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

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?"

giraffe scene was so dope. loved the ending, cutting it off at the moment of greatest emotional complexity. great show

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

That line went straight to my heart.

yeah that killed me <3

i don’t get why joel just doesn’t tell ellie the truth about what happened. unless her dourness in the first half was meant to be taken as some sort ptsd death drive after the horrendous experience with the cannibal guy?

it’s not like ellie had a great love for the fireflies, she was raised in fedra, when she was taken in they chained her to a radiator. i guess maybe it was more not wanting to acknowledge their yearlong journey had been for naught?

that and the fact that her death might have (might, admittedly) saved millions of other people, and while it was indeed fucked up that this choice was dishonestly made for her by the Fireflies, it's fairly equally fucked up that Joel also made the opposite decision on her behalf. Chances are, she may have wanted to sacrifice herself.

also suggests that Joel's decision-making is compromised due to Joel essentially wanting to replace his daughter with Ellie and all of his decision-making stems from keeping her alive, no matter the course. He's become the monster he was from the early days of the pandemic.

I feel like Ellie would leave him if she knew the truth. or worse.

After we finished the finale, I put on the ending sequence from the game— ended the same, shot for shot, and nearly line for line. I admire their commitment to preserving the (pretty much perfect) denouement that the game offered

I don’t think the metric here is human-monster, and that “Joel’s monstrous personality is revealed”. Throughout the series we’re seeing individuals/groups prioritizing “the lives of the few” over “the lives of the many”. Joel’s entire experience (from his daughter’s death, to Tess’s death, to Ellie saving his life) has effectively programmed him into being an Ellie-saving machine.

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?"

― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, March 13, 2023 6:43 PM (yesterday)

fungicide iirc

i don’t get why joel just doesn’t tell ellie the truth about what happened. unless her dourness in the first half was meant to be taken as some sort ptsd death drive after the horrendous experience with the cannibal guy?

the fireflies were doing the ethically questionable thing by not telling Ellie exactly what they were doing and robbing her of agency in the decision, and Joel was doing the morally wrong thing by killing everyone instead of just the people necessary to escape with Ellie

how did ellie end up being raised by fedra when Marlene took her at birth?

anyway don't know why they can't just take some mushroom juice and inject into babies at the right time or something.

have they tried microdosing?

I mean, the biggest “idgi” of the end is that I don’t understand why Marlene, knowing what she knew, knowing what was about to happen to Ellie, didn’t either restrain Joel after capturing him or outright kill him

same reason she didn't initially want to kill Ellie's mother imo

just let the social and moral nature of people take its course and let her soldiers shoot him if the need arises

nobody expects Joel to be the terminator

xxpost yeah, the shooting the doctor in the head wasn't even necessary - the doctor was defending himself with a mere surgical tool, Joel could have easily incapacitated him non-lethally (and quickly, at that). unlike the Fireflies, he wasn't armed, and Joel knew it.

granted, I'm sure he was trying to get Ellie out quickly in case of Marlene, but he was fueled by rage nonetheless. the "I won't let you take her" is what drew the bullet.

pretty obvious that he eliminates everyone who would have the motivation to follow him, and the doctor who specifically wants to dissect Ellie

Marlene's basically saying "we'll find another doctor, we have more people" but it's unclear whether the other firefly chapters know about this scheme. With Marlene and the doctor gone, they're going to have trouble tracking their goal

she was raised in fedra, when she was taken in they chained her to a radiator.

Now that I think about it, why did the Fireflies have Ellie chained to a radiator? Marlene knew about her immunity — she was there when Ellie was born.

xxpost also, consider what Marlene knows of Joel. when he took Ellie, he was reluctant to take her, was doing so only for remuneration, and he kept people at a distance (even Tess). she has no idea that Joel has formed such an intense bond with her. she probably thinks Joel has developed a mild case of protectiveness due to their long journey together, not realizing it's now a deeply-seated bond that will lead him to Charles Bronson anybody that threatens to harm her.

I mean, the biggest “idgi” of the end is that I don’t understand why Marlene, knowing what she knew, knowing what was about to happen to Ellie, didn’t either restrain Joel after capturing him or outright kill him

"where's Ellie?"

"she died so others could live"

"so there's a cure?"

"no, unfortunately the doctor revealed after the surgery that he was a veterinarian"

I mean, the biggest “idgi” of the end is that I don’t understand why Marlene, knowing what she knew, knowing what was about to happen to Ellie, didn’t either restrain Joel after capturing him or outright kill him

I don’t understand why Marlene, knowing what she knew, knowing what was about to happen to Ellie, didn’t either restrain Joel after capturing him or outright kill him

I best read of it I've seen is that she hasn't seen Joel's journey/transformation, and more or less still thinks of him as a mercenary guy that would throw a kid's body on the fire without pause.

As for Ellie and her immunity, Marlene would have had no reason to believe Ellie was immune until she was bitten.

She saw that Joel was upset but had no way of knowing just how attached to her he became, and even if she did nobody would have guessed that he could successfully fight his way through a small army of soldiers to rescue her by himself, or that he would be dumb enough to try in the first place. Hindsight is 20/20

also, the firefly doctor developed this theory of how ellie’s immunity works in the time joel was knocked out (what, 24 hours max?) and decided to proceed to surgery - with no testing? just a gut feel?

idk, just feels like a rushed/contrived setup so we can get some Good Acting and Do You See moments from the two at the end. and it was good acting, don’t get me wrong, but wish it had been more earned.

There was clearly a working theory about this before they travelled across the country in the first place, the cure is mentioned very early on????

I mean idk, I feel like most pandemic media always takes massive shortcuts with the depiction of vaccine/cure development (even Contagion did this a little bit), and this is a society that barely exists anymore, the doctor barely has a staff or many of the tools available to do the rigor that would have existed pre-pandemic. i get the impression patience isn't something any of the Fireflies have either.

I thought it was their plan all along. She just explained it to Joel after he woke up.