If the Fireflies created a cure in The Last of Us, it would have killed Ellie – but would it have even worked? Fans have been divided, but Neil Druckmann has spoken out.
The first season’s finale pretty much mirrored the game, with Marlene dropping a huge bomb on Joel when he arrived in Salt Lake City: the procedure to create a cure from Ellie’s immunity would be fatal.
In short, he murdered everyone and fled with Ellie to Jackson, and he swore to her that the cure wouldn’t have worked and they had to escape because they were attacked by raiders.
Here’s the thing: what if they went ahead with the cure… and it still didn’t work? The science behind it is questionable, but Druckmann has a firm stance on whether or not a cure was viable.
Would Ellie’s cure have worked in The Last of Us?
Yes, if the Fireflies created a cure from Ellie for the Cordyceps pandemic, it would have worked.
If you cast your mind back to the opening scene of The Last of Us TV show, you’ll remember Dr Neuman talking about the potential for a fungal outbreak. “There are no treatments for this, no preventatives, no cures, they don’t exist – it’s not even possible to make them,” he tells the crowd.
Over 50 years later, a doctor with the Fireflies believes he can develop a cure, but he’s killed before his research comes to fruition. In Druckmann’s eyes, if they went through with the procedure, it would have worked.
“Could the Fireflies make a cure? Our intent was that, yes, they could,” he told the Sacred Symbols podcast.
“Now, is our science a little shaky that now people are questioning it? Yeah, it was a little shaky and now people are questioning that. I can’t say anything. All I can say is that our intent is that they would have made a cure. That makes it a more interesting philosophical question for what Joel does.”
Druckmann is right. Joel had an impossible choice: let Ellie die and save the world, or save her and doom the world. If there’s a chance the cure wouldn’t work, his decision to kill everyone and take Ellie home loses its impact.
Similarly, it’s why Ellie is so furious when she finds out what he did. “I was supposed to die. That was my purpose. My life would have f**king mattered, but you took that from me,” she tells Joel in Episode 6.
Also, Druckmann may say the science wasn’t explored in depth, but they explained it well enough in the show. Marlene told Joel that Ellie has a “chemical messenger… it makes normal Cordyceps think that she’s Cordyceps, it’s why she’s immune.”
“He’s going to remove it from her, multiply the cells in a lab, produce those chemical messengers, and then we can give it to everyone. He thinks it could be a cure, Joel,” she added.
