[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 5, “Feel Her Love.”]
An antihero in the making, Ellie didn’t say “feel this, bitch” in “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 5. But the sentiment behind that particularly memorable piece of graffiti — scrawled near a pile of corpses strung up in a zombie apocalypse — pulses beneath every beat in Bella Ramsey’s wrathful performance. Asked what makes a good revenge arc, the star actor emphasized emotion and complexity.
“I think it has to be complicated and nuanced and not black and white,” Ramsey told IndieWire. “It’s not like, ‘Here’s a good guy and here’s a bad guy, and the good guy is going to go after the bad guy, or the bad guy is going to go after good guy.’”
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“I think what happens in this show is that, throughout the season, Ellie maybe isn’t the hero anymore,” they said. “Is there a point at which she becomes the villain? What is the tipping point? And the same with the enemy character that she has, Abby. It’s like, is Abby really the villain? Or does she become the hero? It’s a really interesting look at the nuances of how we view heroes and villains in a story.”
A misunderstood bleeding heart, Abby has an infamously rough reputation among “The Last of Us” fans. When asked for her perspective on revenge by IndieWire, actress Kaitlyn Dever echoed Ramsey’s thoughts — and described her character’s motivations like those of a flawed hero.
“This kind of revenge is really hard to talk about because it is so intense,” Dever said, emphasizing the dramatic nature of Abby’s vow to kill Joel (Pedro Pascal) in Episode 1. “For Abby, she is just someone who’s desperate to make it all go away and make something bad feel better. And the reality is that there really isn’t anything that’ll make that go away, make that pain go away.”
It’s a lesson Ellie may learn herself soon enough, and philosophical quandaries like that are what made “The Last of Us: Part II” a best-selling video game in 2020. It’s “what fuels the revenge” that makes a revenge story great, agreed Dever, adding, “It’s rooted in some sort of pain usually. There’s a lot of nuances to this one, I will say.”
Co-created by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, HBO’s global TV phenomenon has challenged audiences before but never quite like this. In the final moments of Season 2, Episode 5, fittingly titled “Feel Her Love,” Ellie comes down hard on one of Abby’s allies, Nora (Tati Gabrielle), while searching for Joel’s killer.
Despite knowing the complex motivations that inspired Abby to kill Joel — not only did he murder Abby’s scientist dad to save Ellie, but Joel effectively doomed humanity to fungal hell by doing so — Ellie ruthlessly extracts her vengeance with a brutal attack on Nora anyway.
Connecting the dots with Episode 1, IndieWire’s Ben Travers dissected that evolution and Ellie’s commitment to Joel. In his review, he wrote, “Before Joel died, when Ellie was getting ready to go on patrol with Jesse, she told him, ‘My shit with Joel is complicated. I know that. From the outside, it probably looks really bad. It has been really bad. But I’m still me, he’s still Joel […] and nothing’s ever going to change that. Ever.’”
Travers continued, “Whether or not Ellie knew then what she certainly knows now, the fact remains: Something needs to change in Ellie’s relationship with Joel. If it’s not this, then… what?”
“The Last of Us” Season 2 airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
