up alone.
Despite this, or possibly because of this, Ellie seeks basic human connection in many of the people she meets. This is one aspect of the story which makes her relationship with Joel, the game’s other protagonist, so compelling.
Joel does his best to shut everyone out, especially Ellie. He is a man defined by the trauma of losing his daughter twenty years prior — something which still haunts him and causes him to keep everyone in his life at arm’s length.
Ellie, on the other hand, is a character defined by hope. This is such an extraordinary aspect of her character because she has only ever known the post-outbreak world. She has some idea what kinds of danger lie beyond the walls of the quarantine zone, and she knows full well the dangers within the QZ.
She knows, and still, she has hope.
She hopes her immunity to the cordyceps infection will lead to a vaccine, and that that vaccine will lead to an end to the threat posed by the infected.
And without the infected, humanity can reclaim the world it lost. Civilization can resume or even start anew.
It’s a lot for anyone to bear, and yet this fourteen-year-old girl bears it as well as anyone could hope.
However, Ellie’s immunity also causes her a certain degree of isolation. She is told by Marlene, and later, Joel, to keep it a secret. Moreover, she realizes that most people won’t believe her even if she tells them and shows them the scarred-over bite-mark on her arm.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be the last hope for humanity…and not being able to share that with anyone?
I posit that Ellie’s seeking of human connection is largely a result of living with this enormous secret. If she meets someone she comes to trust, who, in turn, comes to care about her, she can comfortably reveal her secret immunity. And while that other person can’t share in that immunity, nor can they bear the weight of the responsibility she feels, they can at least be there for her when she needs comfort or a kick in the ass to keep going.
Unfortunately, that person is Joel. And while Ellie and Joel eventually grow to love one another, Ellie comes to see Joel as a father much faster than he sees her as a daughter.
Of the two, Ellie is the more emotionally intelligent and mature. She picks up on Joel’s reluctance to let people in. And while she doesn’t find out about his daughter’s death until roughly halfway through the story, she can sense the depth of the loss he’s endured and the barriers he’s erected to keep people out.
What makes Ellie such an endearing character is that she has experienced as much loss as Joel.
“Everyone I’ve cared about has either died or left me. Everyone…fucking except for you. So don’t tell me I’d be safer with someone else, because the truth is I’d just be more scared.” — Ellie
But rather than shut everyone out like he’s chosen to do, she has accepted that loss is a part of life, especially in this world. She allows herself to grieve and, eventually, move on and hope to find the people with which she belongs and with whom she will be safe.
Ellie admits that her biggest fear is ending up alone.
Given what she’s lived through and seen, she well-knows what can happen if she ends up alone in this world.
We see this in the character of Bill.
A man “who knows how to find things,” as Joel says, Bill has put up literal walls, compete with bombs and booby-traps, to keep people out. His philosophy is that caring for other people is only good for getting one’s self killed.
As a result of prolonged isolation, Bill has become less than mentally and emotionally stable. He’s perpetually annoyed while dealing with Joel and Ellie. He’s combative and argumentative. He frequently talks to himself, even while with Joel and Ellie.
For Bill, surviving is enough.
Just surviving isn’t enough for Ellie.
And yet, several of the people she encounters don’t even get the luxury of survival. She’s seen first-hand how quickly the people she tries to connect with can die.
For example, she initially begins to connect with Tess, Joel’s smuggling partner. And before Tess and Joel can deliver her to the Fireflies, Tess is bitten. It’s Tess who convinces Joel to take Ellie to his brother Tommy, a former Firefly.
Rather than allow herself to turn into an infected, Tess dies in a shootout buying time for Joel and Ellie to escape the quarantine zone soldiers who’ve found them.
Joel and Ellie later team up with a pair of brothers, Henry and Sam, after getting ambushed by “hunters” — a group of scavengers living in the ruins of an abandoned quarantine zone.
Ellie quickly bonds with Sam, the younger of the two brothers.
What’s more, Joel eventually bonds with Henry.
Only, while fighting off a small horde of infected, Sam is bitten. What’s worse, Sam doesn’t tell anyone. The next morning, after Joel and Henry have supposedly agreed to travel together in search of the Fireflies, Ellie goes to wake up Sam for breakfast. Sometime in the night, Sam had turned.
