Whatever happened to the guns that Marlene bought from Robert at the beginning of the game, and that Joel and Tess were trying to get back? The Fireflies are using them in the Factions multiplayer mode.
Why did the Fireflies miss Joel so many times when he was escaping from the hospital? They were probably just shooting to try to scare Joel to let them have Ellie. They couldn't risk hitting Ellie and damaging the mutated cordyceps in her brain, even a nonhead shot with a 5.56mm round can damage the brain due to remote wounding.
None of the kids in the game can swim. This makes sense, because they were all born after the outbreak and were raised in highly secluded areas where water, along with everything else, was rationed. There would be no swimming pools or trips to the beach in this Crapsack World.
Ellie's a badass, and she only gets moreso as the game goes on. She's infected. The cordyceps fungus normally turns a person insane and violent, but Ellie's is mutated, allowing her to remain in control of herself while still having access to the increased aggression and stamina the cordyceps gives its host. In other words, her cordyceps mutation has formed a symbiotic relationship with her, and anyone that she "infects" (for instance, her offspring) will have better odds of survival for it.
Why does Ellie go hunting with a bow when Joel has plenty of guns and rifles she could have picked from? Probably not to make her presence known to infected or other people when she's on her own. Also, bullets are for more dangerous things like people.
In addition to that, like most post-apocalyptic stories, ammo would slowly become difficult to find. Unless they come across someone that has a whole stockpile of ammo or are proficient with manufacturing ammo of various calibers, a bow would be better because the arrows are reusable.
During the prologue, Joel has to follow a specific trail, which is highlighted by lights, such as the light by the alley, and the light after the behind the restaurant/bar and the light by the broken ambulance. Following this path resulted in Sarah getting killed. Joel has to escort Ellie to the Fireflies, who want to harvest Ellie's brain for a cure, killing her also. What's the Fireflies' motto? "Look for The Light".
The game occurs over the span of the four seasons, which all serve as metaphors for the game. The Summer is usually when nature is growing after being born during the spring, it symbolizes the growing relationship between Ellie and Joel. Fall is when the leaves and nature is dying, Joel has a near death experience, leaving him almost dying. Winter is when everything is dead, and the situation is really bad during winter, somewhat like a Winter of Despair. Spring symbolizes rebirth. Ellie is supposed to be a cure for the virus, a sort of rebirth for humanity. However, to create the vaccine, she would have to be killed. Joel refuses to let this happen, pretty much dooming the world. Meaning the cycle of seasons will happen again.
Then again, see Ellie's badass brilliance. She is not only immune, but has attained symbiosis with the infection. If she ever has children, they will almost certainly inherit these traits, meaning humanity still has a chance.
Ellie is a lesbian so she’s extremely unlikely to ever have children so humanity’s last hope is gone.
Ellie and Joel's relationship, in particular, can also be seen as coming full circle. She starts out being fairly distant and rather mistrustful of Joel, but then becomes very close with him and trusts him completely (Summer). During Fall, she becomes dependent on him, and is at a loss when he gets put out of commission. During Winter, she becomes considerably more independent and capable, and at the end of Spring, not only does she become completely independent, but her trust in Joel is destroyed and their relationship is damaged via his lying to her (see Bittersweet Ending). Hence, they're back where they started, albeit with the balance of power shifted considerably.
The game is filled with Bastard Humans. The military kills people in the street because they are Just Following Orders, the hunters kill everyone they find (as in cannibals), and even the Fireflies choose to vivisect Ellie's brain to create a vaccine. Thus, it's not really that surprising that Joel chooses to save Ellie from the Fireflies - the only ones who deserve her immunity are her and her descendants. Given that the people of Jackson opened their homes to her and Joel, those descendants will thus be Jacksonians. Laser-Guided Karma.
...it’s not an apocalypse at all. The Last of Us is about the last of us (humanity), not the end of the world. The world, as you see quite plainly, is doing just fine. There is nothing unnatural going on. In fact, nature, and nature only, is what’s happening.
This even applies to the humans met in the game. Most of them have let the circumstances turn them into savage, opportunistic murderers who think of nothing save surviving the next few days, most obviously the cannibals met in the final stages, but also the vicious ambushers in Pittsburgh and even the military forces in Boston are just Disaster Scavengers grabbing whatever is available and justifying it with the necessity of survival. The only recognizably "good" faction encountered - the people of Jackson - clearly have to make a conscious effort to show kindness and mercy to Joel and Ellie, especially given their circumstances and the duo's Jerkass tendencies. Thus, they are not just scraping for survival, but actively working to build things that can benefit them in the future - such as relationships with hardy survivors who show signs of doing the same. So "The Last of Us" can also refer to humane humans.
Just a joke a couple of medical students make: in the ending, of coursethey want to operate on Ellie right away. Their head doctor is a surgeon, and all surgeons ever want to do is start cutting.
When Joel tells Ellie "You're not my daughter..." instead of protesting that it's not what she meant, Ellie looks crushed, implying she had grown to see him as a father figure, and thus that statement really hurt her. It doubles as a Tear Jerker.
Why do human enemies who can see and react to Joel still get distracted by bottles thrown near them, even letting their eyes off of him in the middle of a firefight? They probably think it's a Molotov cocktail!
In the end, both of Ellie's parental figures square off in their difference in opinion over what would be "best" for her (Marlene described how she'd known Ellie since her birth, and took care of her for her mom, making her closer to a mother figure than anyone), and both of them take away her choice by deciding themselves what her fate will be; Marlene allows an unconscious Ellie to be killed for the sake of a vaccine, and Joel doesn't ask her what she wants, but takes her away and lies to her. Regardless which one of the two you think were right, the parallel between her "mother" and "father" becomes ironic.
Expanding on this, by the end of the game, Ellie, the child, has reason to be disappointed in both of her parents. Joel is obvious; he's protective to the point of being obsessive, and, if push comes to shove, will choose his own psychological comfort over her independence. But Marlene has the exact opposite problem; it's subtly implied that Ellie views her passing her off to Joel and Tess as tantamount to abandonment, to the point where, after months of no contact, she effectively gives their bond up for broken by singling Joel out as the one important person in her life who hasn't died or "left" her (this opinion would probably not improve if she realized Marlene was willing to kill her for the sake of a cure, Survivor's Guilt or not). The ending is Ellie realizing that, for better or worse, none of the adults in her life are particularly trustworthy, and that she has no choice but to rely on herself.
Also, why did Marlene beat Joel to the garage when nobody else thought of it? Because she thought "where would I go, if our positions were reversed?" She's the only person there who really knows what he's thinking.
Not a major one but it's humorous (and even a bit heartbreaking) that Left Behind was released on Valentine's Day considering Riley and Ellie were confirmed to have feelings for each other and even managed to share a kiss before everything goes to hell.
The main complaint after the Ellie/Riley reveal from the "I have nothing against gay people, but..."-crowd was "she's too young to know what she wants". But what were the lyrics for Etta James's "I Got You Baby"? Looks like someone made a preemptive strike.
People say that we don't know what love is or how to make it grow Well, I don't know if all that's true. 'Cause you got me and baby, I got you
If you look closely during the prologue, you might notice that Joel hits his wrist when the soldier shoots at him and Sarah, and he falls. It's entirely possible this is what broke his watch, which may be considered symbolic by some.
Confirmed in the Part I remake. Joel's watch is indeed broken when he's cradling Sarah's corpse.
The creatures in the game are technically not zombies. While zombies are usually described as "eating humans brains", the game's "infected" have no particular preference but the entirety of humans in general. However, which part of Ellie does it turn out the Fireflies have to remove in order to create a vaccine? That's right, her brain. It might be completely accidental, but looking at it that way, it looks like a clever and subtle nod to a classic zombie trait in that the climax is someone's brain being targeted.
At the beginning of the Spring chapter, Ellie will talk about a dream she had where she was in the control room of an airplane about to crash, and that since she didn't know how to fly a plane there was nothing she could do, but she woke up right before it crashed. In other words, she was trapped in a situation where she had no power to fight, but "escaped" at the last minute. Was this foreshadowing of how the Fireflies would later attempt to kill her while she was unconscious, but Joel saved her before they could get to it?
People might think it sounds harsh when Word of God is Ellie loves Joel, but also hates him at the end for "taking her choice away", but think about it. What teenager doesn't go through a "my parents suck" stage? Being bothered by Survivor Guilt might be a more serious matter than trivial ones, but Ellie's issues with Joel is ultimately him making decisions for her, treating her like a child and not letting her have a say in matters important to her, the usual reasoning behind children "hating" their parents. Of course, that's not to say Ellie's feelings shouldn't be taken seriously, but it might add more sense or comfort for people interpreting Druckmann's words as Ellie harboring genuine hate for Joel.
The first section of the Lakeside Resort chapter is called "The Hunt." It opens, fittingly enough, with Ellie hunting a deer. But the end of the section gives us a seriousBait-and-Switch, because the real prey isn't the deer at all. It's Ellie.
And how. First, David sends men after Ellie to hunt her down and capture her. Then, he hunts her himself to make sure she stays alive. He captures her, locks her in a cage, and takes away her switchblade, leaving her as defenseless as the deer. When Ellie escapes from that, David hunts her again. He follows her footprints to the restaurant, where he sneers that she is "easy to track."
If you had Ellie kill lots of men while making your way through the town, he wouldn't have even needed the footprints— she would have been easy to track by all the dead bodies. Considering how pissed he is when saying that line, it could even be viewed as a result of that.
