‘The Last of Us’ star Bella Ramsey on Ellie’s fateful turn: ‘She loses all sense of logic and rationality’

The post contains spoilers for The Last of Us

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

On Sunday’s episode of The Last of Us, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) took her first step toward getting revenge for Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) murder by killing Nora (Tati Gabrielle), one of the WLF members who participated in Joel’s slaughter.

In the brisk, action-forward episode from director Stephen Williams, Ellie separates herself from Dina (Isabela Merced) and the newly arrived Jesse (Young Mazino) after Dina is injured during a skirmish with the Seraphites. Rather than seek alternative shelter with her friends, Ellie heads to the Seattle hospital, hoping to find Nora. When Ellie confronts her prey, rather than Nora begging for mercy or expressing remorse, she doubles down on her choice, saying Joel deserved to die at the hands of Abby. A brief chase ensues before Ellie and Nora end up on a lower floor of the hospital, where the cordyceps virus has gone airborne. 

That dooms Nora to death, but it doesn’t stop Ellie from extracting her revenge: Ellie beats Nora to find out where Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is stationed.

“She just loses all sense of logic and rationality and just has this single focus,” Ramsey said of Ellie in an interview with HBO that aired after the episode. “She remembers her face and remembers that day in the lodge with Joel, and I think she’s overpowered by her emotion and her anger. She knows that this is wrong, and she’s still choosing to engage.”

“We see the willpower Ellie has is similar to very few characters in the story who would be capable of something like this,” co-creator Neil Druckmann said. “We’ve seen Joel torture people who find where Ellie is in Season 1. We’ve seen what Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) is capable of, and now we’re seeing what Ellie is capable of.”

The episode ends with a shocking revelation. As she lies dying, Nora questions if Ellie knows what Joel did to deserve his punishment: Murdering multiple members of the Fireflies, including Abby’s father, while preventing the Fireflies from using Ellie to create a cure to the cordyceps outbreak. In response, Ellie says she already knows that.

“When did she learn about that?” co-creator Craig Mazin asked HBO, a rhetorical question since he is the show’s primary writer. “If she knew, why is she pursuing this the way she is?”

Answers will come in next week’s episode, which started this week: As Ellie beats Nora to death, the episode cuts to black before fading back in on sleeping Ellie being awoken by Joel in a flashback. It’s the first time the audience has seen Pascal as Joel since the character died in episode two.

The Last of Us airs weekly on HBO.