The Last Of Us Creator Confirms Whether The Fireflies Could Have Made A Cure

At the end of the inaugural season of "The Last of Us," Joel Miller, the series protagonist played by Pedro Pascal, faces a truly impossible choice. After successfully escorting a young girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the post-apocalyptic United States (which is no easy feat considering that the country, like the rest of the world, is being torn apart by the cordyceps virus and the zombies it spawns), Joel meets up with his old friend Marlene (Merle Dandridge, reprising her role from the original video games by Naughty Dog), who asked him to transport Ellie in the first place, and gets some pretty rough news. Turns out that the reason Ellie needed to get to Salt Lake City from Boston safely is that the Fireflies located in Utah are planning to operate on her brain, seeing as she's immune to the cordyceps virus ... and as Marlene tells Joel, she won't survive the surgery.

Nobody tells Ellie this before she goes under the proverbial knife, but knowing her, she'd sacrifice her life to find a cure — which is what the doctors intend to do. Joel deprives her of this choice, whisking her away from the hospital and killing everyone in his path (more on that shortly). Anyone who watched this scene probably wondered one big thing: Could the doctors and nurses that Joel killed even find a cure using Ellie's brain?

Neil Druckmann — who helmed both "Last of Us" games at Naughty Dog and serves as the showrunner for the HBO adaptation alongside Craig Mazin — appeared on the "Secret Symbols" podcast and, among other things, addressed this very question. "All I can say is, our intent was that they would have made a cure — that makes the most interesting philosophical question for what Joel does," Druckmann confirmed, which is, to steal his phrasing, extremely interesting. Before season 2 began, both Druckmann and Mazin weighed in on Joel's choice further, and even they (sort of) agreed that Joel's decision, savage as it was, did make sense.

In an interview with IGN that ran before "The Last of Us" season 2 kicked off on April 13, 2025, Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, and a handful of key cast members — including newcomers Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, and Young Mazino, who portray Abby, Dina, and Jesse in the show's sophomore season — talked about Joel's heartbreaking and violent choice. As Druckmann revealed, he and Mazin feel a little differently about the path Joel chose.

"We have different opinions about this," Druckmann noted before continuing with his position on the matter. "I believe Joel was right," the showrunner admitted. "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 added before saying that he hopes he could avoid committing an act of mass violence. "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."

The bottom line is that we can sit here and argue about Joel's choice all day, but with Druckmann confirming that the Salt Lake City Firefly faction would have found a cure, it absolutely complicates this entire question. Plus, let's throw in the fact that, as Ellie and Joel leave behind his massacre at the Firefly hospital, she has no idea what's happening and asks Joel for clarification, at which point he lies to her about the entire thing. Yes, we know that Joel's choice has quite a lot to do with the fact that he lost his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) during the violent and chaotic onset of the cordyceps virus decades prior, but it still doesn't really make it right, does it? In any case, Joel gets his comeuppance in season 2 of the series.

When season 2 opens, we get a brief reminder that Joel lied to Ellie in the aftermath of the Salt Lake City massacre ... and then the narrative shifts forward by a full five years, giving us a glimpse at the now-apparent divide between the once-close Joel and Ellie. Throughout the first two episodes, we can clearly see there's an issue between them, but that ultimately becomes unimportant when Joel, out on a patrol of the protected settlement of Jackson during a massive snowstorm, rescues a girl who turns out to be Abby from an infected horde.

Unbeknownst to Joel, Abby has been hunting him for five years after hearing that he's the one responsible for killing her father, the doctor who planned to operate on Ellie and find the cure in the first place. After successfully bringing Joel and his patrol companion Dina back to the mansion where her group sought shelter earlier, Abby finally gets her revenge, beating Joel within an inch of his life before, unexpectedly, Ellie shows up. All enmity between the two vanishes in that moment as Ellie begs her surrogate father to get up off of the floor and fight for his life, but it's too late; Abby, who broke a golf club beating Joel, drives the jagged, broken shaft into his neck, killing him.

This is all to say that whether or not Joel was "right" to save Ellie is, obviously, pretty subjective ... as is the question of whether or not Abby was right to brutally kill him. That is, in the end, what "The Last of Us" is all about. In a world torn apart by cordyceps zombies as well as normal human war and turmoil, people will still make selfish choices, and Joel thought of himself and Ellie instead of considering the good of the world. In season 2's penultimate episode, "The Price," we see a flashback where Joel and Ellie finally discuss his decision, and Ellie is irate, telling him that if she had sacrificed herself, her "life would have f***ing mattered." Still, Joel tells her that he'd do it a thousand times over again because he loves her. Neil Druckmann, unsurprisingly, was exactly right: The fact that a cure was within reach makes Joel's decision much more philosophically fraught, but for parents the world over, it's still easy to understand why he did it.

"The Last of Us" is streaming on HBO Max now.