Take a closer look at the last comic you can find as Ellie in the epilogue (located in a wrecked car to the right in the forest). The last part of the summary reads: "Captain Ryan's 'sacrifice' has made him a martyr, an illusion Daniela won't dispel. But how long can she keep what really happened a secret?" Sounds like it's directly referring to Joel and Ellie's situation. The cover picture is even of a young girl looking at an older, bearded man with an unhappy expression.
Remember Marlene's haunting line from the ending of the intro: "Believe in the Fireflies"? In the end, Joel must certainly did not believe in them.
Ellie shows bored curiosity at the gay, male porn magazine she stole from Bill, because she doesn't find it attractive, a small hint that she's gay.
After escaping from Pittsburgh, Henry admits to Joel that he doubts anyone else in his group has survived, and that the hardest part will be "explaining it to Sam". But Sam already figured that they were dead, as he says when Henry first explains their situation. Right from the start, Sam is shown to be more mature than Henry gives him credit for.
David is an amazingly terrible shot when he's hunting Ellie. When fighting him in the steakhouse, he can seen shooting with his left (presumably non-dominant) hand because a little girl named Ellie broke his FUCKING FINGER on his right hand.
At the beginning of the game, Tess pours herself a drink and asks Joel if he wants one to which Joel says no. Given the scarcity of supplies, it's possible that Joel had been planning to use that alcohol as a molotov or health pack so he didn't want to drink it.
Alternately, he's staying sober so that he'll be in prime condition to fight/kill if need be. Considering all he's been through, Joel is probably not the type of person who'd stop at just one drink.
Lanterns are commonly seen throughout the game, which is understandable considering there's no electrical grid up and running anymore. The survivors living in the quarantine zones have access to what look like Coleman lanterns, which give off a lot of light, but they require more maintenance to keep up and running reliably. Proprietary fuel, mantles, pumps, generators, etc. It would make sense for those living under military authority to be supplied with Coleman lanterns rather than kerosene lanterns like Bill was using, because doing so ensures they remain dependent on military actually supplying them with the necessary parts to keep what may be their only source of light functioning long term.
There is no quick fire option in the game, unlike in Uncharted; every shot must be aimed and fired as an individual act. From a Watsonian perspective, ammunition is scarce and thus anyone using a firearm has been trained to make every shot count. From a Doylist perspective, this mechanic serves to highlight Joel's cold and brutal nature by forcing the player to carefully regard each and every enemy before killing them.
As soon as you finally meet the Fireflies in the Spring chapter, their very first interaction with Joel (since the beginning) shows that meeting them was not a good thing and that they are terrible people. So they see a man panickly trying to revive an unconscious child and angrily tell him to stick his hands in the air? And when he doesn't listen as he's clearly too busy trying to save her life, they knock him out? Yeah, Joel had good reason to doubt their morals even before Marlene's revelation.
In the Pittsburgh chapter, you can hear an NPC say the "whole crew" is dead, including the "76 lookout guys". In one day. No wonder Joel and Ellie get a reputation by the end of the game.
"76" can also refer to one of the interstate highways in the Pittsburgh area. I-76 is outside of the city and part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, while I-376 is much closer, going through the city itself including through Downtown Pittsburgh. It's likely that this was the road Joel and Ellie were driving on when they reach the city, and that the crew of hunters they fight in the start of the "Pittsburgh" chapter were assigned to that area to trap any "tourists" who diverge from the freeway, with "76" as an abbreviation. (In addition, the Fort Pitt Bridge, which is the destination for the chapter, also carries 376 between the Fort Pitt Tunnel and Downtown Pittsburgh.
What happens to any ammo you're forced to leave behind when your guns are maxed out? Ellie takes it, explaining why she has ammo for her own gun (and can spawn some for Joel in a pinch).
It may not make sense at first that crouching down and staying still allows you to hide from a Clicker that's right in front of you. However, since Clickers are blind and navigate almost entirely by sonar, they would rely on being able to recognize an object's profile to identify it. A clicker that "sees" an unmoving, waist-high object would more often than not assume it's just part of the environment and move on unless given a compelling reason to think otherwise.
The final chapter of the game takes place in a dark hospital. The enemy faction, the Fireflies, all have flashlights on their guns. They shine in the darkness, just like their namesake.
Stand around too long in the Prologue and Joel is going to inevitably be overrun and murdered by fresh infected. This reaches the point that you can outright see other people attacked and killed, and then get attacked yourself if you had watched it happen. Death was on their heels the entire time, always mere feet away rather than just cinematic flair, and likely every single person in the entire town was wiped out over night by infection or military, if they didn't flee.
