Season 2 of The Last of Us is marching on, and original game co-creator Neil Druckmann is setting the record straight on whether or not the Fireflies would have made a cure if Joel hadn't intervened.
Spoilers for The Last of Us Part 1 and 2.
Since The Last of Us came out in 2013, we've debated if we would have chosen to kill the Firefly doctors to save Ellie or if we would have let them study her brain, killing her, for a chance at finding a cure to the cordyceps infection ravaging the human race. It was an impossible choice: the human race, or your humanity?
A wrinkle in the choice, one that made Joel more sympathetic, was that we didn't know if the Fireflies would actually be able to make a cure. In the game itself, no one knows if Ellie's immunity can be copied or used to help other people. Would you sacrifice a child who'd essentially become your daughter for just a chance to develop a vaccine?
The debate has been raging for 12 years. The ambiguity has led to different perspectives and arguments all being true at once, keeping the game interesting all these years. But now, Druckmann has a definitive answer.
"Could the Fireflies make a cure," Druckmann asks in a clip posted to Reddit? "Our intent was that, yes, they could. Now, is our science a little shaky that now people are questioning it? Yeah, it was a little shaky and now people are questioning that. I can't say anything. All I can say is that our intent is that they would have made a cure."
Neil debunks the cure viability debate once & for all from r/thelastofus
So, there you have it, Joel doomed the world by selfishly choosing to save Ellie. No more debate is needed, it's his fault the cycle of violence continues. "That makes the most interesting philosophical question for what Joel does," Druckmann adds, but a lot of fans disagree.
"I liked the ambiguity of not knowing if there was a 100% success guarantee out of sacrificing Ellie," writes one ResetEra user. Another replies, "Agreed. It should be left unknown."
"Should have left it up in the air," states a fan on Twitter. "This makes the first game look worse… we should’ve never known," writes another.
I'm on the side of the people here. This answer flattens what was once an interesting philosophical debate into a simple trolley problem. Kill one person to save everyone - that's a no-brainer.
There's been a new push to paint Joel as a definite bad guy, removing any of the greyness from his world and the decisions it forces onto the survivors. To Abby, he's the evil man who killed her father, one of the doctors about to operate on Ellie. To Ellie, he's both the man who saved her life and took away its purpose. He was all of these things. But now, he's just the man who doomed the world.
Now that these games are solved, debate done, check out all the upcoming video game release dates. Maybe some of them will also give us endings we discuss for a decade.
