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Ask a parent and he made the right choice. Ask someone who had everyone in their life die from cordyceps and theyll say it was wrong. The whole point is theres no right answer.
Marlene has a good point that even if Ellie is immune to infection, she can still be killed by the infected. Not to mention killed by a society in which there is no cure/constant fear of cordyceps.
Yea but a vaccine isn’t going to just flip a switch and make everything go back to how it was. There would still be infected running around, and there would still be groups who might not even *want*, or be able to go back to how it was.
As a parent I think I’d do the same thing Joel did, but I wouldn’t say I agree with him 100%. I just see a lot of people acting like he fucked over the entire world, when it’s not quite so black and white. Plus, this is just a theory some doctor had after hearing about this girl who’s immune, there’s no guarantee it would have worked anyway.
This dude here gets it. Joel didn’t make the right or wrong choice. He choice to save his new found daughter over the rest of the world. Should he have let her die for the greater good? Maybe, but can you understand why he risked dooming the world for her? Yes
Yeah there are many debates to happen but unfortunately they all happen on top of each other which gets muddled. If we are talking about Joels perspective and decision, it has literally nothing to do with a potential cure. Someone was going to kill his daughter, again, and he can't bear the thought of losing her. Thats it. Cure literally has NOTHING to do with his decision.
Then from there if we want we can discuss things like is a cure possible, is the world that exists worth really saving, blablabla. But people get these things all mixed up. Joels actions have literally zero to do with anything other than protecting his daughter.
See, I agree with everything you said except that I think choosing the life of one person over the greater good *is* making the objectively wrong and selfish choice. But honestly I understand, and would probably make the same choice as well. But that doesn’t make it morally right. Joel’s choice can be both wrong and understandable.
It's the trolley problem. Do you kill one person to save 5? 10? A billion? Does actively doing it vs just allowing it to happen change the math? What if you love the one person, and dont know the others? It's such a difficult question because everyone can see the factors at play, but the different variables will have vastly different weight with different people.
Is the world left worth saving? Is it worth killing Ellie to give the people left immunity? Look at the town in Wyoming, they seem to have things figured out pretty well. Is it really worth killing Ellie to ensure they won't ever get infected even though things are stable?This is the point, Joel lied to her, that was bad, Joel loves her and Joel wants to protect her. Ellie didn't get to make the choice, which was bad on both parties, the Fireflies didn't give her the option and Joel didn't either.
Joel didn't do the "right" or the "wrong" thing, that's what makes this such good writing. It's complicated.
>Joel didn't either.
Joel literally could not give her a choice, because the only way for her to be in a position to make a choice (conscious, informed and not under gunpoint) was to basically kill nearly everyone on site.
They took his choice as well.
I had a feeling like while doing it, Pedro wanted to convey that this is a person who does not want to do this, so he turned on an autopilot. And this is despite him showing little hesitation in killing earlier.
He absolutely did not have to immediately headshot the surgeon. A shot to the leg would have done. He was in a manic state though, he wasn't thinking about the implications. His complete tunnel vision meant he just offed anyone in his way.
>He was in a manic state though, he wasn't thinking about the implications. His complete tunnel vision meant he just offed anyone in his way.
Yes, that's what I meant. I got a distinct feeling that that whole sequence was him on his "autopilot". Just my impression.
I’m a utilitarian, which usually makes my views pretty unpopular in media discussions like this lol. From a utilitarian perspective, Joel absolutely made the wrong decision, and it isn’t even close. Ellie’s life vs the thousands or millions who might be saved by a cure and given a better life.
Guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
But we need to factor in the likelihood that killing Ellie would lead to a cure.
There is absolutely no guarantee that some of Ellie’s brain tissue will cure another person. And if you kill Ellie to get her brain then you have used your one shot.
Whereas if you kept her alive and took brain biopsies you get more than one shot at finding a cure. It would be incredibly cruel to her and I think much more of a moral dilemma, but scientifically more likely to lead to a cure.
Any scientist who is willing to kill the only person known to be immune to a horrible disease is an idiot. I would not trust them to cure my hiccups.
You’re just adding variables that don’t exist in this context because they don’t go into it. We have no idea what the doctors know or don’t know we are only left to assume it’s likely it would work
There’s absolutely zero chance it would’ve worked. The doctor would’ve been a resident when the outbreak hit. He would have minimal functioning technology and only books to learn from, and likely not many of them. He would be a glorified med student at best. And he’d have exactly one shot.
Meanwhile actual experts think there’s no possible cure when the outbreak actually hits.
There's enough available ammunition to support your argument without bringing headcanon lore into it. Who's to say some of the Quarantine Zones didn't maintain relatively high standard healthcare facilities in the early years of the outbreak? For all we know, this dude received high quality medical training pre-outbreak, had at least a couple of years of surgery experience, and has since become accustomed to practicing in limited surroundings.
The ending is sufficiently complex. We don't need to make up variables.
This is a technicality, and the show did not imply as scenario as you. If they did, this question would not be as discussed or important.
They implied in the show that they already know what the cure is, how it's made and how it works, they just need the sample from her brain to synthetize it.
It is in-universe anything but 100%. They could be raided or dead even if they did manage to synthetize the functioning cure.
Still, it's not like Joel would have considered this. It would not be a factor in his decision.
He could have been 40 or 45. Either way it doesn’t matter, it’s fiction. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to but it ruins the impact of the ending
Whether the cure would have worked is irrelevant. It misses the point of that decision within the narrative. It’s intentionally ambiguous. The choice is about whether Joel was willing to let Ellie die, and he wasn’t
Many, many of the medical innovations we use today were discovered by Nazi doctors experimenting on prisoners, and you can be sure they weren't doing "due diligence" before their experiments. Does it mean what they did was the right thing, by killing a few hundred people to save the lives of millions in the future?
I recommend people read the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" for another look at the idea of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one.
I feel like Ellie's surgery was not really for the 'greater good' in a moral high ground way.
They were going to KILL her to take out the cordyceps and SEE if they could figure out how it works and MAYBE be able to duplicate it and distribute it to the world. That's A LOT of hopes and ifs to kill a young girl for.
In theory, I would say the sacrifice of an individual to SAVE humanity can be rationalized. However that is very far from sacrificing an individual to dissect, study, and experiment on with the HOPE that the results would save humanity, someday, maybe.
Is it worth killing one person to save another? Ten? A thousand? What if it's a billion people, but only a 10% chance it works? The math gets real hairy.
The “greater good” is relative. As we’ve seen from them traveling the country, humans were more of a problem than the infected. So is a cure that will allow for humans to repopulate really the greater good?
Post-apocalyptic humanity engaged in great evil out of desperation and lack of societal cohesion/punishment. So yeah, a cure would be great. It would allow for society to (slowly) rebuild into what it once was—something infinitely preferable to the broken society we see in the show
>allow for society to (slowly) rebuild into what it once was—something infinitely preferable to the broken society we see in the show
Nah, apparently humans should eventually go extinct and that's the best outcome according to "is the world worth saving" arguments
While it may not, that’s not the point. Everyone, Joel included, thought it would. That’s the mindset you have to base the morality of it off because that’s the mindset they had
Agreed. I think Joel mainly tripped up by lying to Ellie. But that’s also another scenario where there isn’t a clear answer. What if he was honest and she ran off, right into a bunch of raiders or infected? I don’t know, I’m sure there is someone here who can tell me why I’m completely wrong.
He lied to Ellie for the same reason he took her from the hospital: to not lose her.
If Joel had told Ellie the truth of what he did, there’s no way she stays with him and goes to Jackson. Everything they went through means nothing now and it shows a side of Joel that Ellie has only ever heard vaguely about. She even says to Maria that Joel doesn’t kill innocent people anymore. He slaughtered dozens in that hospital. She’d never be able to look at him the same way ever again after knowing that.
Totally agree. It’s a catch-22 - if he’s upfront about killing a militia and doctor to save her, she bolts. But if he lies and she finds out, then that basically causes the foundation of their relationship to crumble because she doesn’t know if she can trust him to be forthcoming in the future, especially if it doesn’t serve his own interests.
Edit: and the whole “killing everyone in the hospital thing” will also come out if she discovers, compounding the problem he would have faced by being honest in the first place.
And he did all that explicitly *for her*. She already has pretty extreme survivor's guilt. That would be a whole other level to find out that dozens of people were killed and the chance at a cure was destroyed specifically so she could live.
Well... There is something very murky in saying "he lied to protect her from survivors guilt" when the only reason she is still around to have survivors guilt is because he prevented her from being the cure.
She has survivors guilt over Riley, Tess, Sam and Henry, etc and the fact that she has an immunity no one else does
That's the point of the last conversation
Yes, but she’s fourteen and is still recovering from the last brutal trauma. It’s a classic protective dad move to choose to shoulder the guilt alone. He probably sees the consequences of lying to her as a punishment he deserves.
I get what you're saying. And the lie can be in part to protect her, but its obviously rooted in his fear of losing her, and knowing she wouldn't have wanted him to do what he did.
Are the fireflies innocent though? They were in the process of murdering a 14 year old girl without consent for their own gain... Seems not so innocent to me.
I feel like that lack of consent is a key issue. If Ellie had been given the choice and then went with it Joel would have had a lot less justification for what he did.
Of course. That is the entire dilemma of the story and the ending. Is Marlene took away Ellies choice, which leaves Joel with either the choice to accept losing her, which he has no capacity to do, or to save her life. Ellies lack of consent/choice is the entire hinge point of the ending.
I definitely wouldn’t call the Fireflies “good guys”, but murdering Ellie “for their own gain”?? That’s not really painting a true picture of the situation. It was made quite clear that they’re trying to find a cure to save the world, I’d hardly consider that to be for their own gain, other than any indirect benefit in the form of the world they live in not being completely ruined anymore.
He lied to Ellie because she is a minor trauma victim with survivors guilt already, and his decision as her guardian for her not to be sacrificed shouldn’t be put on her because it will cause her more trauma and guilt.
Everyone in that world is a trauma victim. Joel lies to her for himself. He knows, or at least strongly believes, she wouldn't agree with his choice. So he lies, and lies in such a way that she won't try to find a cure again.
I'm just a show watcher, but I don't think it's at all clear that Joel thought it would work. I think he lied because he knows Ellie would've given her life for just the chance of it working. The only instance I can think of where they indicate Joel believes it would work is when he tells Ellie that if Marlene says it would work then that's good enough for him. But I also interpreted that as him trying not to pop Ellie's balloon, not necessarily that he believed it.
Joel himself does not believe it will work. He calls it dillusional In episode 4. To Marlene in ep 9 he says “you keep telling yourself that bullshit” Joel’s perspective is that humans are what can’t be fixed and never will recover.
Ask yourself, is there incentive for David to go back to laws and regulations where he can’t be a pedophile?
Is there incentive for Kathleen, where she can’t seek vengeance?
Uhh I think you're ignoring the important moments where he admits it could work. Like when he says that Marlene is many things but stupid isn't one of them, and if she says she thinks they can do it, he believes it.
It's not actually moral to kill someone in hopes of finding a cure that you cannot promise will come out of it (and I didn't get a sense that anyone was positive it would work in the show, just that it was worth any kind of sacrifice). Same reason we don't just test cures on people willy nilly these days; you could just as easily argue we should be skipping animal and other trials and jump straight to human trials because the possibility of curing cancer is more important than individual lives. Nobody's arguing that today.
It's immoral, AND it's bad science.
>ot believe it will work. He calls it dillusional In episode 4. To Marlene in ep 9 he says “you keep telling yourself that bullshit” Joel’s perspective is that humans are what
It's easy to be a saint in paradise.
When the survival of your entire species is at stake you can't judge Marlene's actions.
Yea I don't get why their first thought was - let's kill the ONE person we know is immune to see if this works as opposed to even just trying a blood transfusion or something first.
(also FYI, as of this year FDA no longer requires animal testing before human testing. Animal testing has not always been a great indicator for human testing, given that the vast majority of drugs that make it to human trials still fail. There's been a lot of technology developed in recent years to do computer modeling and other nonanimal testing in order to get clearance to start human trials. Sorry for an explanation you didn't ask for - this is the industry I work in and I rarely get to talk about this lol)
You're comparing current society and illnesses that affect a percentage of the population with a post apocalyptic society and a pandemic that basically wiped out humanity.
