Tear Jerker / The Last of Us (2023)

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

When You're Lost in the Darkness

• The death of Sarah Miller, which tells the audience what to expect from the series going forward. After all she, her father Joel, and uncle Tommy went through, including a horrific car crash caused by a nearby crashing plane, Sarah is killed just as they escaped Austin by a soldier under orders to keep the quarantine. The world may be starting to end for everyone else, but for Joel it's already gone.
  • The soldier's hesitation and the small "I'm sorry" before he opens fire.
  • Due to Adaptation Expansion, we get to see the full day of Sarah's life right before the pandemic goes into full swing and everything goes to hell.
    • One of the kids in Sarah's class is already infected as he's showing the symptoms of a twitching wrist.
  • When Joel screams for Tommy's help, Tommy can only reply "Joel," knowing that there's absolutely nothing they can do to stop Sarah from bleeding out. Tommy has to watch as his niece dies in terrified agony and his brother utterly breaks down, with the knowledge that (while it was in no way his fault) if he'd gotten there a little sooner, he might have been able to prevent her death.
    • For players of the game, it develops someone that they are already familiar with as a plot device into a full-fledged character; they become invested, all the while knowing what's going to happen. For those who don't know the game, the extra scenes led the audience into believing that Sarah is going to be a main character despite not being featured in the promotional material.
  • Just like in the game, Sarah's death hits hard for lacking the dignity and gravitas typically assigned to fictional deaths. There's no chance to move her to safety, no calling for loved ones, nothing. The poor girl is unable to do anything but hyperventilate from the pain and reach for her dad to protect her, while Joel can do nothing but desperately repeat that he knows she's in unimaginable pain but there's just nothing he can do to ease it. There aren't even last words: one moment she's crying in agony... the next, she's gone.
• The fate of the Adler family, who are infected on the night of the outbreak. Before they turned, they were shown to be lovely people who were good friends with their neighbors Joel and Sarah, but like so many others they would be taken by the fungus before they ever had a chance. What's even worse is in the grand scheme of things, they were just three small casualties in a pandemic that would go on to claim the lives of billions of innocent people just like them.
  • There's also the fate of poor Denise, another one of Joel's neighbors. From her perspective, she just watched Joel run over Mr. and Mrs. Adler, all while Joel is yelling at her to stay indoors. So what does she do? She does the neighborly thing and goes to check on Mrs. Adler. As Joel, Tommy, and Sarah drive away, our last shot of Denise is her kneeling next to Mrs. Adler, only for Mr. Adler to get up and lunge at her. All Denise wanted to do was make sure her neighbors were okay, but all she gets in return is being attacked and getting infected in turn.
• The poor refugee boy who walks into the Boston outpost. Initially, it seems like he's going to be fine... But the soldiers doing a medical check on him notice that he has some suspicious-looking bite marks on his leg. One of them assures him that everything's going to be fine before he's injected with what turns out to be something lethal. Shortly afterward, we see Joel tossing his body into the cremation pit, something he's clearly all too used to after twenty years of hardship.
  • For the soldier herself too, with the subtle pained look when the boy is confirmed positive and doing what she can from there to ensure his passing is without any fear - even holding his hand.

Infected

• In the prologue, Professor Ratna is confronted with the horror that Cordyceps has spread to humans. When she's asked if a vaccine can be created (and just as Dr. Neuman in the previous episode said) she has to tell the military official that there is no vaccine or any hope of making one. Knowing that there are at least fourteen people who've been exposed to the fungus unaccounted for and somewhere in the city, plus the person who originally bit the woman who came to the attention of the authorities, the only thing she can possibly think of is to bomb and level Jakarta, a city of nearly 9 million people, in the hopes of containing the outbreak. As she's on the cusp of weeping, she brokenly asks to be driven home so that she can spend her last hours with her family. And as we already know, it was all in vain.
• When Tess asks Ellie if she was alone in the mall when she got bit, Ellie says no, but her voice catches. Players of the first game know why exactly Ellie's voice cracked, as the mall was where her first love Riley was bitten as well. Ellie never talked about Riley with Joel in the original video game, so to see it brought up early here most likely caused those viewers to feel the same pang of sadness Ellie felt.
• The death of Tess. At the state house, Joel calls Tess out on her uncharacteristic behaviour, at which point she reveals her infection, which has already progressed further than on either of Ellie's bite marks. When Joel kills one of the Not Quite Dead infected, it triggers the attention of the entire infected horde. Tess volunteers to stay behind and hold them off. She tearfully pleas to Joel to keep going on and not let her sacrifice be in vain, before Joel drags Ellie kicking and screaming out the back of the building.
  • It happens briefly but as Tess pleads with Joel, she tells him that she's never asked him for anything, not even to "feel the way I feel," which puts their relationship in a bittersweet light. The implication being that Tess loves Joel deeply, but he couldn't reciprocate in the way she wanted and she had to be content with whatever they had.
  • Tess's tearful expression when her lighter refuses to ignite, upset that she may have failed to save Joel and Ellie anyway.
  • The fact that Ellie immediately objects to Tess staying behind shows how much she's already bonded with her in their limited time together. She doesn't want yet another person she cares for to be taken from her again.
  • And even if Tess is wrong and Joel does feel the same way about her, she can't allow him to correct her, because her infection is coming on quickly and there's about to be a horde on all of them. When she makes the comment about Joel not feeling the same way as her, he immediately starts to argue, but she's forced to cut him off because they just don't have the time to get into it.
• Upon a rewatch, it’s heartbreaking to see how different Ellie is in the beginning of the season from how she is in the end. Despite living in a post-apocalyptic world run by a fascist government, she is still relatively innocent. She is in awe of the ruined city outside the QZ and briefly plays pretend in the flood hotel. By the end of the season, everything she has had to experience changes her, and she no longer has the same cheerful spark.

Long Long Time

• At the beginning of the episode, Joel is carefully placing flat rocks on top of each other by a river, ten miles from Boston. Word of God says that the makeshift cairn is his way of honouring Tess and apologizing for not being able to protect her.
• FEDRA executing the residents of entire towns if there was no room for them in the quarantine zones, just on the off chance that they might become infected later on. This includes babies and young children. Sarah wasn't the only victim of the US government's ruthless method to contain the infection. Even though we're spared from seeing the act itself, the fact that Joel is narrating all this to Ellie while having a very pained and uncomfortable look on his face clearly shows how he's still suffering from the memories of the night that all hell broke loose and when he lost his daughter 20 years earlier.
• In this adaptation, Bill and Frank go from one-note characters to being a fully fledged couple, who meet four years after the outbreak and remain together for the next two decades.
  • The first time they sleep together, Frank asks Bill if he's ever done this before. Almost in tears, Bill admits that this is his first time with a man, and that the only other time was with a woman many years ago, with Frank quick to reassure him that they'll take things as slow as he needs. Considering how thoroughly Bill has established himself as a stoic and antisocial loner up to this point, it's quite moving to see him so openly vulnerable in his desire for Frank and his fear of rejection.
  • When Bill is shot during an attack, he spends the entire time on his treatment bed tearfully trying to give Frank instructions on how he can get to safety.
  • Their end comes when Frank contracts a disease (which would have been untreatable even before the pandemic), and he decides to have one last good day with the man he loves before committing suicide. Bill gives Frank the perfect day by picking out new outfits for them at the nearby boutique, having a private wedding ceremony by their precious piano, and then recreating the first meal they had together. Unbeknownst to Frank, Bill had already crushed the pills into their second bottle of wine so they could leave the world together. On top of that, their wedding and final meal is scored with Max Richter's heartbreaking musical piece "On The Nature Of Daylight".
  • When Frank tells Bill that he wishes to die and details exactly how he wants to spend his final day, Bill looks like he's slowly moving closer to tears. When Frank gets to the part where Bill helps him die via a lethal overdose of pills, Bill completely breaks down and initially refuses, clearly terrified of losing Frank and having to live the rest of his life without him.
  • The fact that their neighbourhood is already showing signs of disrepair and neglect by the time Joel and Ellie turn up. The flowers have started to wilt, the paint on the buildings is peeling, and dust has started to build. Without Bill and Frank maintaining both the upkeep of the town and its safety mechanisms, their paradise will soon fall to ruin like the rest of Boston, and either be overrun by the infected or picked clean by raiders.
  • The scene with Frank and Bill eating strawberries is heartwarming, but the song that plays is from The Last of Us Part II called "It Can't Last", a subtle hint at the way their story's going to end.
• Joel nearly having a breakdown when he reads Bill's posthumous note, and sees that Bill left most of his weapons/ammo for Joel to protect Tess. He leaves Ellie in the house and runs outside, nearly on the verge of tears because he failed to protect her.
  • Joel only takes the note from Ellie because she faltered upon seeing Tess' name.
  • This scene becomes worse when taking into account Tess telling Joel that in the sixteen years they spent as a couple, she never asked him to feel the same way she did. It's heavily implied that Joel did love Tess the way she wanted him to, but he never knew how to show it. And now he'll never get the chance to.
• After her infection and heroic sacrifice at the end of the previous episode, seeing a younger and less world-weary Tess enjoying a normal dinner party at Bill and Frank's is particularly heart-breaking.
• Early in the episode Ellie, who wasn't taught about the subject in school, asks how the pandemic started and Joel explains how contaminated flour was shipped all over the world. When listing the items that had flour in it, Joel briefly hesitates when he says pancake mix, as it no doubt reminds him of Sarah.
  • The fact that it's implied Joel has spent years thinking about how his family had probably just narrowly avoided being infected by the fungus all because they were out of pancake mix and he forgot to buy a cake.

