The Cure in The Last of Us Is A Vehicle, Not A Goal
The following article will contain spoilers for The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part II. If you wish to avoid these spoilers, click away now.
It’s hard to write any sort of reflection regarding The Last of Us franchise, given that a Part III to the post-apocalyptic action-adventure saga is a real possibility. However, there is one aspect of the world of The Last of Us that I do want to write about, and I honestly feel like I can write about. Today, I want to talk about the role that the cure plays in TLOU and its meaning to the world overall. Additionally, I’d like to explore what role the cure could play, if any, in The Last of Us Part III.
Let’s start all the way in the beginning, with The Last of Us Part I.
In TLOU1, Joel and Ellie’s journey to Jackson-Colorado-Salt Lake City is all about the cure, at least ostensibly. Every move they made, every city they found themselves stuck in, etc were all obstacles to overcome on their way to deliver the immune girl to the Fireflies and save humanity. However, the cure takes a huge backseat to Joel and Ellie’s developing relationship as the game moves on. For example, in Jackson, the ranch house scene where the two argue over Joel’s attempt to have Tommy take Ellie the rest of the journey.
If the cure was at the forefront of the game, then Tommy taking Ellie the rest of the way really wouldn't be much of an issue. Tommy is a former Firefly, so he knows who the Fireflies are, how they operate, and where to go. He’s also a very capable survivor, having not only served a while with the Fireflies but also running the start-up commune in Jackson. There isn’t much of a reason to believe that Tommy would’ve failed in bringing Ellie to the Fireflies.
However, the cure isn’t at the forefront here. Ellie is upset because, while she probably recognizes that Tommy is capable of getting her to the Fireflies, she doesn’t trust him to. And she doesn’t have the bond with Tommy that she has with Joel. That’s drives the first game. The bond between Ellie and Joel is what the first game is all about. That’s evidenced even further with the ending, when Joel decides that “sacrificing the few to save the many” is not a motto he can abide by anymore, and he takes Ellie out of the hospital before she can be killed for the cure.
Now, many of you reading this right now already know this. You played the first game, after all. Just bear with me, I promise I am going somewhere with this.
For now, let’s move on to The Last of Us Part II. In the highly anticipated and polarizing sequel, the cure takes a backseat again, in a number of different ways. First, we have Abby, the newest playable character in the series. She kills Joel in the very beginning of the game, and while her motivation for doing so does stem from Joel’s prevention of the cure, that isn’t why she kills Joel. Her reasons for killing Joel are more personal than that.
The surgeon Joel kills at the end of his hospital rampage was Abby’s father. Abby was really close with her father, and she finds herself being unable to move on from his death. So, she trains herself to become an unstoppable killer, and takes out Joel four years after Joel killed her father. The cure is almost non-existent in Abby’s mind. Most of her friends believe that Abby is upset over the cure, however, her internal reasoning always comes back to the death of her father. She constantly has nightmares of walking down the corridor of Saint Mary’s Hospital and finding her father dead, nightmares she’s still plagued with even after she kills Joel.
Transitioning to Ellie for just a second, we can see the cure is once again not at the forefront of her story either. Her not dying for the cure is something that weighs on her mind, but once again, it’s taken a backseat to her obsession with Abby and relationship with Joel. You could even argue that Ellie isn’t mad at Joel because she didn’t get to become the cure, she’s more upset that he took her choice in the matter away, above all else. Furthermore, both of the times Ellie goes after Abby are extremely distant from the cure. The first time, it was her obsession. The second time, it was in search of closure and relief from her panic attacks/PTSD.
We can see just how little the cure means in this scene, where Abby and Lev infiltrate the theatre to confront Team Jackson. After Jesse is killed, Ellie tries to defuse Abby by saying, “I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me. There’s no cure because of me, I am the one that you want. Just let him [Tommy] go.” Here, we can see that Ellie believes that Abby killed Joel over the cure, which we know isn’t the case through our playing as Abby.