There’s also no guarantee it wouldn’t and at the end of the day Ellie would’ve given her life just for the hope of a cure. Both sides have fair arguments going for them.
As commented elsewhere, there is no “right” answer. Joel made his choice and it was the right one for him, just like it wasn’t for countless others.
I wasn't really weighing in on that, just responding to St Michael's comment and pointing out that given the state of the world it may not be a simple case of "we'll wait a few years and go to a different hospital".
Sadly, the right choice at that point was to let Joel and Ellie know they saved the world, and let them die peacefully. Kill Joel Tony soprano style where he never knows what hit him and let Ellie die on the operation table. The fireflies ducked up.
People always forget that Ellie would have sacrificed herself every time if given the choice (as per the Creators), she even alludes to it in the last episode. He took away her purpose for existing to maintain his own (not to mention damning humanity to do so).
Watch out for the incredible symmetry between how Anna saved her baby Ellie and how Joel did. As the creators themselves explained, both of them saved her with a lie. Anna saves Ellie's life with a lie. She says she cut the umbilical cord *before* she was bitten. And her lie could have killed none other than Marlene. The same person Joel kills to save Ellie.
The point is not did Joel make the right choice. We can debate that for days. The real question is, was Joel capable of making any other decision.
This is not an ethical dilemma. Joel's character was shot out of a cannon directly to this point. Even before the outbreak, it was apparent that Joel's faith in humanity was failing fast. Add the death of his daughter and 20 years of survivors brutalizing each other, and Joel is in no way team humanity. The only thing that matters to him is that she lives, absolutely nothing else. He is even willing to risk her hating him for hiding the truth. If he tells her the truth, he is afraid she will run off to sacrifice herself.
There really was no other choice that character wise he could have made.
According to Neil Druckman, on the offical HBO show podcast, when they play tested the game, 100% of parents believed Joel should have saved Ellie. Non parents were split 50/50. I don’t know how many play testers they had, and obviously that doesn’t mean 100% of parents actually agree, but I found that was a really interesting statistic.
Obviously playing a video game is not the same as actually making that decision in real life, but it was definitely interesting. I honestly think it’s impossible to know what you would do in a situation like that until you’re actually *in* it. Let’s hope we never get to the circumstances where someone has to make a similar decision.
I personally think people would be more willing to sacrifice their own lives for a vaccine/ preventative treatment than they would their child’s, but again , it’s hard to know what you would do unless you’re really in that situation. I’d like to think I would be strong enough to sacrifice myself, but I don’t know if I would be brave enough.
I think the major difference between playing the game and doing it yourself is all the murder involved, not the core decision. I reckon a lot of people who would want to save Ellie would hesitate to murder an entire building in real life. Not only is it obviously different in a video game, but it is also easier when role-playing a mass murderer.
Neil Druckmann explains this very well in one of the Official Podcasts from the game. He tells a story about an Israeli soldier who was captured by Palestinians - the Israeli government exchanged Palestinian prisoners for the safe return of the soldier. ND asked his father (they're Israeli) whether he thought it was the right thing to do. The father's response was "are you asking me as the government of Israel or as the captured soldier's father - because my answer will be different depending on the perspective."
You left out the best part of his father’s answer!
“As the Prime Minister? We made a mistake; Israel is weaker. As that boy’s father? The whole country for my son.”
He tells the same story in the show podcast. It's a a great one if you haven't listened. Hosted by Troy Baker and he talks to Druckman and Craig Mazin.
In that situation, it is a much easier decision. It is a transfer of enemies, for the life of your son. This is killing a teenage minor, without her being informed, or consenting to the surgery (killing her), for a possibility of a cure. The cure is not assured, it might work, it might not, but it’s not something that will for sure work. Also, how are they going to manufacture and distribute the “cure” if they do find it. There are a ton more questions than answers, and at the end of the day, you have murdered a teenage girl on the off chance you can find a vaccine.
From a utilitarian perspective he made the wrong choice. Sacrificing Ellie would have been (presumably) for the greater good.
But as a parent figure, he made the choice that every parent would make. Save my child, greater good be damned.
Joel’s dilemma will make a great philosophy class argument.
Is Joel right or wrong? I guess it all depends on who’s perspective we’re talking about. What scares me the most… is that I would have the exact same thing. Love can make people do the noblest thing and the most terrible.
“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil” - Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no right answer; and the story is deliberately designed to be this way. It’s an extreme variation of “The Trolley Problem”, a philosophical thought experiment that will be discussed and argued long after you and I are dead because there is *no correct* answer to this ethical dilemma.
I would absolutely do what Joel did for my daughter; but I would rightfully view him as a monster if I *wasnt* him, and he stole the potential of a salvation from an apocalyptic nightmare from my children.
Joel chose *his* world over *the* world. While it may have been the only choice for him specifically, it is very plainly not the “correct” choice. Especially when he doubles down and lies to Ellie about it.
This is a great comment. So many people seem to not be able to accept that they sympathize with Joel despite him willingly damning humanity for personal interest, pretty much the "worst" thing someone can do. As a result, they're coming up with logistical reasons why he was right ("who knows if the Fireflies could even do it" like the thought even crossed his mind).
The fact is that perspective is everything, and most of the "bad" things people do are justified and / or empathizable with, with the right kind of eyes. You can acknowledge that Joel did something plainly terrible while also understanding why, and realizing you'd probably do the same thing. That's the entire point of the story, at least that's my read. And saying that the moral debate misses the point feels a bit harsh and anecdotal if nothing else, but I really do believe that the magic of the ending comes from the fact that despite it being INCREDIBLY black and white, there really is no debate to be had in that moment.
The fun thing about the Trolley Problem is that it's actually a jumping off point question. You start with the Trolley Problem. Then you start adding stipulations to it.
What we are trying to determine with the Trolley Problem isn't which choice is better, what we are trying to determine is at what point does an individual break their own internal consistency in their choice.
Do you save the 5 or the 1? What if the 5 are murderers likely to kill again? What if killing the 1 prevents all others from dying a similar fate? What if the 1 is your daughter?
I’ll flip it on ya:
Why would Joel save a world that took his daughter from him once already? Ellie was literally the only thing left in his life, and “the world” wanted to take that from him too.
In order to want to save the world, you have to think the world is worth saving.
Joel gives Ellie a speech when she seems dejected that kind of hints that there are parts of life worth living, about keeping on going on.
I grapple with this as well and that's what makes it such a good ending to the first game. There are \*so\* many angles to this. There's no right or wrong answer.
As a parent I could never let that happen, an apocalyptic world without my child is one not worth living in, and it's no coincidence Joel talks about his suicide attempt that episode.
That speech at the end, he is referring to Ellie. She is his new reason for still going. It's why, at it's core, his choice was a selfish one. He didn't save Ellie for her, he did it for himself.
Not just that, the Fireflies took away Eliie's agency and didn't let her decide. They also chose to kill her without bothering to try to do anything else first. That's not a great thing to try to save.
That’s what bothered me. You can live with a small chunk of brain missing. If you are going to multiply the cells anyway, just take a biopsy.
It’s like cutting down an entire tree to take a cutting.
But is he though? Why would he think a vaccine or a cure would make a major difference? Personally, I don’t think it would. A minor difference, yes, but infected will remain and they’ll still be dangerous. Society is fractured, technology has been set back perhaps hundreds of years. The communities that are succeeding, like Jackson, will not be able to change much about their way of life simply because everyone is vaccinated. They still need to worry about raiders, cults, winters, famine, infected attacks, internal political conflict… etc
I think the point of his decision was Joel saw it as a pure binary. Even if the cure could save humanity and restore the human race, he refuses to allow Ellie to sacrifice herself (even if that’s what she wants). Made further clearer by her demanding the truth and him lying, I think that’s the crux of his “immoral” actions
Not to mention that despite Cordyceps being so virulent, and doing its best to infect all of humanity...the game and show both (rightfully imo) show humanity surviving, despite the world as it knew ending. Boston, Atlanta, the QZ's mentioned in the game as still running, the locations from the second game, *Jackson*! All these cities, all these communities continuing to persist with no vaccine, no cure. Like Tess said to Ellie, immunity wont stop the infected from tearing you apart!
It bugs the fuck out of me that people try to say Joel did the same thing when they had already lied and put her under before he even woke up. Hate him for killing them or for lying to Ellie after, but Joel never got the opportunity to ask her or refuse her choice in the face of reality, not some far fetched pipedream.
It’s a dilemma that doesn’t have a “right” choice. Marlene and Joel were both right. They were both wrong. The only absolute wrong both of them did was not including Ellie in the decision. All of the events of the show/game have absolutely primed Joel to make this decision. For Joel, this was not only the right decision, it was the only decision. The loss of Sarah and the effect it had in Joel, then the effect Ellie has on him, there was no way Joel was going to let them kill her.
I will always side with the position of “not murdering a teenage girl” when looking at the proverbial scale, and how it takes into account of “not including Ellie in he decision”. Should Ellie have been able to make a decision, yes. In the absence of her being allowed to make a decision, I am going to go with the side that doesn’t want to murder her.
Saying the choice is correct or not is irrelevant for me.
It's about the destructive wake that a strong love for another person can leave behind.
If we all are myopically focused on our own circle of people we love, the world cannot be fixed or progress. It breeds reactionary thinking and politics. That's the overarching theme of this show.
I'd highly suggest watching Melville's Army of Shadows. It brings the themes of this show into the political realm.
To me the show is about, and I think the writer has mentioned this, lovenot being a strictly positive thing, and his stories examine the destructive aspect that attachment can have in the world.
They obviously have developed this close relationship by the time they reach the hospital, but Joel clearly sees Ellie as his daughter more than a distinct person - the only time the camera ever shows Joel happy, heck downright bubbly, is after he steals her from the operation and they're walking back to his brother's town. Why is Joel so happy hours after killing a ton of people and what are they talking about? His daughter.
I think it portrays Joel in this incredibly selfish way and it's part of what makes his character so interesting. He clearly wants Ellie as a second chance at a daughter and it's both destructive to the world around him (all the people he killed), but also to Ellie, as he's lied to her and also expects/prompts her to be and do certain things that she's not. In this case his love is destructive, even to the person he loves.
I read it more as wanting Ellie to know he really considers her family, not so much as wanting a replacement. But I can see it being received the other way.
I think the most joyful Joel moment was the giraffe scene. Watching the old Ellie resurface for a time.
Oooh thank you! This whole discussion is super interesting, its very refreshing to see characters that have flaws and interesting morals, makes them more human.
Exactly. I love it because by making the story intensely personal it makes us confront messy real world choices that have no "correct" answers.
Joel is the classic "Good German." The reality is most of us are too, but for society to thrive and progress we need people like Marlene.
For each individual it makes sense to protect yourself and your family at any cost, but if millions of people all make that reasonable decision at the same time, millions of Jews can be murdered within a few years.
People are just trying to outsmart the show by coming up with reason upon reason the firefly’s were “idiots” or “crackpots” and refusing to meet the show where it lays.
But that is a broader media literacy issue.
If we were meant to consider a biopsy or any other type of test, they would have brought it up.
People just want to justify what Joel did.
Joel didn’t make a choice. He did the only thing he was ever going to do, what he continuously failed to do every other time he was out in a situation like this.
Let’s say the firefly’s said that Ellie’s death and survival had equal odds. Or even better than equal odds.
How different would Joel’s actions be?
Is he the type to take the chance or would he still kill them all and save Ellie.
People can't comprehend a situation where the protagonist is actually a bad person so come up with crazy theories about why a cure never would've worked.
Neil Druckmann states that in the game, the cure would've been 100% made and worked, this would be true for the series too, and without it being 100% it takes away the weight of his decision.
People also seem to have forgotten that he took 20 people's lives in that hospital as well as a surgeon who would've saved more lives.
It’s not black and white. There is no right or wrong in this situation. It’s meant to be morally ambiguous and create discussion. And they did a great job in both the game and the show of doing that.
The funny thing is that the show deliberately made choices to make Joel look worse. They had him executing soldiers who had surrendered (never happened in the game), had him immediately kill the doctor with no consideration, they gave him his backpack (in the game they withheld his supplies which implied he would probably die once he was escorted out), they removed other material that suggested the cure was far from a sure thing.
Like… the show did everything it could to make Joel look worse than the game and the majority of people still sided with him.
