How Joel Miller Won In The End
Much of the controversy surrounding The Last of Us Part II deals with how the first game’s protagonist, Joel Miller, was portrayed. Many fans believe that the sequel did Joel dirty or that his character was disrespected by the second game's direction. A lot of people feel that his shocking death was just that — shocking, nothing more — and/or that he died for nothing. And while I can understand some frustrations surrounding how the character was dealt with, I honestly don’t think it’s fair to say that Joel was disrespected or spat on.
Since I’ve got some semblance of a platform to actually write out my thoughts, I’m going to use this opportunity to explain why I honestly believe that Joel Miller won out in the end. This might be able to double as a character study.
Since Sarah died on Outbreak Day in the prologue of Part I, Joel has only wanted one thing. Joel just wanted a reason to keep fighting beyond survival, and we know that being a father gave him that purpose. We can see that in the way he carried himself when Sarah was alive. He loved being a father. It gave him a great sense of pride, and it gave him a reason to keep going when times got tough. And once Sarah died, that purpose was taken away from him.
Throughout Part I, we see Joel slowly regain that purpose in his life. His bond with Ellie becomes his purpose, and we see his demanor change. He goes from stoic, distant, and occasionally standoffish to more open, warm, and caring. He talks more about his past, he listens to Ellie as she confides in him about her dreams, interests, and concerns. He is, once again, a father. His life has come full circle, and as we see at the end of The Last of Us Part I, he’s willing to risk life and limb in order to keep that sense of stability and purpose alive.
And here lies my first point: Joel wins out in the end because he, unlike the others in The Last of Us Part II, were able to get what they wanted without falling into the cycle of anger, hatred, and violence the world around them had created.
That’s not to say that he didn’t slip into violent tendencies after he found closure over Sarah’s death. He obviously does. However, he doesn’t lose himself in the anger and violence again. After he finds closure over Sarah’s death, his violent actions are either to protect the closure he’s found, or to protect the community he’s assimilated to in Jackson, Wyoming. In other words, he just does what he needs to do to get by in that world.
The same cannot be said about Ellie. After finding out the truth of the events at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Ellie cuts ties with Joel. She ignores him for nearly two years, only talking to him when absolutely necessary. However, we can see that she still loves Joel despite herself, and in their final scene, we see her take the first steps towards getting closure over her survivors guilt and her relationship with Joel.
I’ll touch more on this later, but just know that Ellie does not find complete closure in that conversation. That conversation is her taking the first steps towards closure. And it’s because she doesn’t have complete closure that she heads out to Seattle following Joel’s death. After his death, Ellie has to simultaneously forgive Joel for his actions, and attempt to let him go and move on with her life. And The Last of Us Part II is all about her journey in search of that closure.
Eventually, she does find that closure, but only after a brutal three-day journey in Seattle, leaving her family behind at The Farm, and brutally fighting through a slavery compound in Santa Barbara. And while her leaving The Farm is understandable in my opinion, it’s still representative of Ellie losing herself in the anger and rage that her obsession with Abby has fostered. She ultimately is able to forgive and let Joel goes, but it costs Ellie a lot of things she held dear.
Speaking of Abby, she’s in the same boat. Hell, she killed the root of all of her trauma and grief, and yet it still wasn’t enough because immediately following her murder of Joel, she just falls back into the WLF-Scar conflict. And, granted, she does eventually pull herself out of it, but she also lost herself in the anger and violence before she was able to find that closure over her father’s death. It costs her not only her relationships with her friends, but also her friend’s lives.
This is not to say that Abby and Ellie don’t win out in their own right. They absolutely do. Ellie and Abby are both able to walk away from their participation in this cycle of violence and move forward with their lives. However, the biggest difference here is that Joel, while he does die, gets everything he truly wants in the end. Abby and Ellie get their closure, sure, but I guarantee that they want their father figures to be alive more than anything else.
Joel gets closure for Sarah’s death, he gets to be a father again, and he does get closure with Ellie. This scene I referenced earlier sees Joel getting closure with Ellie. I said Ellie doesn’t get closure because she wanted to see their relationship to be completely repaired. For Joel, all he wanted since she cut him out was the chance of making it up to her. He wanted the chance to show her that he does think that she matters. He just wanted to know that she loved him the same way he loved her. And, in their final conversation, he got all of that. And we could even extend this further and say that Joel gets what he wants even in death because we know he wouldn’t have wanted Ellie to kill Abby.
To say that Joel was disrespected in this game is ludicrous, in my opinion. He gets pretty much everything he wanted in the end, and he didn’t relapse into the stoic, dispassionately violent version we met at the beginning of the first game. He was able to be the loving, caring father figure and community member in the prologue of the first game. He was able to live his last days the way he wanted to live them, despite the world waiting to change that at every turn.
That is how Joel Miller won in the end.
Photo Credit: Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment
