“I'm taking a ride with my best friend” - The Last of Us on HBO (2023)

Probably reading too much into it but was wondering if that that was a videogame type nod as in TLOU, Red Dead Redemption etc, hitching your horse basically entails just throwing the reins over a pole, branch, whatever

I think I read somewhere (and maybe horsey people know) that horses can more or less be trained to stay put if you just throw the reigns on the ground or in a tree, the same way a dog can be trained to heel.

Just found out that one of the creators of The Last of Us rooted the story in his perspective on Israel’s occupation. He grew up as a settler in the West Bank and the story is largely rooted in a settler’s perspective on the futility of “cyclical violence” and I hate it so much.

— James Ray ☭ (@GoodVibePolitik) February 20, 2023

Caught up last night, and it was good, although the best scenes were where it introduced new material (as has been the case for the whole series IMO).

jon wrote:

1) they just had two empty horses for Joel and Ellie when they were out on patrol? none of them were doubled up when they got back to down

Right, that seemed odd, but to me, and this may or may not have been intentional, it symbolizes the level of closeness right before and after Ep 6's emotional peak. Before, they're each alone on separate horses; after, they're sharing a horse and Ellie is clinging to Joel.

at the campus, Joel just lightly looped the horse's reins over a branch without even attempting a basic know. good thing nothing happened that might have startled the horse!

Watched it back and he kind of pushes the reins into the vee of the branch, which might have been deep enough to prevent the horse from getting away.

every time Gabriel Luna shows up I want to scream "look out, he's a Terminator!"

I assumed he did it to keep the horse from wandering off by itself, but also to let it get away if something really bad happened. Surely you'd want the horse to be able to escape if there's proper danger?

^ that was my thought also

Yeah, that makes sense too I suppose, I just was prepared for something to happen on that campus and, watching him do that, I couldn't help put picturing the horse getting spooked and leaving them well and truly fucked.

Wow, great episode.

Would love to actually see it if the HBO Max app weren't glitching/freezing. Internet connection speed testing fine but ep continually freezing

Here we go.

Lol @ the "back in 5 minutes" sign

boring ep imo

I think we can all agree it was an episode.

whatevs you two bummertowns

i’m w Josh this was a great episode
lots of feels! and i really enjoyed seeing Ellie so happy, seeing what she lost etc

mr veg and i had a wry lol at ellie listening to pearl jam’s riot act on her walkman. the apocalypse setting prob improves that album’s mood significantly lol

and am i crazy or was the carousel playing some kind of calliope version of the cure’s just like heaven?

Yeah it was

Yes, it’s from one of those indie-music-for-babies albums.

My wife actually thought this was maybe the tensest episode yet. That's what happiness on this show has trained us to expect.

Did only late 80s/early 90s music survive the zombie apocalypse?

Tbf, she was listening on a Walkman, right? So that means cassettes, which means the era of peak cassette, which means '80s and early '90s, right? Anyway, she was listening to early '00s Pearl Jam on her Walkman.

Would have been funny if all they had to listen to was copies of REM's "Monster," though.

This was the first episode I got bored and skipped forward through. Yeah, yeah, they're having fun, romance is blooming...when do they get attacked? Skip, skip, skip...OK, here we go.

lol, doubling down on the "we need *more* zombies!" side of the debate.

That's the thing — I'm not someone who wishes this show was The Walking Dead. I hated that show. It was more like, given the essential nature of this show, where everything always ends tragically, it was inevitable that they were gonna get bit, so I found myself sitting there thinking "when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?"

not to be one of those people – but how long would a cassette reasonably last for? some of the ones i had in the 90s do not sounds very good anymore (yes i went back and listened to them a few years ago).

I dug it, though the post-apocalyptic queer romance angle of it can't help but suffer a bit in comparison to the tremendous Episode 3. But I bought their chemistry and liked seeing them have as close to they could to the best night of their lives. Like Episode 3, the strongest moments to me were in showing the power of small shared joys in this world.

I think there's o ne could make a fair critique of these episodes both falling into the "Bury Your Gays" trope where queerness, especially queer happiness = death. Though everyfuckingbody dies on this show so maybe not as much of a thing here as elsewhere. HBO does lean into this a lot though.

Otherwise, I liked the world-building of Kwong making the case for FEDRA, while acknowledging it's still a pretty miserable existence. Would have liked to see a bit more of that inside FEDRA perspective: the culture of the military school, and the anti-Firefly propaganda that Ellie's been steeped in, etc.

Speaking of 90s music

"we need *more* zombies!"

In your head, in your head

My wife actually thought this was maybe the tensest episode yet. That's what happiness on this show has trained us to expect.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, February 27, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Interesting, I thought it was the least tense because the conclusion was inevitable. Other than wondering when and how the jump scare was going to come, there was nothing to anticipate here.

Mixed feelings on this episode. Because the acting is still top notch and I really felt the dynamic between the two characters. So as a character study it was great.