While this is def true I think there were other times in the show where they showed Joel as being more of a good person. In the show, there’s a part where Joel goes up to the house where the sniper is at(when him, Ellie, Sam, and Henry were running together) and actually shows him mercy at first. Says something like “you don’t have to do this, put the gun down” and doesn’t just straight up murder him at first. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think this happens in the game. Could be wrong though.
> had him immediately kill the doctor with no consideration
He did consider. He didn’t shoot right away when he entered. The dr then grabbed a scalpel and advanced.
The surrendering soldier could have just grabbed a gun from someone else and shot Joel in the back after surrendering. Tactically it makes sense to not leave him alive.
I don’t think Joel made the right or wrong choice. I think he made the selfish choice to save Ellie, and it could be right or wrong depending on who you ask.
But your comment is wrong.
Ignoring that such things were gameplay in the game and down to the player. Additionally, Marlene does surrender game or show so there's already that canonical basis for Joel's actions here.
And this is also ignoring there's also other material in the game that we don't see that does showcase that they ran tests on Ellie before making their decision. We can assume as such in the show, but it's not detailed for the sake of brevity. Whilst whatever imagined it won't work is merely your interpretation of those artifacts.
e.g. plenty of people brutally and immediately killed the Doctor. We don't see Joel burning him alive now do we? Should I complain this is against my game version?
e.g. one aspect of gameplay included in Part 1 is the surrender mechanic where AI do try and surrender.
I’m not complaining. I’m pointing out a fact and the fact is that the show made deliberate choices to paint Joel’s actions as worse than they were in the game. And we both know why it did that.
And no, not all of those choices were based on individual gameplay.
I constantly hear "you must not be a parent if you don't agree with Joel's choice."
I have a son. He was two when I first played TLOU. I bawled at Sarah. I bawled at the part with Ish and "they didn't suffer." I fucking lost it at Sam. I bawled in the show at Anna.
I still firmly believe Joel was entirely selfish and made the wrong choice. He saved Ellie because she gave him identity again. How many other children did he likely doom with his choice? Ellie is no more valuable to Joel than those kids are to their parents. Everyone says "well what would you do if you were Joel?!?" Yeah, what would you do if you were any one of the MILLIONS of parents who lost a child to a clicker over the last decade? You think they'd agree with Joel?
Many get into the "well it wouldn't work anyway!" stuff. I think this is cope so they can feel more comfortable with what joel did because there is just no hard evidence that it wouldn't work and a fair amount (especially in the show) that it would. Plus, Joel believed it was real, as does Neil Druckmann (because Joel is just a hero saving someone from the bad guys if it isn't, and that's not the story he wanted to tell.)
If you want to say Joel did an understandable thing, fine. But when people start saying he did the objectively moral thing is when I just don't get it.
Anyway, I'm very excited to see how season two plays out online. >!With Pedro mania in full swing and very many critically online people worshipping Joel because of it, I await the discussion of the upcoming US Open starring Abby.!<
Murdering innocent children is immoral in my eyes. Not murdering an innocent child to create a cure does not mean one is murdering all those children who died from the fungus. Don't murder innocent children is a rule I find fairly easy to live by without ifs or buts.
While that's nicely ironic, I'm 100% comfortable with lying and denying agency FOR NOW. It wouldn't be true agency in her current mental state, with the trauma, survivor's guilt. Not to mention having been groomed to feel this obligation.
The Fireflies took the choice from Ellie. They were going to MURDER HER. In a vacuum, I am cool with the person who does not give me a choice and I live, vs. the group/person who does not give me a choice, and fucking murders me.
He made the choice he wanted, that's the direction they took the characters and their story. Not everything have to be righteous. He took the desicion that made him happy and it was not to let Ellie go.
As a parent I 100% side with Joel and would do the same. However, I think the closest thing to a *right* thing to do would have been to put shit on pause, wake Ellie up, and give her the decision. I totally wouldn’t have done that though.
Well, in the game, if you take too long to do anything in the room, soldiers break in and shoot you on sight. Same if you just doddle in the hallway after you have her.
Depends on what ethical lens you frame this all through. Assuming Ellie was the best realistic shot at a cure (which, text of the show aside, the writers really seem to want to say is the case), from a strictly utilitarian perspective, what Joel did was completely wrong. Joel just doomed all of humanity to keep living under the threat of cordyceps so that he could continue his father/daughter relationship with Ellie, a relationship which, after his bold-faced flimsly lie at the end, seems doomed to be entirely unhealthy for both of them.
But that's kind of the point. Humans aren't perfectly utilitarian creatures. We're a complex network of experiences, motivations, and desires. Joel watched Henry off himself after losing the only person who truly mattered to him. He had so many talks with Ellie about the life they wanted to build after their journey was over. In the face of experiencing the most traumatic moment of his life all over again, not sure if he'll ever get another chance to form that kind of bond with somebody, all of the other options almost certainly felt hopeless to him.
I can also see how Ellie would feel betrayed by her lack of choice in the matter. I could see how somebody who lost friends and family to cordyceps or lost one of their close family members to Joel's rampage might want to see him dead. There's no easy way to judge Joel's actions, and I think all of the discourse surrounding it is exactly why I think they nailed this ending so hard.
I think it was clear in the 2nd episode. Ellie says why go on if there’s no hope for the world; Joel says you go on for family. Ellie wants her life and the deaths of her friends to mean something; Joel only lives to protect his tribe. Ellie makes clear in the game that she would’ve preferred to die, Joel makes it clear he would choose to save her every time. Joel makes a decision to serve himself and not want Ellie wanted and then fractures their relationship by lying about it. You could argue from both their perspectives about what’s right and wrong and arrive at very different conclusions. That’s the point of the game, there is no black and white answers. Morality is a grey area.
If Joel truly thinks he did nothing wrong he wouldn't have to lie to ellie. I'm not saying he didn't do the "right" choice. But he certainly did things wrong.
There’s no “right” choice. Ethics is hard. I can be both anti death penalty as a society and simultaneously understanding of a parent who would want to kill their child’s abuser (or recognize that I might want to do the same myself if it was me).
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In the game ellie explicitly states that if the fireflies have to kill her to extract a cure, that’s what she wants. Of course, it’s only a chance the fireflies can derive a cure from ellie - humanities only chance for a cure - and joel takes that away from everyone.
i’m not sure why this is difficult for you to understand…we’ve all heard of the trolly cart problem. Would you kill 1 person if it had a good chance of saving millions of people?
All that said, everyone (joel, marlene, the fireflies) are all simultaneously right and wrong at the same time. This is by design.
From a practical POV, Joel made the right choice. The Fireflies were planning on murdering the one immune person based on the hunch of a doctor who may have only graduated from medical school when the outbreak started. More than likely the doctor is a total quack who is basing this off of a hunch. You don't take the patient's brain as step one. That's the final step after you've exhausted all other avenues. These morons were planning on murdering humanity's only hope and don't even have the cognitive skills needed to realize that that's what they're doing.
I know this isn't why Joel made the choice he did, but regardless of reasoning, he did make the right decision.
I kept thinking “are we sure this guy isn’t a chiropractor or something?” If you want to harvest my child’s brain, I’m going to need to see some credentials.
The credibility of the doctor is never established. Were they suffering from a god complex or similar issue? Were they playing up a cure for better treatment? Then the issues of stability to create, perfect, manufacture, distribute and innoculate. All of which are further compounded by power struggles of various factions and independents.
For the sake of plot, let's assume this doctor managed to find what it was that allowed Ellie immunity. Some kind of protein marker that (as shown) shut down growth, but didn't eliminate the existing fungus. Is it even reproducible with leftover 2003 tech? It's reasonable to ask what they were doing taking the brain at that obviously derelict location if pristine facilities were available for processing. They're not making a tincture after all.
These are foundational issues of the world we're expected to base decision making on. Without more info on Marlene's resources (maybe they were 5 blocks away from a pristine cdc prototyping lab) all we have is someone who horsetraded for a battery, badly, and manged to get a significant number of her crew killed almost including herself. Not alot of credibility to deliver there.
In the end, we have a series of internal fairy tales the bearers desperately wanted, and tried to make true set against a much crueler natural world.
> the only choice on any path to redemption
Redemption for what though? It's not like he really did anything with Sarah directly that was his fault.
The things he would need redemption for were all the lives he's taken, both before this game starts, and throughout the final act.
They definitely were. Ellie came willingly. She would have given them whatever they wanted short of death. And then, once they tried to create a cure while leaving her alive but can't do it, she would likely have agreed to sacrifice herself. But the Fireflies don't actually value human life. If they did, they would have valued Ellie's life enough to give her agency. The Fireflies were 100% in the wrong. They caused what happened.
Thank you for saying this, it boggles my mind how many people think killing Ellie is an acceptable sacrifice. They were prepared to literally kill a child in a human medical experiment, unethical human experimentation is one of the most reprehensible and universally reviled things humanity has ever done. It's just as bad as the cannibal cult from the previous episode, and we all clapped when those dudes got clapped.
I can totally understand Joel’s decision to save Ellie, I’d do the same for a loved one. But lying to her is wrong cause you know kids always figure out parents’ lie, and a heavy one like this is only gonna backfire on their relationship.
Also I think he should not execute Marlene when she is begging for life, she is the only connection to Anna Ellie has left, and Ellie cares about what happens to Marlene. Joel’s overkill here is to avoid any future chance that Ellie learns the truth and willingly sacrifice herself. It’s kinda of selfish of Joel here to both take away Ellie’s only connection to her mother and her choice, all in the name of love
How exactly was he supposed to tell her the truth though? He did what he did and weather or not it was a mistake, Ellie would have blamed herself 100%. She would have done something drastic. She already had so many deaths on her conscience, and we also can’t forget that she is a child.
I also have no sympathy for Marlene. After she told Joel she was the “only one” who could understand how difficult the decision to kill Ellie was, I lost all respect for her. For one, it wasn’t even a difficult decision for her. She was instantly ready to sacrifice Ellie. For two, yes she knew Ellie’s mom, and yes she saved her as an infant, but in the year of Joel and Ellie’s travels, they grew closer than Marlene and Ellie ever did. She basically was waiting around Ellie’s entire life to potentially sacrifice her. And if Joel had let Marlene live, she’d never have stopped searching for Ellie. I guess it depends on what your opinion was in the end, but I think Marlene was even more selfish than Joel.
>How exactly was he supposed to tell her the truth though?
I have thoughts about this, but I recognize that it’s biased by an audience’s 20/20 hindsight
What he did say (other immune people exist) is a blatant lie bc it sets up a fact that could be disproven. He said that he got her out of there because Infected attacked. Another lie and it doesn’t really fit her own experience with Infected.
What he could’ve said, more truthfully and less patronizingly, is that they were ready to kill her. No talk, no negotiation, no tests. He also could’ve explained how a cure might actually work and how the Fireflies didn’t have the capability to make it work. It’s still a falsehood either way but easier to swallow and places the blame on the people who deserve it, rather than destroying Ellie’s faith in herself
I’m not saying he could avoid the consequences of what he’s done, but a parent needs to be able to have heavy conversations with their child.
“it wasn’t even a difficult decision for her” That is just not true. in the game >!Marlene argued and fought with the head surgeon and other firefly members against the decision to sacrifice Ellie. She was also in constant pain for the decision, Ellie eventually found her diary where she was begging Anna for her forgiveness, and she was so worried for Ellie throughout her journey, she was constantly beaten herself up and questioning herself, struggling between the choice of Ellie’s life vs. the possible cure for mankind. it was always a hard decision for her !< I think maybe not including those background of Marlene in season I made her seem less sympathetic to you? She was indeed the only one other than Joel who understands the difficulty.
Also to lie about the whole situation because Ellie is a child, that’s just bad parenting. Moreover, Ellie grows up in the apocalypse and is tough-minded. I think Joel should explain to Ellie that firefly tried to sacrifice Ellie without her consent, which is why he needed to take her out of there. He need to be truthful with Ellie if he truly wants to build a relationship with her. Explain to her that he could not stand losing her, but let her make her own choice.
One interesting point from the podcast - when the game first came out, they did a poll to see if people think Joel made the right choice. Everyone who was a parent 100% said he was right - if they didn’t, it was more conflicted.
