The Man Behind the Morons

I have taken the highly unusual step of playing a video game during the year of its release. My modus operandi is that I can "earn" a new video game by getting 100% completion in two old games. By happenstance, I finished Ground Zeroes and Monkey Island 2 in close proximity, and my next purchase was The Last of Us Part II.

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Back in June, I published a post detailing my thoughts on the ending of The Last of Us with particular focus on whether the Fireflies could have actually produced a vaccine to the Cordyceps infection as they claimed. (They couldn't.) I went into Part II with one question in mind: Does the narrative of The Last of Us Part II support the contention that the Fireflies would have been successful?

The answer, to my pleasant surprise, is "No."

 

No they weren't.

The game, which is far from short, has plenty of chances to give the player an objective analysis with a pro-Firefly conclusion, and it conspicuously refrains from doing so. Every thing said in support of the Fireflies is spoken by Joel, who's too intimately involved with the story's events to see the big picture (and he's hardly a man of science in any event), or a Firefly or ex-Firefly, who we have previously established are morons. It would have been a trivial effort for Naughty Dog to add a scientist character who could have independently evaluated the vaccine development notes and confirm that it would have worked, or show the player evidence of previous Firefly medical successes. They deliberately didn't do this.

What they did give us is Jerry Anderson. Jerry is not technically a "new" character, in that he's the "final boss" of the original The Last of Us. He's greatly expanded upon in the sequel via flashback sequences that show he's the leader of the Firefly vaccine program. But first, we get a brief bit of gameplay in which he rescues a trapped zebra. The stark contrast between how Jerry treats a trapped animal and what he intends to do to an equally helpless human immediately reminded me of the Nazi concern for animal welfare. This guy is just an ambulatory bundle of red flags.

Jerry, convincing Marlene that murder is the only solution. (He doesn't have to try too hard.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jerry has done absolutely none of the necessary prep work for this undertaking. The idea that he has done serious and through testing on Ellie, his only subject, in a matter of hours, is a sick joke. Jerry is explicitly called "the only man who could create a vaccine," so we know that he hasn't written any of his supposed process down or shared it with his team. This is basically the opposite of how science works, and we're firmly into the realm of Mad Science. My guess is that Jerry is pulling a long con on the Fireflies: he wants to string them along with the hope of a vaccine for as long as possible, but now Ellie has arrived and threatens to reveal that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing. In order to maintain the status quo, Ellie needs to die ASAP. He can't risk Ellie asking the Fireflies to hold off on killing her until they've done real testing, so she needs to be immediately put under anesthesia and never come up again. Once she's safely deceased, Jerry can redirect the blame for the inevitable failure of the "vaccine" onto the useful idiots he's got working under him.

Far from justifying the Fireflies' actions, The Last of Us Part II actually grounds their nebulous incompetence by revealing it to be in part the result of deliberate manipulation. Jerry deserves a spot in the pantheon of video game villains next to Caesar and Grima.

Jerry, getting what he fucking deserved.

Also, wasn't it weird that the whole game finished without anyone getting bitten? I thought for sure that Lev was going to get munched on at some point.