#TLOU2 The Tragedy of Alice

I’m writing this as the ending credits of The Last Of Us 2 roll and Ellie and Joel’s duet plays on. This post will have tons and tons of spoilers so:

Spoilers for the entire story of The Last Of Us 2 follow. Do not continue reading until you have completely finished the game. This will be the only warning for the spoilers that I will be mentioning ahead and again, they are quite numerous and detailed.

You have been warned.

All good?

First I have to say that on a personal level violence against animals and especially dogs is a trigger for me. I don’t mean that lightly, our beloved Rottweiler-Shepherd mix died minutes after having a seizure in my arms. I’ve returned games because I knew I wasn’t going to finish them as killing dogs was a requirement. So when Ellie first encounters attack dogs in this game, it was a bit of a hit in the stomach for me. Honestly, it takes the animals to be truly unrealistic for it not to bother me. Like a robotic vampiric zombie dog will probably be fine.

Some developers revel in allowing players agency over their story. Character fates and narrative outcomes are built up over a series of player decisions. Not Naughty Dog. Not only does Neil Druckmann and company keep a firm leash, if you’ll excuse the pun, on the story’s events … they will often lay bare those events and force the player to take a good hard look at it. Uncharted could have just been a simple jump, run and gun action game, but Naughty Dog took the genre apart and inspected what actually makes a grown man want to risk his life for artifacts over staying safe with the people he loves.

At one point in TLOU2, Ellie kills an attack dog in pursuit of Abby. This isn’t a side portion of the game, Ellie has no choice but to beat the dog with a pipe. The player can have Ellie do that or quit playing the game. At this moment, you don’t know anything about the dog other than it will probably kill Ellie.

Then the narration flips over to Abby and you learn quickly that the dog has a name.

Alice.

And a favorite toy.

That Yara throws for Alice in a bonding moment with Abby.

Alice seems to be a good dog, even if she’s a trained attack dog.

She’s also doomed.

Both of the games in the franchise are extremely violent, both in terms of specific violence directed at the characters, violence perpetuated by the characters, and the overall impact of violence in general. The Last Of Us ends with Joel brutally killing scores of people, including Abby’s father. In one scene, the sequel shows that Marlene insists on telling Joel that Ellie must die in order to save the world. This is after her arguing with Abby’s dad, the surgeon about to sacrifice an adolescent girl to create a vaccine, on if said sacrifice is justified.

My personal take on this is that Marlene can’t commit to this action but is also unwilling to stop it. So she tells Joel. Marlene knows Joel from his years of Boston. We know that before meeting Ellie, Joel is a dark, angry and violent person. His brother still has nightmares from his years under Joel’s care. Joel’s early scenes with Ellie are snarls of giving orders.

My personal take is that Marlene loaded Joel like a gun and pointed him at that operating room, where Joel would end up gunning down Abby’s dad and any chance of a vaccine in the future. Not that Joel isn’t to blame for his own actions, but Marlene shouldn’t have been surprised by the outcome.

The Last Of Us 2 is an epic introspection on the nihilistic properties of violence. Alice is not only doomed, she was doomed the moment Joel leaves Saint Mary’s with Ellie. She’s doomed because she’s Abby’s guard dog and TLOU2 is all about the ever unfolding chain of events that happens when violence is chosen as the only solution. So while Alice’s death is extremely disturbing to me, the tragedy that is Alice is awash in a sea of loss that the two main characters leave behind by the time the end credits are scrolling.

Abby is haunted by her father’s death, which makes her feel compelled to brutally kill Joel. Perhaps if the Wolves had killed Ellie and Tommy, it would be the only example in the entire saga where violence ended violence. But would it? Would Jessie and Dina pair up for revenge? Maria has plenty of influence in Jackson and seemed inclined for a little revenge for her brother in law. Mix in her husband? And Ellie? The violence might have actually turned tenfold worse.

The Last Of Us 2 is a difficult game to get through. Not because it isn’t good. It’s completely brilliant. I could write a whole other ramble about how amazing the mechanics come together and how brilliantly updated they are from Naughty Dog’s previous outings. No, it’s difficult because you become both emotionally attached to the characters but also want to shake your fist at their flaws. You want to tell Ellie to simply stay with Dina. You want to tell her to focus on getting Tommy back home and abandon the blood quest of killing Abby. Having the player actually have Abby attack and nearly kill Ellie is a challenge to get through, and not just because AI Ellie is a terrifying force to be reckoned with. It’s because Ellie is both the person you’ve now spent many hours keeping alive and hearing her bad jokes and seeing her love another person and also the person that murdered all of Abby’s friends.

And Alice.

Naughty Dog could have just done a Joel and Ellie team up where he apologizes a lot for robbing her of saving the world. They could have just gone up against a lot of really bad people who totally deserved murdering and the player doesn’t have to do any hand wringing once they’ve put down the controller.

They could have kept the video game standard of violence mostly for sport or shock value. It probably would have sold bunches and gotten a healthy review and some awards.

But that would have been a wildly dishonest and cowardly way to go. Joel is a bad person trying to be a good person and by the time he starts to get it right, his actions catch up to him. Ellie was an innocent person who went through a hellish ride of survival with Joel and when faced with his loss, she doesn’t fall back on his fleeting good side. She returns to being the killing machine he showed her to be. Abby is introduced to us as an already trained killing machine who ends up trying to redeem herself by saving Lev and Yara. Yet when she is faced with the choice to kill Ellie and a pregnant Dina, she seems to delight in it. Lev saves them, not Abby.

If you were looking for good and evil, you’ll have to go play Halo or something. The Last Of Us is a series about survival and the human cost of the actions in the wake of surviving. People aren’t good or evil, they are just elements lined up on a spectrum of loss and tragedy against a backdrop of a lost and tragic world.

I’m usually a person who would knock a story for using a dog’s death to score emotional shock. But Alice’s death isn’t played up for cheap feels. Nothing comes cheap with this story, it all comes at a grave cost.

Which is why this game is so much better than it has any right to be.

Which is also pretty much my review of all of Naughty Dog’s past games, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I applaud the team for this game.