This interview contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1 on HBO (and the games, of course).
The “was Joel right?” debate has been ongoing since the first game debuted all the way back in 2013. Did he do the right thing when he saved Ellie’s life, even if that act meant a cure for the cordyceps infection that had devastated humanity might never be found? The question was then later rekindled after the finale of HBO’s The Last of Us Season 1, fueled further by the differences in Joel’s character in the series and the shift from spores to tendrils.
That was two years ago, and still the debate among fans rages on. So with Season 2 debuting on April 13, we took it upon ourselves to go straight to the source. I sat down with creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, as well as series stars Bella Ramsey (Ellie), Gabriel Luna (Tommy), Kaitlin Dever (Abby), Isabela Merced (Dina), and Young Mazino (Jesse) to get their take on whether or not Joel made the right decision in the hospital on that fateful day.
Because, you know, what better way to start your day than a debate about a life-saving murder-spree? (Our interview was at 9 in the morning.)
“We have different opinions about this,” Druckmann immediately offers, followed by a jovial laugh and a “we do, we do,” from Mazin.
But upon further discussion, it turns out that the pair’s opinions aren’t terribly far from each other after all.
“I believe Joel was right,” Druckmann admits. “If I were in Joel’s position, I hope I would be able to do what he did to save my daughter.”
“That’s so interesting, because I think that if I were in Joel’s position, I probably would have done what he did,” Mazin adds. “But I’d like to think that I wouldn’t. That’s the interesting push and pull of the morality of it. And that’s why the ending of the first game is so provocative and so wonderful. It just doesn’t let you off the hook as a player.”
Most of the cast, however, are more non-commital on the subject. After a moment, Ramsey, Merced and Dever all chime in with different versions of “it’s complicated.” Merced, however, takes it a step further, mentioning that she thinks “this season explores that.” The word “that” of course is doing a lot of heavy lifting, considering just how complicated this conversation is.
Luna stands with his proverbial brother Pedro in the same way Tommy stood with Joel. “I’m biased,” he says. “I’m his brother and I understand and you can’t see the scope of the whole world. You can only see your world, and Ellie is his world. And so I mean, I can’t personally fault him as Tommy and maybe not even as Gabe, so I don’t know.”
The musings between the cast were pretty consistent, with everyone agreeing that there is no simple answer to the question. Mazino, who plays Jesse, did dive in a bit further though.
“I feel like he was on autopilot,” Mazino says of Joel’s slaughtering the people in the hospital while saving Ellie. “I think he was kind of just… he blacked out and it was just all hazy until he came to.”
Mazino’s answer here is probably the fairest shake of them all. Can you say, definitively, that if a loved one was going to die and the best answer you were provided in the moment was that it only might save the world, your loved one wasn’t given the opportunity for consent and the surgery was happening immediately, that you wouldn’t have done the same? I can’t. And it’s that back and forth of what you hope you would do versus what you would probably do that makes the story of Joel and Ellie compelling.
“People get to the end of The Last of Us [the game] and there is that question, what would you do? What should you do if faced with the opportunity to save the world, if you sacrifice your child. That goes back to Abraham and Isaac. It’s so profound. The notion of sacrifice to save the world,” Mazin says.
The familiarity only makes it harder. “It’s a difference between, OK, if I had to kill a random person to save who knows how many lives, in the abstract, you would say, well, yeah, that makes sense, of course,” Druckmann adds. “But now, remove it from being a random person and it’s your kid. Now the answer is very different.”
That differentiation takes the conversation from the traditional Trolley Problem — should you sacrifice one person to save a group of people — and makes it a deeper, even more complicated ethical question.
“It’s like death begets death begets death and I think that’s just a perfect example. And yeah, it’s his world. Who cares about the world if your world isn’t there?” Mazino asks.
“Yeah, he saved his world, just not the world,” finishes Ramsey.
Now that you’ve had time to sit with the question in the time between the Season 1 finale and now, what do you think? Was Joel right?
