I seemed to have interpreted something very different about Joel's character and the ending than most. To me, Joel was a broken man projecting his feelings for his daughter onto Ellie by the end, and he didn't see her so much as her own person but something to protect. He wouldn't talk to her about the traumatic deaths she witnessed and called her 'Baby Girl', just like he did his daughter, as well. It was most evident to me in the ending, though. He never considered what she would have wanted, making the decision himself, and even lied to her when she asked what really happened. I never got the feeling that he genuinely cared about ELLIE so much as cared about doing whatever it took to prevent losing his daughter all over again.

Edit: I guess I should answer the question in the thread title, huh? I would have drawn my weapon and demanded they allow Ellie to wake up, and tell her every detail of what was going to happen, and what the outcomes would be. It's unfair to make the decision for her, but it's also unfair let her make the choice uninformed.

Pretty sure Carl and I had a big debate over this a few months back.

But I'd have liked the option to do what you wanted. The ending was good but it left me feeling a little hollow. 

The newspaper also mentioned contaminated crops, so i suppose the infection could have started being spread all over the country by food distribution.

Its Funny Because, I saw The ending As a take on Suicide, you have Eli talk about: When will it be its turn, and now she find a good excuse to go.

And you have Joel, talking about always going on and never giving up,


You have on a side.

someone with good reason with selfish intentions and the other side good intentions for selfish reason.


The Thing with survival its never giving Up. That What I remember from this..


The ending was awesome.

It's not a matter of spreading it, it's a matter of being able to sustain a healthy number of infected so that the military can't over power them.  And since they only replenish their numbers every 2 days, it seems to me like it would be easy to overpower them even if there were thousands of infected.

Contaminated food though, that could be possible, especially if the military ate this food, but even still, I don't know if they could sustain those numbers.

What Joel did to Ellie is what most of us will do... i really love this game, i love the story, the graphic, solid gameplay, and everything. Maybe there is a sequel, maybe not, or maybe a sequel without Ellie and Joel idk.... but the ending is perfect to me.

I roasted each and every doctor/nurse in that surgical room with my flame thrower, and i laughed maniacally as it did it.

Vaccines work in real life without curing those already afflicted; for example, the polio vaccine doesn't give someone crippled by it the use of their legs back, but it stops more people from suffering the same fate. The trick is to break the chain of transmission.

In real life cordiceps eventually kills its hosts, and even if not here, people don't live forever, so without the ability to expand their numbers the infected population would slowly die out. Once they were gone, society could begin to rebuild. It was the pressure of the infected threat, after all, that kept civilization fractured in the world of TLOU.

Was it a guarantee of salvation? No. But it was a promising chance.

Judging from a lot of posts, you would rather murder a bunch of people to save one girl who isn't even blood related? So basically you would rather become a killer.. ok lol

I am sure the surgeon you kill probably was a father of a family that you murdered for your own good.

If i had to write a sequel i would go for something completely new a few hundred years in the future.

The fungus has evolved into forming hive like structures of the infected and actually breeding humans as lifestock inside overgrown cities so it won't run out of people to infect.

And there is a small tribe of immune humans, that are descendants of ellie who are trying to deal with this situation.