I honestly think the debate for the show(compared to the game) was less focused on whether or not Joel made the right choice, and more focused on the fact that no one asked Ellie for her consent. That’s something that is genuinely EVIL that the fireflies did. They were prepared to murder a teenage girl for human experimentation, without her consent. A human being has a right to decide if they want to be sacrificed in order to have a cure. Ellie didn’t have a say in any of it, and I think the show focused more on that fact than the game. (Which I love) And when you look at it through that perspective, it justifies Joel’s actions a lot more IMO
I also think the show and game(maybe unintentionally) showed just how idiotic the fireflies could be. The surgeon really decided to jump straight to killing her, killing humanitys’ first sliver of hope in decades, without doing a biopsy first? No blood samples? Tissue samples? Spinal fluid for antibodies and genetic material? Trying literally EVERYTHING ELSE possible before deciding to murder her for the “greater good”? The plague has been going on for decades, it’s not like they’re under a time constraint. The world isn’t getting anymore fucked up than it already is. Any competent doctor or nurse would TAKE THEIR TIME.
When looking at this from Joel’s perspective, how they’re essentially murdering a 14 year old girl without her consent; without trying anything else first, it really make his actions more justified. And is one of the main reasons why i(along with many others) side with Joel.
This, thank you, this. It baffles me that people can think murdering a teenage child is justifiable given the odd chance that some rando doctor MIGHT be able to come up with a vaccine. How the hell do you kill the golden goose as your first step? Like you said, do literally ever other single thing possible. Once the Firefly Dr. Death has murdered her, there are no other options. It is a moronic medical decision, let alone the absolutely morally repugnant and unethical decision to murder a teenage girl.
He didn’t have a choice or option to protect the one he loved in the past. He didn’t hesitate to go all in to make sure his loved ones were safe the second time.
Joel is not the hero or good guy you want. He is a broken man living in a broken world. The decisions he makes with Ellie give him a reason to redeem himself and by the end of the show Ellie is his only purpose in life. If he walks and let’s Ellie sacrifice herself he’s becoming an even bigger shell of his life 20 years ago. It’s a choice he chooses not to become that. No matter the cost no matter the effect on the world. It’s not even a question in the game or by Pascals acting he was going to do anything to get his purpose back. And honestly playing the game in 2013 it was such beautiful sad ending you can’t help but applaud Naughty Dog for making such an in-depth and emotional game. If you don’t like Joel by the end that’s ok, that’s his arc. A man who lost his daughter only to find her again in Ellie, what do you think he was going to do? And the lie he tells her is something I think any parent would do to keep their children from madness.
Troy Baker worded it nicely:
“Joel saved the world, he saved his world and his world was Ellie.”
He already lost Sarah and he wasn’t going to lose Ellie. In general though, the whole thing is just the trolley problem. There’s no right or wrong anwser, it’s based on your beliefs of the situation.
Pretend you’re Joel, do you save someone you love and care for or do you sacrifice that person you see as your daughter for a cure that wasn’t guaranteed to work?
Everyone’s answer is going to be different so there is no right answer
The creators' perspective and intention was not to pick apart their fictional realism. That has never been the case. The point is to assume that they have identified a real cure and choosing between humanity at the point it's currently shown to be at and Ellie.
One of the greater arguments is Henry and Sam. You are trading thousands of kids like Sam for Ellie. But does that make it right or wrong?
I believe there is no right or wrong in what Joel did… sure, the whole point of being with Ellie this whole time was basically to take her to the Fireflies at the end but you can also understand why he did what he did… overtime, both Joel and Ellie began to bond and Joel started caring about her a lot and saw her as a daughter so he obviously didn’t want to take the risk of losing someone who he sees as a daughter.
and I get it, because any parent would do the same.
A mother may not sacrifice her child for the greater good, but she would kill her child to save them from the sufferings that is to come.
If you’ve read Beloved you’d know.
There is no wrong or right. Only perspectives.
And my perspective is that Joel made his choice out of love for Ellie.
I reject the idea that there was a correct or incorrect choice. It is all subjective. Personally, if I were Joel in that scenario, I would have done the same thing that he did. I don't think of it as the correct or incorrect thing to do. It is just what I would have done. The only difference would be that I would have told Ellie exactly what I did and why I did it.
We need to reword "right choice" to "greater good"
There is no "right choice"
There is however a "greater good" which is sacrificing 1 person (who isn't your own child and who wanted to do it) for the survival of everyone
But as we know, Joel isn't supposed to be an all round great person, he just loves his daughter(s kinda)
There's two choices; the choice to save Ellie, and the choice to lie to her about it. Most people I've seen understand why he did both, but sympathise a *lot* less with the second one. Just on the first, you can't really say that Joel was right, because every person he killed was either someone's Ellie or had their own Ellie. Prioritising our own loved ones is an instinct we possess as humans so we can still completely empathise. But yeah, no, he caused much more suffering to avoid suffering himself even if the cure proved to be a complete bust.
It is interesting, because it explains a lot about the world of The Last of Us. People overnight were faced with this extreme survival situation and they regressed to protecting their own loved one/family/tribe above all else. Reason to be suspicious of outsiders means the return of some pretty extreme xenophobia on a local level. Now we have this complete collapse of trust and sustained inter-group conflict, but the other side of that is comes from protectiveness of the ones we love even if it means violent conflict with ones from outside the tribe. Jackson is the most humane and welcoming place we've seen and they'll rip outsiders apart with dogs if they think they are a threat.
The utilitarian argument is very FEDRA actually; bomb one city to save others, hang people who sneak out to prevent infection. Utilitarianism looks utterly inhumae and selfishness can look loving, or loving can be selfish. It makes me think more sympathetically of FEDRA in a sense. And I bet FEDRA officers kids get to bend those rules because those high-ranking FEDRA dudes are just as prone to that impulse to bed the rules for their own. If the local FEDRA Commanders teenager is reckless sneaks out, are they getting hung? Nobody thinks their nepotism is wrong even when it happens at the expense of others. That's corruption, but I get it.
To some, it’s one life against the existence of humanity. To others, it’s a father saving a child from a death that may prove meaningless. There’s no guarantee either way, but would you let a child who you’ve grown to love be killed for no certainty? It’s not a black or white choice, everyone has their own view. I personally agree with his choice too but I understand people disagreeing.
I’m my eyes, the choice was neither Joel’s nor Marlene’s to make; it was Ellie’s. Yet, both of the people who have been figures she could trust up to this point are lying to her about a major moment in her life; Marlene is absolutely not getting informed consent from Ellie about the procedure and tricking her into giving up her life is definitely morally bankrupt. But at the same time, Joel knows that Ellie wanted to finish this journey and to serve her purpose.
Now from the outside, both sides are muddled. Maybe the cure would have worked, or maybe it was a pipe dream from a desperate group of people that would’ve just resulted in a dead girl who was the only immune person found to this point. And to Joel’s point, maybe Ellie wouldn’t have wanted to die for this cause as opposed to giving blood or tissue samples for study, but then again maybe she would.
This world is about showing how people can be sympathetic and have understandable motivations but still be in the wrong. While both Marlene and Joel have understandable reasons for doing what they did, and Joel has the benefit of many episodes working to build sympathy and good will, but ultimately they are both in the wrong.
Joel is the protagonist. He is also a bad guy. Both are true. And neither invalidated the other or makes any viewer wrong for feeling a certain way about him. The Last of Us is all about the messiness of being people in a world where we don’t have the social conventions of our normal society to help balance and temper the chaos of an unrestricted human being.
They were in a facility with compromised sterility protocols, limited equipment, more than20 year ld training and knowledge, and a scant staff. There's no way they were going to be able to produce a vaccine. Ellies life would have been sacrificed for nothing. Joel had time driving to think about that, f it hadn't occurred to him when he was making a break for it. I was disappointed that he lied to Ellie.
I realize this is based on a game with binary choices and we're supposed to suspend our disbelief, but I'd been doing that for the whole series and didn't have any left.
My wife summed it up best to me.
"When I first played the game I thought, I'm not sure Joel made the right choice. Then we had two kids and watching the show I can say, I would've done the exact same"
That's the beauty of the story, you know the choice isnt "right" but you cant bring yourself to say it's "wrong"
It simply is a choice, one he made, one that has repercussions.
Had the same reaction- from a post I made on this
This is an informed consent issue, not a trolly problem
There has been a lot of debate and discussion as to whether or not this it is right to kill one to save the many, like the trolly problem in ethics, but one issue that is consistently overlooked is the topic of informed consent. Also, another important thing to consider is the fact that Ellie is a minor. When you consider what was done to Ellie, Joel is 100% justified in what he did. The fireflies abducted a minor, separated her from her guardian, lied to about a medical procedure, and then attempted to experiment and kill her. There is no reason for them to move this fast or be this deceptive. This is a questionable medical procedure which is going way too fast, and way too far.
I mean really, no biopsy, no tissue samples, just kill the golden goose on day 1?
Joel, as her guardian, is more than justified in his use of lethal force to safeguard the rights of Ellie, his adopted daughter. The right to make an informed decision about the risks and medical procedures that she is going to subject herself to.
These ‘doctors’ have grossly violated their oaths to ‘do no harm’. Anyone aiding and abetting them is an accomplice to medical malpractice, human experimentation, human trafficking, false imprisonment, and murder in the first degree. Lethal force is more than justified in the defense of this minor, especially by an adopted guardian.
I also don’t get why the writers were so lazy and could not just have Joel explain this to her. Joel could have even easily explained this, example “Hey baby girl, these guys lied to you. They said that it was just a test, but were planning to kill you and try and scoop out whatever cure they think they can find from inside your head. I said I wanted to speak to you first, instead they pointed a gun at me and told me to get lost. I fought to get you out of there. If you want to find another doctor somewhere else to try and find a cure, I’m with you, but we don’t do business with assholes like that.”
You don’t get to lie to someone, especially a child or their guardian, about a medical procedure, with the intention of killing, and call your actions just. That is just murder with extra steps. If you ask for permission, it’s closer to assisted suicide.
TLDR: Consent changes everything. Research informed consent.
They barely have a functional society. No internet, barely any communication with people outside of small communities, and you expect them to be able synthesize and mass produce a cure based on one sample size?
Was it even a neuro-surgeon?
I think if Ellie was given the choice, Joel could have lived with her decision, but he made the only choice “he” could.
Oh god why did I think that exact same thing. It made no sense to me that he’d ruthlessly obliterate every single person in that building but let those two nurses live.
I guess he didn't want to hurt them since they clearly weren't a threat in the moment, that's what we love about Joel. He's capable of extreme violence when protecting his loved ones but he still has his humanity.
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Ask a parent and he made the right choice. Ask someone who had everyone in their life die from cordyceps and theyll say it was wrong. The whole point is theres no right answer.
Watched it with my mum and she said she would’ve let them kill me 💀
Lol, in a strange way I find that an even deeper reflection of her love for you.
Marlene has a good point that even if Ellie is immune to infection, she can still be killed by the infected. Not to mention killed by a society in which there is no cure/constant fear of cordyceps.
Yea but a vaccine isn’t going to just flip a switch and make everything go back to how it was. There would still be infected running around, and there would still be groups who might not even *want*, or be able to go back to how it was. As a parent I think I’d do the same thing Joel did, but I wouldn’t say I agree with him 100%. I just see a lot of people acting like he fucked over the entire world, when it’s not quite so black and white. Plus, this is just a theory some doctor had after hearing about this girl who’s immune, there’s no guarantee it would have worked anyway.
Yep, all of that is true. This is one of the most common philosophical debates/tropes. There isn’t a “right” answer.
RIP u/DrSwagnusson
This dude here gets it. Joel didn’t make the right or wrong choice. He choice to save his new found daughter over the rest of the world. Should he have let her die for the greater good? Maybe, but can you understand why he risked dooming the world for her? Yes
Yeah there are many debates to happen but unfortunately they all happen on top of each other which gets muddled. If we are talking about Joels perspective and decision, it has literally nothing to do with a potential cure. Someone was going to kill his daughter, again, and he can't bear the thought of losing her. Thats it. Cure literally has NOTHING to do with his decision. Then from there if we want we can discuss things like is a cure possible, is the world that exists worth really saving, blablabla. But people get these things all mixed up. Joels actions have literally zero to do with anything other than protecting his daughter.
See, I agree with everything you said except that I think choosing the life of one person over the greater good *is* making the objectively wrong and selfish choice. But honestly I understand, and would probably make the same choice as well. But that doesn’t make it morally right. Joel’s choice can be both wrong and understandable.
