The Last of Us Season 2 Finale Echoes Joel’s Legacy Through Ellie

The Last of Us has always had a knack for powerful callbacks, and the Season 2 finale delivers one of its most emotional yet — drawing a poignant line between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal).

In the finale, Ellie tracks Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) to the Seattle Aquarium. But instead of finding Abby, she encounters her friends Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). Desperate for answers, Ellie turns to an old — and brutal — trick.

“You, bring me that map,” she demands of Mel. “You’re gonna point to where Abby is.” She then turns to Owen and adds, “Then you’re gonna do it, and it better fucking match.”

This interrogation method should sound familiar to fans: Joel used the exact same tactic twice in Season 1. First, in Episode 6, he asked an elderly couple to mark their location on a map. Later, in Episode 8, he used the same strategy — with a violent twist — to extract information from David’s (Scott Shepherd) men while searching for Ellie.

What Joel’s Map Trick Reveals About Ellie

Ellie’s use of Joel’s map tactic is more than just a nod to the past — it’s a clear sign of how deeply Joel has influenced her. Over the course of their journey, Ellie has absorbed not only Joel’s survival skills but also his darker tendencies. Her relentless pursuit of revenge has begun to mirror Joel’s own brutal methods.

In the finale, Ellie even reflects on how easy it was for her to hurt Nora (Tati Gabrielle) to get what she wanted — a chilling echo of Joel’s own willingness to torture for information. When Joel used the map trick in Season 1, it was accompanied by a gruesome stabbing — a moment that cemented his ruthlessness.

Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, spoke about this transformation in an interview with Mashable. “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,” Ramsey said. “In fact, they’re kind of two sides of the same coin.”

To portray this evolution, Ramsey channeled Pedro Pascal’s performance from earlier episodes. “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,” she explained. “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.”

The Last of Us Season 2 is now streaming on HBO Max.