If The Last of Us Part 1 is about childhood, The Last of Us Part 2 is about adolescence. Moody, spiky, murderous adolescence. It’s essentially about young people being young. Everyone is trying to bone each other, and everyone is trying to deal with the mark their parents left on them, and everyone is fighting all the time. Except in this case, the fighting is lethal.
Abby’s friends are no exception. Half of them have boned. Half of them are still trying to bone. And all of them are full of raging, murderous angst. They would be the perfect cast for an apocalyptic Euphoria. And they would have been, except they fāed around with the wrong girl and found out. Big time.
Ellie doesn’t necessarily want to kill Abby’s friends as revenge for the death of Joel Miller. In fact, she doesn’t really give them much thought at all. After all, Abby Anderson is the one who actually did the deedāand the subject of Ellie’s hatred. Abby’s friends are just a means to an end. Abby’s end. But many of them just so happen to meet their end, too.
Jordan
Jordan is just like every other boy: He’s simply trying to get some. Or kill some. Okay, maybe not like every other boy. Maybe a modicum of boys; a modest sliver of really sociopathic bastards. So Jordan went with Abby and their friends to kill Joel. When Ellie came in and saw her surrogate dad bloodied and beaten, Jordan immediately jumped her. Ellie cuts his gross face with a switchblade, and his paramour Leah (told you, everyone is boning) comes over and tends to his wound. After Joel dies, Jordan moves to execute Ellie in cold blood, but is stopped by Owen. He settles for knocking Ellie out. Still a dick move.
Jordan and a group from the Washington Liberation Front find and capture Ellie, and he and a fellow soldier tie her up to interrogate her. Just before Ellie is about to be executed by the other soldier, her partner Dina blows him away through a skylight above. The glass shatters, and Dina falls to the floor. Jordan then proceeds to holster his pistol and strangle Dina with his bare hands because he is a bloodthirsty bastard. Ellie manages to cut herself free with a shard of broken glass from the skylight, and she runs up behind Jordan and stabs him in the neck. I believe her exact words are “gotcha motherfāer.”
Got him good.
Leah
Yes, that is Leah with her boob out. It was a picture she sent to her now-dead boyfriend, Jordan. I told you, these folks are horny. While Leah never lifted a finger to hurt Ellie or Joel, Ellie no doubt views her as complicit. After all, she was there. In an effort to hunt down Abby, Ellie goes to a radio tower where Leah is currently being stationed. The goal is to interrogate her, which will probably prove fatal to the girl. However, Ellie is too late. The radio station was attacked by a fundamentalist cult called the Seraphites, and Ellie finds Leah’s corpse riddled with arrows. Another dead end. Literally.
Nick
I do NOT envy how this guy went out. Nick helped hold Joel down while Abby beat him to death, so he was about as involved as you can get without pulling the proverbial trigger. Ellie attempts to track Nick down, but unlucky for him, Tommy finds him first. Ellie and Dina walk in on the aftermath. Nick and a friend’s corpses are found beaten beyond recognition and tied to chairs. Tommy used an interrogation technique on the pair that was invented by the Miller brothers themselves. The last time we saw this technique in action, Joel popped a man’s kneecap off with a knife, strangled him, and then beat the other to death with a pipe. Tommy and Joel don’t leave survivors with this technique; they cause so much pain that their captives beg for death. Yikes. Ya done goofed, Nick.
Nora
This one was especially brutal. I’m referring to both Nora and her fate, mind you. She held Joel down along with Nick while Abby beat him to death. Later, Ellie finds Nora in a WLF-controlled hospital and attempts to coerce her into giving away Abby’s location at gunpoint. Nora instead confesses to Ellie that she “still hears his screams.” For one moment, my heart went out to her, thinking that she was repentant for killing Joel. But then she says out of NOWHERE that Joel screamed like a “little bitch” before he died, and Ellie and I simultaneously LOST IT.
