The Last of Us loves a good callback, and in its Season 2 finale, it draws a heartbreaking connection from Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to Joel (Pedro Pascal).
The callback comes when Ellie attempts to hunt Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) to her hideout in the Seattle Aquarium. Instead of finding her target, she finds Abby's friends Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). In an attempt to learn where Abby is, she gestures to a nearby map of Seattle.
"You, bring me that map," she tells Mel. "You're gonna point to where Abby is."
Ellie addresses Owen next: "Then you're gonna do it, and it better fucking match."
If that tactic sounds familiar, it's because Joel used it not once but twice back in Season 1. In episode 6, he first asked an elderly couple (Elaine Miles and Graham Greene) to point out their current location on a map. Later, in episode 8, he pulled the same trick on David's (Scott Shepherd) cronies in order to learn where David had taken Ellie.
What does the return of Joel's map tactic tell us about Ellie?
That Ellie tries Joel's map tactic on Owen and Mel proves just how much she's learned from Joel in their time together — and how her revenge quest has seen her slowly becoming Joel, especially when it comes to violence. In the season 2 finale, Ellie also discusses how easy it felt to harm Nora (Tati Gabrielle) in order to learn what she wanted. Joel himself is no stranger to torture: His use of the map strategy in Season 1, episode 8 was accompanied by him ruthlessly stabbing one of David's men in the leg.
Ramsey discussed Ellie's growing similarity to Joel in an interview with Mashable, saying, "Ellie really is becoming Joel in a certain way, and would hate that if you said it to her, because she thinks that she's the opposite to him. In fact, they're kind of two sides of the same coin."
To capture that sense of sameness, Ramsey channeled Pascal in these darker scenes.
"I did sort of try and take, not really from rewatching [Season 1], just from remembering how it was to be in scenes with [Pascal], where he was taking this sort of hard-ass, protective stance," Ramsey said. "I really tried to emulate that a little bit with Ellie, and thinking about how much she looks up to Joel, and how she has learned everything that she knows, basically, from him."
