Warning: There are spoilers here so please don’t ruin the show for yourself by reading this. Now if you have watched the show, I am so happy that you’ve decided to bless yourself by doing so. You may read on.

The Last of Us stars Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel, and Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie. The best thing I can say about them is that they are going to win an Emmy. I’ll leave it at that.

The show is about an apocalyptic world where humans got infected with a disease that turns them into zombies through fungus that got into the food supply. After that, if you got bit by an infected person, you would turn into a monster as well. Unless you are Ellie who is immune. Everyone is fighting for their lives at this point 20 years after the initial infection.

Groups like FEDRA and the fireflies have formed to either maintain order, help others stay alive, find a cure or fight against people and infected. Joel and his significant other, Tess, are given the responsibility of smuggling Ellie, a fourteen year old girl, to some fireflies out west for a reason that is at first unknown to them.

Joel is looking for his brother, so he reluctantly agrees to take Ellie out west for Marlene, who is head of the fireflies. Ellie eventually tells Joel and Tess that she got bit and explains that she won’t turn into a monster. She could actually help create the cure. The show is about their journey west and surviving through it all.

Ellie doesn’t know a world before the apocalypse, but Joel does, which creates different perspectives for the viewers to see.

Both characters are very similar to each other based on what they have gone through. The deaths of Tess, Henry, Sam, Riley and Sarah, Joel’s daughter, have had a huge impact on both of them whether they were direct or indirect. The effects of the losses they’ve experienced is evident especially in Joel.

Not only that, but throughout the show they both had to kill people whether they were infected or not, and the feeling of doing so lingered. Their moods changed after having to resort to murder. Their goal was just to keep each other and themselves alive. That’s all.

Pedro Pascal plays Joel as a stoic man with hints of tenderness. Oftentimes, you can see his protective dad side kick in when Ellie is in any sort of danger, although he refuses to admit to her in the beginning that she means anything to him.

To contrast his manner, Bella Ramsey plays Ellie as a goofy, fun, naive but also mature young girl who wins Joel over by being unapologetically herself. She fights to keep him alive just as hard as Joel fights for her.

So many times I was scared for the lives of both Joel and Ellie. That fear made me see how important both of them were to each other but also to the viewers. They need each other more than they know or wish to express. They may not admit it, but they would die for each other without hesitation.

After Ellie has to fight for her life after being trapped inside a cell in the town, which is run by David, a pedifile and a cannibal, she is reunited with Joel who was previously badly wounded. Ellie had to resort to drastic measures to save him and then save herself. Knowing this, Joel attempted to make her feel immensely safe and put on a smile for her that we rarely see. He wanted her to know that she would be okay now that she was back with him.

Towards the end of the show when Joel explains to Ellie that the scar on his head is not from someone shooting at him, but from him attempting to end his life after the loss of Sarah, we realize he is deciding to be vulnerable in the company of Ellie to illustrate to her that she can get through this and that she will always have him. He wants her to remain alive even if everything she is experiencing begins to feel like too much.

That is when she says, “Time heals all wounds I guess.” and then he replies with “It wasn’t time that did it.” As tears were rolling down my face during this scene, I could clearly see how much Ellie means to him and how she pulled him out of the darkness that was his life before he met her.

Joel’s seemingly tough exterior gets broken through by the charismatic Ellie who loves him so dearly. As the story progresses, his actions speak for themselves. His love for her is so great that he is willing to kill everyone who gets in their way for her safety. The cure required the doctors to operate on her brain. In the end, he couldn’t allow her to die for the human race as his love and protectiveness for her was so intense at that point.

The fact that Joel only saw Ellie as “cargo” in the beginning and couldn’t help but to grow to love her as he loved his daughter was something I wish I could witness for the first time again.

The entire storyline and the many small details were so incredible. I became more aware of them after watching the show for the third time all the way through.

I can confidently say this is one of the best shows ever made. The visuals, the characters and everything was so beautifully presented. I can’t get enough and I wish so badly for the second season to come sooner than the end of 2024.