Ten years ago, gamers were arguing over the ending of . Now the finale of the HBO series has premiered, and a whole new audience of viewers new to the story are arguing about it. I, for one, love discourse, and I love that this game that sꦡo many of us admire has once again spawned arguments over its conclusion. Spoilers ahead, obviously.
In the finale, Joel and Ellie finally find the Fireflies, but the faction doesn’t recognise Joel and immediately knock him out. He wakes up in the hospital with Marlene standing over him – she reveals that Ellie is being prepped for a surgery that will most likely kill her, so they can extract the co♚rdyceps from her brain and make a cure. Marlene says she didn’t tell Ellie so she wouldn’t be afraid, and tells her men to escort Joel to the highway and leave h🅰im there.
Joel overpowers them on the way out of the hospital and murders everybody in his way until he finds Ellie. Then he murders the surgeon who was going to operate on her and takes Ellie back to Jackson, Wyoming. Wܫhen she asks what🍰 happened, he lies to her, saying that the Fireflies had been testing other immune people, and they couldn’t find a cure, so they left. Ellie makes him swear he’s telling the truth, and he does.
The ending of the episode is more or less the trolley problem, but with added complications. Some people have written that immediately killing your only test subject to make a cure is a bad idea, which I agree with – Slate wrote a piece ab🍌out how , but let’s put that aside. This part of the story is pretty much science fiction, bꩲut let’s take it at face value.
Let’s say that the only way to make a cure really wa💞s to kill Ellie. Let’s also assume, for argument’s sake, that she was the only immune person in the country and that the cure would have worked, since there’s no way for us to know. Discussions around the ethics of Joel’s choice have revolved largely around the fact that Joel had already lost a daughter, and couldn’t bear losing another, surrogate though she may be.
The show makes it quite clear that Joel did this out of desperation, not rational thought – while we can armchair philosophise about whether it was utilitaria⛄n for him to doom the world for one person, Joel was not philosophising, he was simply acting on his impulses. Earlier in the show, we saw him having panic attacks over the thought of not being able to protect Ellie, and we know that he sees he▨r as a reason to live because of what he says to her earlier in the episode. He does what he believes he must to protect her.
Of course, it’s a selfish thing to do. They were living in an objectively bad worꦜld, full of people who hurt each other, and danger at every turn, but by allowing the surgery, Joel would have given the world a chance at healing – though we know from earlier in the episode that Joel had tried to kill himself after losing Sarah, and the burden of losing Ellie as well would likely have been too much to bear.
Here lies the major ethical question – Ellie did𒐪n’t consent to the surgery. It’s heavily implied that she would have been willing to die to make a cure, had she been asked, as she insisted to Joel they had to go “all the way” to make everything they’d been through worth it. There is a version of this trolley problem where Ellie willingly lay on the track to save everybody else, but she was never given the chance. A sacrifice where the person dying doesn’t know they’re dying is just a murder. It’s worse to think that Marlene might have known Ellie had to die all along, essentially getting Joel to deliver her to her death.
Joel knew that Ellie didn’t know, and there’s an argument to be made that it’s okay to massacre a building full of people, including the last remaining surgeon in the country who could make a cure, in order to stop a child from being murdered. If the Fireflies had asked Ellie, and she’d consented, maybe a lot of death could have been avoided, but they didn’t. They told Joel the truth, that she didn’t know she was about to be killed, and Joel retaliated to stop a murdꦓer. F*** around and find out… except he killed people who put down their weapons and begged for their lives. The argument circles around again.
The entire point of the ending is that there is no easy answer. There are people who say Joel was entirely in the right, and people who say he was entirely in the wrong. Even a middle ground, where he was right to save her but wrong in how he did it, can be debated. I think it was the wrong choice, but the reason people feel so strongly about it is because nobody can really blame him for doing what he did. We have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:all done selfish things for love, and while none of us will ever have to murder a building full of people to rescue a surrogate daughter, it’s not hard to imagine the d♏ifficulty of the situation.
The beauty of the game, and now the show, is that there is no easy moral takeaway – you are forced repeatedly to confront the horror of the world and the peop൲le in it, and the brutality it takes to survive in the world. The protagonist that you thought was a hero turned out to be capable of equally horrible things. The ending of the game was provocative for its time, and it still is now, in a differen🥃t medium. The ‘good guy’ stopped the world from being saved, and whether it was worth it is up to the viewer. Whether you agree with his choice or not doesn’t make the ending good or bad. The moral quandary is the point.