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

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.

Confession: we had a bunch of those Rockabye Baby CDs back in the oughts. When we had babies and a CD player.

I remember feeling embarrassed, because I'd been successfully target-marketed. "You are a parent, but you still like rock music. No 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' for you, no; your offspring should drift off to sleep to the pleasant sounds of Smashing Pumpkins being played by a plinky celesta synth patch."

But I am a sucka and fell for it. I remember the U2 and Cure ones being kinda cute.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/qwkAAOSwQaZexicK/s-l500.jpg

But it has the same energy as that Onion piece: https://www.theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981

I had a bunch for free. I want to say go-tos were Depeche Mode, Rush, AC/DC. They were most useful because as toddlers our kids liked us to stay in the room until they fell asleep, so these let us listen to lullabies that didn't drive us nuts.

uh adored this episode but i love lesbians

This show has less whining than that piece of shit “Fishsman is in trouble” so

holy fuck that was

dark
terrifying
emotionally draining

i need to take a sad nap now

i love this show so much but GOD

Felt sort of blunted by how short that was, felt like it could have been two episodes

Fwiw, this is the first episode that didn't really hold my wife's attention, because the baddie is such an obvious villain, and very akin to similar villains we've seen in countless similar scenarios. Posted on the other thread, but this episode did feel weirdly rushed, as has the season as a whole, imo, which really does feel like it needed an extra episode in there somewhere to flesh some stuff out. I'm a little surprised, since the creators seem to have had carte blanche, and while I see why they'd want to tweak and expand the story the way they have, I'm not always sure why they compressed it where they did. Anyway, still great stuff, looking forward to reactions to the final episode.

I didn't feel all that rushed to me, beyond maybe Joel's healing. But I had the opposite experience as Josh's wife, I thought this one was gripping as hell. Of course you knew he was the bad guy from the start, but how they just kept peeling back layers of how awful he really was - first assaulting the grieving girl, then the cannibalism, then Ellie.

Yeah, it was pretty intense.

FWIW, in the game (and this is not really a spoiler but just in case) you play this section as Ellie, and initially you and David team up to fight a bunch of mushroom monsters, which builds trust before the reveal, and might have at least temporarily averted this show's character introduction tropes/traps. But it also provides an extended period of time spent with Ellie on her own, surviving solo, which thematically might have deserved more emphasis in the show. Without changing anything about this episode, I would have extended it or split it into two, the first with Ellie surviving, then David, then captured; the second with Ellie fighting for herself/escaping and Joel, separately, desperate to find her. Otherwise, a lot of the scenes in this episode were almost beat for beat straight from the game.

I knew David was evil as soon as I saw the Bible

he didn’t seem like an obvious villain to me (and please dont pile on w how obvious it was or i’ll chop you all up myself)


the religious stuff seemed benign initially but assaulting the daughter definitely gave the scary vibe & “keep him til spring” uh

but in terms of his dealings w ellie and how SHE perceived him, the way he tried to put ellie at ease by talking about himself as a schoolteacher who found god after the apocalypse, it’s ~just~ enough to seem like a regular weirdo, vs Villain. allowed for her to think ok maybe he’s a weird guy who’s lost his way and she briefly pushes her doubts down just a little etc etc

like to me there was enough of a ramping up to the cage scene to make it scary. she HAD believed him a little bit (which is a LOT for her) & relaxed briefly (again, not her style w strangers), but even just that moment for her, that was enough to be currency of the betrayal when she realized exactly what he wanted & was doing

anyway that’s what i saw

She never trusted him enough to put down her gun, right?

For David they really piled on the disgusting. The strong implication is that he was a terrible person *before* the mushrooms, and the apocalypse further enabled him to even more easily prey (in every sense/meaning/pun) on those around him.

I thought David was the best villain of the series, no disrespect to Melanie Lynskey, because he was complex. He clearly wanted to be a good leader, he clearly wanted to be a real man of God, not just twisting Bible passages around to get himself laid, or whatever...but at the same time his own dark side would not permit him to be that guy. And sometimes he was able to control it and be the person he wanted to be, like when he traded the medicine to Ellie for the deer, and sometimes he did things out of desperation — like, do we think he wanted to be a cannibal? — but then stress him enough and the demon comes out. And I do think he genuinely admired Ellie's strength and self-reliance, he just went back and forth on whether that made her a thrilling potential ally/partner or an enemy to be destroyed. He had a lot of conflicts going on and the actor conveyed all that very well.

For all the talk of it being a lean winter and resources being sparse, you'd think that they would have figured out how to plan ahead for that given it's been a long-ass time since the zombie plague hit. You know, unless their leadership is hell-bent on maintaining control through isolation and scarcity.

I think "I'm not going to let you kill these people because we have religion and rules" was less about morality than it was control. You can kill them, but only when I say it's ok. Also, we might eat them.

He was also attempting to manipulate Ellie big time. This "oh, we're equals talk" really sounded more like "btw I want a child sex object and need to coerce you into our way of life before you'll either take that role willingly or have lose all ability to resist"

have lost, that is

Didn't David say that the group kept getting attacked by raiders, and each time moved further and further west, one presumes with fewer and fewer people/resources? He's a long way from Pittsburgh.

The idea that they were a group of benevolent, god-fearing folk who were hounded across the country and driven to desperation, becoming violent and cruel is what we're told, but I am not sure that David guy was the most reliable of narrators

"Ah, so, uh you said the cult word. I guess people might see us as a cult. Also, I recently smacked someone so hard they fell out of their chair when they dared to speak out of turn."

Oh, for sure, the guy was a master manipulator, which means an expert liar. That's why I wished *this* was the baddie we got more build up with, as opposed to ... I already can't remember the character Lynskey played. This is a good example of expanding on something in the game to no real narrative benefit while compressing something to its (again, relative) detriment.

David is the embodiment of the famous lyric from the musical Into the Woods, "Nice is different than good". He speaks calmly and softly, comes across as friendly at first glance, but he actually rules through carefully controlled menace. like the "everything happens for a reason" soliloquy, where he uses his Cat Stevens voice to distract Ellie long enough to allow his partner time to return and draw his gun on Ellie, while implicitly stating that he knows who she is, and who Joel is, while lulling her to think it's only Joel he's after.

it's not beating people with a big stick, but having one and the constant threat that it could be used.

his henchmen were well-cast -dudes looked hungry af

I'm pretty sure the narrative benefit of having the earlier two episode Missouri encounter -- which, I agree, could have been a little shorter -- was to establish and further the Joel/Ellie dynamic while taking a breather on the road. The second part was everything the first part set up: who is Henry, why is this Kathleen person so adamant on finding him, what was his sin of collaboration that was so bad?

I think one common thread is the examination of what people are living for, as opposed to surviving, and what governs their actions. If your city overthrows FEDRA, ok, what happens after that? Kathleen's motivation is vengeance. David and his group are completely governed by fear and the power he wields by telling them that it's actually faith.

xp what living on starvation rations without a beard trimmer in a snowy excluded area does to a mf'er

His right hand man, btw, is the actor that plays Joel in the game!

BTW, now that we're past this episode, here's a darkly funny meme that made the rounds after a Twitch streamer played the game and reached this point (note her demeanor after so many hours already spent with this story).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09cpCqkFwa8

Bunny had a cameo in the show, but a better fate.

interview with Troy Baker, who played David's right-hand man James in the episode:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627597/the-last-of-us-troy-baker-interview

his read on his character's motivations ring true to me