He attacks Ellie.
In order to save her, Henry shoots his brother. Overcome with grief and feeling responsible for Sam’s becoming infected, Henry turns the gun on himself.
Suddenly, Bill’s sad, solitary life doesn’t seem so bad.
The deaths of Sam and Henry are a painful reminder that, in this world, even if you find people you come to trust and care about, they can be taken from you at any moment.
This causes Ellie to cling to Joel more so than before. Joel, on the other hand, shuts her out completely.
As awful as their lives have been after leaving Boston, Joel and Ellie get a glimpse of a positive example of what life could be like.
They eventually find Joel’s brother, Tommy, while traveling through Jackson County, Wyoming.
Tommy has made a nice life for himself after leaving the Fireflies. He’s found a community of people willing to work together in order to keep each other safe and fed. He lives in relative peace, though pillaging bands of hunters and marauders are an ever-present threat. He’s even found love, having married Maria who “sort of runs things around here,” as he tells Joel.
When Joel tries to pass Ellie off to Tommy to complete the job of delivering her to the Fireflies, arguing that finding a cure was his brother’s cause, Tommy replies, “My cause is my family now.”
Ellie and Joel’s time in Jackson is significant because it shows them that it’s possible to find a home away from the dangers of the quarantine zones and the infected. Furthermore, it shows them it’s possible to find purpose, to be part of a community, and to have a live — not just survive.
And, despite all the loss they’ve experienced, it’s possible to find family — in Joel’s case, literal family as he’s reunited with his brother. And in Ellie’s case, Jackson can provide the family she’s been looking for.
After they leave Jackson, Joel finally begins to open up to Ellie. He begins to talk about his dead daughter, his past, and the kinds of things he used to dream about doing. The two of them bond, laying the foundation for what will become their surrogate father-daughter relationship.
But…
Because the writer-director of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, is a self-proclaimed “fucking cruel writer,” Ellie’s finally finding family in Joel is immediately tested.
As I wrote about in my last post, Joel and Ellie eventually find the Fireflies. Marlene informs Joel that the cordyceps in Ellie have mutated — it’s what makes her immune — and that it’s possible to synthesize a vaccine from the infection within her.
But, because the infection grows all over the brain, removing the mutated cordyceps from Ellie will kill her.
Being faced with the imminent death of the person he’s come to love most in this world, Joel prevents the Fireflies from operating on Ellie. And by “prevents,” I mean he murders the shit out of everyone who stands between him and Ellie.
Ellie is unconscious while Joel is killing his way through soldiers and doctors to save her. She had drowned when she and Joel were found by a Firefly patrol, and then she was anesthetized in preparation for surgery. She doesn’t wake up until Joel is already driving the two of them back to Jackson.
The end of the story is tragic because Ellie has lived with the responsibility of her immunity and the hope for a cure for approximately a year at this point. She has lost people in their search for the Fireflies. She has lost her innocence inasmuch as she has killed people in order to protect herself and to protect Joel.
Before finding the Fireflies, Joel suggests they go back to Tommy’s and “be done with this whole damn thing.”
Ellie tells him there’s no half-way with this. That after everything they’ve been through and after everyone they’ve lost, “it can’t be for nothing.”
They leave the Firefly base in Salt Lake City without having developed a vaccine for the infection. Her hope for saving humanity goes unfulfilled.
It’s tragic because she didn’t have a say in the decision to sacrifice her life to save humanity. Joel choses for her based on what he wants, not what she would want.
It tragic because their journey, everything they’d been through, ended up being all for nothing.
Well, almost.
Despite not using her immunity to develop a vaccine, Ellie has found someone who is a capable survivor and who, by the end of the story, would do anything to stay with her and keep her safe.
Joel takes her back to Jackson, where, in Part II, we see she is a valued member of the community. Joel, Tommy, Maria, and her friends in Jackson have become her family.
Yes, she has lost people. And more significantly, her immunity to the infection has lost its meaning.
But she has found her place in the world.
And thanks to the family she has found, she won’t have to end up alone.
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