Please Hold to My Hand

• Thanks to Adaptation Expansion, the enemies Joel and Ellie face go from being two-dimensional mooks they mow through, to full-fledge group with stated goals and backstory.
  • The entire conflict begins when Joel and Ellie are ambushed by Kathleen's group, killing their attackers in self-defense. It's assumed that Joel and Ellie are allies of someone named Henry, and it sparks Kathleen's group to hunt them down, which will result in more deaths.
  • Despite nearly killing Joel, the young and terrified Bryan pleads for his life after being paralyzed by a shot from Ellie. He begs for the two to bring him to his mother, and his final words are desperate cries for her before Joel finishes him off.
    • Bryan's appeals are clearly aimed at Ellie, and his despair reaches its peak when he realizes she won't intervene to save him.
    • Ellie herself is visibly crying while listening to the young man pleading, and starts crying again when Joel offers her sympathy while they're hiding in the store—both times silently, and trying to brush it off or hide it.
  • Kathleen's fervent and often blind drive to hunt down and kill Henry comes from a place of intense pain and trauma; Henry ratted Kathleen's brother out to FEDRA, who arrested and beat him to death while he was in custody. When she visits the community's doctor, held prisoner in one of the FEDRA cells, she deliberately wonders out loud if it's the same cell that her brother was murdered in.
  • FEDRA managed to set so many members of a community against each other. The doctor (who delivered Kathleen and presumably many more of her comrades) protested that FEDRA essentially held a gun to his head to force him to help them, but she now can only see him as a collaborator and, once she finds out that Bryan has died, goes back and shoots him.

