Brilliant, gut-wrenching, despairing or just routine? The season finale of HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama series The Last Of Us simply refuses to be lured into the trap of easy adjectives. By staying true to the show’s video game origin, the episode showcases how Pedro Pascal’s Joel turns into a nerveless killer to save the life of Bella Ramsey’s Ellie at the cost of endangering the future of mankind on earth.

Here are the highlights from the The Last Of Us finale episode, which is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Ellie’s immunity explained in a cold opening

Ellie is the only person who is immune to the worldwide cordyceps infection that turns humans into zombies. At the start of the season finale, we see a pregnant woman, Anna (Ashley Johnson, who originally voiced Ellie in the game), arriving at a Fireflies safehouse just in time to deliver her baby. When she is in labour, an infected person breaks into the house and attacks her. Anna kills the zombie with a knife but couldn’t save herself from getting a bite. Shocked and shaken at first, Anna suddenly realises that she gave birth to her baby during the attack. The baby was connected to her mother via the umbilical cord at the time of infection and hence had the fungus right from birth. Marlene (Kathleen Coghlan), the leader of the resistance group Fireflies, arrives at the safehouse a few hours later and finds the mother with her newborn. Anna begs her to take care of her baby and falsely claims that she cut the cord before she was bitten. Marlene reluctantly takes the baby and kills Anna. Anna’s baby is in fact, Ellie and her beloved knife was the one Anna used to kill that infected.

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Joel and Ellie’s bond

Over the past eight episodes of the season, Joel has been protecting Ellie as he has been tasked with delivering her to a Fireflies’s unit. Their relationship develops from that of a smuggler and his package to a father figure and a foster daughter. There is one moving moment where Joel tries to strike up a conversation with Ellie, who is still in shock after stabbing the cannibalistic leader of a cult 21 times on the head with a cleaver. During the same scene, Joel talks to Ellie about his suspicion about the Fireflies but Ellie is determined to reach the destination to help others with her ‘magical ability’ to prepare a cure for the infection. She, however, tells Joel that she will follow him wherever he wants to go after that. At an unexpectedly tender moment, Joel hinted to Ellie that time didn’t heal his pain of losing a daughter but her appearance in his life has done a lot to alleviate it.

Fireflies’s plan for the cure

The series also lays down the plan of the cure engineered by the Fireflies in detail. After the duo were attacked by Fireflies members and taken to the hospital, Joel wakes up as a captive as Marlene tells her that Ellie is being prepared for surgery. She explains that the dormant infection in Ellie’s brain is producing chemical messengers that make infected cordyceps cells think that she’s already turned.

She tells Joel that the Fireflies now plan to remove that fungus from her brain, multiply its cells in a lab to produce more chemical messengers and prepare a cure, which means that Ellie’s life has to be sacrificed. This doesn’t go well with Joel as he begs Marlene to let Ellie go. Marlene does not pay heed to his request and asks the guards to shoot down Joel if he tries to do anything.

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Joel’s point of view

The series turns into a first-person shooter video game in the finale for a couple of minutes. The bloody and morally harrowing climactic fight sequence fully embraced its video-game roots and by doing so enhanced the power of drama. We see the point of view of Joel, who is distraught by the thought of a doctor killing Ellie for his science project. He kills the guards with Ellie’s knife and then takes their M4 rifles to finish off every Fireflies member in the building. He retrieves an already sedated Ellie from the operation theatre in his arms to escape from the hospital. He also guns down Marlene in cold blood when she confronts him in the parking lot.

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Joel’s moral ambiguity

After a few hours, Ellie wakes up in the back seat of Joel’s car. Joel lies to her, saying that the Fireflies have given up on making a cure after testing multiple people who are also immune. He also says he managed to escape the building with Ellie as some raiders attacked the hospital and started to kill everyone. While trekking back to Jackson County, Ellie stops Joel and poses the ultimate test of his moral character. She asks him to swear to her that what he said about the Fireflies is true. In his quest for a new life with his daughter, Joel lies to her again with a straight face. Ellie, on the other hand, is uneasy. The look on her face doesn’t make it clear whether she is coming to terms with the fact that she is no longer humanity's last hope for a cure. Or has she just given Joel a chance to tell the truth and now can't trust him?