In “The Last of Us,” Joel Miller is admittedly not a great guy who does a lot of morally questionable things, but his reasoning for saving Ellie is something I can’t blame him for.
The first season of the show came out in 2023, and as the second season is rolling out now, my interest in affirming this point has been reignited.
Now I’m not a parent, so I don’t know what it’s like to have your own child be in danger and the fear that drives someone to save their child at all costs, but I think I understand why he did it.
At the beginning of “The Last of Us,” one of the first things we see is Joel losing his daughter, Sarah. So, it is understandable that he would not let that happen again to someone he sees as a daughter.
Ellie is not Joel’s biological daughter, but she’s like a stepdaughter to him and she means so much more to him than just a friend. Ellie reciprocates this feeling.
Most people don’t know what it’s like to kill someone, but Joel’s actions show the kinds of things that a person might do for someone we love.
It is wrong to kill people, but when they are threatening to kill someone you love, many people would not hesitate to kill them before that can happen – and that is exactly what Joel did.
In both the game and the show, Ellie has to have Cordyceps surgically removed so it can be examined in order to create a cure for the virus. However, Cordyceps grows in the brain, so the operation will kill her.
As it happened, the surgeon operating on Ellie is also the only person in the world who knows how to do the operation, so when Joel ends up shooting him in the operating room, he essentially destroys the chance the world has at finding a cure.
People will say that by killing the Fireflies and the surgeon who was going to operate on Ellie, Joel destroyed the world’s chance at a cure to the Cordyceps virus.
However, we don’t know that for certain. We don’t know if or how they could have been able to develop a vaccine for the virus and if it didn’t work, then Ellie would have died for nothing.
In the real world, it takes a lot more than just one case to develop a vaccine, so I don’t think it would be very likely that this would work. In the real world, there are no clinically FDA-approved vaccines for fungal infections, according to the American Society for Microbiology.
Joel wasn’t willing to take that risk and I don’t blame him. I can’t say whether or not I would have done the same thing, but then again, I don’t live in a post-apocalyptic world where having morals won’t get you very far.
I can’t deny that Joel’s actions were selfish and that it wasn’t what Ellie would have wanted. The prologue to “The Last of Us” shows exactly why he did it and it makes one think about the question of what we would do to save the people we love.
When Joel’s daughter Sarah dies in the beginning of the story, the audience is compelled to feel a great deal of empathy for Joel, so it comes full circle when Joel is faced with the possibility of losing someone close to him again.
It was wrong for Joel to lie to Ellie about there being no cure and it was wrong to kill the Fireflies and the surgeon, though Joel did not act out of malice, but out of fear.
Joel did what he thought was right, even if it wasn’t necessarily for the right reasons. One of the main themes in “The Last of Us” is dealing with loss.
He dealt with the loss of his child for 20 years and after such a long time, he finally found someone he truly cared about more than himself and he could not deal with losing them again.
It is for this reason that I do not blame Joel for what he did. It may have been wrong, but if they were in his position, I think many people might do the exact same thing.