In the Sewers chapter, you come upon a room with several bodies of children covered with a tarp ("They Didn't Suffer") with another adult corpse nearby. A supplement pills pick-up is right next to it, implying he fed the pills to the kids or downed a few of them himself to put an end to things. Joel's horrified "Jesus..." reaction adds to the creepiness of the scene.
A Mook describes Ellie as David's newest pet. How many other girls has David spared only so he can rape them? How many has he killed after he got tired of them?
Hold on... Marlene's Firefly subordinates told her to kill Joel after he delivered Ellie to them? Does that mean they had actually intended to keep a potential vaccine a secret which is why any outsider knowing about it couldn't be allowed to live? Or did they just think Joel would come back to stop them if left alive?
What would have happened if Joel and Ellie had arrived safely at the hospital in the end? Marlene would have asked a conscious Ellie if she would be willing to sacrifice herself, and Ellie being as bothered by Survivor Guilt as she was, would probably have said yes. The same scenario of Joel saving her would probably have happened, but she'd be fully aware of the situation and perhaps even tried to go back to the Fireflies without him knowing. Seeing it like that, it's a good thing they had that incident with the river leaving Ellie unconscious before the Fireflies found them.
I thought about that too. I pictured Joel bursting into the operating room only to find Ellie standing between him and the head surgeon with a gun threatening to kill him if he doesn't back down.
For someone as terrifyingly good at sneaking, tracking, and generally being quiet as David, it seems a little odd that he would make such a rookie mistake as stepping on a branch. Until you notice his subtle smugness and the way he seems almost pleased to have Ellie ordering him around, that is. He was close enough to her (while she was distracted, no less) that he could easily have shot her in the head, if all he'd wanted was the deer she'd taken down— and given his companion's incredulous reactions throughout the whole scene, that was probably their usual routine! The entire scene was David improvising an opportunity to introduce himself to a vulnerable young girl traveling alone. He also probably wanted Ellie to think she had the upper hand so she would let her guard down more easily.
In a 'blink and you'll miss it' moment, when David tells James to get medicine before looking back at Ellie, he briefly checks out her body.
Why didn't Joel just tell Ellie the truth about the Fireflies and that they wanted to kill her to attempt the vaccine, which is why he saved her? Probably because he figured that if she did know the truth, Marlene would be right and she'd want to sacrifice herself.
Why was David's group shooting at you when they're presumably friendly and were looking for supplies? They're cannibals. Joel and Ellie are supplies.
Following the museum ambush early on, you can hear Tess muttering a quiet "Shit...!" When Joel checks up on her, she passes it off as being winded. She just realized she's been bit.
It later becomes apparent that the 'shroomy walls and spores are a result of the infected progressing until they biodegrade. If the hypothesis that you remain self-aware during infection is correct, then you also get to add the experience of slowly rotting alive to the list of nightmares.
The infected called "Runners" aka. people who just recently turned are recognized by how they will stand in a cowering position and sound like they're crying or walk around with pained grunts and noises in general, giving the impression that the person they were is still partly or completely conscious and is making the tortured noises they do due to eiher the pain of the transformation or the experience of feeling themselves turning while not being able to stop it.
The average person becomes a violent psychopath when infected, but what about someone who was already violent, or who wasn't aware of their infection in the early stages when they were at least partly conscious? An abusive parent, maybe, or a rapist? How many people got infected that way?
When Joel is interrogating David's men they say Ellie is his newest pet. Considering the disturbing ephebophile undertones and the comments of the enemy survivors, who talk about how they have enough of David's habits, suddenly things get much darker.
Fungal pandemic: God, they must be bleaching the hell out of everything in the quarantine zone. The smell must be borderline unbearable.
Why do you never see any women and children in most of the survivor groups outside the quarantine zone?
David can be seen warning a woman about Ellie during the blizzard section.
In the cannibal camp, Joel comes across a ledger recording how much meat the cannibals brought in every month, with some hauls going up to over 5000 pounds. How much of that meat was human?
Math Time! Lets say that the average adult human weights roughly 150-140 pounds, the biggest “haul” on the cannibal’s list is 5140 pounds, if all of that meat is human then that’s around 33 people.
Finally, after some calculation and assuming that all the meat is human, the number of people captured and eaten is roughly 215 (bear in mind that not all those people may have been adults).
The restaurant in which the Boss Fight against David takes place. It's a massive diner/steakhouse, with slogans such as "The Lord Will Provide" on the walls and looks even creepier when it's on fire. Then you realize that God knows how many human remains were served for dinner at this place.
The worst part is that Ellie can breathe in spore-filled environments, meaning that she most probably has fungal growth inside her lungs.
Those aren't spores, but rather a type of mycotoxin which would explain how it affects Ellie as much as anyone else. It's also very unlikely that Ellie has fungal growth in her lungs as A. That would result in her suffocation, and B. Due to the nature in which the fungus itself takes root in its human host.
