I think Marlene realized in the waiting room that entrusting Ellie to Joel would inevitably lead to a situation like this, since she appears to know at least somewhat about his past.
Possibly, but we can look back to episode one and we see an unfazed Joel tossing the young girl's body into the fire. He is completely numb and desensitized. Knowing his history, I was surprised that he had no reaction to the little girl, but it showed how much he had changed over the years of the apocalypse. He seems to be the one willing to do what needs to be done, no matter how bad. I think Marlene thought (wrongly) he would remain the same Joel.
I haven't played the game, but I'm not squeamish about games with violence.
I don't think showing more, or showing it more explicitly, would have added much to this show. We don't need to see a close-up of Joel starting to pop out someone's kneecap to understand he's doing it or how awful it is.
I’m not advocating for more, but it’s hard to expand on my comment without talking more about part 2. To me they showed violence when violence told an important part of the story on season 1, not gratuitously.
I do not want to read this thread yet since I only finished to the end of Ep3 today with my Dad but I did want to comment on the Guns & Ammo magazine that we see somewhat prominently. At first I thought it was a pure Easter Egg for Fallout, but I had forgotten that in Fallout the magazine is Guns & Bullets, not Guns & Ammo. But I kinda feel like it may still be a Fallout Easter Egg, just where they used the actual magazine that the name "Guns & Bullets" likely cribbed.
Joel asked her this question in this exact episode.
Joel: "We don't have to do this (get to the Fireflies and see if you're the cure/ a vaccine),"
Ellie: "After everything we've been through. After all I've done... "There's no halfway with this. We finish what we started,"
In addition, when Marlene tells Joel 'This is what she would have wanted' Joel himself seems to silently agree with her, which leads to him finally deciding to shoot her dead (ending a moment of hesitation, where he considered changing his mind about what he was doing).
Finally in the game (Part 2) Ellie herself says
she would have sacrificed herself,
but obviously that's not known to anyone at the moment in the show.
While no-one 'knew' for certain, and no-one bothered to ask Ellie, everyone correctly surmised that Ellie would have given her life for the vaccine, even Joel.
No, again that was not his choice. His choice was 'Do I murder these people, AND save the life of the girl I love, potentially dooming the entire Human race in the process'.
He is a profoundly broken person who has chosen violence for more than a decade at this point as one of his ways of medicating. He has decided, incorrectly as we see, that he's fixed now because of Ellie, and the moment that's threatened, he goes completely off the rails again.
Yeah. He's an Evilly aligned protagonist, who has routinely engaged (and is deliberately depicted engaging) in torture and multiple cold-blooded murders.
He loves Ellie. But it's a selfish love, and ultimately a selfish decision he makes.
No spoilers but the second game works much better with less gratuitous violence so probably true. Though I didn’t think season 1 was over the top. Joel’s worst scenes were still shocking. YMMV
They omitted a fair bit of violence from the TV series. In the game, Joel obviously kills a lot of people. His kill tally by the end is huge. In addition, in the game he's also shown engaging in torture an additional time, casually breaking Roberts are in the QZ at the start, before Tess murders him in cold blood:
It was one of my initial complaints about the show was that they made Joel slightly more heroic to start. In retrospect now I've seen the entire series, It was a good choice to highlight his eventual fall.
If given more time, I would have preferred they started with him 'Evil', we got time to see his gradual redemption with Ellie, softening and becoming kinder and more compassionate, before finally ending with what we got on the finale (brutal mass shooting).
It's my one main criticism with the show, and it's echoed by many other critics; the series felt rushed and would have benefitted greatly from half a dozen or so more episodes. The ending didnt really feel as 'earnt'as it was in the game.
Then the second game comes along and is like "Did you know an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind? Bet you never heard that one before. Bet you thought we were gonna be like 'Yeah revenge is cool actually.' Well you're wrong. We're so clever."
I think that's a simplistic, surface-level read on the themes of TLOU2.
It's far more nuanced than "revenge is bad."
It's more a story to reveal how we often judge what we see by first impressions of how they affect us, without taking the time to consider the reasoning of the other person. It's about the fallacy of believing we can make the right choice if we don't know the truth.
Consider that the psychological root of why Ellie is so hell-bent on revenge is because Joel lied to her, and she was never able to resolve her resentment of that lie, so his death did not simply steal a father figure, but forever deny her reconciliation she was on the cusp of pursuing. If she and Joel had had a healthy, honest relationship, I honestly don't think his death would have driven her to go to such lengths for revenge.
And in Abby's story, when she gains knowledge of Lev's situation, it recontextualizes for her the conflict between the WLF and the Scars. Before she dehumanized the Scars, but with knowledge came empathy and a chance to avoid violent ends.
He wasn't condemning anyone to death by getting the macguffin for Kang. Kang just wanted to leave his prison. As it turns out, the fact Kang did NOT leave his prison looks to be something that is going to lead to a lot more deaths than if he did get out (as Kang explained to Ant man, and as Scott himself pondered at the films end).
In any event I'm pretty sure he recanted and stopped Kang from leaving, while saving his daughter in the process, and not engaging in a mass shooting spree.
Different context, and different outcome.
Mod Edit: Added spoiler tags. This thread is not about Ant-Man, which is still in theaters. Please be considerate of others who may not have seen the film yet. ~Umbran
