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Game On: Ellie is the movie monster in 'The Last of Us Part II'

NAUGHTY DOG

Game On: Ellie is the movie monster in 'The Last of Us Part II'

Spoilers ahead for both games in ‘The Last of Us’ franchise.

The best moment from the original The Last of Us is also the moment I hate the most.

The game’s finale sees the lead character and emotional mess Joel rush into a Salt Lake City hospital’s hallway, guns blazing. His mission is to save co-star and emotional substitute for his daughter, Ellie, from a surgery that may lead to a cure for the zombie plague that has obliterated the world, but at the price of her life.

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It’s a trade of equivalent exchange Joel isn’t willing to make, setting off on one last charge of murder and bloodshed. The game immediately gives you an automatic assault rifle, signifying that the time for stealth and trap-based theatrics is over. Joel has one goal now: Charge headlong into the dark, kill whoever is in his way, and save Ellie one last time. He gets to the operating room and one final obstacle awaits the player: Three medical staff, including the doctor.

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The doctor refuses to back down from the surgery, even as an enraged Joel has a gun pointed at them. There is no way around this moment for the player. No choice. No moral grey. You are forced to pull the trigger on innocent people because the plot must go on. And while this moment made me mad for its emotionally duplicitous treachery, I realized something else.

This moment is vital. Without this moment, The Last of Us is nothing more than The Walking Dead derivative, post-apocalyptic shlock seemingly too proud of itself for saying “wow, we might be the true monsters in this dead world. It really makes you think.” This moment makes a statement about Joel; he is a broken man who only sees making amends for his past mistakes as his only path forward. Much like how Ellie will scream at Joel in regards to this moment of him saving her from an assured death, Joel wanted to do something with his life that mattered. All it cost him was his humanity and his relationship with the child who he gave everything to save.

Much like this moment in the first game, The Last of Us Part II hinges on a moment where Ellie chooses revenge and headlong violence. The player learns at the end of the game that her revenge was motivated by trying to find forgiveness for Joel’s sin in her name. But at this moment in the red light-tinged basement of a hospital with a crowbar and a scared woman, Ellie is only one thing.

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She’s the movie monster. She’s the unyielding slasher. She is rage, incarnate.

The chase scene in the hospital where Ellie tears through doors and ignores a hail of bullets in her pursuit of Abby-adjacent lackey Nora is a complete change of pace. No longer is the game about stealth and mindfulness, but instead, Ellie runs through hallways screaming taunts and bloody murder at this woman whose only sin was helping a friend (even if said help involved torturing and killing a man). Ellie is an unstoppable machine here. Covered in weapons and leaping over obstacles, she shrugs off gunfire from her pursuers, chasing Nora into the plague spore-infested basement of the hospital after the two crash through the floor.

I make the movie monster comparison not simply because Ellie comes off like Jason Vorhees from Friday The 13th in this scene, but also because of the symmetry and use of genre tropes. It’s impossible to deny that Nora, a Black woman, is often the first and frequent victim of horror movie monsters, and one that Ellie dispatches with the same gore and violence as classic horror fare.

But if you need more evidence that Ellie is meant to be the monster, look no further than when players take control of Abby later in the game. In the same hospital. Against the largest, most grotesque Infected found in the franchise. A literal unstoppable ball of rotted mass and wailing flesh, able to kill in a single hit.

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And much like the Rat King Infected, Ellie also becomes a writhing mass that lashes out for reasons she can no longer fully understand. Her rage is a cycle unto itself, and the same one that Joel found himself in so many years prior, deciding to redeem his most loved one at any cost. It isn’t until the game’s crescendo final fight in the murky waters between an Abby who has made peace with her rage and an Ellie who thinks the only answer is revenge to obtain forgiveness that we see the truth.

Ellie will always be the monster and there’s nobody left to forgive her.

First Published July 9, 2020, 1:30 p.m.

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Gameplay image of Ellie from "The Last of Us Part II."  (NAUGHTY DOG)
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