This article contains spoilers
(As I hope you all could surmise from the title)
Let’s start with genocide.
That’s the final solution Isaac Dixon, Abby’s boss and leader of the Wolves, found for the Seraphite problem: if he kills every single member of this rival faction fighting him for land, then there will be no one left to take revenge. Ellie herself — who’s locked in a self-destructive quest to avenge Joel — reaches a similar conclusion when speaking with her girlfriend Dina: apparently, Abby’s mistake was to let her live when she came to Jackson. By sparing the life of an innocent girl, Abby allowed the cycle of violence to continue, since now that very same girl, having had her innocence stripped away by several strikes of a golf club, is now consumed by anger, hellbent on making Abby pay for what she did.
Isaac has already tried peace, and it didn’t last long. His truce with the Seraphites — the Wolves call them Scars to turn them more monstrous – was eventually broken because people can’t simply brush a history of violence under the carpet. One of the most crucial notes we find in the game is in the Aquarium often visited by Abby: the children of a man — now a skeleton — abandoned him there because he refused to avenge the death of their mother. “When the soldiers killed mom, you just stood there like a coward. What kind of example is that? You should’ve gotten angry. You should’ve made them hurt more than they hurt us,” they wrote.
This is the key to understanding what drives most characters in Part II and what leads them to their ruin: they feel that they’re duty-bound to avenge their loved ones. To refuse this path is a sign of weakness, of submission, as it allows injustice to prevail. To say “enough is enough” and stop — or even refuse to enter — the cycle of violence is to betray your history, it’s to betray the victims of violence. If someone hurts the people you love, you hurt them back, you hurt them worse, because the violence you perpetrate is ultimately proof of your love for them.
Abby’s crush, Owen, is being hunted by his former colleagues precisely because of that: his crime was to hesitate to pull the trigger against a Scar. This is unthinkable because genocide doesn’t allow for nuance, as it necessarily operates in the “you’re either with me, or against me” mentality. You either support the complete obliteration of our enemies or you’ll be accused of supporting their most egregious and horrible actions. “I hit this one on the head,” Owen begins to explain what happened to Abby, “Hard. And he goes down. And his weapon is right there. And he doesn’t go for it. Instead, he… turns to me. And he’s old. And tired. He was just… ready. I’ve killed a lot of Scars. And uh… This fucking guy. I couldn’t do it.” Owen thought of his enemy as a person just for a second (“he’s old and tired”), and showed empathy by putting himself in the Seraphite’s shoes, interpreting his reaction (“he was just ready”), and that’s a capital offense: the Seraphites are not supposed to be people, they’re Scars, they’re fanatics, they’re monsters.
And so, Isaac attacks the Scars, invades their island, and tries to burn it all to the ground. Abby is there, however, going through the fire and the carnage to try and help Lev and Yara, two Seraphites who saved her life the previous day. If Owen was considered a traitor just for hesitating to kill a Scar, what Abby is doing here is simply scandalous in the eyes of someone like Isaac. She’s betraying everything the Wolves stand for, she’s turning against her own for the enemy.
This sequence of events is crucial to Part II, as it will lead to the eventual disparity between Abby and Ellie’s narrative arcs, already showing how the former has finally become able to break free from the cycle of violence and see the “other” as someone like herself. When Yara is killed in the war — while taking out Isaac, bless her heart —, it’s Abby who douses the flames of Lev’s anger. “Those were your fucking people,” Lev says to her, accusingly, and Abby’s answer is telling: “You’re my people!”
She has spent time with Lev and Yara and even allowed herself to get close to them and respect their beliefs. Lev, in particular, is keen to convert Abby to his religion, and often quotes his prophet’s words to her. When she’s shaking due to her fear of heights, going up an elevator, Lev quotes his prophet to her to make her calm down, and Abby is taken aback by his words, realizing that there may be more to the Seraphites than she had thought at first. So, Lev explains that the problem is that the Seraphites’ leaders corrupt their own religion: if their prophet — who’s a woman, mind you — preached for peace, for understanding, for opening one’s heart to the suffering of others, his leaders taught close-mindedness and bigotry, perpetuating even more suffering.
It’s not a coincidence that Lev is a trans boy being persecuted by his own people: just like Abby, who abandoned the Wolves when she realized they were too far gone in their hatred, Lev is running away from the Seraphites because they no longer reflect their own religion, having weaponized it for power. “She wouldn’t want any of this. Her writings don’t have violence in them,” Lev explains to Abby, when questioned about upholding his faith even though the Seraphites’ hatred against him is fueled by it. “We weren’t stoning or hanging people until she died. They’re taking her words and twisting them,” he says. Imagine the concept, a beloved religious figure telling people to love others like they love themselves, and then after their death, their followers starting to use this religion to justify their own bigotry. How preposterous. But Lev’s advice to Abby is important nonetheless: “Read the text.”