Endure and Survive

• The Clicker that broke into the car Ellie was hiding in clearly used to be a little girl, who was not even Ellie's age when the fungus turned her into a monster.
  • In the game, all Infected enemies are adults, with the exception of Sam briefly in a cutscene. The little Clicker is a reminder of how cruel the world is now, and how children aren't spared such a terrible fate.
• Perry and Kathleen's deaths. The former spends his last few moments desperately trying to protect Kathleen, only to be brutally killed by the Bloater, and the latter goes out screaming in terror and pain as the little girl Clicker mauls her. However hateful she is, that's an awful way to go.
  • Perry is especially tragic. Throughout the two episodes he showcases Undying Loyalty to Kathleen, and despite her increasingly unhinged and short-sighted crusade against Henry and his brother, he doesn't stop supporting her for a moment. He believes so strongly in her that when the area is being swarmed he sacrifices himself on the belief that she will recognize the importance of giving Kansas City strong leadership now that they truly need it. Unfortunately his faith is entirely misplaced, and she immediately goes back to seeking her pointless revenge and gets herself killed.
• Kansas City was under the control of the fascist remnants of the US government for twenty years, and the residents of the city finally managed to rebel and drive them out — and just as the people might be starting to hope for a better future, the city's swarmed by Infected, and there's no militia left to save them. Likely everyone in the city is doomed to either die in agony or be turned.
  • Unfortunately, what inevitably replaced FEDRA turned out to be far from ideal. The Kansas City Uprising under Kathleen quickly degraded into a reign of terror where numerous men, women, and children were brutally interrogated and publicly executed under the accusation of being collaborators, sympathizers, or more tellingly, guilty of aiding and abetting Henry and Sam. Even if the Militia did survive, life under them would've just been another flavor of dystopian Hell.
    • What really drives the knife deeper however is the fact that Michael, Kathleen's brother and the original Rebel Leader of the Kansas City Uprising, was a Reasonable Authority Figure who was completely empathetic to why Henry sold him out to FEDRA as it was the only way the kid could get Leukemia medication for Sam, who was written off as a waste of resources. Michael even explicitly ordered Kathleen to leave the brothers alone as a Last Request, which Kathleen refused in favor of turning their entire revolutionary movement into an instrument for her personal quest for revenge. If Michael was still alive to see what his efforts were warped into under his sister's command, its heavily implied that he'd be appalled beyond belief.
• Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have said that they imagined that the sniper whom Joel was forced to kill essentially committed Suicide by Cop. He was already in his sixties when the pandemic happened, watched the world go to utter hell for twenty years and likely reckons that the revolution isn't going to be much better than FEDRA and Kathleen will kill him for failing regardless; he just wants it to be over.
• When Henry is horrified that Kathleen wants to kill Sam as well, protesting that "He's just a fucking kid!" she coldly replies "Kids die, Henry. They die all the time." How many children has Kathleen — has Henry, has Joel, has Perry, have so many people — watched die in the fallout of the cordyceps pandemic, not just because of the fungus or FEDRA's brutality but because of the simple lack of resources or medicine?
• In the motel room, Sam reveals to Ellie that he was bitten by one of the Clickers earlier. In desperation, Ellie cuts open her palm and smears her blood on the wound in the hopes that it might help. It doesn't.
  • Sam asks Ellie to stay awake with him. She agrees, but then it cuts to her waking up.
  • Ellie admits to Sam that she fears that she'd end up alone one day. For video game fans who have played through both games, it's a depressing Foreshadowing moment for what lies in store for Ellie later on.
  • At the end of the episode, she leaves the notepad over Sam's grave. On it? "I'm sorry." Ellie feels terribly that she gave him hope for nothing.
• Henry's reaction after he realizes he just shot an infected Sam. His betrayal of Michael and the entire resistance movement to save his brother now being All for Nothing, he shoots himself out of despair.

