Revenge and Faith in The Last of Us Part II

This article is a spiritual sequel to “Can You Pet The Dog?” over at Deep-Hell. As Deep-Hell did, we want to take this opportunity to remind you that we are able to bring contributors on through the generosity of readers like you.

How much faith do you put in one person? It’s the first question that comes to mind when discussing the type of faith present in 2013’s The Last of Us, a story so overwhelmingly detached from the spiritual and so deeply focused on one man’s relationship with his surrogate daughter. The way I read the end of The Last of Us, Joel Miller annihilated the possibility of humanity’s long-term survival. He did it to save a girl, but most of all he did it to prevent himself from feeling the pain of losing his daughter again. It’s a story about how Ellie, then a girl, put her faith in a man, in a father, who betrayed it. If the first game was about how Joel was the man to ultimately doom us, the anti-savior, then The Last of Us Part II is a zoomed in look at the personal fallout of his actions — from two perspectives. 

As a triple-A video game sequel, The Last of Us Part II presents an impressively different type of story. It is inarguably narratively ambitious to introduce us to Abby Anderson and immediately have her bash Joel’s brains in. The seemingly senseless violence of Joel’s death is as disorienting as the perspective shifts. But perspective is exactly what this is giving. The ambition to tell the story of the daughter of the doctor who Joel murders in the near-perfect ending of the first game is what justifies  the existence of a follow-up at all. It is impressive, then, that one of the myriad ways The Last of Us Part II chooses to differentiate itself is by making God part of the equation.  

Read reductively, The Last of Us Part II is a game about two women slowly coming to the same conclusion about generational cycles of violence. One falls faster than the other, but both lose nearly everything and everyone they love in the process of coming to terms with the consequences of their actions. It’s bleak, but both characters live, Abby earning something closer to an ambiguously happy ending than Ellie’s melancholic return to an empty house. On a pure character level, there is sense to be made here. In being as sympathetic in the long run as Ellie, Abby’s characterization achieves the narrative trick of the game. We have come to sympathize with Joel’s killer, perhaps more so than his(our) beloved Ellie. 

Perhaps not, many dimwitted fans would likely argue, but this is where I struggle to read ambiguously – much as I struggled and struggle still to read Joel’s final actions in the first game in any other way than the one I always have, even at 18 goddamn years old. My conviction is unwavering and when looking at this story more to find out why, I found it. The Last of Us Part II cannot separate faith from family. 

Religion is discussed most explicitly by Dina, Ellie’s lover and true counterpart, who it turns out is pregnant while the two are in Seattle tracking down Joel’s killers. Early on while exploring the city, Ellie and Dina find themselves in a derelict synagogue. The player is prompted to have an optional conversation with Dina about what Judaism means to her, and what it means to believe in the post-apocalypse. Perhaps letting players opt out of this specific conversation was a smart decision for a game that sold ten million copies (before the most recent PS5 release even), but artistically it’s a coward’s move. 

For Dina, faith is family, and food, and culture. This place is miraculously full of good memories, even though she had never stepped foot inside before. That is the power the place of worship holds over her. Even the tunnel-visioned Ellie can see that. It’s an optional scene, but a vital one to understanding Dina’s place in the story. 

Her Judaism, the only depiction of a real faith in the game, is both serious and pure. Dina is unmitigated good in a sea of so much compromise, and her belief grounds her in something Ellie is so obviously lacking. She is a believer and that is a beacon of hope for Ellie. Her life and love is a blessing she offers freely to Ellie, who sees this but ultimately can’t move past Joel, even after the two begin to raise a child together. 

Ellie has no room for faith. This is the nature of being consumed by a singular, myopic idea. In The Last of Us Part II, Ellie’s quest for revenge is pathological. It’s hereditary: a disease she caught from her father. To even consider believing in something as big as faith, Ellie would need to abdicate what she views as her responsibility to Joel. She is incapable of conceptualizing a world where someone else passes final judgment. For Ellie, believing in God would be giving up. At the start of the game, Abby feels the same way.She has a Dina too. One she listens to.

It actually matters very little to the story how and why Abby meets the teenage Seraphite Lev and his sister Yara. Their instantly-felt life debts to each other are beyond contrived in a world full of people saving each other’s asses from the fungally-infected. As everyone around them dies horribly, though, the two must become each other’s world entire and, like with much of the series, it’s the performances that sell the characters (shoutouts to Ian Alexander and Laura Bailey or else you might not even be getting this essay).

Lev is a fascinating character because of how he holds onto his faith. The Seraphites who raised and rejected him were a religious cult at war with Abby’s aligned faction, the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). Lev is a trans man, a conflict that leads his own ignorant mother to displacing her children onto a battlefield where both sides want them dead. Later we learn his faith in his prophet has not only been unshaken by the trauma, but given new life. In the words of his own prophet, “Only When Weak May I Carry My True Strength.”

Abby, serving her role as Ellie’s foil, is stubborn (and yoked) as an Ox, but when it comes down to the wire she makes the choice to believe in something greater than herself. Lev teaches her tolerance, faith, and forgiveness. She literally stops calling him a “Scar,” a fictional slur the WLF uses for the Seraphites, after he more or less says “please don’t call me that.” After Ellie kills everyone Abby cares about, it’s Lev’s influence that allows Abby to spare her. But it’s not just forgiving Ellie that informs me of Abby’s faith, it’s the belief in a hope she once cynically laughed at to her lover’s face: the existence of the Fireflies. It’s the hope that bears out in the end. 

Dina and Lev present the protagonists with a choice to believe. Ellie refuses and leaves Dina to pursue revenge. Abby chooses to believe in Lev, in the Fireflies. One an acceptance and the other a rejection. Abby finds God and home, as one, and Ellie is left to possess neither one without the other. 

Despite this positioning, Dina and Lev are not immune to the constant suffering of living in this world. By the end of the game, they’ve each gone through hell and come out the other side. If their souls are so pure, though, and their faith so unwavering, they surely must have a purpose for suffering. Right?

If The Last of Us Part II were a Catholic game, there might be some more simple answers. It isn’t. Suffering will not lead to redemption. The Last of Us Part II is a Jewish game, and the Jewish faith cares about the preservation of human life, above all else. 

In the Jewish faith when your parent dies, you mourn for 12 months. It is done in stages, each with less intense restrictions than the last. First is the Aninut, a period that lasts until interment. Then, is the typical Shiva that follows any Jewish burial, that’s seven days. The Shanah, the 11 month period that follows, is dedicated to mourning and reflecting. It’s an extended period of bereavement. 

Ellie is in different stages of mourning Joel each time she makes the decision to go after Abby, but even months later we understand she is still mourning. Perhaps, if she had some guidance through this first year, this Greek tragedy could have been avoided. 

The Last of Us Part II believes in the power of the process. God abandoned this world. Here, faith is more than a belief in God, it is a way of understanding that beneath the visible horror, there is a plan.There is a plan to build a new world. This worldview becomes troubling when belief becomes the way the game distinguishes its heroes from its villains. 

The end of the game can be read as pure nihilism, but ambiguity of the ending lies in Ellie’s potential. The moral universe has become smaller. It’s divided into good people, bad people, and Ellie at the crossroads between the two. You have preserved her life, above all else. Now it is up to her to choose what to do with it. It’s on you to believe, or not, in Ellie. Whether she exists or not beyond the pixels on your screen is immaterial.