There’s a Reason We Don’t Know Anything About Ellie’s Dad

At first glance, this storytelling choice seems to deliberately invoke the idea of, well, Jesus Christ. He’s a figure largely seen as a savior of mankind, someone who was conceived without a human father and typically serves as hope for humanity. The parallels to Ellie — another savior of sorts for mankind, whose biological father doesn’t seem to exist as far as viewers can tell — is hard to miss. 

Also, we can’t help but notice that one of the most striking images in both the game and show is that of Joel carrying an unconscious Ellie out of the hospital, not long after he thought she died from the drowning incident. It’s an image that seems awfully reminiscent of the famous sculpture of Mary carrying Jesus’s corpse in her arms, after his crucifixion and before his resurrection. The imagery is complicated in “The Last of Us” by the fact that we know Joel’s dooming humanity by saving Ellie; Jesus died for our sins, but Joel’s refusing to let Ellie do a similar feat. It’s still a poignant moment, of course: maybe Ellie is supposed to just represent Joel’s salvation, not humanity’s as a whole. 

None of this was intentional, however. At a press conference attended by /Film’s own Ben Pearson, showrunner/game creator Neil Druckmann talked about the decision to exclude Ellie’s father from the narrative: “In our calculation and our engineering of the decisions we made of how we picked what we picked [and] how we placed it, that religious iconography for Ellie wasn’t in our calculus. That was never a conversation for us.”