#trying to offload any discomfort you feel towards joel's choice onto a secret potential third ending

[a-really-bad-decision]

Look. I get that folks who are approaching the finale from this angle are usually doing so from a place of genuine good faith and love for Joel. But like. If your immediate reaction after finishing season 1 is to insist that the cure never could have been developed/distributed/tested/viable and that the Fireflies were stupid/naive/slapdicks/never could have accomplished it anyways, so Joel Definitely Did Nothing Wrong, I can’t help but feel like you’re wildly missing the point of it all.

Because like. Joel did not ever care if the cure could have worked. He did not care if it’s what Ellie might have wanted in that moment (neither did the fireflies of course, but they’re not the ones who traveled by her side, protected her, made her feel safe and cared about). Neither of these were ever a point of consideration in the finale. Ellie’s death and the resultant hypothetical cure could have had a guaranteed 100% success rate. It could have spread instantly, around the world the moment they removed her brain from her skull, turning every single runner, clicker, and bloater back to a healthy human being, with no deleterious side effect.

And Joel still would have shot that doctor point blank in the face.

Because that moment right there, is the point. To me at least. It’s the climax that the whole story has been building towards: a father’s beautiful, selfish decision to save his daughter at the literal cost of the entire world. And not just the world in an abstract sense, but in ways that carry weight to him on a deeply personal level. Tess’ dying wish. A real future for his niece or nephew. Ellie’s own agency in all of this. And he did it without hesitating for a moment.

Going from treating Ellie like cargo, like a clicker waiting to happen, to deciding that her life is more important to him than than any other human being who was or ever will be born? Regardless of whether it’s “““healthy”””, that’s an incredible fucking relationship arc. And it only has this level of gravity and meaning if there are genuine consequences to making that decision.

(And let me be clear here: none of this is a moral indictment of Joel. Joel’s motivations, actions, decisions etc. are all incredibly blatant, human, and relatable, and if he’d done anything but go on that rampage, it would have contradicted everything we know and understand about him so far. Also, he’s fucking fictional. Who gives a shit if he did a Kinda Amoral Thing. None of it is real, and it doesn’t matter)

The argument here isn’t that Fireflies Good And Smart And Can Totally Save The World For Sure Guys, or Joel Did Objectively Bad Thing And Is Unforgivable Bad Forever Now. The argument is that the show is much more interesting and internally consistent if you buy into the idea that there’s a chance, even a slim one, that the fireflies could have extracted a viable vaccine at the terrible cost of a fourteen year old girl’s life. That maybe Joel did prevent a cure from being made – that he potentially did doom the world for Ellie (or at least doomed it to another few decades of limping painfully by until something else came along). And that despite the cost, he pulled that trigger, brutally and without hesitation. He did it knowing that he’ll have to go on living with the knowledge of what he took from everyone, and how effortless it was to make that choice in spite of it all. That he’ll willingly betray Ellie’s trust as many times as he has to if it means keeping her from taking the burden of that guilt on herself, but also because he can’t bear the thought of her hating him if she learned the truth. And most of all (and in his own words), that if he was given the chance to go back and do it again, he would have made the exact same choice all over.

You take that out, and what kinda finale do you get now? A run and gun scene of a man rescuing a girl that he’s come to love, sure, but now it’s from a bunch of one dimensional, child murdering villains, set in a place they never had to go to, preceded by a journey that was rendered useless before they even left, all because there was never any chance of it working in the first place. Pointless roundabout cynicism, and an endpoint that now textually only existed to stick the protagonists in their get along sweater.

You don’t have to agree with this specific interpretation of the ending. I get that this can come across as a harsh reading of Joel, especially since he’s a character that myself and others genuinely like a lot. But that nitpicky fixation on proving that the cure never could have worked always felt more for the benefit of the uncomfortable player/viewer than as any sort of actual narrative improvement. A way to divest yourself of ever having to sit with the weight of either choice. Of having to think about the way that a secret so massive, sitting unspoken between you and a loved one, can rot that relationship. Of the way that someone you thought you trusted can act in your best interests, but against your own wishes.

And if that’s not what you want from the show, genuinely and without judgment: that’s fine. You keep doing you. I’m just not sure why you’re watching something like tlou otherwise.