What exactly would happen if Ellie had a relationship? Since the fungi can spread through bites, can it be transmitted through saliva or sex? What does that mean for Ellie's Survivor Guilt if she accidentally murders someone through love alone?
Part II clears this one up by revealing that she was actually angsting about this herself, only to find out to her infinite relief that this doesn't happen - she's not contagious in any way. On the flip-side, it also means her immunity can't be passed on to her kids.
During the ending Marlene admits that manufacturing a working cure from Ellie isn't certain. The intro video has a news soundbite that explains the widespread efforts of medical professionals and organizations (including the World Health Organization) couldn't create one, so even if a cure can be made from Ellie, a tiny group creating a cure from one sample have the odds significantly stacked against them.
Cordyceps is common in vitamin supplements like the ones Joel gathers throughout the game. True it's not the kind that's threatening humanity but you can't play the game without unease over that fact.
The Word of God statement that part of Ellie resented Joel at the end and realized she would have to leave him. "Leave" as in not staying physically close to him (ex. live in a different house), or "leave" as in leaving Tommy's???
Even after surviving everything, Ellie has a very uncertain future to look forward to. Given that she's The Immune, she'll likely be pressured to have children to a far greater degree than the other women, as her children will likely carry her immunity and thus create the possibility of a future free of infection. Unless she runs away, back out into the dangerous wilderness, she's likely not going to have a lot of choice in whether or not she wants to have kids.
It gets even worse when one considers the big reveal of the Left Behind DLC. One must seriously hope that Ellie is bisexual as opposed to an out-and-out lesbian, because if it's the latter, she won't even be able to suck it up and enjoy the sex. Her only option when the inevitable comes will be to Lie Back and Think of England.
Of course, if she turns out to be actively contagious, she won't have to worry about it, because no guy would risk that. It would be suicide, and who knows how many would die before she actually got knocked up. Fortunately for Ellie, a guy knowing he would die from having sex would be a pretty big boner-killer.
Artificial insemination isn't all that difficult even by post apocalyptic standards. It's more likely Ellie's pessimistic view of the crapsack world would stop her from considering children.
In the DLC, the loud background music to Ellie and Riley's kiss scene could well have attracted the runners that infected them.
The title of the DLC. When Riley eventually succumbed to the infection, she likely had to be "left behind" by Ellie.
Worse, let's go over the ending. Riley goes through the options: Mercy Kill or be the Zombie Infectee. How many people have developed immunity but were put down by people as an act of mercy in what was actually a Senseless Sacrifice.
If Ellie has enough of the fungus in her blood and spinal fluid for it to be detected and to grow normally in culture when examined by the Fireflies, then she's almost certainly contagious. Given that the fungal disease has no cure and has an almost 100% fatality rate after infection, the idea of her being anywhere other than a biocontainment level 4 suite is a medical nightmare. Sure, she's not running around biting random people, but anyone who accidentally ate or drank after her would be at risk. A minor cut that she might not even notice could get infectious material on clothing or sleeping bags. Essentially, she's the equivalent of a person contagious with Ebola traveling over land from Boston to Salt Lake City.
Not too bad once you hear that she's immune because she has a mutated fungus. In fact, anyone that she infects will be immune to the primary disease.
Again, Part II confirms that Ellie is not contagious in any way, much to her relief. The only danger she poses to others is through plain old physical violence.
If you choose not to do anything at the end of David and Ellie's fight where he's pinning her down, all that happens is that Ellie passes out, further implying that he might have had other things in mind before killing her. Although, Joel was right around the corner so David would have had his head chopped off before he could have done anything anyway.
Robert tells Joel and Tess that the Fireflies are "basically all dead", even going so far as to suggest they're weak enough that the weapons he sold them can be retrieved forcefully by the three of them. Marlene also admits that the only reason she's turning to Joel and Tess to smuggle Ellie in the first place is that there are no Fireflies left who could've done it instead. But at the same time, the situation in the quarantine zones has gotten so bad that survivors like Henry and Sam are throwing their lot in with the Fireflies as a last resort. The whole situation suggests that humanity is in dire straits short of a miracle... a miracle that Joel ends up preventing.
What if Henry and Sam hadn't died in Pittsburgh and had made it with Joel and Ellie all the way to Salt Lake City. Would they have sided with the Fireflies in sacrificing Ellie? If so, Joel would almost certainly have killed them.
While that's true for the parts of the US that Joel and Ellie travel through, we have no information on how the rest of the world is doing. The US aren't the only country on this planet after all. It could be just as bad or even worse on the other continents, but it's also entirely possible that the survivors in Europe, Africa, Asia or whatnot did what the US couldn't, drove back the infected over time and have been rebuilding ever since; maybe they even found a cure of their own. It all depends on the sort of outlook you prefer for the future of humanity, an optimistic or a pessimistic one.
