The Final of Us Season 2, episode 6 packs such an emotional punch that it is troublesome to see previous Joel (Pedro Pascal) lastly enjoying “Future Days” for Ellie (Bella Ramsey), or the teary scene during which he comes clear about what actually occurred on the Firefly hospital.
However woven all through the flashbacks that span the 5 years between Season 1 and Season 2 is a few refined symbolism, which can have greater implications for the characters and the story going ahead.
We’re speaking, after all, concerning the moths. Why do they characteristic so strongly on this episode, and what precisely do they imply to Ellie? Let’s break it down.
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The place do moths characteristic in episode 6?
Moths characteristic strongly within the first three birthday flashbacks in episode 6. On Ellie’s fifteenth birthday, simply two months into their keep in Jackson, Joel makes use of the numerous moth drawings on Ellie’s bed room wall as inspiration for a sample that he carves into the neck of the newly restored guitar he offers her as a present.
A yr later, as they’re strolling again from the pleasant museum go to Joel takes her on for her sixteenth birthday, he tells Ellie that they need to do that extra usually. “In!” Ellie responds, earlier than one thing off the trail catches her eye. She stops and stares, her expression clean, earlier than Joel asks if she’s okay. Ellie replies, “Yeah,” and retains strolling. The digital camera then pans and we see mild glinting off the wings of a number of moths which might be flying round a useless tree stump.
One other yr on, on her seventeenth birthday, Ellie will get a tattoo of a moth to cowl up the self-inflicted burn on her arm, which she gave herself two years earlier as a way to conceal her chunk mark.
“Never did ask, what is it with the moths?” Joel asks her that night time, after agreeing to let her transfer into the storage.
“Um, nothing,” responds Ellie. “I just read about them in a book on dreams and stuff. It’s kind of symbolic.”
“Oh, right,” says a clearly confused Joel. “Yeah, like change and growing and such.”
However as we discover out shortly, that is not what moths symbolise in any respect.
What do the moths actually symbolise?
Not lengthy after the dialog with Ellie, Joel ambushes his therapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara), and asks her about what moths symbolise in desires.
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“So a moth… That probably means change and growth?”
“No,” she replies. “That would be a butterfly.”
“Oh. So, what’s a moth?”
“Death,” comes the response. “If you believe in that shit.”
Credit score: Liane Hentscher / HBO
Within the subsequent scene, when Ellie is clearing out her bed room, we see a bit of paper lined in moth drawings. “You have a greater purpose” has been written throughout it.
So what precisely do the moths, and this concept of a better objective, imply to Ellie?
What do the moths imply to Ellie?
The very first thing to keep in mind is that Ellie’s total life has been dominated by demise. As she says on the finish of Season 1, when she’s telling Joel concerning the first individual she killed: “Her name was Riley, and she was the first to die. Then it was Tess, and then Sam.”
If the moths symbolise demise, then it is sensible that Ellie would have a fascination with them — as a result of demise follows her all over the place she goes.
It is also attainable that, on account of this, Ellie is affected by survivor’s guilt. Why is she nonetheless round when so lots of her family members aren’t? Why is she the one with the immunity to turning into Contaminated? This hyperlinks to the road woven by way of her moth drawings a few “greater purpose,” which out of the blue makes extra sense throughout the last dialog she ever has with Joel, proper on the episode’s finish.
“Making a cure would have killed you,” Joel tells her, after admitting that he murdered the Fireflies as a way to save her life.
“Then I was supposed to die!” Ellie responds. “That was my purpose, my life would have fucking mattered, but you took that from me! You took it from everyone.”
Ellie is clearly haunted by the duty that she carries, simply as she’s haunted by all of the folks she’s misplaced alongside the way in which. Drawing the moths is probably a means of processing, and taking some management over, the demise that shadows her all over the place she goes.
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