So, both Abby and Lev manage to abandon their groups, being able to forsake loyalty to those who took them in, who fed and protected them, because they could see the tribalism that governs their actions for what it was. And if Lev was nonetheless incapable of doing the same to his mother — a true fanatic that chose the bigotry of her leaders over the life of her own son — and came back to the Seraphite homebase for her, he paid a dear price for his mistake: Lev was not only attacked by his mother, but also lost Yara during the escape from the island.
In essence, Abby has managed to abandon the “us” (Wolves) vs “them” (Scars) mentality and become capable of not only distancing herself from the actions of her own people and judging them, but also of seeing “the other” as part of her own, as part of herself. Lev is not the other anymore, he’s her people.
It’s not a coincidence that the red light that has been, throughout the whole game, condemning Ellie and Tommy’s actions, bathing their victims with an ominous scarlet aura, finally vanishes from Abby’s nightmares when she decides to help Lev and Yara. She’s doing that for selfish purposes, yes, consciously trying to redeem herself, but the effect that her actions have on her worldview is nonetheless impactful. It still changes her for the better, freeing her from that vicious cycle.
For this is, it seems, the only solution Part II offers to the cycle of violence: if the truce between Wolves and Seraphites didn’t work, it was because it was a half-measure. The people of both groups still saw the other as an “other”, they still harbored historical grudges, and they were still taught about the injustices they suffered. In other words, since alterity remained the bedrock of both cultures, peace was never going to last. It’s a problem of empathy, as revenge narrows our perspective and blocks any attempt to see those who wronged us as people. It’s a difficult thing to be able to extend empathy to those we don’t believe deserve it, but Abby eventually manages that. The tragedy, however, is that this happened too late in her life.
For she has already hunted down and brutally killed Joel — the man who had just saved her life from the infected — with several strikes of a golf club, because he had killed her dad years before. So, when she gets back to Owen in the Aquarium, it’s just to find his motionless corpse lying next to his pregnant girlfriend, Mel — all knifed to death by Ellie. Abby is once again taken by fury and revenge and once again goes after those who hurt her loved ones, doing precisely what she advised Lev not to do. It’s the cycle restarting.
She tracks Ellie down to Seattle and shoots Tommy (who survives) and the father of Dina’s child, Jesse (who perishes immediately). She beats Ellie in a fight and is about to kill Dina when Ellie begs her to stop. “You should’ve gotten angry. You should’ve made them hurt more than they hurt us,” those kids wrote to their father in the Aquarium. Abby has gotten angry; there’s no room for compassion anymore. So, when Ellie says, “Stop. She had nothing to do with this! She’s pregnant,” Abby’s answer is a simple “Good,” as this will allow her to hurt Ellie just as much, if not more than she had hurt her. Ebby killed Mel, Abby will now kill Dina.
But this is when Lev appears and shouts Abby’s name, pleadingly. Lev represents everything that she has learned so far, her whole growth as a human being, and so Abby does the same thing that Owen did before, and which led him to be hunted by his own people: she hesitates. And then she decides. Abby pushes Dina aside, gets up, and leaves both Ellie and Dina alive — but not without warning the former not to come after her again. Abby has said, “Enough is enough.” The killings should finally stop. Right?
What follows is a significant time skip. We see Ellie on a farm, taking care of Dina’s baby. The scenery is so idyllic that it feels almost like a dream sequence at first, as Ellie and Dina appear as a happy couple, living together and raising a family. But then Ellie walks into a barn and sees Joel being beaten to death with a golf club and curls herself into a ball: it’s not because she left the cycle of violence that it left her. She’s still emotionally scared, still traumatized by the events. Just like Joel used to do, instead of seeking help, she has put her pain in a box, closed the lid, and let it fester. She refuses to talk to Dina about it, to treat her rage, choosing instead to let it silently boil.
The killings should have stopped. Abby had said enough is enough, after all. But just like that Wolves/Scar truce, we see that it’s indeed not enough: Ellie still sees Abby as the other who must be eliminated. And Tommy does too. He lost his eye when he was shot by Abby, an apt perversion of the “an eye for an eye” motto, as he went for revenge and just lost his. And he’s upset that Ellie is just being happy living her life on a farm instead of going after the woman who killed his brother. She should be angry; she should be hurting Abby more than she has hurt them. So, he comes by her house to push her back into this path: “Reckon it’s easy to forget about her when you’re sitting all comfy way out here. ‘I’ll make her pay.’ That’s what you said when we got back to Jackson,” he says to her.
Dina, the sweet Dina, argues with Tommy and makes him leave, but it’s already too late, for his words have gotten to Ellie, tapping into the guilt she felt when she first embarked on her journey through Seattle. Ellie tries to leave in the middle of the night, but is caught by her wife. “I love you,” she says to Dina, who replies in simple terms, “Prove it. Stay.” But Ellie can’t, she owes Joel violence, she owes him her own suffering. As she wrote in her journal at the beginning of the game, since he died horribly, she has no right to be happy. It would not be fair to him.
