Then the two women spend the next several minutes beating the absolute shit out of each other. Abby, who has completely let go of her conflict with Ellie, shrugs off the challenge until Ellie hold a knife to Lev’s throat. The two women are about to make their escape from the prison compound when Ellie demands that they settle things once and for all. The story is utterly bleak by this point, but here’s an action-packed finale if you want one.Įventually Ellie rescues Abby and Lev on a desolate execution ground. You even get an automatic silenced weapon, a suppressed SMG, just so you can finally let loose. Compared to the careful work of establishing the history of the WLF and Seraphite factions in Seattle, the Santa Barbara setting just feels like an extra level stocked with enemies you really won’t feel bad killing. They mostly serve as cannon fodder that Ellie has to carve her way through on her way to a final scene with Abby. This new crop of enemies isn’t given much characterization. It’s a disservice to both characters and it compounds the problem of motivation that undercuts every part of Ellie’s story.Įllie trails Abby and Lev to Santa Barbara, where they’ve been abducted by some kind of gang or militia. Instead the only tacks Dina appears to take with Ellie are, “You have an obligation to this family” and “Hey, have you considered how hard it is for me to deal with you?” Unsurprisingly, Ellie walks out. The conversation where they try and work through what’s going on with Ellie? It doesn’t happen. Dina, who has been established throughout the story as a survivor of things as bad or worse than Ellie has seen, has no role to play here other than the “spurned wife”. Joel’s decision was “Fatherhood or the World” and the rest of the game was a murderous sprint.īut the trick doesn’t work well here because the characters and the relationship we've seen to this point makes the scene ring false.
So all the things that would make sense of people to do in that situation, there was no time to consider. She was under the knife, and he had minutes to react. This was a trick employed in the first game as well: Joel had no time to come to terms with the Fireflies’ sacrifice of Ellie. Dina goes from “come back to bed” to “I won't go through this again” in seconds. It is remarkable how quickly this part of the story unfolds given the leisurely pacing of other parts of The Last of Us Part 2. So she attempts to leave her new family before dawn, only to be confronted by Dina.
Ellie can’t live, can’t move on, unless she does something to lay this trauma to rest. Just like that, the pastoral bliss is shattered. At a moment of happiness and peace, the scene dissolves as Ellie relives Joel’s execution.
#Does ellie die in the last of us 2 series#
“Settler Homesteading, but Queer” is the game’s vision of happiness, underscoring the degree to which this series has masked a conservative, middle-class vision of America with queer representation and anxiety about the evils of both ideology and government.īut Ellie is restless, beset by cinematic flashes of PTSD. Their white clapboard farmhouse stands atop a fortified hill overlooking a river valley that flashes and shimmers in the late afternoon sunlight. It’s so overdone it’s practically calendar art: Ellie wanders amber fields of grain beneath an endless golden-hour sunset. Ellie and Dina have created an idyllic nuclear family as they pass their days on an equally idyllic family farm. Abby, whose relationship with a lot of her friends was poisoned or scarred in some way by the bloody vengeance they saw her take, can’t play the monster in front of her last friend in the world, this surrogate little brother she’s ended up with. Lev, the kid Abby has taken under her wing for much of the game, begs Abby to stop. She is on the verge of killing Dina right in front of Ellie when Abby’s newest (and last, as it turns out) friend intervenes. The two women fight, and Abby gets the better of Ellie in a cat-and-mouse duel in the theater’s backstage. It probably should have been, given that this turns out to be the game’s final verdict on Ellie’s misguided quest. This could be the start of the game’s denouement. And now, as Abby confronts Ellie with every reason to kill her and virtually no option to spare her, she calls it a waste. Abby let them keep their lives (a point just about all of Ellie’s victims try making to her).
Tommy and Ellie weren’t part of Joel’s crimes. For them, revenge and justice were one and the same. But that’s not who Abby or her closest friends were. If Abby's goal was to inflict pain on Joel, it certainly would have hurt him to watch them die. Because Abby is right: she and her strike team could have killed Ellie and Tommy. It’s an insightful turn of phrase and probably the moment the game comes closest to sticking the landing.
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