Movies - TV
The Last Of Us Season Finale Skips An Emotional Cliffhanger From the Game
By MICHAEL BOYLE
Spoiler Warning!
This story contains spoilers for
“The Last of Us.”
The season finale of “The Last of Us” was mostly faithful to the source material, but it made one significant change: The show cut out the game’s cliffhanger where it seems like Ellie drowned. In the show, Joel's last memory before waking up in the Firefly Lab is of a stun grenade going off and a soldier knocking him out, but the game’s version had a much more emotional payoff.
In the game, Joel's last memory is of him attempting CPR on an unconscious Ellie, and even when a gun is pointed at his head and soldiers are telling him to put his hands up, he doesn't stop trying to save her. His final conscious moments are spent in absolute terror with him thinking he's lost Ellie for good, a powerful emotional beat that created a lot of suspense.
Instead of a drowning sequence, the show gives viewers an earlier scene where Joel and Ellie express how much they care for each other, but it feels like compensation for their lack of on-screen bonding throughout the season. In the game, Joel and Ellie’s bond naturally develops over dozens of hours, so they don’t need to express how much they care about each other.