Abby even looks confused at why the cure is even being brought up for a split second, before completely ignoring that the cure was ever mentioned and stating that she’s upset that Ellie and her group killed all of her friends. I think that scene and short back-and-forth are a lot more important than a lot of people realize. The Last of Us Part II has a lot to say, and I think that in this scene, the game makes one thing abundantly clear.
The cure is not a goal to be achieved in the world of The Last of Us, it is a vehicle used to explore.
The goal of The Last of Us Part I is to get the player to buy into the relationship that Ellie and Joel build throughout their cross-country journey. They use the cure as a way to explore how that relationship is built, and how much these characters are willing to do for each other now that they’ve formed that bond. Joel’s rampage through the hospital at the end of Part I is proof positive of that fact. The cure was never truly the goal of the first game.
It’s obvious to anyone who’s played The Last of Us Part II that creating the cure wasn’t a goal in that game either. It again took on the role of a vehicle to explore Ellie and Joel’s relationship, but instead of exploring how that kind of bond could be strengthened, it was used to see how that bond could be severed and whether or not the rift between the two could be repaired. What’s more interesting is how little the cure means to Abby, especially when you consider her role in the story.
There was absolutely a story to be told where someone could’ve killed Joel as a direct result of his prevention of the cure. A story where the motivation stems from the cure and the cure only. I honestly can’t even think of any type of motivation that would be stronger than getting back at the guy who doomed humanity. However, Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross chose to go in a different direction. They deliberately chose to ignore that and instead created a separate, more personal motivation for Joel’s character.
To me, that choice to stray away from using the cure as motivation is the writers of this series saying that the cure is not a goal for these characters to achieve. And this is something that I feel is lost on a lot of fans of these games, especially those that were critical of The Last of Us Part II’s story. I’m not saying that to pick on those that didn’t like the game, this is just an observation I’ve made.
I’d like to use the most prominent example I could find of a TLOU2 critic placing a lot more emphasis on the cure in TLOU1 than Neil Druckmann himself. A YouTuber going by The Closer Look released this three-hour critique/rewrite of The Last of Us Part II. I’m not going to lie and say that I am a fan of their rewrite, nor do I agree with the majority of their criticisms. I am using this rewrite as an example because there is a lot of emphasis on the cure, and it feels disjointed with the TLOU series in my opinion.
In this rewrite, FEDRA has a massive role in the story, and they’ve developed a cure that “works like antibiotics.” It’s not a vaccine, they say, and it’s a one time solution. Basically, if you get bit, you take one dose of this cure and you’re cured, unless you get bitten again, in which case you’ll need another dose. And FEDRA uses this cure as a way to gain power over other factions in Seattle. A lot of this rewrite revolves around Abby searching for Ellie, not Joel, in order to find the cure and aliveate the Fireflies, not WLF, from FEDRA’s wrath.
This rewrite does try to present Ellie and Joel’s relationship as important, but it does take a backseat to the cure. The cure is presented in this rewrite as a goal to be achieved. Dina is kidnapped and exposed to spores by Abby for it, and Abby’s motivations are completely changed so she actively searches it out, so much so that she discredits all of her father’s work towards a cure, which is something she’d never do canonically.
There are random moments where Joel and Ellie will talk, or where Ellie will have a random flashback to a good time with Joel, but these moments are few and far between the moments where she actively aids Abby in breaking into a FEDRA hospital in order to help further Abby’s goal of finding a permanent cure. And I’m sorry, but this just isn’t what The Last of Us is about. TLOU1 was, ostensibly, about the cure, but was truly about the relationship between Ellie and Joel. This rewrite, ostensibly, is about the relationship between Ellie and Joel, but truly about this race for a cure and to take down FEDRA.
I know I’ve been rambling a lot here, so let me sum all of this up. The Last of Us, overall, is not about the cure. It was never about the cure. It’s about the characters within the world, their interactions with one another, how they react to the world around them, and how they navigate any conflict they come across. And I honestly believe that the cure doesn’t need to feature at all in a The Last of Us Part III. There’s no real role it can play, unless you create a story in which Ellie’s generation comes to terms with the fact that there is no cure, and how they decide to live with that fact.
Photo Credit: Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment
