#however I AM saying 'Joel had no real choice in this specific context'

[femonologue]

Two things I'd like to add:

First, a lot of folks apparently need to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a pivotal work of dystopian fiction, one whose themes are so closely mirrored by TLOU's season finale that I would be honestly surprised if at least one writer involved (in either the show or the game) hadn't read it and been profoundly affected by it. In this context, TLOU approaches Omelas from a different standpoint - rather than learning and being expected to accept the awful source of Omelas' prosperity, Joel is asked to help build it, and he delivers the most definitive refusal of which he is capable: he lashes out to destroy its builders. He is not bound by the helplessness of the eponymous Ones Who Walk Away. He isn't paralyzed by a choice between cruelties and driven into exile by his guilt over being unable to resolve both; there is no Omelas to walk away from. Instead, he is confronted with a cruel bargain which he fundamentally cannot accept.

Which brings me to the second thing I'd like to zero in on: Joel did that - had no choice but to do that - because Ellie's his daughter. He might not have stated it explicitly, but in the finale and the episodes prior, the show very carefully and thoroughly establishes, through context and behaviour, that this man has straight-up adopted Ellie. He loves her. It is frankly ridiculous to expect that any loving parent, in any context, could be expected to voluntarily sacrifice their own child the way he is asked to - especially when the cited "greater good" looks so much like a desperate grasping at straws, as my husband outlines above.

People are looking at the finale from the wrong perspective. It's not about the choice Joel made. The notion of "choice" barely even enters the equation for him. He is, or at least has already committed himself to becoming, Ellie's dad. He's also so notoriously good at killing people - and so hard to kill, himself - that even Marlene, a hardened veteran of revolutionary warfare, sometimes appears a little afraid of him. But when he appears to finally accept her decision, she thinks the matter's resolved and sends him off unsupervised apart from the whopping two (2) armed guards tasked with walking him to the highway. She knows that he is capable of killing these men. And he, placed in that situation, can (and frankly should) be expected do just that. He's Ellie's dad. He's not going to sit idly by while his kid, who he loves and has chosen to live for, is calmly executed. That's why he shoots the doctor - it would be incredible if he didn't. He is holding a gun, and this is the man who intends to massacre his daughter. To Joel, it's simple arithmetic. He's killed better people for worse reasons. It's exactly the same with Marlene. He's right to conclude that she'll come after Ellie. She just explained to him why that's the case.

Things play out the way they do not because Joel chooses violence against the Fireflies, but because the Fireflies choose violence against Ellie, who Joel feels compelled to protect. Marlene doesn't have the full context. She thinks Ellie is just a job to Joel. She doesn't realize how invested he is.

The lie at the end is a different issue - a complex one, with many valid perspectives to consider - but what happens with the Fireflies is straightforward. Accepting Marlene's deal is mutually exclusive with being Ellie's father, and being Ellie's father is already a cornerstone of Joel's identity. A huge chunk of the episode is dedicated to showcasing how radically he's begun to change, as a means of thoroughly establishing that this dude sincerely loves the foul-mouthed runaway child soldier that he's adopted. And then Marlene unwittingly tells him that she's going to kill his daughter before leaving him, an infamously skilled gunfight-winner, nearly unsupervised in a hospital full of loaded guns.

In the lead-up to the climax, Ellie is plainly terrified and putting on a brave face; she knows she's going to be experimented on, and she's smart enough to recognize that this might not end well for her. Marlene, too, makes a difficult choice; the safest move would be to simply kill Joel, since he's notoriously dangerous and the Fireflies no longer need him. But Marlene attempts to honour their agreement, to the extent that she's able, because she thinks she's dealing with the mercenary Joel that she knows - she doesn't realize that she's looking a father in the eye and asking for permission to kill his kid. Joel simply assesses the situation, recognizes that he is capable of potentially saving Ellie, and does it. It's that or giving up on life and his reason for living it, and this very episode dedicates a scene to establishing that he's tried to do that before and can't.

The finale doesn't hinge on Joel making a choice. It's structured around him not having one.

TLOU finale thoughts: Seeing a lot of people arguing about whether Joel made the right decision, or that it is indesputable that he made the wrong decision, and listen, listen...

