The Last Of Us Is About The Danger Of Unconditional Love, Showrunners Say

This post contains major spoilers for the season finale of "The Last of Us."

The story of "The Last of Us" doesn't end with a dramatic sacrifice from a selfless hero or a "Resident Evil" boss fight with a mutant clicker. There are no bad guys, let alone unquestionably good ones. There's no emotionally fraught, tear-jerker finale. Instead, we watch Joel's (Pedro Pascal) bloody, murderous rampage through the Salt Lake City hospital to save Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from a fatal brain surgery. One that Marlene (Merle Dandridge, reprising her role in live-action) emphasizes could potentially reverse-engineer a cure to the Cordyceps infection. One life in exchange for the future of humanity.

The season finale decides to end on something quiet, but not any less impactful. Without shame, Joel tells a lie. There's a hold on Ellie's face, and she says, "Okay." Cut to black, roll credits. The delivery of one word holds so much power and meaning in this story because, mushroom zombies aside, "The Last of Us" is ultimately a tale about love.

/Film's Ben Pearson attended a virtual press event with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, in which they attempted to distill the one core idea that drives the entire franchise. In the end, both showrunners expressed that the game and the show serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of "unconditional love."

"That was the concept for the story, both for the game and the show," Druckmann said. "How can we make the player feel the unconditional love that parents feel for their child, and this worry and fear and love and joy that can come with it?"

Love and loss haunt Joel and Ellie's entire journey through a fallen, alternate United States. On the very first day of the Cordyceps outbreak, Joel lost his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker). Meanwhile, 14-year-old Ellie, orphaned in the middle of the apocalypse, has lost everyone she's ever cared about. Throughout this whole season, we've watched the father/daughter duo slowly come together and fill the void in each other's hearts while their story intersects with other forms of love. Despite all his attempts to shut her out, Joel's love for Ellie blossoms into something complex and powerful. Druckmann shared he wanted every thread in the series to go back to Joel and Ellie's relationship:

"Sometimes, when you love something unconditionally, logic goes out the window and you will do really horrible things to protect the ones you love. And there's a lot of examples worldwide of this happening all the time. So for us, it was just like, 'Okay, here are all the different pieces that we have, the tools that we have, within this story. How can we, with each episode, thematically touch on that in some way?' Both the [beauty] and the joy that can come out of, like, a story like Bill and Frank, and a fate worse than death when a man has to kill his own brother because he's turned. And then, ultimately, the greater and greater sacrifices Joel has to make for Ellie. And likewise, what she's going through to protect him."

For the HBO series, Druckmann seized a wonderful opportunity to go deeper into these side characters than ever before. Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank's (Murray Bartlett) tragic love story, for example, adds dimension to Joel and Ellie's quest as much as it stands alone.

Craig Mazin, who previously worked on HBO's "Chernobyl," is no stranger to existential dread and apocalyptic horrors. The showrunner felt like a natural creative fit with Neil Druckmann, especially as a personal fan of the original game. "We give [unconditional love] way too much credit, like it's the highest form of love," Mazin said. "Unconditional means literally no conditions. None. Including conditions whereby you really ought to be doing something that is not in the best interests of the person you love."

Mazin is vaguely referring to Joel's actions in the season finale when he decides to save Ellie from the Fireflies while she is unconscious, robbing her of her own agency to choose what to do with her immunity. The weight of Joel's decision eventually becomes a pivotal part of the sequel's main premise. In season 2, expect to see Ellie begin to navigate her feelings about her protector's unconditional love, something that Mazin professed he didn't have a black-and-white stance on. "I'm not suggesting I have a hard opinion about how things go at the end," he said. "I don't. I'm confused about it, morally. I think it's a difficult choice. I go back and forth, and I think a lot of people will go back and forth on it."

The ending of the original "The Last of Us" elevated the material from a solid pastiche of the zombie genre into something genuinely new. It was provocative, controversial, and unafraid to push the medium's boundaries. There is no right or wrong answer to the dilemma at the center of its ending, and will divide audiences in its live-action retelling, just like it did in the game.