The acts are nauseating and gratuitous-but they track with the person we’ve caught glimpses of throughout the season. Some flinched at the penultimate episode, in which Ellie is held captive by a preacher-turned-cannibal named David (a wet-eyed, unsettling Scott Shepherd), prompting Joel to torture and kill two of David’s followers in an attempt to find her. Viewers have already begun to express a similar discomfort. When they reached the operating room, he said, about half waited or searched fruitlessly for another option: “They linger there for a while before they realize, ‘No, I’ve got to kill this doctor.’ ” (Parents, he noted, were far less likely to hesitate.) Many players were unnerved at being denied a conventionally heroic narrative-and at their forced complicity in an arguably villainous one.

Before the game’s release, in 2013, Neil Druckmann, its creator, found that play-testers were split some wanted the choice to save the world, or simply had no interest in murdering innocent medics. This ending, which is identical to that of the video game on which “The Last of Us” is based, has been divisive for more than a decade. He storms the hospital wing where she’s being prepped for surgery and guns down everyone who stands in his way, choosing his surrogate daughter over the rest of humanity. In the finale, he brings Ellie, who is resistant to the Cordyceps fungus that has ravaged mankind, to a base where the Fireflies, a rebel group, hope to use her immunity to develop a vaccine-at which point he learns that a possible cure would come at the cost of her life. But it’s Joel himself who ultimately emerges as the most extreme embodiment of the rule. Henry (Lamar Johnson) sells out a resistance leader to an authoritarian regime to secure treatment for his cancer-ridden younger sibling Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), once an idealist and liberator of her community, is consumed by vengeful bloodlust in the wake of her own brother’s death. When Craig Mazin sold “The Last of Us” to HBO, he described it as “a love story about how love makes people do terrible things.” In the course of the show’s first season, which concluded Sunday night, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) encounter a panoply of desperate, compromised characters on their trek across a post-apocalyptic America.

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