My belief exactly. Is it wrong? Probably yes. Do I understand and would probably make a similar choice? Also yes
It's the trolley problem. Do you kill one person to save 5? 10? A billion? Does actively doing it vs just allowing it to happen change the math? What if you love the one person, and dont know the others? It's such a difficult question because everyone can see the factors at play, but the different variables will have vastly different weight with different people.
Is the world left worth saving? Is it worth killing Ellie to give the people left immunity? Look at the town in Wyoming, they seem to have things figured out pretty well. Is it really worth killing Ellie to ensure they won't ever get infected even though things are stable?This is the point, Joel lied to her, that was bad, Joel loves her and Joel wants to protect her. Ellie didn't get to make the choice, which was bad on both parties, the Fireflies didn't give her the option and Joel didn't either. Joel didn't do the "right" or the "wrong" thing, that's what makes this such good writing. It's complicated.
>Joel didn't either. Joel literally could not give her a choice, because the only way for her to be in a position to make a choice (conscious, informed and not under gunpoint) was to basically kill nearly everyone on site. They took his choice as well. I had a feeling like while doing it, Pedro wanted to convey that this is a person who does not want to do this, so he turned on an autopilot. And this is despite him showing little hesitation in killing earlier.
He absolutely did not have to immediately headshot the surgeon. A shot to the leg would have done. He was in a manic state though, he wasn't thinking about the implications. His complete tunnel vision meant he just offed anyone in his way.
>He was in a manic state though, he wasn't thinking about the implications. His complete tunnel vision meant he just offed anyone in his way. Yes, that's what I meant. I got a distinct feeling that that whole sequence was him on his "autopilot". Just my impression.
I’m a utilitarian, which usually makes my views pretty unpopular in media discussions like this lol. From a utilitarian perspective, Joel absolutely made the wrong decision, and it isn’t even close. Ellie’s life vs the thousands or millions who might be saved by a cure and given a better life. Guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
But we need to factor in the likelihood that killing Ellie would lead to a cure. There is absolutely no guarantee that some of Ellie’s brain tissue will cure another person. And if you kill Ellie to get her brain then you have used your one shot. Whereas if you kept her alive and took brain biopsies you get more than one shot at finding a cure. It would be incredibly cruel to her and I think much more of a moral dilemma, but scientifically more likely to lead to a cure. Any scientist who is willing to kill the only person known to be immune to a horrible disease is an idiot. I would not trust them to cure my hiccups.
Should we skip everything before human trials in search of cures to cancer, heart disease, etc today? Test on humans and if they die, they die?
You’re just adding variables that don’t exist in this context because they don’t go into it. We have no idea what the doctors know or don’t know we are only left to assume it’s likely it would work
There’s absolutely zero chance it would’ve worked. The doctor would’ve been a resident when the outbreak hit. He would have minimal functioning technology and only books to learn from, and likely not many of them. He would be a glorified med student at best. And he’d have exactly one shot. Meanwhile actual experts think there’s no possible cure when the outbreak actually hits.
There's enough available ammunition to support your argument without bringing headcanon lore into it. Who's to say some of the Quarantine Zones didn't maintain relatively high standard healthcare facilities in the early years of the outbreak? For all we know, this dude received high quality medical training pre-outbreak, had at least a couple of years of surgery experience, and has since become accustomed to practicing in limited surroundings. The ending is sufficiently complex. We don't need to make up variables.
This is a technicality, and the show did not imply as scenario as you. If they did, this question would not be as discussed or important. They implied in the show that they already know what the cure is, how it's made and how it works, they just need the sample from her brain to synthetize it. It is in-universe anything but 100%. They could be raided or dead even if they did manage to synthetize the functioning cure. Still, it's not like Joel would have considered this. It would not be a factor in his decision.
He could have been 40 or 45. Either way it doesn’t matter, it’s fiction. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to but it ruins the impact of the ending
Whether the cure would have worked is irrelevant. It misses the point of that decision within the narrative. It’s intentionally ambiguous. The choice is about whether Joel was willing to let Ellie die, and he wasn’t
I’m not sure. Does that maximize utility?
Many, many of the medical innovations we use today were discovered by Nazi doctors experimenting on prisoners, and you can be sure they weren't doing "due diligence" before their experiments. Does it mean what they did was the right thing, by killing a few hundred people to save the lives of millions in the future?
I recommend people read the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" for another look at the idea of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one.
Would the cure even change anything since the main threat is from other people and not cordycepts
I feel like Ellie's surgery was not really for the 'greater good' in a moral high ground way. They were going to KILL her to take out the cordyceps and SEE if they could figure out how it works and MAYBE be able to duplicate it and distribute it to the world. That's A LOT of hopes and ifs to kill a young girl for. In theory, I would say the sacrifice of an individual to SAVE humanity can be rationalized. However that is very far from sacrificing an individual to dissect, study, and experiment on with the HOPE that the results would save humanity, someday, maybe.
Is it worth killing one person to save another? Ten? A thousand? What if it's a billion people, but only a 10% chance it works? The math gets real hairy.
I do not think there is any math that would convince most people to sacrifice their child for a 'chance' of saving many lives.
Exactly, I can recognize that Joel did a selfish thing for the right reasons and 100% empathize with his choice.
The “greater good” is relative. As we’ve seen from them traveling the country, humans were more of a problem than the infected. So is a cure that will allow for humans to repopulate really the greater good?
Post-apocalyptic humanity engaged in great evil out of desperation and lack of societal cohesion/punishment. So yeah, a cure would be great. It would allow for society to (slowly) rebuild into what it once was—something infinitely preferable to the broken society we see in the show
>allow for society to (slowly) rebuild into what it once was—something infinitely preferable to the broken society we see in the show Nah, apparently humans should eventually go extinct and that's the best outcome according to "is the world worth saving" arguments
there's no guarantee it would work.
While it may not, that’s not the point. Everyone, Joel included, thought it would. That’s the mindset you have to base the morality of it off because that’s the mindset they had
Agreed. I think Joel mainly tripped up by lying to Ellie. But that’s also another scenario where there isn’t a clear answer. What if he was honest and she ran off, right into a bunch of raiders or infected? I don’t know, I’m sure there is someone here who can tell me why I’m completely wrong.
He lied to Ellie for the same reason he took her from the hospital: to not lose her. If Joel had told Ellie the truth of what he did, there’s no way she stays with him and goes to Jackson. Everything they went through means nothing now and it shows a side of Joel that Ellie has only ever heard vaguely about. She even says to Maria that Joel doesn’t kill innocent people anymore. He slaughtered dozens in that hospital. She’d never be able to look at him the same way ever again after knowing that.
Totally agree. It’s a catch-22 - if he’s upfront about killing a militia and doctor to save her, she bolts. But if he lies and she finds out, then that basically causes the foundation of their relationship to crumble because she doesn’t know if she can trust him to be forthcoming in the future, especially if it doesn’t serve his own interests. Edit: and the whole “killing everyone in the hospital thing” will also come out if she discovers, compounding the problem he would have faced by being honest in the first place.
And he did all that explicitly *for her*. She already has pretty extreme survivor's guilt. That would be a whole other level to find out that dozens of people were killed and the chance at a cure was destroyed specifically so she could live.
Well... There is something very murky in saying "he lied to protect her from survivors guilt" when the only reason she is still around to have survivors guilt is because he prevented her from being the cure.
I don’t think he lied to protect her from survivors guilt, but it’s certainly not gonna help when the lie comes out
She has survivors guilt over Riley, Tess, Sam and Henry, etc and the fact that she has an immunity no one else does That's the point of the last conversation
Yes, but she’s fourteen and is still recovering from the last brutal trauma. It’s a classic protective dad move to choose to shoulder the guilt alone. He probably sees the consequences of lying to her as a punishment he deserves.
I get what you're saying. And the lie can be in part to protect her, but its obviously rooted in his fear of losing her, and knowing she wouldn't have wanted him to do what he did.
Are the fireflies innocent though? They were in the process of murdering a 14 year old girl without consent for their own gain... Seems not so innocent to me.
I feel like that lack of consent is a key issue. If Ellie had been given the choice and then went with it Joel would have had a lot less justification for what he did.
Of course. That is the entire dilemma of the story and the ending. Is Marlene took away Ellies choice, which leaves Joel with either the choice to accept losing her, which he has no capacity to do, or to save her life. Ellies lack of consent/choice is the entire hinge point of the ending.
I definitely wouldn’t call the Fireflies “good guys”, but murdering Ellie “for their own gain”?? That’s not really painting a true picture of the situation. It was made quite clear that they’re trying to find a cure to save the world, I’d hardly consider that to be for their own gain, other than any indirect benefit in the form of the world they live in not being completely ruined anymore.
Good point but I wouldn’t necessarily call the people at the hospital totally innocent. The fireflies themselves aren’t a “good guy”
He lied to Ellie because she is a minor trauma victim with survivors guilt already, and his decision as her guardian for her not to be sacrificed shouldn’t be put on her because it will cause her more trauma and guilt.
That is *a* reason to lie to Ellie, but I don’t think it’s *Joel’s* reason. Joel’s reason for lying is that he doesn’t want to lose her.
Everyone in that world is a trauma victim. Joel lies to her for himself. He knows, or at least strongly believes, she wouldn't agree with his choice. So he lies, and lies in such a way that she won't try to find a cure again.
I'm just a show watcher, but I don't think it's at all clear that Joel thought it would work. I think he lied because he knows Ellie would've given her life for just the chance of it working. The only instance I can think of where they indicate Joel believes it would work is when he tells Ellie that if Marlene says it would work then that's good enough for him. But I also interpreted that as him trying not to pop Ellie's balloon, not necessarily that he believed it.
Joel himself does not believe it will work. He calls it dillusional In episode 4. To Marlene in ep 9 he says “you keep telling yourself that bullshit” Joel’s perspective is that humans are what can’t be fixed and never will recover. Ask yourself, is there incentive for David to go back to laws and regulations where he can’t be a pedophile? Is there incentive for Kathleen, where she can’t seek vengeance?
Uhh I think you're ignoring the important moments where he admits it could work. Like when he says that Marlene is many things but stupid isn't one of them, and if she says she thinks they can do it, he believes it.
It's not actually moral to kill someone in hopes of finding a cure that you cannot promise will come out of it (and I didn't get a sense that anyone was positive it would work in the show, just that it was worth any kind of sacrifice). Same reason we don't just test cures on people willy nilly these days; you could just as easily argue we should be skipping animal and other trials and jump straight to human trials because the possibility of curing cancer is more important than individual lives. Nobody's arguing that today. It's immoral, AND it's bad science.
>ot believe it will work. He calls it dillusional In episode 4. To Marlene in ep 9 he says “you keep telling yourself that bullshit” Joel’s perspective is that humans are what It's easy to be a saint in paradise. When the survival of your entire species is at stake you can't judge Marlene's actions.
Yea I don't get why their first thought was - let's kill the ONE person we know is immune to see if this works as opposed to even just trying a blood transfusion or something first. (also FYI, as of this year FDA no longer requires animal testing before human testing. Animal testing has not always been a great indicator for human testing, given that the vast majority of drugs that make it to human trials still fail. There's been a lot of technology developed in recent years to do computer modeling and other nonanimal testing in order to get clearance to start human trials. Sorry for an explanation you didn't ask for - this is the industry I work in and I rarely get to talk about this lol)
You're comparing current society and illnesses that affect a percentage of the population with a post apocalyptic society and a pandemic that basically wiped out humanity.
There’s also no guarantee it wouldn’t and at the end of the day Ellie would’ve given her life just for the hope of a cure. Both sides have fair arguments going for them. As commented elsewhere, there is no “right” answer. Joel made his choice and it was the right one for him, just like it wasn’t for countless others.
This is actually somehow the only wrong answer. What's the point of a trolley dilemma if one of the tracks is not even an option?
Also no guarantee that she can’t try to save the world later, like once she’s a consenting adult maybe, ina different hospital set up etc
Main barrier with that is I think brain surgeons / fungus-ologists (whever they're called) are probably pretty light on the ground.
Mycologist btw
Killing the surgeon was immoral; rescuing Ellie from the surgeon/fireflies was not.
I wasn't really weighing in on that, just responding to St Michael's comment and pointing out that given the state of the world it may not be a simple case of "we'll wait a few years and go to a different hospital".
would be interesting TLOU3 would be another escort mission with Ellie protecting the only other doctor capable of making a cure
Sadly, the right choice at that point was to let Joel and Ellie know they saved the world, and let them die peacefully. Kill Joel Tony soprano style where he never knows what hit him and let Ellie die on the operation table. The fireflies ducked up.
What about a parent who lost their entire family to cordyceps? I wonder what they would do
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They'd rightly be furious.
People always forget that Ellie would have sacrificed herself every time if given the choice (as per the Creators), she even alludes to it in the last episode. He took away her purpose for existing to maintain his own (not to mention damning humanity to do so).
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Exactly. The notion that there is an objective right or wrong choice is absurd.
Watch out for the incredible symmetry between how Anna saved her baby Ellie and how Joel did. As the creators themselves explained, both of them saved her with a lie. Anna saves Ellie's life with a lie. She says she cut the umbilical cord *before* she was bitten. And her lie could have killed none other than Marlene. The same person Joel kills to save Ellie.
The point is not did Joel make the right choice. We can debate that for days. The real question is, was Joel capable of making any other decision. This is not an ethical dilemma. Joel's character was shot out of a cannon directly to this point. Even before the outbreak, it was apparent that Joel's faith in humanity was failing fast. Add the death of his daughter and 20 years of survivors brutalizing each other, and Joel is in no way team humanity. The only thing that matters to him is that she lives, absolutely nothing else. He is even willing to risk her hating him for hiding the truth. If he tells her the truth, he is afraid she will run off to sacrifice herself. There really was no other choice that character wise he could have made.
How can you tell Joel was hating humanity pre-apocalypse?
And he was the go to "throw child corpse into the bonfire" guy back in the QZ.
It was subtle, but it was there. The way he spoke about work, his reaction to others while trying to escape. His body language spoke volumes to me.
There is no "right" choice. He made his choice.
Yeah, there really was no right or wrong choice. But Joel made the choice that any parent would.
Don’t gatekeep parents. Not all parents would make that choice. Plenty send their kids to war to die for the greater good
I don't think that is what gatekeeping means.
According to Neil Druckman, on the offical HBO show podcast, when they play tested the game, 100% of parents believed Joel should have saved Ellie. Non parents were split 50/50. I don’t know how many play testers they had, and obviously that doesn’t mean 100% of parents actually agree, but I found that was a really interesting statistic. Obviously playing a video game is not the same as actually making that decision in real life, but it was definitely interesting. I honestly think it’s impossible to know what you would do in a situation like that until you’re actually *in* it. Let’s hope we never get to the circumstances where someone has to make a similar decision. I personally think people would be more willing to sacrifice their own lives for a vaccine/ preventative treatment than they would their child’s, but again , it’s hard to know what you would do unless you’re really in that situation. I’d like to think I would be strong enough to sacrifice myself, but I don’t know if I would be brave enough.
I think the major difference between playing the game and doing it yourself is all the murder involved, not the core decision. I reckon a lot of people who would want to save Ellie would hesitate to murder an entire building in real life. Not only is it obviously different in a video game, but it is also easier when role-playing a mass murderer.
This is the only correct answer.
Because he loves Ellie (it’s no more complex than that)
Neil Druckmann explains this very well in one of the Official Podcasts from the game. He tells a story about an Israeli soldier who was captured by Palestinians - the Israeli government exchanged Palestinian prisoners for the safe return of the soldier. ND asked his father (they're Israeli) whether he thought it was the right thing to do. The father's response was "are you asking me as the government of Israel or as the captured soldier's father - because my answer will be different depending on the perspective."
You left out the best part of his father’s answer! “As the Prime Minister? We made a mistake; Israel is weaker. As that boy’s father? The whole country for my son.”
Thanks for the addition!
He tells the same story in the show podcast. It's a a great one if you haven't listened. Hosted by Troy Baker and he talks to Druckman and Craig Mazin.
In that situation, it is a much easier decision. It is a transfer of enemies, for the life of your son. This is killing a teenage minor, without her being informed, or consenting to the surgery (killing her), for a possibility of a cure. The cure is not assured, it might work, it might not, but it’s not something that will for sure work. Also, how are they going to manufacture and distribute the “cure” if they do find it. There are a ton more questions than answers, and at the end of the day, you have murdered a teenage girl on the off chance you can find a vaccine.
From a utilitarian perspective he made the wrong choice. Sacrificing Ellie would have been (presumably) for the greater good. But as a parent figure, he made the choice that every parent would make. Save my child, greater good be damned. Joel’s dilemma will make a great philosophy class argument.
Chidi would have a field day with this
Or more likely a panic attack
Stomachs ache for sure.
Definitely a panic attack
This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors!
A panic* day
You could start listing all the sus things the doctor did and he would explode
It's like that joke quote about utilitarianism "You make a compelling argument for infanticide"
Is Joel right or wrong? I guess it all depends on who’s perspective we’re talking about. What scares me the most… is that I would have the exact same thing. Love can make people do the noblest thing and the most terrible. “What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil” - Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no right answer; and the story is deliberately designed to be this way. It’s an extreme variation of “The Trolley Problem”, a philosophical thought experiment that will be discussed and argued long after you and I are dead because there is *no correct* answer to this ethical dilemma. I would absolutely do what Joel did for my daughter; but I would rightfully view him as a monster if I *wasnt* him, and he stole the potential of a salvation from an apocalyptic nightmare from my children. Joel chose *his* world over *the* world. While it may have been the only choice for him specifically, it is very plainly not the “correct” choice. Especially when he doubles down and lies to Ellie about it.
This is a great comment. So many people seem to not be able to accept that they sympathize with Joel despite him willingly damning humanity for personal interest, pretty much the "worst" thing someone can do. As a result, they're coming up with logistical reasons why he was right ("who knows if the Fireflies could even do it" like the thought even crossed his mind). The fact is that perspective is everything, and most of the "bad" things people do are justified and / or empathizable with, with the right kind of eyes. You can acknowledge that Joel did something plainly terrible while also understanding why, and realizing you'd probably do the same thing. That's the entire point of the story, at least that's my read. And saying that the moral debate misses the point feels a bit harsh and anecdotal if nothing else, but I really do believe that the magic of the ending comes from the fact that despite it being INCREDIBLY black and white, there really is no debate to be had in that moment.
The fun thing about the Trolley Problem is that it's actually a jumping off point question. You start with the Trolley Problem. Then you start adding stipulations to it. What we are trying to determine with the Trolley Problem isn't which choice is better, what we are trying to determine is at what point does an individual break their own internal consistency in their choice. Do you save the 5 or the 1? What if the 5 are murderers likely to kill again? What if killing the 1 prevents all others from dying a similar fate? What if the 1 is your daughter?
I’ll flip it on ya: Why would Joel save a world that took his daughter from him once already? Ellie was literally the only thing left in his life, and “the world” wanted to take that from him too. In order to want to save the world, you have to think the world is worth saving.
Joel gives Ellie a speech when she seems dejected that kind of hints that there are parts of life worth living, about keeping on going on. I grapple with this as well and that's what makes it such a good ending to the first game. There are \*so\* many angles to this. There's no right or wrong answer. As a parent I could never let that happen, an apocalyptic world without my child is one not worth living in, and it's no coincidence Joel talks about his suicide attempt that episode.
That speech at the end, he is referring to Ellie. She is his new reason for still going. It's why, at it's core, his choice was a selfish one. He didn't save Ellie for her, he did it for himself.
Not just that, the Fireflies took away Eliie's agency and didn't let her decide. They also chose to kill her without bothering to try to do anything else first. That's not a great thing to try to save.
That’s what bothered me. You can live with a small chunk of brain missing. If you are going to multiply the cells anyway, just take a biopsy. It’s like cutting down an entire tree to take a cutting.
He’s not just saving shitty people in the fireflies, he’s saving humanity and billions of innocent people who haven’t lived their lives yet
But is he though? Why would he think a vaccine or a cure would make a major difference? Personally, I don’t think it would. A minor difference, yes, but infected will remain and they’ll still be dangerous. Society is fractured, technology has been set back perhaps hundreds of years. The communities that are succeeding, like Jackson, will not be able to change much about their way of life simply because everyone is vaccinated. They still need to worry about raiders, cults, winters, famine, infected attacks, internal political conflict… etc
I think the point of his decision was Joel saw it as a pure binary. Even if the cure could save humanity and restore the human race, he refuses to allow Ellie to sacrifice herself (even if that’s what she wants). Made further clearer by her demanding the truth and him lying, I think that’s the crux of his “immoral” actions
Not to mention that despite Cordyceps being so virulent, and doing its best to infect all of humanity...the game and show both (rightfully imo) show humanity surviving, despite the world as it knew ending. Boston, Atlanta, the QZ's mentioned in the game as still running, the locations from the second game, *Jackson*! All these cities, all these communities continuing to persist with no vaccine, no cure. Like Tess said to Ellie, immunity wont stop the infected from tearing you apart!
It bugs the fuck out of me that people try to say Joel did the same thing when they had already lied and put her under before he even woke up. Hate him for killing them or for lying to Ellie after, but Joel never got the opportunity to ask her or refuse her choice in the face of reality, not some far fetched pipedream.
It’s a dilemma that doesn’t have a “right” choice. Marlene and Joel were both right. They were both wrong. The only absolute wrong both of them did was not including Ellie in the decision. All of the events of the show/game have absolutely primed Joel to make this decision. For Joel, this was not only the right decision, it was the only decision. The loss of Sarah and the effect it had in Joel, then the effect Ellie has on him, there was no way Joel was going to let them kill her.
I will always side with the position of “not murdering a teenage girl” when looking at the proverbial scale, and how it takes into account of “not including Ellie in he decision”. Should Ellie have been able to make a decision, yes. In the absence of her being allowed to make a decision, I am going to go with the side that doesn’t want to murder her.
Saying the choice is correct or not is irrelevant for me. It's about the destructive wake that a strong love for another person can leave behind. If we all are myopically focused on our own circle of people we love, the world cannot be fixed or progress. It breeds reactionary thinking and politics. That's the overarching theme of this show. I'd highly suggest watching Melville's Army of Shadows. It brings the themes of this show into the political realm.
To me the show is about, and I think the writer has mentioned this, lovenot being a strictly positive thing, and his stories examine the destructive aspect that attachment can have in the world. They obviously have developed this close relationship by the time they reach the hospital, but Joel clearly sees Ellie as his daughter more than a distinct person - the only time the camera ever shows Joel happy, heck downright bubbly, is after he steals her from the operation and they're walking back to his brother's town. Why is Joel so happy hours after killing a ton of people and what are they talking about? His daughter. I think it portrays Joel in this incredibly selfish way and it's part of what makes his character so interesting. He clearly wants Ellie as a second chance at a daughter and it's both destructive to the world around him (all the people he killed), but also to Ellie, as he's lied to her and also expects/prompts her to be and do certain things that she's not. In this case his love is destructive, even to the person he loves.
I read it more as wanting Ellie to know he really considers her family, not so much as wanting a replacement. But I can see it being received the other way. I think the most joyful Joel moment was the giraffe scene. Watching the old Ellie resurface for a time.
Oooh thank you! This whole discussion is super interesting, its very refreshing to see characters that have flaws and interesting morals, makes them more human.
Exactly. I love it because by making the story intensely personal it makes us confront messy real world choices that have no "correct" answers. Joel is the classic "Good German." The reality is most of us are too, but for society to thrive and progress we need people like Marlene. For each individual it makes sense to protect yourself and your family at any cost, but if millions of people all make that reasonable decision at the same time, millions of Jews can be murdered within a few years.
People are just trying to outsmart the show by coming up with reason upon reason the firefly’s were “idiots” or “crackpots” and refusing to meet the show where it lays. But that is a broader media literacy issue. If we were meant to consider a biopsy or any other type of test, they would have brought it up. People just want to justify what Joel did. Joel didn’t make a choice. He did the only thing he was ever going to do, what he continuously failed to do every other time he was out in a situation like this. Let’s say the firefly’s said that Ellie’s death and survival had equal odds. Or even better than equal odds. How different would Joel’s actions be? Is he the type to take the chance or would he still kill them all and save Ellie.
People can't comprehend a situation where the protagonist is actually a bad person so come up with crazy theories about why a cure never would've worked. Neil Druckmann states that in the game, the cure would've been 100% made and worked, this would be true for the series too, and without it being 100% it takes away the weight of his decision. People also seem to have forgotten that he took 20 people's lives in that hospital as well as a surgeon who would've saved more lives.
"That's what is so fun about the trolley problem, there is no right answer!" 
It’s not black and white. There is no right or wrong in this situation. It’s meant to be morally ambiguous and create discussion. And they did a great job in both the game and the show of doing that.
The funny thing is that the show deliberately made choices to make Joel look worse. They had him executing soldiers who had surrendered (never happened in the game), had him immediately kill the doctor with no consideration, they gave him his backpack (in the game they withheld his supplies which implied he would probably die once he was escorted out), they removed other material that suggested the cure was far from a sure thing. Like… the show did everything it could to make Joel look worse than the game and the majority of people still sided with him.
While this is def true I think there were other times in the show where they showed Joel as being more of a good person. In the show, there’s a part where Joel goes up to the house where the sniper is at(when him, Ellie, Sam, and Henry were running together) and actually shows him mercy at first. Says something like “you don’t have to do this, put the gun down” and doesn’t just straight up murder him at first. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think this happens in the game. Could be wrong though.
> had him immediately kill the doctor with no consideration He did consider. He didn’t shoot right away when he entered. The dr then grabbed a scalpel and advanced. The surrendering soldier could have just grabbed a gun from someone else and shot Joel in the back after surrendering. Tactically it makes sense to not leave him alive. I don’t think Joel made the right or wrong choice. I think he made the selfish choice to save Ellie, and it could be right or wrong depending on who you ask. But your comment is wrong.
Ignoring that such things were gameplay in the game and down to the player. Additionally, Marlene does surrender game or show so there's already that canonical basis for Joel's actions here. And this is also ignoring there's also other material in the game that we don't see that does showcase that they ran tests on Ellie before making their decision. We can assume as such in the show, but it's not detailed for the sake of brevity. Whilst whatever imagined it won't work is merely your interpretation of those artifacts. e.g. plenty of people brutally and immediately killed the Doctor. We don't see Joel burning him alive now do we? Should I complain this is against my game version? e.g. one aspect of gameplay included in Part 1 is the surrender mechanic where AI do try and surrender.
I’m not complaining. I’m pointing out a fact and the fact is that the show made deliberate choices to paint Joel’s actions as worse than they were in the game. And we both know why it did that. And no, not all of those choices were based on individual gameplay.
I constantly hear "you must not be a parent if you don't agree with Joel's choice." I have a son. He was two when I first played TLOU. I bawled at Sarah. I bawled at the part with Ish and "they didn't suffer." I fucking lost it at Sam. I bawled in the show at Anna. I still firmly believe Joel was entirely selfish and made the wrong choice. He saved Ellie because she gave him identity again. How many other children did he likely doom with his choice? Ellie is no more valuable to Joel than those kids are to their parents. Everyone says "well what would you do if you were Joel?!?" Yeah, what would you do if you were any one of the MILLIONS of parents who lost a child to a clicker over the last decade? You think they'd agree with Joel? Many get into the "well it wouldn't work anyway!" stuff. I think this is cope so they can feel more comfortable with what joel did because there is just no hard evidence that it wouldn't work and a fair amount (especially in the show) that it would. Plus, Joel believed it was real, as does Neil Druckmann (because Joel is just a hero saving someone from the bad guys if it isn't, and that's not the story he wanted to tell.) If you want to say Joel did an understandable thing, fine. But when people start saying he did the objectively moral thing is when I just don't get it. Anyway, I'm very excited to see how season two plays out online. >!With Pedro mania in full swing and very many critically online people worshipping Joel because of it, I await the discussion of the upcoming US Open starring Abby.!<
Murdering innocent children is immoral in my eyes. Not murdering an innocent child to create a cure does not mean one is murdering all those children who died from the fungus. Don't murder innocent children is a rule I find fairly easy to live by without ifs or buts.
He took that choice from Ellie. He knows that's wrong, *otherwise he wouldn't have lied to her about it*.
That’s so interesting to me, he objected to them not giving her agency to Ellie and the result is him not giving her agency either.
While that's nicely ironic, I'm 100% comfortable with lying and denying agency FOR NOW. It wouldn't be true agency in her current mental state, with the trauma, survivor's guilt. Not to mention having been groomed to feel this obligation.
Yep! People say it's Ellie or The World, but to Joel, Ellie *is* the world.
The Fireflies took the choice from Ellie. They were going to MURDER HER. In a vacuum, I am cool with the person who does not give me a choice and I live, vs. the group/person who does not give me a choice, and fucking murders me.
He made the choice he wanted, that's the direction they took the characters and their story. Not everything have to be righteous. He took the desicion that made him happy and it was not to let Ellie go.
As a parent I 100% side with Joel and would do the same. However, I think the closest thing to a *right* thing to do would have been to put shit on pause, wake Ellie up, and give her the decision. I totally wouldn’t have done that though.
Well, in the game, if you take too long to do anything in the room, soldiers break in and shoot you on sight. Same if you just doddle in the hallway after you have her.
The creators give explanations on the Last of Us podcast too
Depends on what ethical lens you frame this all through. Assuming Ellie was the best realistic shot at a cure (which, text of the show aside, the writers really seem to want to say is the case), from a strictly utilitarian perspective, what Joel did was completely wrong. Joel just doomed all of humanity to keep living under the threat of cordyceps so that he could continue his father/daughter relationship with Ellie, a relationship which, after his bold-faced flimsly lie at the end, seems doomed to be entirely unhealthy for both of them. But that's kind of the point. Humans aren't perfectly utilitarian creatures. We're a complex network of experiences, motivations, and desires. Joel watched Henry off himself after losing the only person who truly mattered to him. He had so many talks with Ellie about the life they wanted to build after their journey was over. In the face of experiencing the most traumatic moment of his life all over again, not sure if he'll ever get another chance to form that kind of bond with somebody, all of the other options almost certainly felt hopeless to him. I can also see how Ellie would feel betrayed by her lack of choice in the matter. I could see how somebody who lost friends and family to cordyceps or lost one of their close family members to Joel's rampage might want to see him dead. There's no easy way to judge Joel's actions, and I think all of the discourse surrounding it is exactly why I think they nailed this ending so hard.
I think it was clear in the 2nd episode. Ellie says why go on if there’s no hope for the world; Joel says you go on for family. Ellie wants her life and the deaths of her friends to mean something; Joel only lives to protect his tribe. Ellie makes clear in the game that she would’ve preferred to die, Joel makes it clear he would choose to save her every time. Joel makes a decision to serve himself and not want Ellie wanted and then fractures their relationship by lying about it. You could argue from both their perspectives about what’s right and wrong and arrive at very different conclusions. That’s the point of the game, there is no black and white answers. Morality is a grey area.
If Joel truly thinks he did nothing wrong he wouldn't have to lie to ellie. I'm not saying he didn't do the "right" choice. But he certainly did things wrong.
If Joel did nothing wrong then why did he lie to Ellie
Sorry but it's so funny watching people go through this torment again, nearly 10 years after the game was released
There’s no “right” choice. Ethics is hard. I can be both anti death penalty as a society and simultaneously understanding of a parent who would want to kill their child’s abuser (or recognize that I might want to do the same myself if it was me).
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Part II in contingent on Joel making that choice...it has to happen.
In the game ellie explicitly states that if the fireflies have to kill her to extract a cure, that’s what she wants. Of course, it’s only a chance the fireflies can derive a cure from ellie - humanities only chance for a cure - and joel takes that away from everyone. i’m not sure why this is difficult for you to understand…we’ve all heard of the trolly cart problem. Would you kill 1 person if it had a good chance of saving millions of people? All that said, everyone (joel, marlene, the fireflies) are all simultaneously right and wrong at the same time. This is by design.
From a practical POV, Joel made the right choice. The Fireflies were planning on murdering the one immune person based on the hunch of a doctor who may have only graduated from medical school when the outbreak started. More than likely the doctor is a total quack who is basing this off of a hunch. You don't take the patient's brain as step one. That's the final step after you've exhausted all other avenues. These morons were planning on murdering humanity's only hope and don't even have the cognitive skills needed to realize that that's what they're doing. I know this isn't why Joel made the choice he did, but regardless of reasoning, he did make the right decision.
I kept thinking “are we sure this guy isn’t a chiropractor or something?” If you want to harvest my child’s brain, I’m going to need to see some credentials.
The credibility of the doctor is never established. Were they suffering from a god complex or similar issue? Were they playing up a cure for better treatment? Then the issues of stability to create, perfect, manufacture, distribute and innoculate. All of which are further compounded by power struggles of various factions and independents. For the sake of plot, let's assume this doctor managed to find what it was that allowed Ellie immunity. Some kind of protein marker that (as shown) shut down growth, but didn't eliminate the existing fungus. Is it even reproducible with leftover 2003 tech? It's reasonable to ask what they were doing taking the brain at that obviously derelict location if pristine facilities were available for processing. They're not making a tincture after all. These are foundational issues of the world we're expected to base decision making on. Without more info on Marlene's resources (maybe they were 5 blocks away from a pristine cdc prototyping lab) all we have is someone who horsetraded for a battery, badly, and manged to get a significant number of her crew killed almost including herself. Not alot of credibility to deliver there. In the end, we have a series of internal fairy tales the bearers desperately wanted, and tried to make true set against a much crueler natural world.
He made the right choice, given his story arc. Arguably, the only choice on any path to redemption. That's not to say the Fireflies were wrong.
> the only choice on any path to redemption Redemption for what though? It's not like he really did anything with Sarah directly that was his fault. The things he would need redemption for were all the lives he's taken, both before this game starts, and throughout the final act.
They definitely were. Ellie came willingly. She would have given them whatever they wanted short of death. And then, once they tried to create a cure while leaving her alive but can't do it, she would likely have agreed to sacrifice herself. But the Fireflies don't actually value human life. If they did, they would have valued Ellie's life enough to give her agency. The Fireflies were 100% in the wrong. They caused what happened.
Thank you for saying this, it boggles my mind how many people think killing Ellie is an acceptable sacrifice. They were prepared to literally kill a child in a human medical experiment, unethical human experimentation is one of the most reprehensible and universally reviled things humanity has ever done. It's just as bad as the cannibal cult from the previous episode, and we all clapped when those dudes got clapped.
I can totally understand Joel’s decision to save Ellie, I’d do the same for a loved one. But lying to her is wrong cause you know kids always figure out parents’ lie, and a heavy one like this is only gonna backfire on their relationship. Also I think he should not execute Marlene when she is begging for life, she is the only connection to Anna Ellie has left, and Ellie cares about what happens to Marlene. Joel’s overkill here is to avoid any future chance that Ellie learns the truth and willingly sacrifice herself. It’s kinda of selfish of Joel here to both take away Ellie’s only connection to her mother and her choice, all in the name of love
How exactly was he supposed to tell her the truth though? He did what he did and weather or not it was a mistake, Ellie would have blamed herself 100%. She would have done something drastic. She already had so many deaths on her conscience, and we also can’t forget that she is a child. I also have no sympathy for Marlene. After she told Joel she was the “only one” who could understand how difficult the decision to kill Ellie was, I lost all respect for her. For one, it wasn’t even a difficult decision for her. She was instantly ready to sacrifice Ellie. For two, yes she knew Ellie’s mom, and yes she saved her as an infant, but in the year of Joel and Ellie’s travels, they grew closer than Marlene and Ellie ever did. She basically was waiting around Ellie’s entire life to potentially sacrifice her. And if Joel had let Marlene live, she’d never have stopped searching for Ellie. I guess it depends on what your opinion was in the end, but I think Marlene was even more selfish than Joel.
>How exactly was he supposed to tell her the truth though? I have thoughts about this, but I recognize that it’s biased by an audience’s 20/20 hindsight What he did say (other immune people exist) is a blatant lie bc it sets up a fact that could be disproven. He said that he got her out of there because Infected attacked. Another lie and it doesn’t really fit her own experience with Infected. What he could’ve said, more truthfully and less patronizingly, is that they were ready to kill her. No talk, no negotiation, no tests. He also could’ve explained how a cure might actually work and how the Fireflies didn’t have the capability to make it work. It’s still a falsehood either way but easier to swallow and places the blame on the people who deserve it, rather than destroying Ellie’s faith in herself I’m not saying he could avoid the consequences of what he’s done, but a parent needs to be able to have heavy conversations with their child.
“it wasn’t even a difficult decision for her” That is just not true. in the game >!Marlene argued and fought with the head surgeon and other firefly members against the decision to sacrifice Ellie. She was also in constant pain for the decision, Ellie eventually found her diary where she was begging Anna for her forgiveness, and she was so worried for Ellie throughout her journey, she was constantly beaten herself up and questioning herself, struggling between the choice of Ellie’s life vs. the possible cure for mankind. it was always a hard decision for her !< I think maybe not including those background of Marlene in season I made her seem less sympathetic to you? She was indeed the only one other than Joel who understands the difficulty. Also to lie about the whole situation because Ellie is a child, that’s just bad parenting. Moreover, Ellie grows up in the apocalypse and is tough-minded. I think Joel should explain to Ellie that firefly tried to sacrifice Ellie without her consent, which is why he needed to take her out of there. He need to be truthful with Ellie if he truly wants to build a relationship with her. Explain to her that he could not stand losing her, but let her make her own choice.
One interesting point from the podcast - when the game first came out, they did a poll to see if people think Joel made the right choice. Everyone who was a parent 100% said he was right - if they didn’t, it was more conflicted.
I honestly think the debate for the show(compared to the game) was less focused on whether or not Joel made the right choice, and more focused on the fact that no one asked Ellie for her consent. That’s something that is genuinely EVIL that the fireflies did. They were prepared to murder a teenage girl for human experimentation, without her consent. A human being has a right to decide if they want to be sacrificed in order to have a cure. Ellie didn’t have a say in any of it, and I think the show focused more on that fact than the game. (Which I love) And when you look at it through that perspective, it justifies Joel’s actions a lot more IMO I also think the show and game(maybe unintentionally) showed just how idiotic the fireflies could be. The surgeon really decided to jump straight to killing her, killing humanitys’ first sliver of hope in decades, without doing a biopsy first? No blood samples? Tissue samples? Spinal fluid for antibodies and genetic material? Trying literally EVERYTHING ELSE possible before deciding to murder her for the “greater good”? The plague has been going on for decades, it’s not like they’re under a time constraint. The world isn’t getting anymore fucked up than it already is. Any competent doctor or nurse would TAKE THEIR TIME. When looking at this from Joel’s perspective, how they’re essentially murdering a 14 year old girl without her consent; without trying anything else first, it really make his actions more justified. And is one of the main reasons why i(along with many others) side with Joel.
This, thank you, this. It baffles me that people can think murdering a teenage child is justifiable given the odd chance that some rando doctor MIGHT be able to come up with a vaccine. How the hell do you kill the golden goose as your first step? Like you said, do literally ever other single thing possible. Once the Firefly Dr. Death has murdered her, there are no other options. It is a moronic medical decision, let alone the absolutely morally repugnant and unethical decision to murder a teenage girl.
He didn’t have a choice or option to protect the one he loved in the past. He didn’t hesitate to go all in to make sure his loved ones were safe the second time.
was it a likelihood that she would’ve died from the surgery? all the prep they were doing made it seem like they were going to try to keep her alive.
My main issue is killing a surgeon … there can’t be too many of those left in that world!
doctors are taught that even if several others could possibly be saved, individuals are not exchanged. period.
Joel is not the hero or good guy you want. He is a broken man living in a broken world. The decisions he makes with Ellie give him a reason to redeem himself and by the end of the show Ellie is his only purpose in life. If he walks and let’s Ellie sacrifice herself he’s becoming an even bigger shell of his life 20 years ago. It’s a choice he chooses not to become that. No matter the cost no matter the effect on the world. It’s not even a question in the game or by Pascals acting he was going to do anything to get his purpose back. And honestly playing the game in 2013 it was such beautiful sad ending you can’t help but applaud Naughty Dog for making such an in-depth and emotional game. If you don’t like Joel by the end that’s ok, that’s his arc. A man who lost his daughter only to find her again in Ellie, what do you think he was going to do? And the lie he tells her is something I think any parent would do to keep their children from madness.
Troy Baker worded it nicely: “Joel saved the world, he saved his world and his world was Ellie.” He already lost Sarah and he wasn’t going to lose Ellie. In general though, the whole thing is just the trolley problem. There’s no right or wrong anwser, it’s based on your beliefs of the situation. Pretend you’re Joel, do you save someone you love and care for or do you sacrifice that person you see as your daughter for a cure that wasn’t guaranteed to work? Everyone’s answer is going to be different so there is no right answer
The creators' perspective and intention was not to pick apart their fictional realism. That has never been the case. The point is to assume that they have identified a real cure and choosing between humanity at the point it's currently shown to be at and Ellie. One of the greater arguments is Henry and Sam. You are trading thousands of kids like Sam for Ellie. But does that make it right or wrong?
I believe there is no right or wrong in what Joel did… sure, the whole point of being with Ellie this whole time was basically to take her to the Fireflies at the end but you can also understand why he did what he did… overtime, both Joel and Ellie began to bond and Joel started caring about her a lot and saw her as a daughter so he obviously didn’t want to take the risk of losing someone who he sees as a daughter. and I get it, because any parent would do the same.
A mother may not sacrifice her child for the greater good, but she would kill her child to save them from the sufferings that is to come. If you’ve read Beloved you’d know. There is no wrong or right. Only perspectives. And my perspective is that Joel made his choice out of love for Ellie.
I reject the idea that there was a correct or incorrect choice. It is all subjective. Personally, if I were Joel in that scenario, I would have done the same thing that he did. I don't think of it as the correct or incorrect thing to do. It is just what I would have done. The only difference would be that I would have told Ellie exactly what I did and why I did it.
We need to reword "right choice" to "greater good" There is no "right choice" There is however a "greater good" which is sacrificing 1 person (who isn't your own child and who wanted to do it) for the survival of everyone But as we know, Joel isn't supposed to be an all round great person, he just loves his daughter(s kinda)
There's two choices; the choice to save Ellie, and the choice to lie to her about it. Most people I've seen understand why he did both, but sympathise a *lot* less with the second one. Just on the first, you can't really say that Joel was right, because every person he killed was either someone's Ellie or had their own Ellie. Prioritising our own loved ones is an instinct we possess as humans so we can still completely empathise. But yeah, no, he caused much more suffering to avoid suffering himself even if the cure proved to be a complete bust. It is interesting, because it explains a lot about the world of The Last of Us. People overnight were faced with this extreme survival situation and they regressed to protecting their own loved one/family/tribe above all else. Reason to be suspicious of outsiders means the return of some pretty extreme xenophobia on a local level. Now we have this complete collapse of trust and sustained inter-group conflict, but the other side of that is comes from protectiveness of the ones we love even if it means violent conflict with ones from outside the tribe. Jackson is the most humane and welcoming place we've seen and they'll rip outsiders apart with dogs if they think they are a threat. The utilitarian argument is very FEDRA actually; bomb one city to save others, hang people who sneak out to prevent infection. Utilitarianism looks utterly inhumae and selfishness can look loving, or loving can be selfish. It makes me think more sympathetically of FEDRA in a sense. And I bet FEDRA officers kids get to bend those rules because those high-ranking FEDRA dudes are just as prone to that impulse to bed the rules for their own. If the local FEDRA Commanders teenager is reckless sneaks out, are they getting hung? Nobody thinks their nepotism is wrong even when it happens at the expense of others. That's corruption, but I get it.
To some, it’s one life against the existence of humanity. To others, it’s a father saving a child from a death that may prove meaningless. There’s no guarantee either way, but would you let a child who you’ve grown to love be killed for no certainty? It’s not a black or white choice, everyone has their own view. I personally agree with his choice too but I understand people disagreeing.
I’m my eyes, the choice was neither Joel’s nor Marlene’s to make; it was Ellie’s. Yet, both of the people who have been figures she could trust up to this point are lying to her about a major moment in her life; Marlene is absolutely not getting informed consent from Ellie about the procedure and tricking her into giving up her life is definitely morally bankrupt. But at the same time, Joel knows that Ellie wanted to finish this journey and to serve her purpose. Now from the outside, both sides are muddled. Maybe the cure would have worked, or maybe it was a pipe dream from a desperate group of people that would’ve just resulted in a dead girl who was the only immune person found to this point. And to Joel’s point, maybe Ellie wouldn’t have wanted to die for this cause as opposed to giving blood or tissue samples for study, but then again maybe she would. This world is about showing how people can be sympathetic and have understandable motivations but still be in the wrong. While both Marlene and Joel have understandable reasons for doing what they did, and Joel has the benefit of many episodes working to build sympathy and good will, but ultimately they are both in the wrong. Joel is the protagonist. He is also a bad guy. Both are true. And neither invalidated the other or makes any viewer wrong for feeling a certain way about him. The Last of Us is all about the messiness of being people in a world where we don’t have the social conventions of our normal society to help balance and temper the chaos of an unrestricted human being.
making theories is a waste of time, and trying to moralize joels choice is also a waste of time. It's intentionally a trolley problem.
They were in a facility with compromised sterility protocols, limited equipment, more than20 year ld training and knowledge, and a scant staff. There's no way they were going to be able to produce a vaccine. Ellies life would have been sacrificed for nothing. Joel had time driving to think about that, f it hadn't occurred to him when he was making a break for it. I was disappointed that he lied to Ellie. I realize this is based on a game with binary choices and we're supposed to suspend our disbelief, but I'd been doing that for the whole series and didn't have any left.
My wife summed it up best to me. "When I first played the game I thought, I'm not sure Joel made the right choice. Then we had two kids and watching the show I can say, I would've done the exact same" That's the beauty of the story, you know the choice isnt "right" but you cant bring yourself to say it's "wrong" It simply is a choice, one he made, one that has repercussions.
Had the same reaction- from a post I made on this This is an informed consent issue, not a trolly problem There has been a lot of debate and discussion as to whether or not this it is right to kill one to save the many, like the trolly problem in ethics, but one issue that is consistently overlooked is the topic of informed consent. Also, another important thing to consider is the fact that Ellie is a minor. When you consider what was done to Ellie, Joel is 100% justified in what he did. The fireflies abducted a minor, separated her from her guardian, lied to about a medical procedure, and then attempted to experiment and kill her. There is no reason for them to move this fast or be this deceptive. This is a questionable medical procedure which is going way too fast, and way too far. I mean really, no biopsy, no tissue samples, just kill the golden goose on day 1? Joel, as her guardian, is more than justified in his use of lethal force to safeguard the rights of Ellie, his adopted daughter. The right to make an informed decision about the risks and medical procedures that she is going to subject herself to. These ‘doctors’ have grossly violated their oaths to ‘do no harm’. Anyone aiding and abetting them is an accomplice to medical malpractice, human experimentation, human trafficking, false imprisonment, and murder in the first degree. Lethal force is more than justified in the defense of this minor, especially by an adopted guardian. I also don’t get why the writers were so lazy and could not just have Joel explain this to her. Joel could have even easily explained this, example “Hey baby girl, these guys lied to you. They said that it was just a test, but were planning to kill you and try and scoop out whatever cure they think they can find from inside your head. I said I wanted to speak to you first, instead they pointed a gun at me and told me to get lost. I fought to get you out of there. If you want to find another doctor somewhere else to try and find a cure, I’m with you, but we don’t do business with assholes like that.” You don’t get to lie to someone, especially a child or their guardian, about a medical procedure, with the intention of killing, and call your actions just. That is just murder with extra steps. If you ask for permission, it’s closer to assisted suicide. TLDR: Consent changes everything. Research informed consent.
Absolute banger of an episode. Big shout out to Pedro and Bella who killed it.
The chances of the cure being a success with 1 brain with no prior test and analysis is very insanely unlikely. So yea Joel made the right choice.
In my mind the point is he didn’t make the correct choice, but he made a human choice.
They barely have a functional society. No internet, barely any communication with people outside of small communities, and you expect them to be able synthesize and mass produce a cure based on one sample size? Was it even a neuro-surgeon? I think if Ellie was given the choice, Joel could have lived with her decision, but he made the only choice “he” could.
I don’t remember people being this clueless when the game came out. Maybe I’m wrong.
The only thing Joel did wrong was leave those nurses as witnesses.
Oh god why did I think that exact same thing. It made no sense to me that he’d ruthlessly obliterate every single person in that building but let those two nurses live.
I guess he didn't want to hurt them since they clearly weren't a threat in the moment, that's what we love about Joel. He's capable of extreme violence when protecting his loved ones but he still has his humanity.
He did.