Ok - now that's over......
I finished The The Last Of Us yesterday, and was somewhat perplexed by the ending in which Joel [the character you have mainly played as] quite suddenly morphs from what you'd assumed was the 'good guy' into the perhaps 'not so good after all' leaving the game to finish on a slightly unhappy note. A brief recap runs as follows. Joel, some years after loosing his daughter in a sort of 'viral caused zombie outbreak' becomes unwillingly embroiled in a quest to deliver an apparently immune teenage girl to a hospital run by a renegade group who are attempting to isolate a vaccine that will save humanity from the deadly contagion. After a long and hazardous trek, during the course of which he has become attached to the girl [almost as a substitute daughter] he arrives at the centre, only to discover that the process of isolating the virus and developing the vaccine will involve the girl being sacrificed, as the pathogen is inextricably integrated into her brain, which must necessarily be resected, resulting [for obvious reasons] in her death.
By this point, the girl [Ellie] has been taken to theatre, and Joel incarcerated while the necessity of this course of action is explained to him. Enraged, he breaks free, killing his guards and heads up through the hospital to rescue her before she can be killed. En route he discovers tapes and memo's showing that the group leader, a woman called Marlene, far from being indifferent to Ellie's fate, has agonised over the need for her destruction - and in fact having raised Ellie from childhood, has a much bigger hurdle to overcome than he Joel, in accepting it. Despite this Joel fight's and kills his way to the operating theatre, where the surgeon is about to begin the procedure. Bursting in, Joel threatens all of the operating room staff and when the surgeon refuses to surrender Ellie, he kills him and everyone else in the theatre. making off with the unconscious girl, he puts her in his vehicle, before being found by Marlene and being begged to reconsider what he is doing. Telling him that Ellie is humanity's only hope and that "it is what she would have wanted" Marlene begs for her own life as well, but Joel shoots her on the basis that "You will only try to find us".
Later Ellie comes too in the truck and asks what has happened. Joel lies to her, saying that there were lots more immune children just like her, and that the renegades had actually given up looking for a vaccine anyway. Later as the two approach another town Ellie, somewhat unhappy and unsure what is going on, tells Joel that when she was first bitten by an infected person [the means by which the virus spreads] she was not alone, but had been in the company of a group of other girls. She had watched them all die one by one and was suffering the most terrible guilt that she had been the only one to survive. She begs to know that what Joel has told her is true and he, after a pause, promises that it was.
And so it ends.
Now here's the dilemma. Did Joel do the right thing in saving Ellie or not. Sure he killed everyone in his path to save her - lot's of well meaning people as well as the ones who were trying to prevent him from reaching her - but he had earlier promised her that he would not leave the hospital without her. But in many ways his acts were as much for himself as for Ellie's sake; he could not stand the thought of loosing a second 'daughter' - even in the face of saving humanity. And the clues were there that Joel was not necessarily a good man even right from the start; he didn't get to survive by being good - he got to survive by being utterly ruthless. Put in broader terms the question boils down to are good ends ever justified by bad means. Thomas Covenant would have known the answer to this; he was prepared to let the whole Land perish to save the life of one child bitten by a rattle-snake - and Morham agreed with him.
Now The Last Of Us is not the first game to make us make moral choices, but here's the point - in this game we are not given the choice. There are no alternate endings, there are no dialogue choices where we can mediate the harshness of the ending. Joel kills innocent people, lies to Ellie and quite probably acts against what would have been her wishes had she been aware of what the choices were - and in all probability does it more for his own benefit rather than hers. Unlike say Bioshock, there were no alternate possibilities with which we could assuage our guilt. We all want Ellie to live - of course we do, we have travelled with her across the apocalyptic waste that America has become, we have seen her save Joel at her own grave risk - but we want a nice clean end; we want to see Joel's choices vindicated and for him to come up smelling of roses......but he doesn't. Instead we finish on a note of mendacity. An unhappy girl following a decidedly questionable man into a ruined world where hope has been snuffed out on the back of selfish need.
