The Last of Us Part 2 has one of the best, though admittedly controversial, game storylines of all time, and there’s one that hits incredibly hard. A moment between Ellie and Joel makes the whole game for me.
Editor’s Note: There will be spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2 below.
The pivotal moment happens during the flashback during the final scene of The Last of Us Part 2. After coming home to the cleared out farmhouse, Ellie picks up her guitar. However, she finds she can no longer effectively play due to her missing fingers. A flashback of her last conversation with Joel begins, giving her a chance to relive the night prior to his death.
After his public embarrassment by a frustrated Ellie at the Jackson dance, Joel plays his guitar on his porch. Ellie approaches, and the two share some awkward small talk about coffee. Joel then moves the subject to Dina and the nature of Ellie’s feelings for her.
Ellie then directly shifts the conversation to the thing they’re dancing around, which they’ve likely been avoiding for months. “I was supposed to die in that hospital,” she says in frustration. “My life would’ve fucking mattered. But you took that from me.”
Joel considers this only briefly and tells Ellie, with no hesitation, that given the chance he would “do it all over again.” Ellie sits with this for a moment, then tell Joel that she doesn’t know if she can forgive him for it. Joel, silently, accepts this.
However, she adds one final glimmer of hope: “But I would like to try.”
A visibly emotional Joel tells her he would like that. After this, the two part ways, unware that they would never speak again.
I think this scene is the heart of everything Ellie did in The Last of Us 2. While at first it seems like her quest was about revenge or “justice,” that’s only a surface level interpretation. To me, I think it’s about this conversation. Of course she wanted revenge, but revenge isn’t what drove her to the lengths she went to over the course of the story.
When Abby killed Joel, she didn’t just take his life. She also took away Ellie’s chance to forgive him. I think that place in her heart where all these unresolved feelings about Joel and his choice lived were now filled with this obsession over Abby’s actions. Ellie associated Abby with these feelings and thought killing her would make it go away.
This is why I think she leaves Dina to go to Santa Barbara, despite her chance at living an ideal family life together. So much of Ellie is flooded with guilt. The survivor’s guilt she always had, but also everything surrounding her relationship with Joel. At this point, I believe she still hadn’t forgiven Joel, even after everything, and it’s eating her up inside. When she finally finds Abby, it is Ellie who forces the final fight. She simply doesn’t know what else to do, in her mind she has to kill Abby to make these feelings go away.
But, right before Ellie can kill her, she sees a flash of a moment in her mind. She sees that night on the porch with Joel. It’s after this that she lets Abby leave with Lev. I think this moment, just before she crosses the final line, is when she forgives Joel.
Ellie now understands at that point during the scene that killing Abby isn’t going to do anything for her. She finally understands it’s her own turmoil she’s been fighting against this whole time. Ellie didn’t kill Joel, but she hurt him by distancing herself. I don’t find her hesitance to forgive him unfounded, but she lived in that limbo for a very long time. Because of this, so did Joel. Her final words to him, those of hope for their future, was likely the happiest he had been in a very long time.
So she finally makes her peace with Joel, both with what he did and also that he’s gone, all at once. She lets Abby go, in some ways also forgiving her, and breaking the cycle of revenge that spread death all over Seattle throughout the game. Ellie finally learned what Abby did after she killed Joel. Revenge doesn’t make any of those things go away, you have to let them go on your own.
I interpret the ending, and Ellie leaving the guitar, as her finally letting things go and forgiving herself too. It is an oddly hopeful conclusion in some respects, especially given it is also how the scene with Joel and Ellie ends. Things aren’t good, but maybe they’re starting to get better.
The Last of Us II Remastered is available exclusively on the PS5.
