For me the show started out amazing and ended as good/very good. When they omitted zombies from the second half of the show I thought it was odd but I wasn’t super bothered by it. Then, after watching the finale and realizing that they were critical to the gravity of the final choice, I was very disappointed in the lack of zombie threats.

It felt like Jurassic Park without dinosaurs. Everyone in Boston and KC should just move west and restart civilization in Oklahoma instead. We just saw two characters travel by foot and horse for hundreds and hundreds of miles talking as loudly as possible including in downtown Salt Lake City and there’s no zombie threat there whatsoever.

So Joel made the right choice because the other option would not have had a meaningful impact on the world of The Last of Us.