Nora flees and Ellie gives chase through the hospital. Eventually, Ellie finds Nora at a dead end. There’s a hole in the floor with spores below. Ellie drags her down into it, and Nora becomes infected. Nora tries to escape Ellie, but comes face to face with a locked door. Ellie grabs a piece of metal pipe and begins savagely beating Nora with it to get her to confess where Abby is. The game cuts away before we see exactly what happens, but in the next scene, a traumatized Ellie comes home to Dina and says that she knows where Abby is. The interrogation was successful. Whether Ellie then proceeded to beat Nora’s brains out or leave her in the dark to turn into an infected is up to interpretation. My guess is she picked the first option.
Manny
Manny almost becomes a sympathetic character at one point. Almost. He’s a loyal friend of Abby. He likes anime. He takes care of his dad. He even helped Abby sneak out of a WLF base in order to look for Owen. It was pretty sweet. He also spat on Joel’s corpse. Still haven’t forgiven him for that. Evidently neither had Tommy. Manny and a small squad were sent to the marina in order to find boats to invade the Seraphite island. He found Tommy instead. Tommy proceeded to gun down Manny’s entire squad with a sniper rifle before Abby found him pinned down behind a car. The pair slowly move in to ambush Tommy, and almost succeed. They manage to corner Tommy in a room in a cruise ship terminal. However, just as Manny and Abby are about to go in, Tommy pulls a reverse Uno card and pops out from a door behind the pair. He then puts a bullet in Manny’s head, killing him instantly and spattering Abby with blood and brains. It was shocking, gross, and uncomfortably satisfying.
Owen
You know, Owen wasn’t really a bad guy. He just made bad decisions. He left Abby for Mel. He got Mel pregnant. He was complicit in Joel’s murder. He killed a WLF soldier. He deserted the WLF. He then cheated on a pregnant Mel with Abby. On second thought, he sounds like a pretty bad guy to me. He loved Abby, however, and tried to do good at times, but he just wasn’t very good at it. He then made one more fatal mistake: he tried to take on Ellie. Ellie ambushed Owen and Mel while they were arguing in an aquarium, and Ellie began to interrogate them at gunpoint. Owen then tried to reach for Ellie’s gun and she shot him through the chest. At least this way he can’t make any more bad decisions?
Mel +1
Unlike the rest of these bozos, Mel actually regretted her involvement in Joel’s murder. She became distant from Abby and the rest of the group, no doubt terrified by what they were capable of doing. She spends the rest of the game being aloof and antagonistic, probably roiling with guilt. She later accuses Abby of trying to save Owen from the WLF in order to rekindle their romantic relationship. She is also quite far along carrying his child. Girl is really going through it. She is with Owen when Ellie ambushes them, and when Ellie points a gun at her, Owen tries to grab it and gets himself shot. Mel then makes the fatal mistake of charging Ellie with a knife. She is quickly overpowered and stabbed through the neck, and she dies moments later. With his dying breath, Owen tells Ellie that Mel is pregnant, and Ellie is horrified. Mel and Owen’s unborn child inherited the sins of their parents, and paid for them with their life. Poor bb.
Alice
Mel’s unborn baby dying is pretty sad right? WRONG. THIS IS SAD. ALICE. LOOK AT THAT SWEET LITTLE FACE. Alice was Abby’s dog, or rather, a WLF military dog that Abby often worked with during missions. Alice was adorable. She liked to play fetch with a little squid squeaky toy in the aquarium, and she was there for Lev to provide emotional support while his sister Yara recovered from her injury. Alice also was an infected-killing machine and saved Abby’s skin multiple times. This poor baby was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Ellie broke into the aquarium to find Abby, she found Alice first. Alice was surprised by Ellie, and as a war dog, she was trained to attack anyone she didn’t know. Alice pins Ellie down, but Ellie stabs her with a switchblade. She dies on the floor. It’s awful, and by far the most tragic death on this list. I’d sacrifice all of them just to let Alice play fetch one more time.
(featured image: Naughty Dog)