I have not played the game, I haven't had a PS since the PS2 and my computer can't handle modern games. That's fine. I'm just saying that I don't know how the game presents it, but the show did a fairly good job of convincing me specifically that there's never going to be a cure for this.

In the very first episode, a foremost expert in this field is offered literally any resource by her government to work towards a vaccine, and what does she tell them? You can't make one, that's not how cordyceps and how we interact with them (or aren't supposed to be able to interact with them) works. And when she is offered all the resources they can offer, she opts to go home and spend however long she has left with her family. The episode really fucking sold me on this point.

Fast forward, and we have Dr. NoHypocraticOath lying to a child so he can give her brain surgery that will kill her on purpose. Is he the foremost expert on this shit in North America? Well I don't fucking know--if he had a name I don't recall anyone saying it. Didn't get to see much of his face, but he didn't look Joel's age. It's been 20 years since the apocalypse, does he even have a medical degree? Did he make one up? Did he read some books and decide that he was an expert/had a degree? And even if he does have a medical degree, what does he know that that FOREMOST EXPERT IN EPISODE ONE DID NOT, EVEN WITH UNLIMITED RESOURCES OFFERED?

And let's be real, since we are talking about resources. Expert in episode one was like...the amount is NONE. NONE resources will be required because we are literally all going to die, you can't make a vaccine for this shit. Would she have changed her tune if Ellie had been alive then and available? I'm not sure the answer is yes!

But Dr. Childmurder is like yeaaah I think we can pull this off in this extremely unsanitary operating room in this burnt out pediatrics ward using equipment that may not even run properly because anyone who knew how to service it is probably dead. DOUBT!

Now, I guess you can argue that Joel doesn't know about that lady in episode one. He was on the other side of the world and never met her, probably wouldn't have even seen her on TV because she was spending her last moments with family. He's running on limited info, you could say, and I suppose you could argue that because he doesn't know this, he's in the wrong because for all he knows, maybe Dr. Stabbington McBraintheif had the right idea! He should have believe Marlene when she said it was for the best!

And to that I say...again, no. Joel's maybe not a rocket scientist, but he is a survivor before anything else. Even if he wasn't emotionally compromised and his ability to not crumble wasn't all in on Keeping This One Kid Alive, he's been built up to be competent enough to sniff out shoddy reasoning, bullshit and decisions made out of desperation rather than sense. If I can look at this shitty hospital and these garbo conditions and these desperate people who have elected not to inform someone volunteering to help that they've decided to just kill her and hope this works and think that that's super fucking suspicious, then Joel can too, and should have, and did.

Do I agree that lying to Ellie was the best way to cap that off? No. Their entire relationship has been based off of being truthful even when the truth was mean, and being real and him not treating her like an actual child. Whatever's going to happen in season 2 is probably going to be super fucked up, it's probably going to hinge on that lie, and it probably could have been completely avoided if Joel had just said, "I woke up and Marlene wouldn't take me to you. She proceeded to tell me that she'd tricked you into thinking you were having some tests done, but that they were literally just going to kill you. Maybe you would have wanted that, if they'd asked you! But that was the biggest fucking red flag, and there were A Lot of red flags, from the Doctor willing to just flat out murder you looking not old enough to have gotten his pediatric brian surgery degree before colleges stopped being a thing to the shoddy equipment to the fact that they literally tried to bribe me and when I was like absofuckinlutely not, she started to march me out to the highway and told them to shoot me if I at all deviated from that path. Isn't that completely fucked up?" Because even if Ellie was mad about that, she has generally respected Joel's opinions on people and things and probably would have forgiven him eventually for killing them.

But yeah--maybe it's different in the game and for all I know someone does manage to synthesize a vaccine form Ellie's brain at the end of the second one. But the show? Has made it pretty clear that Marlene's cure was a last ditch attempt to find a cure and there was zero guarantee it went anywhere. I see a lot of people addressing this like the cure would have definitely been able to be made, but there was like...zero evidence to suggest that this wouldn't have just been a total waste that also killed a beloved child, and making the call Joel did was objectively the right decision based on the info he had at the time, and based on literally everything else the plot has told us about cordyceps for the entire season.

If you were for some reason convinced that the cure had even a tiny chance of being synthesized form this, you're welcome to explain it to me. I just can't see it!