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

“why wait for a deer to show up when we have all of this meat right here”
~gestures to henchmen~

xxxpost You'd don't eat anyone in the game. But I do think Mortal Kombat was a commentary on violence. I think they referenced it in the podcast, how Ellie is entirely a product of this fucked up world of death and violence. That's really all she's seen and knows. So of course the violence is cool. They also laugh when that corpse they find falls through the floor.

Re: Joel ... antibiotics can be pretty effective! You can feel better in just a couple of hours, probably faster if it's literally injected into the infection site. With David's burning-building behavior, though, in the game at least he thinks he's been infected by Ellie and has nothing to lose. Dunno why they changed it here.

now that I think about it... maybe showing the availability of deer and rabbits was intentional, the psycho cult leader had developed a preference for cannibalism?

I don't get it, I think the human bodies hung up for meat were people who died in other ways (e.g. the guy killed by Joel) not people they intentionally killed for food!

What's the proper wine pairing for human?

https://64.media.tumblr.com/0817dd7cb43dc5d80dcdd3b5fd471cde/e1d75d128dfc608c-48/s540x810/35493fe81b329a9b8c3442f2e840643837806a08.gif

I don't get it, I think the human bodies hung up for meat were people who died in other ways (e.g. the guy killed by Joel) not people they intentionally killed for food!

I guess I thought they set that up in order to establish the circumstances whereby they get their meat people.

Also, what was David's endgame for spring? Like, the crocuses are out, the birds are singing, the kid is like "can we bury Dad now" and David is going to be like.. "Sorry kid I forgot where we put him"??

I think the chief creep and his lieutenants were out there intentionally killing people for food in addition to eating Dad and others who die from their own clan, while keeping it a semi-secret from his sheep. They tried to kill Joel right away at the University. I got the impression the bodies they were bleeding out were from others they'd found and killed for food.

There’s no necessity for his actions, he’s a predator that is thriving in this exactly the same as the fungus. They are not eating people out of pure need!

The way he tucked into that big ol' plate did suggest he was pretty into it.

and he was definitely trying to serve up some Dad to Ellie.

And of course he had the biggest portion.

I got the impression the bodies they were bleeding out

those stew chunks looked pretty bloody, pretty fresh

One detail that was really chilling was when David stopped screaming while Ellie was hacking away at him.

it seemed fairly clear to me that at least some of the group were at least suspicious about the source of the meat, cue the one woman's doubtful face when they guy told her it was venison. unclear just how "secret" the cannibalism was to the general population of that town.

i was kind of annoyed they just left the dead deer lying around

eat the irl venison you craven dicks

gotta eat the other stuff before it goes bad.

well then at least clean and hang up the deer, ffs!

EXACTLY

David, the floor is not a meat locker

“how about instead of grooming teen girls you go and dress this fuckin DEER that’s lying around HMMM”

this is how accidents happen, David.

Just caught up with last week’s episode. It definitely felt like multiple folks were in on the cannibalism (even if just from desperation) and that’s why they so quickly tried to kill Ellie and Joel in the earlier episode. But if the cannibalism was indeed preferable, why did David agree to trade for the deer? Like to the point where he said to his henchman “that’s not code, go get some medicine.”

They wanted her to lead them to Joel and figured she'd probably sacrifice herself for him if they tried to for ever at gunpoint?

Yeah, it was a ploy: as he later revealed, he knew who she was and wanted to get her under his influence through persuasion, since force was tricky.

Finale was...pretty good. The violence was surprisingly brutal.

Joel just couldn't handle losing another 'daughter' and went back to his old ways. dammmn.

lol Joel Wick

i’ll be in my blanket fort

goddamn it this show

That ending was… abrupt.

It was heartbreaking playing that out in the game. It took me a while to just do it. I didn't want to. And it was a weird feeling being forced to act out the very thing you don't want to do.

Second game even more so. Speaking of which, for those that have played the second game, was the farmhouse at the beginning of this episode the same farmhouse/location/layout of the farmhouse from the second game? That had to be intentional, right? Though I have no idea to what end.

Fun fact for newbies: the actor that played Ellie's mom is the actor that does her voice and motion capture in the games.

weirdly thought she looked kinda like her too

she really did!

xpost - So did I.

Yeah, the violence was really brutal. My wife just kept muttering "jesus christ" every time he fired another shot.

In the show, at least, it reminded me a little of the end of "Unforgiven." A story spent alluding to how bad a character used to be, only to reveal that maybe that character hasn't changed as much as we've been led to believe. Or as my wife said at the end, Joel is "complicated."

The actress playing Ellie's mom looked enough like her that for a moment I thought maybe it was a flash-forward, that we were seeing a pregnant future Ellie breeding a generation of cordyceps-immune humans.

nobody told me that Ellie had the same origin story as Blade

that was the big reveal

I thought it was a great ending. Non-gamer here, and studiously avoided spoilers.

Really pulled together the big themes of the show but kept it complex and messy. If the show's central question is "what would you do to survive and protect your loved ones?" - this ratchets up the stakes all the way to "would you betray all humanity to protect your loved one?"

And I think the sneaky thing about it is it gently points to the fact that almost all of us of any means are constantly doing that on one level or another, that our self-interest blinds us to the suffering of the many. On some level, I see the story as a critique or at least an examination of love and loyalty as being inextricably bound up in self-interest. Not a theme I think gets examined much.

I think there's interesting irony in that the old "bad" selfishJoel would have no problem dropping the kid off to her fate which potentially saves humanity, but the new "good" healed empathetic Joel does the selfish thing... So don't quite see it as "this is who Joel was all along".

both versions of Joel are selfishly trying to protectfrom suffering loss again but in very different ways

this time he’s finally allowing himself to experience a kind of parental love again & it’s softened him so you expect good choices but trauma is a bitch! it makes him try to protect himself in an even more extreme way but cloaked in saving her

the irrational place we’re now at with him is hugely compelling & for me personally, weirdly relatable

feel like regardless of the outcome, visiting the hospital was going to irrevocably change the nature of Joel and Ellie's relationship

her face had the strong "I don't believe you but I'm going to try to live as if I do so I can move on"

Reading a summary of the events of the second game I assume S2 will bear way less resemblance

Weird how little the infected played a role in this. Heck, they even went out of their way to explain the way they're all connected, and that comes up ... once? The whole world is the way it is because of the infected or threat of infection, yet aside from a couple of isolated set pieces they really rarely made their presence known.

Tempting though it may be, I highly recommend fans of the show avoid spoilers for the second game, where things get *really* messy, both in-game and in real life. Unless you can't wait, of course!

Always Read Spoilers

I feel like the show is saying "the real monsters are YOU and ME, maaaaaaaaaaaan"

have to imagine lots of the 'infected' are dying out, sans the ones that make it to stage 3 and 4

went back & started listening to the official podcast - it’s quite good, lots of interesting insight

I guess there were a lot of legitimate questions Joel could have had about the Ellie procedure such as:

*How would Fireflies circulate the cure, would FEDRA distrust the research/order it destroyed/block distribution?

*Would FEDRA be willing to cede their authoritarian power in favor of restoring traditional representative government?

*Would life ever return to a semblance of what it was even with a cure?

And would probably use those to justify his decision , even though that clearly isn't why he made it