The scene where Joel tortures two of David's men becomes a lot darker if you consider the interpretation that not all of David's group was aware that some of them were cannibals, meaning those two could just have been regular survivors following a man's orders in exchange for a place to live. Joel might have just tortured and murdered two "innocent" men. At least, men who were no worse than himself.
These men are fully aware they've been out tracking a little girl because their leader has a history of keeping girls as "pets". That's why they're in the neighbourhood - they tracked Ellie to kidnap her, and then kept looking for Joel so no one would come find her and take her away from David. Innocent is a strong word.
In Left Behind, how terrible must Riley have felt at the end, given that it's essentially her fault that they got bitten? (Since she took them to the mall, and also played the loud music that likely attracted the infected.)
Riley is also the one that got Ellie to roar with the werewolf mask and suggested racing to see who could break all the windows on a couple cars with bricks faster. There's Idiot Ball, and then there's having a death wish.
So did Sarah's mother find out what happened to her daughter? Assuming she's still alive somewhere or at most was at the time of the outbreak, how was she doing???
It could be assumed that the mother is dead, since more often than not the mother would get the child in a divorce, since it seems to be implied that Sarah's mother is no longer around. That or Joel gets her on certain days, and that day was one of them, in which case your question stands. She probably was infected though.
The Fireflies' efforts to make a vaccine were rather hopeless from the beginning when you really think about it. Let's say they successfully managed to create a vaccine. Well... then what? How much of the vaccine could they even create from one sample (Ellie's brain)? And how would they administer it to humanity? They don't have the resources to travel around the country and share it with everybody, not to mention most groups would try to kill them and steal it immediately. And what would the vaccine do about the Infected? Even if a person is immune, it won't stop a Clicker from ripping their throat out. The Infected that already dominate most of the country almost certainly can't be cured due to the physical damage done to their brains, and they're not just going to magically disappear. At best, they could hope that they could keep a small, immune community around long enough for the rest of humanity and the infected to die out and then start rebuilding from there. Unfortunately, however, that would be extremely unlikely to work out.
The matter is actually far worse than that. Scientists have only just recently discovered the cordyceps that infect ants don't actually attack the brain to control the body, but rather hijack the body and simply drag the brain along for the ride. If the same holds true in the strain of cordyceps in the game, the effort by the Fireflies was doomed from the beginning since the brain of the infected will reveal nothing at all.
After the Time Skip, we find that the military will kill anyone who is infected even before they would have turned. How many of those that were preemptively killed could have also been immune?
Henry and Sam are brothers but are around 12-13 years apart, which is a pretty huge gap. Somehow Henry had parents that managed to survive and stay together for that long (he mentions having been five when the cordyceps hit, meaning about eight years passed before they had Sam). It adds another layer to their relationship that he got a brother that late in such a world, explaining even more so why he's so overprotective of him (as some time after this their parents who had survived for so long ultimately died) and all the more heartbreaking when he ultimately fails him.
Let's assume for a moment that mankind eventually develops a vaccine against the cordyceps one way or another. It still wouldn't make the infected magically go away, and although they can't infect anyone anymore, they're still a vast physical threat, and there'll still be billions of them, outnumbering the human survivors a thousand times over. Rebuilding Earth for real won't be possible unless more or less all of the infected have been exterminated. Now keep in mind that the infected grow ever more dangerous the older they get. If the development of a cure takes long enough, mankind might well find itself facing nothing but Bloaters at every corner. And that's not even counting the abovementioned possibility of the infected being able to breed. All in all, not a cozy outlook for the future of the human race regardless of whether or not a vaccine is found.
Recent studies on the Cordyceps Fungus have shown that it doesn't control the minds of its victims, but the bodies. So if one applies this logic to the game, then the Infected are still very much in there (at least in the early stages).
It also implies that the Fireflies' vaccine wouldn't work: they were looking at a mutant strain that dwelled in the brain, not the muscles. So it's unknown if they'd be able to actually make a cure from a single sample of a highly mutagenic specimen.
In-universe: it makes sense that Ellie didn't appear to buy Joel's lie in the end, if all he did was drop in on the Fireflies only to be told there's nothing they could do so he should just take Ellie and leave again, why did she wake up drugged and wearing a hospital gown?
Everything about the Fireflies' plan for Ellie and by extension, Ellie's special fungus. A special mutant Cordyceps couldn't just leave her immune to other Cordyceps and give her all the cool powers in spite of it, fungal infections don't work that way. If there was anything keeping Ellie from turning, it'd mean it was something in her genes rather than a special mutant fungus. The fact that the Fireflies think they have to get it out of Ellie's head, have tried this on others and failed seems to show that the Fireflies have no actual idea what they're doing. If they want to find a cure, their best bet would be keeping Ellie alive for samples to study. They're the last people who should be trying to work on a cure. Joe was in the right for saving Ellie because she'd have died completely pointlessly.