Kin

• A subtle one, but Ellie never actually answers Joel's question about what she wants to do after they reach the Fireflies.
• Joel has a panic attack outside after Tommy tells him about Maria's pregnancy, which reminded him of his own perceived failures as a father. To make things worse, he spots a woman with the same hairstyle as Sarah picking up her young daughter in the town square. For a moment Joel appears to imagine, with a haunted look on his face, that the woman was Sarah all grown up with a daughter of her own and himself as a grandfather to that little girl. Then she turns around and the illusion is broken, with Joel snapping back to sobering reality.
• During their conversation in the bar, Joel brings up the point that—radio rules or not—Tommy just leaving Joel in the dark with no word whether he was dead or alive didn't sit well with him. When Tommy tries to explain that those were the rules established by the commune, Joel's expression is a mixture of anger and hurt as he simply says "I'm your brother. "
• Joel tearfully recounts the past few months to Tommy, confessing that despite his rough exterior, he feels constantly weak and terrified of failing Ellie (and by extension Sarah). Rather than risk her life, he asks Tommy to take Ellie to the Firefly base.
  Joel: You think I can still handle things but I'm not who I was. I'm weak. Lately, there are these moments where the fear comes up outta nowhere and my heart feels like it's stopped. And I have dreams. Every night. ... I don't know. I can't remember. I just know that when I wake up I've lost somethin'. I'm failin' in my sleep. That's all I do. It's all I've ever done is fail her again and again.
  • Earlier when Tommy asks Joel about Tess, there's a noticeable pause before Joel lies that she's fine. It's only later that Joel can bring himself to confess to Tommy that his partner had gotten killed, and it's clear that he's also carrying guilt from not being able to save her.
• Pay close attention to the memorial dates in Tommy and Maria's house: Maria lost her son, Kevin, when he was three and a half years old, two days after the pandemic started.
• Ellie reading the journal of a girl who once lived in the house and calling her teenage problems 'bizarre', asking Joel if thinking about boys and clothes was all that concerned girls her age before Outbreak Day. It's a stark reminder of how much innocence Ellie has lost due to the state of the world.
• After their fight in the evening, Joel goes to his own bedroom and imagines hanging up Christmas tree ornaments... with an unbroken watch and Sarah by his side. He's quietly crying as he turns off the light to go to sleep.
• Joel is stabbed by a raider and eventually passes out from blood loss. As Ellie attempts to wake him up and stop the bleeding, she begs him not to leave her.
  Ellie: (through tears) I can't fuckin' do this without you. I don't know where the fuck I'm going, what the fuck I'm gonna do. Joel. Please.

Left Behind

• Ellie's situation in the FEDRA compound is a lonely one where she is treated as an outcast by others and is a target of bullies. The point is hammered home hard when she's laying in her bed at night, and turns to see Riley's empty bed in the other corner of the room.
• A very minor one, but while they're in the abandoned mall, Riley and Ellie come across a Victoria's Secret store. Riley lightly scoffs at the idea of Ellie wearing lingerie, and Ellie joins in, but as Riley heads off Ellie's expression changes and she nervously fixes her hair in the reflection of the glass window. It's a small, quick reminder that underneath all the sarcasm and the stabbing and the terrible, terrible puns, Ellie is a teenage girl who's feeling insecure about her crush and her appearance.
• Near the end of their night together, Riley admits to Ellie that she has orders to transfer to the Atlanta QZ, and that Marlene wasn't interested in recruiting Ellie to join her. Ellie is devastated by the news and angrily walks off.
• Ellie and Riley manage to reconcile before the night is over, and even start exploring some romantic feelings for each other, when a Stalker - having been roused by all the noise the two were making - finds and attacks them. Unfortunately, both of them receive a bite in the struggle, which they are well aware means that whatever hope they had of a life together has been instantly destroyed.
  • In the original game, Riley is rather tranquil as she talks about her and Ellie losing their minds together. Here, however, she can only mutter a defeated apology before the both of them are reduced to quiet, Broken Tears as they embrace one another, sitting and waiting to turn. It's one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the show so far.
  • Unlike in the game, we get an answer as to what happened to Riley. While the Left Behind DLC ended on an ambiguous note, Ellie confirms in Look for the Light that she had to put Riley down when she turned. Not only that, but Riley - her first kiss and first love - was the first time she'd had to kill someone.
• A minor example, that still stands out nonetheless due to the Crapsack World nature of the setting: after Ellie kisses Riley, she immediately apologises, only for Riley to respond, "for what?" The look of sheer joy on Ellie's face when she says this is heart-shattering, as it's the first time we've seen her truly happy, and the audience knows that we likely won't see her that happy again.

