The Besties - Spoilers Ahoy! The Last of Us Part 2

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

*SPOILER ALERT* This week’s episode goes all-in on The Last of Us Part II and leaves no virtual corpse unturned. Together, The Besties break down the plot, discuss the controversy and explore in-depth the failings of this game’s bleak view on justice. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Hey Plant. Mm-hmm. Oh, first let me say this before because I want to make sure it's super... Jelani, this is going to be the cold open of the show where we open with a big joke. Like in Saturday Night Live, how sometimes they had somebody go up

to be the president or something like that. I'd love to get this clean, Griff. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. I'd just love to get this clean. Okay. Hey Plant. Uh-huh. You were the last of us to get on the call

live from new york jan hicks okay what a what a fucking pull. Amazing. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best end of a game. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best end of a game. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and we're going to talk about this game. My name is Ross Forsyth, and I'm going to be so happy to talk about this fun-loving adventure. It's a romp!

It's a romp. It's a fun-loving romp loving romp the last of us part two this is i want to say this right up front this is our spoiler cast spoilies spoilies this one's got spoilies and not like some spoilies we are going to go i assume to the very very very, very end of The Last of Us 2. If you have not played The Last of Us Part 2, and you care, I beg of you, hop off now, and stop listening. But then come back.

Play the game and then come back, and we'll see you then. Yeah. I can't believe Ellie explodes. And see, like, that wasn't real, but that's, like, the kind of stuff that we are going to be be doing so we can talk about crash bandicoot being in the game now oh shit okay actually did you get that did you hear that little bit of dialogue by the way when they're looking through the porn tapes no there's they're looking through the porn tape

this is very early in the game they're looking through the porn tapes and one of the porn tapes is called Smash Brandy's Cooch. Oh. Oh man, I didn't get that. Jesus. I was on the floor. Also, last non-spoiler thing, Naughty Dog, change your logo. You have to change. It looks so ridiculous

when the first thing after this grim ass game is like this huge cartoon paw like we did it it's like making the entire game and then putting a big dog shirt on it it's like the last of us part three bought to you by big johnson like come on anyway their first logo was just a babe do you remember that their first logo was just like a babe with blonde hair and there was a nude code you could punch in to make the baby naked.

So that's Justin saying he wants that instead. No, that is not actually, sorry. Should we, I feel like this episode could get very, very, very out of hand very quickly. I am suggesting that we spend maybe five minutes at the top to try and uh summarize sort of the the big beats of the game okay um and maybe maybe we can relay this if we need to but like i i think keeping it tight is is important because the plot of this game is i think what is making it so sort of divisive.

And it would be good to sort of prime everybody about that. Yes. While we organize our thoughts on that, can I hit one more mechanics thing that we didn't get a chance to talk about? I didn't really realize until I was playing it. Would that be okay? Sure. I am blown away. I think this game has a lot of really impressive achievements.

I think the one that impresses me the most is I think this is some of the best level design. Oh, God, yes. I have ever seen in any video game ever. So there's like three stages of level design. I think it's I can only go this way. That's stage one. Yeah. Stage two is I can only go this way but you're making it look

like i could go otherwise stage three is i have no idea which way you want me to go this is an absolute mess and then i think that they're at this other level in this game where it's like it looks like i could go anywhere but i think i'm probably gonna go this way like subconscious level not even like looking for like the red door or the flashing house or whatever it's just like yeah this feels like the right way to go it's like almost on a subliminal level and i think it is really really outstanding i couldn't believe how many times i thought i was lost yes and just ended up like oh this was right okay great absolutely i think we may have done a slight disservice to, we talked mostly about mechanics last episode,

but like the sound design in this game is also maybe the best I've ever, like from a, you know, not just like a voice acting and mixing and all that stuff perspective, but just like every piece of combat, the sound of an arrow whistling by, like every single thing about this game

sounds like incredible. I think it is a technical masterpiece, but we're not fucking talking about that are we talking about talking about who gets killed who wants to take a stab uh let me start until i get tired because i think we also should talk about the end of last of us one last of us one story about joel who's uh a uh who's at the beginning of this fungal apocalypse. His daughter is killed. And so he's a very sad man. He is living in Boston and has to get Ellie,

who is immune to this virus, across the country. He's a smuggler. A Han Solo type, but by way of Lars von Trier. By the end of the game, they have grown close. He has sort of like learned how to love again.

And he learns that this group, the Fireflies, the only way that they can make a cure for the fungal infection is that Ellie is going to have to die. So Joel says, nah, and kills everyone in the hospital, kills the doctor who was making the thing. Like it literally just butchers a bunch of unarmed people and here's here's the very crucial part of this entire thing uh because i think it like it sets last of us 2 on a course that either of you like or dislike is ellie and this is like how the game is written is not given the choice of like do i want to die or not for

some reason the doctors do not tell her but they do tell joel well we find out in the game that they're like why would you do that and they're like oh we owe it to him surely he won't murder us all yes and joel lies about it joel does not tell her yes yes well i'll get to that point so joel knows this he decides even though this is not his child it reminds him enough of his child that he must protect this person over all of society he will not give her a choice like he can't just wait a minute and like let her wake up and then be like hey how do you feel about this instead he kills everybody and then at the end of the game ellie's like hey you know like what was up and joel's like nothing they just it just didn't work out and then she's like oh yeah that doesn't seem weird and then now we're pulling out of the game

yeah that doesn't seem weird and then now we're pulling out of the game there's the question of is joel a good person and the creator of this game has said multiple times that like that's just how papas are that like every dad would make this choice for their child and i think that is the the weird issue of this game is the game seems to be fundamentally on the side with Joel. It is reasonable that Joel took this action. And also that Ellie did not deserve this choice, nor that this choice was even possible when it was so flagrantly possible that this could be discussed at any point along the way.

And it is not discussed barely at all in Last of Us 2, which makes it even stranger. Yes, everything that happens in Last of Us 2, which makes it even stranger. Yes, everything that happens in Last of Us 2 is an answer to that. That is why we spent some time on Last of Us 1. Last of Us 2, four years later, they are living in Jackson, Wyoming. Fungal infection is still going on.

They never found a cure, obviously. And there is a growing resentment between Ellie and Joel that is explored mostly through flashbacks throughout the rest of the game. During a patrol, we get to meet Dina, who is Ellie's girlfriend and maybe the most pound-for-pound charming character ever included in a video game before.

And Joel encounters a group of other survivors led by a woman named Abby. And he's with his brother Tommy and they quickly realize something is off and the group murders joel in front of ellie that's the big thing that happens in this game that they wanted to keep a secret joel gets killed the protagonist of the last of us one gets killed by abby and then he gets bio-shocked to be clear he gets hit to death with a golf club in the head yeah uh and so ellie and dina uh sort of follow tommy who is joel's brother on this quest for revenge uh to seattle where abby and her group

of survivors uh who are part of a larger sort of militia called the washington liberation front or wolves uh are holed up and they're just straight up going there to kill all of them, specifically Abby. So you go to Seattle looking for Abby. Along the way, you encounter the other members of her group and dispatch them in various ways. You encounter a lot of infected in Seattle. You encounter a lot of Seraphites, which is like a religious cult. And that is the first half of the game, going through Seattle over the course of three days through increasingly treacherous environments and killing literally all of Abby's group. And then at the end of it, you are at this theater. Dina is pregnant, which has thrown a wrench into the the works a bit because she is uh feeling very under

the weather abby finds you in this theater and shoots your friend jesse who's just like there and is the the dina's former boyfriend who uh is the father of the child and he just gets shot in the face and tommy is held at gunpoint and abby says you know i gave you a chance to live and you wasted it end act one okay can i just discuss one aspect of this yes please the one thing i wanted to establish is when do we find out that they are former fireflies um that are basically exacting revenge on joel for murdering everyone i because i feel like that was an assumption that i made very early on like who else could it be literally it's the the moment you see them and find out hey we're the first scene i think one of the earliest scenes in the

game is you see them outside jackson wyoming you play as abby at the very like right there at the very beginning for a couple scenes and they say they're there to find someone you see them looking into the encampment where joel and ellie are living and saying yeah we're gonna find him and kill him and like instant after act one they revealed that abby's father was the surgeon who gets killed by joel and that set her on this quest for revenge right so there's there's they're doing the same thing but like that was not a surprising twist to me at all and i don't know if it was supposed to be but it was so clearly this game was going to like reckon with what happened at the end of last of us one

so like that's of course who that is and why they are there and why when they're like hey i'm joel and the room goes quiet and they all look at each other it's like yeah because you guys are about to fucking kill him yeah yeah okay i just wanted to establish that the the one thing i wanted to talk about and this does not tie into the main story at all uh plant texted me about it and i thought it was it's worth mentioning because i actually found it good but i also appreciate that it was a little ham-fisted i've played a lot of video games over the years i've probably walked into 10 000 video game churches like over the course of ever i do not remember i've ever thinking i can't think of the last time i walked into a synagogue if ever in a video game and you actually do yeah in this game uh dina is jewish uh it doesn't come up until you sort of go into the synagogue but she talks a

little bit about faith and uh it is a representation of judaism that is i would say most closely associated with the rugrats representation of judaism which is to say like it's painting with a pretty broad brush but i will say in the same way that when i saw rugrats the passover episode seeing this interview game gave me kind of a warm feeling just to see like some sort of judaism represented in a way that isn't like bj blaskowitz is jewish and he's killing nazis for revenge this right something that is tied to something other than world war ii yeah right exactly just like having cultural judaism represented in a video game is like kind of a very rare, if ever, thing. So I was actually happy to see it.

The great part, though, is you explore this temple. And then at the very end of it, of collecting all these things, you find a note from the rabbi. And the note is the exact opposite of the game. The note is like, you know, in in times of darkness we must like seek the light it's like uh yeah okay so um uh that's really nice i'm gonna spend the next 20 hours brutally maiming people um but thanks for the pro tip that's weird that's the one instance of dissonance narrative dissonance that's cool that you've highlighted it there um i i was kind of disappointed in the first in very i mean first what is it guys like hour two hours when joel is killed i felt disappointed

just because not because i felt like it's some great loss of the character troy baker is getting work he's fine but i felt like he made a big choice at the end of the first game and i realized seeing that that unless they did some like timeline twistery which there's a little bit of but not much that we weren't really gonna get to see him struggle with the impact of that or or or sort of live sit in that i mean as far as joel is concerned i mean and and in the way the game is painted it joel has gone on joel made that decision and has gone on to live a very pleasant life i mean as pleasant as anybody's life as pleasant as anybody's life is you know in this fairly idyllic i mean there's like fucking bar room dances and stuff like that like it's it's not the worst in the world sure and the game has sort of said like well joel is

fine like joel is fine with that choice and i'm not saying actually that i want to see him punished for that as a dad myself like i don't know and i hope i would never i can't imagine why i would ever be put in that scenario which is really a weird scenario by the way to hang two games on if if one of the biggest questions is like would you sacrifice your child for the rest of humanity to persevere and it's, what the fuck do I care? I don't know. Why do I need to think about that? I don't know.

It's not a universal question at all. It's not. It's not in any way, shape, or form. The struggles of parenthood are about, in my experience at least, are about sacrificing yourself and parts of yourself. What are you willing to give up in you and let go of in you for your child? But it's very rarely like, hey, humanity is going to beef it if you don't let your kid.

Why are we spending time talking about it? It's like such a bizarre. It's like the trolley problem if on one end is is your dad and the other one is all of the meds and it's like the fuck do i care i'm never gonna be in this scenario there's no morality to think about i don't i don't know is mr met on the side of the yes he's trying that's easy then i take the mess um so yeah that that was my big disappointment and this will kind of get us to i guess the end of so yeah that that was my big disappointment and this will kind of get us to i guess the end of the first half and we can dive into all the second

half but first half is a nugget right they introduce so many compelling stories that are are very universal they introduce the story of um i don't know if we talked about this at all last week but ellie and joel and this idea of like generational divide and how hard it is for generations to communicate. And it's like the metaphor here is even more extreme because Joel lived in a world that Ellie can't live in. And Ellie is reminded of that every time because of her passion for spacecraft. Joel's relationship with Dina and this question of like, hey, can you raise a child in a world that you know is going to be worse for them than it was for the generation before it like what does that mean and then there's also that love triangle between um ellie dana and who's dina's ex jesse jesse which is all

interesting so all three of those threads are great and every time like wow they really set up a really compelling drama i can't wait to see oh my god somebody got their head blown off right end of drama and then and that is it now we can talk about the second act they set up all of this really strong storytelling and they're just like you know what we're not really here for that we're here for blood um we're gonna punctuate like just cut all those stories short um and now let's go to another person so we can do that to them and then we can just let them beat the shit out of each other and see who wins did you guys want to see joel i want to try to keep it in the first uh

first half and then and get and then not spend forever here but did you share my feelings about the joel thing that did that feel a little bit like of a truncation to you or did it make sense i wanted to push back against that because all of the uh joel gets killed in the first two hours of the game joel continues to appear in the game through flashbacks during ellie's uh like chapters and during a uh you play as abby in the second half of the game but i feel like we're dancing around that for some weird reason uh but at the very very end of the game you do take back over as ellie again uh and during ellie's parts of the games you see joel in flashbacks and they are important flashbacks and the flashbacks essentially tell the story of how ellie finds out joel lied and how she responds to that uh and i think the punishment of joel that you see is even during

the good parts there is a sequence in this game that will stick with me like forever and I have mixed feelings about this game but I think it's one of the most unforgettable games by its literal definition I've ever played that's the scene that you have in the museum where you're exploring with with Joel and he's taking you there for his birthday for your birthday and you climb inside a, and he plays the audio from the Apollo 11 launch for you. It is so beautiful. It is naughty dog storytelling at its best. But even during those scenes,

and especially during the scenes where Ellie starts to figure it out, Joel kind of knows he's doomed, both from a moral and ethical perspective uh from a karmic perspective like you can tell he knows that someday something's going to get him but also and most importantly because he knows it's not tenable with ellie like he knows that ellie is figuring it out and you can just watch him especially at the moment where she confronts him and says hey I I know definitively you lied uh it's it is uh a a staggering sort of facial acting voice acting performance from Joel but like you see that that is the punishment is even when it is good even when he is living a life that you know justin said was you know better than most you know like he he knows

he's he's done for like he knows that he is he has spoiled everything i i agree with all of that my only issue and you're right that scene is unforgettable and fantastic my issue is you do all of that and then at the very end of the game we get a flashback so we're still in this kind of timeline of of the past uh in which ellie confronts joel and joel's like you know what if i if i had the chance i would do it all over again and ellie's just like oh okay you know now we can work towards peace and it's like wait what i mean that's ellie throughout the whole game is like on big emotional journey and then somebody just repeats back the same thing that has pissed her off a million times and she's like it hit a little differently now yeah i think it's why i think her reaction is wild i i i think it is weird that like the whole crux the lie and the terrible thing that joel's being punished for is i could have let you beef it but i didn't and like i hope that i raise

a child where if i tell her this exact story she's like oh choice dad wouldn't have wanted you beef it but i didn't and like i hope that i raise a child where if i tell her this exact story she's like oh choice dad wouldn't have wanted to beef it thank you so much for that do appreciate the assist on that was 14 don't want to die so choice of you to kill all those scientists guys and get me out of there absolutely chill let's go watch a movie i mean together we haven't talked about it but we should be very clear like ellie before in the first game before she goes into surgery and gets put unconscious by whatever before the surgery she makes it very very clear that no matter what happens the thing that she wants is the vaccine to come from her she makes it very clear to joel

there's no guessing she will absolutely sacrifice herself to have this thing happen now granted she's young that's fine but like there's no question about it what her motivation is and what she would do in this scenario and joel knows this like joel knows what she would prefer in this scenario and then she reiterates it in this game she's like i wanted to die you took that away from me i wanted my death to have me right i wanted my death for that in the left behind dlc for the first game where you explore like her her first uh like love interest with a young girl and at the by the end of that you kind of see that nihilistic isn't like the right word but just like this deep

desire for something to mean fucking anything in this apocalypse and she wanted to mean something and he he did not allow that right and i and i would say i think at to plant's point like i think the scene between them at the end where they're discussing this choice that he made and how she feels about it and the fact that she basically says i'll work towards uh forgiving you is just like a total undercutting of the first game like that is the most blah like way to wrap that emotional thing up which has a lot of tension and a lot of power to it but just for it to be like we'll manage and the universal lesson for the parent is at the end of the day you can't control your children like that's the clear message is that like the thing i kept waiting for him to say was

this was your choice and like i took that for you like that is that is such a universal thing for a parent to understand about their children that you can't control them make these decisions for them anyway should we talk about the second half yes let's take a break and then we will come back with a discussion of the second half of last of us part two so this is the last of us part two part two right so that we make the flip uh what is, I mean, not exactly halfway. I would probably say when you switch to Abby, you're probably at about the two-fifths mark. I would say it's about halfway. It's about halfway. I think it's about close to halfway.

The epilogue is about as long as the prologue. And it's literally the same three-day period that Ellie spends in Seattle. You control Abby as she okay your this game this game is extremely divisive right and there's a ton of reasons for that and we can get into that or we can't get into that but like i think uh for most folks who play this game whether or not you come away from it liking it depends on if naughtyughty Dog succeeds in this trick that it is trying to pull, where now you are controlling Abby during the same three-day period. There's a little bit of crossover. You see some of Ellie's handiwork, right?

and be on her side after she kills Joel, then they're going to land some punches on you that otherwise, if you decide fairly early on, like, I do not like this character and they have not done a very good job of making me sympathize with her, they are not going to land, right? Otherwise, like, if that's the case, you're going to spend half this game

just kind of spinning your wheels a little bit. okay you're you were right in what you were saying yes you are but you are um no you're right what you're saying i think that there's not a but it's just your that is correct my issue with this the entirety of that so we're really talking about two different things right the arc of joel and whether or not his choice was the right one or not is literally we have that we have summarized the entire thing that is not dealt with i feel like outside of the sequences with joel in it we sort of wrap joel up in flashback and ellie's journey is very much about the cycle of violence right and i don't know if we touched enough on, she kills a lot of people. She kills a pregnant woman at the end,

not knowing she's pregnant. And by that point, she has completely just like lost herself. Like she has lost herself to this violence and she is like, she is like just destroyed at that point. She's hollow at that point. This is where it broke down for me.

I'm not a violent person, right? And I almost feel like the game should ask me that at the beginning like do you think violence is actually pretty cool and then i would say not really and they would like here is the crash bandicoot for free we're sorry we're sorry we wasted your time here is a free crash bandicoot because you won't get anything out of this. I watched the moment that they made the switch to Abby. I was like, oh, Eye for an Eye makes the whole world blind. I get it. And it's like, imagine if you played through this entire character story, then what we claim is that by the end of it,

you might not actually want Ellie to fucking stab her in revenge. And it's like, I was there. I was there before. I don't like to kill people. I don't think we should be killing people. I think she probably should have been like, I get it. Whatever. This sucks.

Like, we should let this go. The entire second half is like, we're going to do all this. It does some other things, which I'd like to touch on. But the main idea is, we're going do all this legwork it does some other things which i'd like to touch on but but the main idea is we're gonna make this a sympathetic character that where you might be actually understand why she killed joel i was fucking there i don't need to play 15 hours more to get me there i was there and so the whole thing was like hitting these dead notes of like do you get it she's killing that guy because he killed her. It's like, yeah, I get it.

And a lesser version of the previous 15 hours. It's like, what if it was also not as well designed and more linear? Let's not get, because that gets very messy. I do want to specifically talk about one aspect of what we were just talking about. Specifically, that transition that Justin's talking about is very important because you're right justin it does not land and it's not just that she killed like a few of um abby's friends it's that she's killed probably dozens if not 50 guards in the most gruesome way possible where where you're like ripping their throats out with a knife so like at that point you feel so kind of nauseous about the violence that you need to

ask yourself would anyone come away after all of that violence being like yeah that worked out great i was i was super happy with that it is it actually is interesting because it ties in with so then the narrative lead on this game i'm blanking on her name but she worked on west world and west world the whole theme of westworld for for really almost all of it was this idea of like hey maybe people shouldn't be so awful to these hayley gross hayley gross is her name maybe people shouldn't be so awful to these like ai people that actually have feelings it turns out and and the twist is very similar to that which is to say like hey you should feel bad about all these AI guards

that you just killed because now you're meeting them in their home, in their stadium, they're eating burritos and talking about Harry Potter. Like you should feel super bad. Right. But I felt super bad because it was so gruesome. It's already pretty bad.

It was already bad. So like, it just does not land. Griff, blow through those narratives. Right. The beats. After reliving Abby, finding her father and all the other doctors dead at the hospital uh you flash forward to this same three-day sequence in seattle you

wake up in the wolf the washington liberation front compound and they have their shit just as set up as jackson the parallels are just constant right they have a farm uh on a football field they have like all this shit right you get to You get to meet the other characters that you murdered and a couple of other new characters, and instantly they humanize them or attempt to humanize them, and there's literally not much else to say about it. You learn a little bit more about

why they're at war with the Seraphites. That's a big thing of the game. you learn a little bit more about, uh, why they're at war with the Seraphites. That's like a big thing of the game. And I, I like, not only did I not necessarily jive with Abby, but also like, I didn't really care about the, the wolves and the Seraphites and their whole like war or whatever.

They had to, it really felt like they had to, they had to introduce an impartial third party that everybody could feel good about killing no matter which side of it but that is sort of how again the parallel of this second act Abby is going to look for Owen who is one of the people who Ellie dispatches

in the first half of the game they are former romantic partners he has gone AWOL from this organization after killing another one of the wolves he is held up at this aquarium that is kind of like his home base where he is this little fucking he has gone AWOL from this organization after killing another one of the wolves. He is held up at this aquarium that is kind of like his home base where he has this little fucking blanket fort or whatever. You murder your way to the aquarium

and on your way you encounter two Seraphite kids who save your life after you are kidnapped by the Seraphites named Lev and Yara. And you get to the aquarium after leaving those kids behind and you feel guilty about it. So the next day you go to check up on them and you have to get... The following sequence of events

is you basically helping these kids out. Like by following sequence of events, I mean the main body of the game, of the second act of the game. You have to get Yara back to the aquarium where the pregnant woman whose name i cannot remember there's a lot of hell no uh is she is a surgeon she's going to cut her arm off because her arm has been terribly broken and needs to be amputated so you and lev have to go and get medical supplies and get back there. The, the, after like that surgery is a success,

uh, a main sort of narrative driving factor of the game is, uh, Lev is a trans boy who was like not accepted in this very religious society. Um, but, uh, because they ran away,

he fears that there will be retribution against his mom who is still there. So he goes back to this island compound of the Seraphites that's about to be raided by the wolves. You go there with Yara to save him. Yara gets killed along the way. And after like a fuck ton of people get murdered on this island, you and Lev escape. And then... Wait, wait, wait. Pause, pause then wait wait pause pause pause pause pause a fuck ton of people get murdered including one man that you shred with a like scythe um like you literally pull his jaw off yeah you fuck him up it's it's it's rough stuff it's intense although

the sequence before that is fucking on the horse in the flaming village is fucking cool in a different game it would be it makes zero sense in this one but it's cool uncharted sequence uh okay so this is this is really the first time i've unless i'm forgetting something where you come across ellie's handiwork because you return to the aquarium there is mel and owen who both of them were about to escape to Santa Barbara on this boat and, you know, raise their child or, you know, or whatever, and they are dead. And Abby, like, loses it, finds a map on the floor

telling her where Ellie is at the theater. Boom, their paths get, you know, we reconnect right there. And let's pause because there's another act here that is huge, but I think we should like unpack this one first. Does that sound fair? I mean, we can get through the final two hours

of the game pretty quickly. Let's do that. Final two hours, you mean the final like eight hours because there's another eight hour ride. No, stop it. No, it's two hours. I clocked it because I looked up a playthrough video thinking like there's another eight hour ride. No, stop it. No, it's two hours. I clocked it because I looked up a playthrough video thinking like, there's no,

I gotta be close to the end of this son of a bitch. The two, the Abby and Ellie square off in this theater. You're controlling Abby during this boss fight, right? And you get the upper hand. You have a knife to Dina's throat. After shooting Tommy, what appears to be in the head killing him, but he's fine, I guess. You have a knife to Dina's throat after shooting Tommy what appears to be in the head killing him but he's fine I guess

you have a knife to Dina's throat and Lev is there and Ellie says she's pregnant and Abby says good about to kill her and Lev convinces Abby to stop to not do it and she says don't ever let me see you again she runs away

flash forward to Dina and Ellie living happily on well living okay on this farm to stop, to not do it. And she says, don't ever let me see you again. She runs away. Flash forward to Dina and Ellie living happily on, well, living okay on this farm. The baby is there and Ellie is suffering from like PTSD, panic attack, like really severe stuff. Tommy shows up, says, I know where Abby is. You should go kill her. Ellie leaves after Dina says like, don't, if you do this, this like don't come back

she goes there encounters yet another faction of terrible murderers called the rattlers who have imprisoned abby uh they're just dickheads they're just dickheads uh you yeah these are not these are actually like they they dress them in the most fucking freddy mckay beer style just so you know it is fun to kill. These are subhuman. We have 35 seconds to introduce these characters. Here's what they look like.

Go, now go. You've seen their fucking cargo shorts. They're dirtbags. They're killing us. They're in the dad rock and they have fights. They release infected to fight when they're on chains.

Yeah. That's where they're at. They're like cliche walking dead characters. I think it's fine. Yes. It's hard to come by entertainment these days. So Ellie says, hello, nice to meet you, and slaughters a thousand of them.

With a silencing machine gun. It makes me the dark shroud of legend. Your people have disgusted us, whispers. The one who descends upon your peaceful village and murders everyone in it. So Abby and Lev have been captured by this group,

are essentially crucified on this beach. So it's actually a specific form of torture. This was very popular in Japan and was often done against Christian martyrs where they put them up on a crucifix, but they don't actually crucify them. They let the waves come in and they die of exposure. So very, very, very specific form of torture

okay so i was led to believe at least somebody makes a comment that she got bitten and this is what they do to people oh no no what no it's torture no it's just torture okay it's just torture i mean it's obviously torture there's a line where they say that she tried to escape and this is punishment is that what it was so I could have sworn I heard someone say she got bitten. Ellie cuts her down, cuts Lev down, and there's this moment where they are both going to these boats on the beach to just kind of go their separate ways. Ellie then has a flashback to Joel's caved-in head,

throws Abby down in the water, says, you're gonna fight me or I'm gonna kill Lev. So you have this fucking brutal fight, knife fight in the water. Not like cool knife fight where you're like dodging blows. Knife fight where you are just slashing each other to ribbons.

And Ellie finally, after getting two of her fingers bitten off, has the upper hand, is drowning Abby. And then you see these flashbacks to this final scene with Joel where she says, I forgive you.

Let's work on this relationship and lets her and Lev go to sail off into the distance you return home to the farm sure enough Dina and the kid are gone you pick up your guitar which is like a recurring theme throughout the game and you can't you can't play it as

well anymore. You got those fingers bit off you know. You got those fingers bit off. What a metaphor. You got the flashback to the final scene with Joel where she says I'd like to try to forgive you. And then she flashes back to the president, sets the guitar down by a window, walks off into the distance, cuts a black. That's OK. Holy, holy. There's a lot there.

But I because I know we're going to run long. So I want to specifically talk about one element of Abby's story that is basically the turning point for her as a character because up until this moment she's basically supposed to be you know motivated by the strength of her love for Owen and the wolves and fighting against the scars and whatever and the moment I'm talking about is specifically when she goes

back for the two kids part a I had no idea there were kids until it was explicitly stated like four to five hours after you meet them. Really? I don't think it's ever said out loud. I don't know how

you, I mean the graphics. It's hard because Abby is so much, she's bigger I think, like her build is much bigger and I think compared to her I just thought they were slight. Right. People like,

I just thought there was just smaller people than, than, than Abby. So that's thing a, but thing B is the reason she makes this turn. That is like the total opposite of where her character was before. It's because Owen says something about how, Oh,

he saw this scar and he was old and he had given up and I, I let him live and that just like 30 second story and she has a dream i'm sorry she has a she has she has many dreams about the the sequence where she finds her father dead right so she right she keeps flashing back to her father oh god and so like that so the dream and the story are enough for her to completely change everything about her sacrifice everything that she previously cared about. Let me, I don't think that's true. I don't think that that's a fair way of encompassing sort of the change.

And this is my defense of The Last of Us 2. It is a game about eye for an eye makes the world go blind. Right. I think that the nuance to that is not just that like violence leads to more violence and that violence is bad it's that retributive justice is inherently like not fulfilling is not satisfying does not accomplish the very goal that is in the name retributive justice except it's super satisfying cut to the kill shot the kill shots are so sick no i mean and and this is this is a thread that is carried through her and her group uh have some turmoil as

they find joel and even some disagreement like when they're close and and can't even get it together she kills joel and then the repercussions she has to live with just like joel has to live with the end of last of us one is that it didn't fix anything. And that if anything, it has driven an enormous wedge between her and the only people in this world that give a shit about her. And that is something that Ellie struggles with as she kills all these people

and like doesn't feel great about it. In fact, she just feels worse and worse until she kills Mel, a pregnant woman, and like fucking loses it, right? The game tackles like justice in that manner as something that is like kind of clumsy and like not all that satisfying so that in my opinion is like there's a lot we don't see before this three-day period in seattle that is why she is making this change it's like you can tell like shit's not good as she's walking around the wolf

compound like talking to all these people. Like, things are, things have reached a breaking point. But the problem is that idea is undercut. So, she goes through the whole game. She's basically protecting Lev. She becomes Lev's guardian. She saves him from the island. She rides through all this fire.

She rips a guy's jaw off to save Lev. She goes back. She sees that Ellieie has murdered um mel and owen and then she has a choice she can do the thing where she basically takes care of lev and sends him off to santa barbara which is maybe safe and she's with him and everything's great or she can risk all of that to go to the theater and try to exact her version or revenge on ellie which seems like a total re-reversion of where she was previously and that's the issue is that question gets played out over and over and over in the end the other thing

happens is like um abby says you know like just don't i don't want to see you again and you would think that ellie after her entire experience with the first half of the game, would be like, got it. You would also think that Dina, who has like seen all these things Ellie had done, would be like, listen, I love you, but I don't think I can live in a room far away from people with you because you kill people for sport. because you kill people for sport um but instead what happens is we get this sequence that it feels very like well it's like a the cool video game sequence where it's like and now we're on a farm and we're herding sheep like there's something about it it's like so red dead um and then it's like oh no now we have to learn it again and the only way for ellie to do this is to go all the way to santa barbara oh she travels literally across the country during a post-apocalypse slaughter her way through this uh compound of rattlers uh find abby pull her

off of being tortured because apparently she could have just let her she could have been like you know what i'm just gonna sit here and let that the waves ride out um has to beat the snot out of her forces her to fight her. And then while strangling her, and I don't know if you noticed the symbol, her reflection in the water is Abby underwater. And then in the middle of all of it, she's like,

I know I came all the way across the country and just killed like another thousand people. But now something, now a memory kind of poof changed in my mind. And now I think it's okay and now we've learned our lesson and now i'm going to go all the way back home which also why and again like the thing that it dodges which is like the thing that you keep waiting for them to just talk about the very obvious thing is for abby to say i know who you are you are the one person who could be the cure i am a former firefly i am

going to santa barbara there might be a way for us to still make a cure i have spared your life why do you not come with me or when they're in santa barbara just just convey this information in any way possible hey you want you want to save people turns out that's actually an option but it's never said but i don't think that's bad storytelling like it is people making it is people making constantly the wrong decisions and again like the wedge chris that like keeps that exact scenario from happening that keeps people from having that conversation is this sense of justice is this is that like it's all learned the lesson by the end like how like nobody nobody changes right like even joel and this is seen in joel's final scene in

the game like he hasn't changed he would do the same fucking thing like nobody changes in this game ellie is constantly offered the opportunity to just fucking leave and doesn't because she has to get this justice and and like i don't think that I don't think that characters making the wrong decision and being poisoned by this sense of justice and being poisoned by how much sunk cost fallacy violence they've committed so far is bad storytelling. In fact, I would argue the opposite. I think it is a very real...

It's not just that violence leads to more violence, it's that violence ruins everything. I just want to put a bow on my point. I think there's an argument for being good storytelling and bad storytelling. The good storytelling, the really generous reading here, is this is Aristotelian high tragedy, that these people are not human, that they are different than us, that they are so driven by this one core idea that they will make decisions that we would never make and everybody around them is like hey stop doing that and they can't and that's tragic so like i think i think in that way that that i honestly think that's what

they were going for um i don't like that as a story of like just modern drama storytelling i don't think it works because anybody no matter how poisoned you are no matter how dark it has gotten at some point you would say i know who you are you want this thing i also have this thing like you would at least convey the information maybe you wouldn't invite them for like a you know a party together but you would at least convey the information and that i i just it drove me crazy throughout this whole game how many times things were prevented from moving forward just because characters arbitrarily like i'm just not going to share this information that is absolutely crucial to everybody it's not arbitrary okay well i would also add like it's

one thing to do the like very directed unchanging characters for a two-hour movie for 30 hours it's not have characters change is outrageous and kind of inexcusable to be perfectly honest like the character that changes is abby though right like with her relationship with uh lev and yara like you are that that is trick, right? That is the sympathy that you are supposed to feel is because, hey, she is warming up to these two kids and fighting against Lev's persecution. Isn't she great?

That is not afforded to Ellie. That is only afforded to Abby because they really need you to sympathize with her even a little bit for the game to work. You guys want to hop in here? Yes. I'd just like to take a minute. This game sucks.

Wow. And I feel like in every sense, it's very accomplished in a lot of different ways. And I told Russ, I was waiting up until literally the end of the game i had not made up my mind about this thing because what i saw was like there's a lot of moving pieces and if they can pull pull them together in like something i don't see coming because i didn't know how this would end it but i thought if they could pull these pieces together, it could be genius.

And it pretends to, but it's not saying anything. If it was saying something, here's what Plant said would have happened, or the fact that Abby cared so much for Lev would have started a reverse chain reaction that would make Ellie let her go in the same way that violence triggered violence they would at any point show that peace could trigger peace but instead something like that right that only works with violence though because and this is the fucking biggest problem with this game to me abby makes the decision at the very beginning of the game to spare ellie she does not kill ellie

and she is punished for that and it makes the the entire rest of the game fucking suspect this game is saying nothing except maybe violence is bad and And yet they have this company, and this is not everybody's, so many people have been doing this, but still I'm going to say the fact remains. This game says nothing other than wanton violence is bad. And yet this company has been profiting off of the joy of that for 15 years. And this game is not them reckoning with their past in the way that like god

of war the new god of war feels like that this is more of that for every bit of this is undone every message of like you know violence is pretty bad i guarantee you their next game it be an uncharted or a last of us or whatever will have that love like have a level of violence increased accuracy of larynxes getting pulled out of necks i mean it's absolutely there are two options for the brutality of this game and it is either one to convince me that you shouldn't fucking bite people's throats out or two to make it cool or fun or shocking or exploitative whatever to sizzle it up a little bit and since i am in no way thinking that that level of violence is cool i've now just had to be subjected to it for 30 hours and learn nothing and like that to me is the that is

why this game like i felt like at any point they could have just said something that would land and would make a point and without that it's just fucking nihilism like it's just it's it's nihilism that that even worse it doesn't even have a point about nihilism. And that is where I landed at the end of this game. I think I'm coming off most positive about the game. I still think it is flawed. I despise Last of Us 1, but I think this is a step up from Last of Us 2, which is probably why I don't have a lot of problems

that, let's say, most YouTubers have with the game. Which, by the way, there's a... We could do a whole second episode, or third episode i guess about like the backlash the the divisiveness the metascore bombing the all that shit i think that if this game did have a positive message at the end of it that would undo it like i think if this game uh you feel bad at the end of this game you you walk away alone because of your actions at the end of this game the violence has destroyed everyone's lives and there is no there is no learning that has

has happened there is no message i feel like uh the closest you get right is this flashback scene with joel which i think is actually a pretty artful way of doing it because if the game had ended with and you know what i think that that's i think that i've grown because of this and i'll never do it again like that would that would undo literally what the tone of the rest of the game was which is like yes violence is bad i don't think it would actually justify the game because if he had learned then i would understand why ellie did all this if he if he didn't learn anything yeah yeah, it's like... Or didn't,

because for me, Griff, if they had instead, like, Ellie had killed Abby and that was the thing and then she was all alone, like, at least that's something, right? Like, at least that says... Her letting Abby go

after literally 10 minutes before, like, slaughtering a whole compound of Rattlers like that that bit doesn't land I'm saying that like the the the message of this game is that like these people's lives have been ruined by violence I think it's easy and like try to say like this game is all about how violence is bad because I think this game is about that but I also think it explores it to a depth that like a video game has not done before and i think that naughty dog is kind of the company that has to do that because it's called the fucking nathan drake dilemma of here's the charming rogue who's just slaughtered thousands of people i think that like you get to the end of this game and ellie hasn't changed that much

because violence has fucking poisoned her life and like that's it like that's the message of the game i don't think there can be a redemptive arc at the end of it you can't but you can't do that and expect me to take it seriously when I'm also eating 60 pills to do headshots like I'm not it's not a joke

do that in like a six hour indie game where you're actually not making violence fun and you're actually like saying something about it with gameplay you cannot have you it is it is absolutely like have your kid get eaten too and i don't know if you've seen neil druckman's twitter account but he's sharing you know these like compilation videos of like sweet kills and it's like that that's where i'm just like lost where it's like what is this like what what are

you saying whatsoever i don't want optimism i just want satisfaction like i just wanted to say something like narrative satisfaction or otherwise it's not a story we need to find a way to wrap up because we're going very long actually we don't we can just apparently stop and have joel play a fucking guitar song and did you learn anything i hope so because that's the end of the game. To kind of mesh together Justin and Griffin's points, I think the biggest bummer for me is like, sure, Naughty Dog, honestly,

it could be the right studio to make anything. They're clearly very talented. Every little bit of this game was made with extreme talent. The bummer is that this is the game that they decided to make. And that this is the game that they felt compelled to make. And this is the game

that is somehow necessary to be made in video games. I agree with Justin that I just don't think we need to answer this dilemma. You want to answer this dilemma? Stop making every game about shooting people in the face. That's how you answer it. You start making games.

That would be transgressive yeah that's a that says something that does something if that's what you're actually after like change then change they're interested in that but instead it's this thing of like we're we're kind of embarrassed by this thing that we're making but we're gonna still make it we're gonna make it better than it's ever been made before we're gonna let you know that it's also pretty gross to but to paint this in the last night this is the last defense i will make of last of us two uh which boy howdy i'm coming off as a real fucking sony crony this episode huh boys um a lot of the as soon as i finished the game i knew how divisive it was and i started to dip into some of those uh youtube well no because i wanted to kind of know how the other half lives right and there's plenty of you know bigotry sort of feeling some of that fire but a lot of it is like people who

loved the first game and didn't like what happened to specifically to joel in this game uh didn't like the game's message about violence right and? And the common thing that I kept seeing was this game constantly makes you try to feel bad. It tries to make you feel bad for playing the game and tries to make you feel bad for the decision that Joel made at the end of the game. And I didn't like that. And to me, that's what I think is so sort of important about this game is that like, I think for a lot of people,

they have not had to confront that violence about this game is that like i think for a lot of people they have not had to confront that violence in this game for there's plenty of people who played all four uncharted games uh five including lost legacy six including golden golden compass i don't know the psp one uh who got to be in those games and like the nathan drake dilemma didn't even register right i think that i think that if you know the term ludonarrative dissonance, maybe it's like maybe it is a – they were treading covered ground at that point. But I think it is staggering the adherence to this idea of violence being poison because I think there's plenty of people for whom that idea has never crossed their mind when they think about video games. Okay, I know we've got to wrap it up. I know Fresh has given me the wrap it up.

Then don't pretend like you're not part of the fucking problem. You've been desensitizing people to this for 15 years and you wonder why they're violent. You've been giving them points for headshots for a decade and a half, and you wonder why they're not more sensitive about violence. And you're still doing it, by the way. There's a raid on a compound of 30 people. You don't have to reckon with every one of those kills. Every once in a while, you have to look back and be like, damn, that's a lot of corpses, even for me.

Oh, that one was named Mark. I know that that body used to belong to a mark he liked frio brand corn chips do you feel bad yeah i do do you want me to kill 60 more only if you want all their scissors and rations okay y'all you all sent so many questions uh and they're wonderful but unfortunately we have bloviated for far too long to to dip into the mailbag so we are we are sorry but we hope it was cathartic for you perhaps to type those emails to us maybe you grew as a result of it um thank you for listening to our show a reminder that you can follow and listen for free on spotify which you're likely doing right now uh if you want to share the show besties.fan this would actually be a pretty good one if people finish the game and they want to like hear what four

white people say about it then we've got them covered uh uh and so that that is worth checking out plant tell me about this newsletter everybody's talking about. Well, you can follow us on Twitter at TheBestiesPod and if you want to join our newsletter, it is the first linked message, a pinned message at the top of the Twitter feed.

That's going to do it for us this week. We're so tired. Sorry, we talked for so long about it. We've got to record another episode after this, believe it or not. That's going to do it for this week, so be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's

best friends pick the world's best games they should call it the best of us The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!