After the soldier shot and fatally wounded Sarah, how was Joel completely unscathed? He even turned his back so the soldier would hit him instead of Sarah, yet he's completely fine.
Joel turns just as the bullets fly, it's likely that a bullet struck him lightly and momentum caused him to spin, leaving Sarah more exposed. Otherwise, his seemingly being uninjured could be explained that he was too busy worrying about his daughter, so he wasn't paying attention to his own wounds.
Some eagle-eyed players might have noticed Joel has a bullet-wound in his left shoulder, meaning that bullet might have torn through his shoulder and hit Sarah.
There's a part where you have to climb a ladder onto a building, lift it onto the building and use it as a bridge to another building. The ladder seems to have been put there by Bill so he could use it the same way you did; so how did the ladder get back to the bottom of the first building after Bill used it?
Gameplay and Story Segregation perhaps. It's the same as when Joel and Ellie are in Pittsburgh and sees those hunters go into a hotel, yet when Joel and Ellie enter the hunters somehow disappeared up on the second floor even though you have to get a ladder standing elsewhere to follow.
Why is it that no one in the Boston area has a knife? Regulating weapons inside the quarantine makes sense, but the soldiers you kill outside of Boston apparently don't carry combat knives on them, either.
There probably haven't been any kind of functioning metalworks in twenty years, so any knife you find is probably at least twenty years old and subject to the same wear and tear that any knife would be, so whatever knives most people have access to are likely worthless by now. That's part of the brilliance with Ellie's knife: it's a switchblade, so the blade itself has been protected from use and weathering all this time just by being closed. Of course, that doesn't explain where all the other switchblades in the world went, but there you go.
Actually, Tess does have a knife, which means Joel is the only person everyone is afraid to give a working, fine, reusable blade to.
Or where Bill's high-quality Kukri came from. It's actually not that hard to make a decent knife. Humanity's been doing it for millions of years, long before the invention of the band saw. And since machine shops and metal of some sort are needed to maintain guns, someone could easily make a knife or two. Let's chalk it up to Rule of Fun.
Maybe Joel's the problem? It's not that knives aren't readily available, it's just that he's got an aversion to ordinary knives somehow.
Maybe Joel just prefers gunplay, and hand-to-hand combat. Something tells me, and experienced smuggler, and black-marketer, would have a decent knife if he really wanted one.
If Ish was waiting out the first wave of infection "out at sea", how did his boat wash up on the outskirts of Pittsburgh?
Considering Ish's quirky sense of humor and way around language, it's possibly just a figure of speech for him.
My theory is, he could not find a port that was safe to dock in, and since his boat was already on its last legs, he just took it up a river, and then just ran it up on a beach, when he got to where he wanted to go.
The reason that Ellie hasn't turned, and the reason the Fireflies want to cut out her brain to make a "vaccine", is because her Cordyceps Brain Infection is symbiotic instead of parasitic; she's not unique, her infection is - basically the CBI equivalent of Cowpox. Doesn't that mean that her infection is the vaccine? The Fireflies Fail Biology Forever.
Also, why would they go for a full removal of her brain? Brain tissue samples are quite possible, and can be done without too much risk. Given the very likely possibility that they will need more samples, it seems foolish to get the whole brain. In the worst case, they could try to use Ellie to breed a new generation of immune humans. They seem to be killing the goose that laid golden eggs.
This bit actually makes at least some sense, especially after the revelation in The Last of Us Part II that Ellie isn't infectious. The species that CBI is based off of, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, isn't like most pathogens that cause a Zombie Apocalypse. It's a complex, multicellular fungus that can't reproduce or form a colony from a random cell. Most examples of infection have developed to the point that they're producing spores in the victim's saliva, but Ellie's brain is colonized by a subspecies that is apparently self-limiting in a human host and isn't producing spores at all. Getting it to reproduce effectively is kind of a long shot in the first place, but would definitely require getting it to grow in culture and form fruiting bodies, which the small cultures that will grow from her blood probably can't do, or they would just be using those, so they need the entire organism, or at least enough that it can survive and thrive in a lab, if it can do that at all. It's entirely possible that this whole thing is pointless, if the samples taken from her blood and cerebrospinal fluid are as close as they can get to culturing it successfully, but it's not totally irrational that they would want to try given the unbelievably high stakes. If her infection is fairly extensive, or in a vital part of the brain, then there might very well not be a way to do that where Ellie can survive.
When Joel and the group are going through the sewers, it's obviously nighttime as it's a full moon on the outside. Yet, once they've gotten out, it's suddenly in the middle of the day.
Maybe they were in there longer than the gameplay lets on?
