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

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.

Joel replies instantly “cordyceps grows in the brain” idk lads but I feel a non-medical guy like himself having this kind of working knowledge might indicate that the infection’s site and spread factors are fairly well known about by survivors? I mean granted I was only watching the show 50% of the time with my eyes open.

Still he may have assumed they'd be running tests and taking blood to use to develop a cure from the info they'd gather.

they know how the cordyceps spreads but what theories do they have about ellie’s immunity, when they only knew about it for a few days before they were forced to move x-country and without having a chance to do any testing on her?

if there plan all along was to vivisect ellie for her valuable brain fungus on the dream of one doctor (just couldn’t do it early on via fedra coming after them in boston) i suppose i don’t really feel bad that they all got merked

The infection shows itself within a day or two, they’ve got a whole planet of that data. Since she made it alive and well to the other side of the country, add that to the pile.

the theory of immunity that marlene seemed to be working with was very similar to the idea behind inoculation/vaccination. i guess they would try to use her stem cells to synthesize a vaccine.

yeah i’m not disagreeing that they know ellie is immune, i just don’t understand what the basis for their theory for her immunity is? they leapt immediately to the “we must extract her brain” theory… on what basis exactly?

we’ve got a whole planet of people who’ve had covid, we know how it spreads, but that doesn’t put us any closer to understanding why certain people seem to have a natural immunity?

tbf in the show they're 20+ years post outbreak, and presumably research has been carried out by FEDRA/etc.

they said that cordyceps had been growing in her since birth so that the cordyceps transferred to her from a bite thought she was cordyceps rather than human and ergo didn't move to 'attack' her.

we’ve got a whole planet of people who’ve had covid, we know how it spreads, but that doesn’t put us any closer to understanding why certain people seem to have a natural immunity?

― 龜, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

haven't extracted enough brains yet, obviously

yeah i’m not disagreeing that they know ellie is immune, i just don’t understand what the basis for their theory for her immunity is? they leapt immediately to the “we must extract her brain” theory… on what basis exactly?

we’ve got a whole planet of people who’ve had covid, we know how it spreads, but that doesn’t put us any closer to understanding why certain people seem to have a natural immunity?

― 龜, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 11:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hmm yeah see Neanderthal's post above for the answer, but this post makes me think that maybe you left the room during the scene that explained this along with the opening scene?

They knew she was immune, they didn’t know she was full of cordyceps until they examined her. Presumably some of the time Joel was unconscious was spent MRIing her, etc, and finding this out.

This was such a pleasant surprise, especially for an adaptation. I'd seen a bunch of videos about the game and so was spoiled for a lot of the story, especially the ending, but seeing it fleshed out in such a competent way, all the way through, was so great!

Episodes 3 and the penultimate were my favorites. It was nice to see so much of 3's time given over to people building a life together instead of going overboard with grimdark apocalypse tropes - I especially liked that they gave the raiders barely any screen time as frankly they didn't deserve the attention. It would have been stupid to devote ten minutes or half the episode to some rote house-to-house fighting or nine different survivalist gimmicks; having "the fence" finish the marauders offscreen instead was a perfect conclusion to their shitty lives.

The cannibal episode was also a stand-out: the foreshadowing with the line about Jesus and 'knowing' him by eating his body, the 'venison,' the leader getting to eat so much more than everyone else, Ellie peeling off his fake-ass folksy 'Midwest-nice' outer layers to reveal the monster he's been all along...I got the feeling at least some of the characterization for David was new and not simply a beat-for-beat retelling of the game's story, and it all works here.

The show has been great about laying a foundation for the decision Joel makes in the finale, arguably better than the game itself. It's also great at showing how all kinds of people choose to live their lives in a world that can be - but does not have to be - unrelentingly brutal and cruel. In that respect, those two episodes are perfect bookends.

Didn't like the final two episodes much really. I guess I wanted more to be happening around the main two although the focus on them and the power it generates makes story sense. I probably feel the same about The Mandalorian season 3 so far ha.

My only complaint about this series is that it really could have used a bit more one on one time between Joel and Ellie. The actors are good enough to sell the relationship, regardless, but I don't think a few more beats/scenes would have hurt, especially considering the relatively modest run times. I wonder if the total of just Joel and Ellie together (not including incapacitated Joel) is less than the total of Bill and Frank?

Also prolly could have used a pinch more infected, even if just in passing, to underscore a pervasive threat that I don't feel this adaptation quite conveyed. But this is minor stuff.

No fantasy infected giant boss fight at the end, no cred