On the other hand this is kinda turning into Tragic Gilligan's Island, with a special guest star joining the cast in their weekly plight... only in this case the guest star will absolutely get murdered by the end.

Thought the FEDRA vs Fireflies debate bits were boring, neither side is going to be fleshed out enough to be interesting and the conflict seems mostly irrelevant to the core story anyway.

empire vs rebels template

ok then

Feel sorry for anyone who didn’t like this.

But I bought their chemistry and liked seeing them have as close to they could to the best night of their lives. Like Episode 3, the strongest moments to me were in showing the power of small shared joys in this world.

I think there's o ne could make a fair critique of these episodes both falling into the "Bury Your Gays" trope where queerness, especially queer happiness = death. Though everyfuckingbody dies on this show so maybe not as much of a thing here as elsewhere. HBO does lean into this a lot though.

Love the fact they showed one of the best fatalities in Mortal Kombat II but would an arcade in 2003 have had that game and errrr Joust? Maybe? MKII was easily ten years old by then.

I’m almost always into coming of age stories about people who are living much different lives than I’ve lived tbh

I like the idea of this one as a mirror/inversion of ep 3, nicely said

Sweet episode, superbly acted, but I agree with unperson that it maybe wasn't the most exciting because we knew where it was heading.

That said, I know it's an old trope but this show really hammers home the fact the least scary thing in zombie films are the zombies themselves. They just look a bit silly when you finally see them, so I'm glad their screen time is left to a minimum

Technically if it was a 2003 era abandoned arcade there should a been a DDR machine with cobwebs.

I loved the ep though.

It wasn't entirely like EP 3 in that it explored the pain of two young women who either didn't know or barely knew normalcy, both having been brought up through a creepy fascist military regime, and having different reactions to it

Ellie's programmed responses aren't shocking as she's never been outside of that bubble.

We all knew what was coming, but that wasn't really the highlight of the episode

Well, whoever dressed the set for the arcade scene knew the pinball heads who were watching would get a kick out of the conspicuously placed Medieval Madness machine

what the arcade really needed

https://www.videoamusement.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Top-skater-skateboarding-Arcade-Game-rental.jpg

Has anyone watched any of DMZ, the other HBO post-apocalyptic virus show?
Thoroughly trashy Warriors/Escape From NY retread with a 2020's virus/civil war fixation update. Kind of horrible, but possibly fun hot garbage from what I saw of the first episode.

If it had been released much earlier I'd have been intrigued, but the people working on the show had to qualify they were deviating strongly from the (not great, tbh) source material by a writer who had a number of me too-style allegations. After the reviews for the show were kind of meh, I didn't feel like navigating that quandary

aw jeez did not know any of that, it's definitely missable

I just listened to the podcast recap episode, and remarkably, most of that mall was FX! They had a tiny little part of a decommissioned single-story mall in Calgary that was basically the escalators and not much else. So the entire view of the mall coming online, that was all FX. Not only that, the entire second floor was FX, so every time you saw the second floor, even from the single-story soundstage set, that was apparently all created as well. Pretty incredible.

I actually thought Riley was a bit of a weak point in the acting when the scene calls for solemnity; I think she handles the fun scenes a lot better. Bella Ramsey making puppy dog eyes at her on the carousel was extremely powerful, though.

Yeah, I'd agree. Charismatic and likeable, and very believable that Ellie would crush on her - but a bit wooden in the dramatic parts.

I thought this episode was interestingly complicated but by the end I was confused and thought maybe I wasn't *supposed* to take it as interestingly complicated? Like, that whole opening scene when Riley breaks in read very tensely to me -- Ellie has boundaries that she expresses and Riley just steamrolls her -- their entire dynamic is Riley saying "You don't know what you want, I know what you want." And then she brings Ellie to a place Ellie's not supposed to go, a place which is very dangerous, and where -- if not for a miracle immunity nobody in the story knows about -- Ellie would have been killed. Obviously Riley has sympathetic aspects too, just as the Fireflies do, but I understood her to be a sort of personification of what's morally ambiguous and kind of nervous-making about the whole Firefly project -- it's exciting, it appeals to the part of you that wants to feel you Matter, but at the same time, you know, people get killed, and to what end is not totally clear.

But I think what I saw when I watched this was probably not actually what was in it.

I think she thought the mall was safe. She was living there or temporarily camping out there. She turns on all the lights and makes as much noise as she wants. The stray zombie was a total surprise.

Ellie mentioned what she was told - that it is full of infected, but that wasn't true. The dangerous part was supposed to be the trip there sneaking around patrols.

Also she broke into her own room (at least as of just two weeks ago according to their exchange).

If you're keeping up with "The Last of Us," you definitely remember last week's ethereal, gorgeous but you-know-it-won't-last carousel scene featuring Ellie and Riley.

If you recognized the music as the melody from The Cure's "Just Like Heaven," you might have accurately clocked it as a Rockabye Baby! cover. Or if you didn't recognize it right away, you might have been one of the people that helped shoot the RBB song to #1 on Shazam's most discovered songs.