When We Are In Need

• The cannibal that Joel killed back in the sixth episode wasn't just a faceless Mook. He had a wife and young daughter mourning his loss, and the girl tearfully asks David when they can have a funeral to bury her father. Unfortunately, David informs her that the ground is still too hard and that the burial will have to wait.
  • Later, when David orders the community to hunt Joel and Ellie and "bring them to justice," the little girl interrupts him to yell that they should kill both of them.
  • After being slapped so hard she fell to the floor, the girl then unwittingly eats what remains of her father, unaware that David has turned to cannibalism to keep them alive. Even if the rest of the episode's events hadn't happened, Alec would've never had a proper burial.
• Ellie is put through hell in this episode- she is captured by cannibals, beaten, and nearly raped. Though she manages to escape and reunite with Joel, she breaks down in his arms, thoroughly scarred by her experience.
  • Her screams during the final scene with David are excruciating to listen to. Ellie's not just angry and defiant—she's sobbing with fear.
  • When Joel finally reaches Ellie, he unfortunately grabs her from behind, causing her to immediately start yelling and struggling against him (continuing to make stabbing motions even though she’s no longer armed). It’s a dissociative PTSD flashback being played out onscreen, as Ellie’s horrifying screaming and blank, terrified expression all but broadcasts the fact that though she was looking in Joel’s face, she was still seeing David. Her sobbing and mumbling almost sounds like laughter.
  • This moment also causes Joel to comfort Ellie, first with a quieter “Sweetheart-“, then finally calling her "baby girl", which was how he spoke to Sarah as she died in his arms. After 20 years of maintaining near-total detachment from everyone but his brother, with whom he has a much more complex relationship, Joel has finally found someone he truly connects to emotionally.

Look for the Light

• Because she got bitten, Anna was only able to be with her daughter for the first few hours of her life, not even able to nurse her for fear of passing on her infection, and is in tears when she puts Ellie down for the last time and pushes her towards Marlene.
  • When Marlene got there, Anna was holding Ellie with a knife to her own throat. She clearly planned on holding her baby for every second she could, then killing herself when she started to turn to make sure she couldn't hurt Ellie.
  • Anna tearfully begging Marlene to kill her, so that she wouldn't have to suffer as the infection took over her body. Marlene is clearly both distraught and reluctant, but does the deed anyways.
• Anna leaving her knife to her daughter, clearly the only thing she could give her child. And Marlene made sure that Ellie got it.
• Baby Ellie immediately begins wailing after Marlene shoots Anna, distressed by both the noise and some instinctual knowledge that her mother is gone forever.
• Ellie is withdrawn for most of the episode, dealing with her trauma from the previous episode while Joel tries to cheer her up. It isn't until the giraffe is spotted that she begins to act more like her old self.
• Joel tells Ellie that he nearly committed suicide after Sarah was killed, and only survived because he flinched before shooting, which caused the bullet to just graze his head.
  Ellie: So time heals all wounds, I guess?
  Joel: It wasn't time that did it.
  • A bit of a fridge Tearjerker here as well: Joel confesses he felt like he had nothing left to live for after Sarah's death, and implies that Ellie was the one who healed the pain of losing her. No mention made of his younger brother, Tommy (and the two of them aren't as estranged/distant as they are in the game).
• Marlene condemns Joel for both dooming humanity's chances of a cure for cordyceps and for denying Ellie's likely choice to sacrifice herself for the sake of that cure, but Joel regrets none of his actions because he couldn't bear to lose another daughter.
  • For that matter when telling Joel that the cure requires the death of Ellie, the fact that even if she decided it had to be done - Marlene outright says she understands how Joel feels, Ellie’s foster mother being quietly tearful torn up by what she feels must be done.
• Joel's rampage through the hospital to look for Ellie, potentially destroying any hope of a cure being found and condemning humanity to the cordyceps. As he methodically eliminates almost every Firefly in the building surrendering ones included, the music that plays is a Dark Reprise of the show's theme, to make clear the tragedy and horror of what is happening.
  • The scene also makes Tess' sacrifice in episode 2 utterly pointless. It was her dying wish for Joel to complete the job and give humanity a fighting chance.
• The look on Ellie's face when Joel swears that he told her the truth about the Fireflies implies that she doesn't really believe him, the beginning of the slow erosion of her once unconditional trust in him.