When Tess gets bitten, she states that it had only happened an hour previously and was already worse than Ellie's. The length of actual play time between the time she noticed the bite on the roof (passing it off as being winded) and this comment was roughly ten minutes. There was no timeskip in between so timescale is clearly played with to match what the devs needed at the time.
Not exactly true. There is a skip to show Joel, Ellie and Tess having got closer to the Capitol Building, meaning they skipped some of their travelling there.
When Ellie and Riley are escaping the infected in the DLC, they at some point run through a gate to which Ellie has to find something to prop it open with for Riley, when Ellie could have just held it for her and then shut it in front of the infected.
Why did Joel decide to drive through Pittsburgh, instead of turning around and finding an alternate route that goes around the city? Considering that he knows that cities and towns are havens for hostile humans and infected, and that there was no real reason to drive straight through it.
Gas. They could only go so far in that truck and he likely figured taking a chance through the city was better to potentially being stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Besides, Joel also scolds himself for knowing he "should have turned the truck around" shortly after.
Why is a fungal infection that reproduces via airborne spores spread by biting?
It's shown on a few notes you can pick up in downtown Boston that explain that the disease is spread through the air and through contact with infected bodily fluids. Therefore, having even a cut be exposed to a blood splash from the infected could result in infection. Biting is just an easy, simple way to transmit and share it.
When Joel interrupts Ellie from hacking David to pieces, there's a clunk of the machete as if she dropped it on the floor. Yet when it shows the machete, it's implied to be stuck in David's skull. Second, when Ellie first tries to grab the machete, she's so exhausted and/or beaten up she can barely muster the strength to crawl. Yet when Joel arrives, she's walking just fine. The latter might be explained by adrenaline rush from the brutal way she just killed David though.
When the group gets separated in the sewers and clickers appears, Joel tells Sam to be quiet while they chase after Ellie and Henry. It would have made way more sense for Joel to bang on the wall and make lots of noise to confuse the clickers while Ellie and Henry got away. It's not like they could have got to him or Sam anyway.
Joel had no way of knowing what else was around. By making lots of noise, he could unwittingly bring a horde out.
Which he would have, given the group of Stalkers and Clickers in the room right behind them.
Parental worries should still have kicked in for Joel, seeing three or four clickers right on Ellie's heels, than worry about his own safety. And in regards to that last comment, he had no idea the room behind him had infected. With that said, I'm sure it doesn't have to do with Joel's mindset more than it has with the creators simply not having made a "make noise to stop infected from attacking your escorts" mechanic.
Joel has been doing this for long enough that he's probably capable of keeping his wits about him, at least to an extent, under circumstances where a normal person would completely panic. He also has to know that he would be no good to her dead and, while he doesn't know that there's a room full of Infected nearby, he also doesn't that there's not. An environment with four Clickers, who are rare Infected that take years to develop, is always going to be deep in territory that has long since been overrun. Making enough noise to distract the ones that couldn't reach him could easily (and in this situation, would) bring in others that would be a problem.
He's also not just going to casually murder Sam via Clicker. Even Joel's not that much of an asshole. Ellie's armed and she's with Henry. He's not going to do her any good getting both himself and Sam killed by being stupid - much like when they were split up in the hotel, the best thing he can do is get back to her fast as possible.
When David talks to Ellie about her request for antibiotics, he says, "Whoever's hurt, you clearly care about them". Ellie never mentioned if the person she needed them for was hurt or just sick. How would David know it was specifically an injured person Ellie was helping unless someone reported to him that Joel was injured? This is the first clue that David isn't like what he seems.
Minor example after Joel's encounter with clickers and a bloater at the university. Although he merely tells Ellie that he ran into some infected when they reunite, in their next ambient conversation she explicitly talks about the clickers he fought. She was too far away to hear them when it happened, so how did she know he encountered clickers?
Most of the infected you encounter are runners, the earliest stage of infection, but it's been 20 years since the outbreak, and various in-game conversations make it clear that runners soon turn into stalkers, then clickers and eventually bloaters as the infection keeps growing inside of them. By the time the game takes place, the majority of infected should at least be in the clicker stage, and with less than 1% of the human population remaining uninfected, where do all those new runners come from? The obvious meta explanation is gameplay balance, but the narrative fails to come up with a proper in-universe reason for this discrepancy.
A number of locations have large fungal growth coming from human corpses. It could be that only so many infected develop into the clicker stage and that a large number die and turn into Ophiocordyceps gardens. Alternately, the majority of them have starved to death by that point.
review pointed out why the game is called "The Last of Us". It's the same reason Naughty Dog is Not Using the "Z" Word; because it can't be a Zombie Apocalypse if......it’s not an apocalypse at all. The Last of Us is about the last of us (humanity), not the end of the world. The world, as you see quite plainly, is doing just fine. There is nothing unnatural going on. In fact, nature, and nature only, is what’s happening.