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

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

Also, of course, would they even be able to develop a cure? Plus, you don't exactly engender trust by knocking someone unconscious, kidnapping his charge, telling him she's going to die and then abruptly sending him on his way under threat of execution.

I believe Neil Druckmann was inspired in part by "Children of Men," which has a similar structure and degree of distrust/paranoia in who exactly has Clive Owen's or his own charge's best interests at heart.

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!

I think Season 2 should totally abandon the game and lean much more into the Kung Fu traveling-the-country/adventure-of-the-week model.

Lone Joel and Cub

Was the violence as brutal as all that? The music and the slow pace gave it a very dreamy kind of feel, like he was doing it in a trance.

A difficult ending, it felt strangely anticlimactic but I think it will grow on me. Ellie’s face at the end is incredible, this show has never needed to be about the monsters or the action to be great.

Joel when he was just talking about his daughter and Ellie and trying to separate the two of them in his mind and to Ellie - really painful to watch. And you could almost feel Ellie pulling away from him ever so slightly.

Scene with giraffes was a nice little bit of wonder before all the horror.

I’ll miss watching this every week!

yeah the more he opened up to Ellie about his daughter the more you could feel the disappointment (?) & trepidation growing in her

“It wasn’t time that did it” - this scene also said a lot with very little!

also YES that giraffe scene was the coolest

dawning realisation
https://i.postimg.cc/13m1LZ8f/41-F91-C07-839-D-4-BA3-A52-A-B59-F625-F0402.jpg

he’s finally allowing himself to experience a kind of parental love again & it’s softened him

Softened him? It hardened him! Moving him to simplify life down to a rigid "save Ellie" and enabling him to heartlessly mow down dozens of people!

i meant it *visbly* softened him with Eliie in those scenes ~before~ the hospital- you expect him to make good choices bc of that and then bodies bodies bodies

xp complete quote was

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

oh good point fair enough!

they even went out of their way to explain the way they're all connected, and that comes up ... once?

Would be pretty funny if all they had to do was find one of those guys that's rooted to the ground and pour herbicide down his throat. "Shit, why didn't we think of that 20 years ago?"