There’s another jump in time, and we see that Abby and Lev went looking for the remnants of the Fireflies, searching for another group to belong to, but were caught by slavers instead. And Ellie can’t have that: she would be pissed if even an infected got to Abby before her, as she wants not justice but the cathartic release of revenge. She wants to feel Abby die in her bones. Maybe she believes this will free her from her trauma, cure her of her PTSD, or at least allow her to finally be happy, now that she has fulfilled her duty to the dead.
These last moments in the game are fascinating. First, there’s the slavers, the only faction in the story that is one-dimensional in its villainy, with no time spent to develop its members and allow us to see them as people. They’re monsters and — worse still — they’re standing in Ellie’s way, so we shoot them down quickly without blinking twice. If, during the last twenty hours, the game has been directly judging us for the people we kill, here we seem to get a cathartic moment of release: “It’s okay to shoot these ones down,” Part II seems to say. Or… maybe not. The whole game has been pushing us hard to see “the other” as people despite the horrible things that they did or the group they belonged (it forced us to meet them after we had already passed judgement), so when it finally stops to push us during the last scenes, it makes the slavers basically function as a final test for empathy. If those past hours did their job, we’re to actually be thinking here, “What if this woman was called Sarah and was secretly helping the slaves while concocting a plan to free them and get out…before we blew her chest open?”
Then, there’s the gigantic irony that Ellie is actually saving Abby and Lev. After butchering half of the slaver camp, Ellie finds them both on a nearby beach, almost unconscious, crucified by the slavers — Abby is not even her bulky self, living up to the nickname Abs, but weakened and starved. She’s half the size of what she used to be and the difference is striking, making her almost unrecognizable.
This means that she would have died there on the beach, slowly and horribly, had Ellie stayed home. She would have had her revenge had she forsaken it. But Ellie had to do the deed herself; she had to feel that cathartic release in her bones, so she frees Abby… just to kill her herself. Abby, however, doesn’t want anything to do with this psychopathic girl anymore and tries to walk away. Ellie, then, threatens the very same person who saved her life before, saved the life of her wife, and the life of their son.
This is the moment when Ellie hits rock bottom. There’s no excuse anymore: Lev didn’t kill anyone dear to her — on the contrary. He isn’t attacking her or even defending himself. Lev is not a threat to Ellie here. He isn’t even in the way of her revenge. Lev is just lying on a boat unconscious when Ellie puts a knife to his neck. The very same boat that has been staring at us on the start menu screen from the very beginning — the tragic foreshadowing of where everything would end up.
What follows on that foggy night, then, is a brutal skirmish, where both women are badly hurt but not holding back. Ellie slashes Abby repeatedly, sticks the knife in her shoulder and above her breasts, but is punched back and kicked down. They’re both bloodied, exasperated, barely managing to stand, their balance wavering with each movement. We don’t even get why they’re fighting anymore, what they’re fighting for, it all just feels senseless. Ellie manages to knock Abby down and tries to drown her, but Abby bites two of the girl’s fingers off. Ellie, then, overcome with pain, crying on that baleful beach adorned with crucified bodies, finally lets it go. “Just take him,” is the last thing she says to Abby.
But Ellie returns home just to find it abandoned. Her senseless quest for revenge cost her nothing less than her family. Dina has left her, and Ellie doesn’t even look surprised – who would after their last conversation, after all. So, when she goes up to her old room, where all her things are still stored, and picks up her guitar, we can see how she’s even partially unable to play it without her fingers now. She’s lost everything and she’s alone.
The final scene, of course, brings us back to the source of all the trouble: Joel. “I was supposed to die at that hospital. My life would’ve fucking mattered. But you took that for me,” Ellie confronts him in the flashback. Joel seems to struggle to find words, visibly haunted by his actions (the animation work in this game is truly fantastic). “If somehow the Lord gave me a second chance at that moment…” he finally answers, “I would do it all over again.” Then he looks at her intently, defiantly. There is no trace of regret in his expression. “Yeah… I just… I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that,” Ellie says, making Joel nod in agreement, as if he were expecting precisely that answer. “But I would like to try,” she suddenly finishes. And so, Joel breaks down, looks at her with tears in his eyes — we can see he doesn’t believe he deserves that second chance — and simply says, “I’d like that.”
But they never got the chance, for Joel was soon beaten to death by Abby with a golf club right in front of Ellie. And Ellie went on to brutally murder a lot of people, including a pregnant woman, and threaten the life of an unconscious kid. Joel didn’t want Ellie’s death to matter; he wanted her life to matter, and he killed and died for that. And look at what happened, look at Ellie’s life, at Ellie’s work, and despair.
“No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition
April 20, 2025.
