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

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

Good interview:

https://www.vulture.com/article/last-of-us-craig-mazin-season-finale-ending-interview.html

Neil has said when they were testing the game, parents almost 100 percent of the time said, “He did exactly what he was supposed to do,” and a lot of times, people who weren’t said, “He’s a monster.” I’m a parent. I straddle the line. We cut a line out of episode five and I regret it. I wish I could put it back in. It was when Henry says to Joel, “I did a bad-guy thing.” There was an exchange where Joel says, “So you’re saying if you had to do it all over again, you wouldn’t?” and Henry says, “I’m saying if I had to do it all over again, I would try really hard not to. And then I probably would.” If I were in that situation as a parent, I would try really hard not to, but I probably would. If Joel walked away without regrets, if Joel walked away without shame, that would be different. Then I would say he’s a monster. But you don’t lie unless you know you’ve done something wrong.

on the ellie / immunity / doctor tip upthread:

i am not a doctor & barely understand biology/medicine but why would ellie being in surgery entail them killing her & taking her whole brain

can they not take a biopsy sample to get enough cordyceps to test?

or is this like, we don’t have tech anymore we either take her whole brain & save the world or b) everyone dies

A comment on the interview I just posted:

Joel's decision is also rational. This doctor has one patient who is immune, and he's going to kill that patient trying to make a cure. What if he fails? What if he isn't smart enough to make the cure, but some other doctor later would be? He should study her for years before he commits to an irreversible course of action. That would be rational; instead, the doctor surrenders to his fear and misery and pride.

lol internet dork, that isn't why he did it. he gave Ellie the opportunity to tap out, and she wanted to go to the finish line, and he didn't object, so he clearly had some faith they could find a cure. he probably wasn't expecting a prolonged, multi-year study either. he didn't gaf about the success of the procedure, he literally said "find someone else", meaning 'let someone unimportant that I don't care about die'.

lol @ the idea of a doctor trusting that they have 4 years to study someone who could be killed at any moment by FEDRA or scavengers - being immune to cordyceps doesn't mean being immune to

*dying

I thought they'd got you midsentence

lol

If you were like me and wondered if the giraffe was real, it was: https://www.polygon.com/23639876/last-of-us-giraffe-real-cgi

The most significant difference between the show and the game is that the game has SO much literal (and I mean *LITERAL*) backstory: hundreds of letters, notes, bulletin boards, post-its, diaries, journals, posters, graffiti, voice memos, overheard dialogue... it's just hours and hours of this stuff you encounter while you're scavenging for crafting materials, health kits and ammo. It's what gives the game so much depth is just these unending layers of tragic missives forced back into handwritten form now that technology has taken ~1 century backstep. None of that made it into the show (aside from some critical main characters dialogue).

And while I enjoyed it (and cried!), the gratuitously fanfic ep 3 was OTT enough to trigger both game loyalists and homophobes (the intersection of which is probably larger than I imagine)... An epic counter-troll by the show producers perhaps? In the game Bill plays a significant plot partner for Joel & Ellie while you only briefly encounter Frank post-mortem hanging from the rafters in a warehouse a few beats after you've parted ways with Bill. Again, I enjoyed the artistic freedom taken but it was clearly a departure from the game leaving short-shrift for the more essential plot-driven episodes. Maybe they're shopping for a spin-off a la Better Call Saul... Last Of Us universe DLC expansion.

Also there's no way any vaccine is going to be produced & distributed without computers, massive clean labs, cold chain air-conditioning, rapid transit (air/trucks)... that's all a pipe dream.

Just the way the show treats the threat of the infected being significantly less than the threat of fellow mankind, the vaccine's importance is lessened.

I need to rescreen the whole season to see how often the logic shifts and changes, hopefully less then Pedro's attempt at a Texas accent haha

xp I think expanding Bill and Frank is a substitute for the backstory of artifacts you mention, a way to sheet the disaster home to its effect on people and relationships.

Joel clearly did it because he wasn't going to lose Daughter The Second but that doesn't make the plan (or their stated reasons for cutting out her brain stem) any more coherent. Her microdose of cordyceps from the knife had 13 years to develop in her body - so why couldn't everyone microdose a little and develop it? Or if it's because she was an infant, stem cells, etc. then adults can't develop the immunity anyway late in life. Cutting out her brain stem cordyceps and, uh, growing it in a vat for everyone to vaccinate themselves with... wouldn't that cordyceps just attack them?

Who cares, it's a story about fungus zombies that's not entirely coherent about how it even spreads (the first wave involves bites rather than airborne spores... but grandma goes zombie without being bitten) but I don't think 龜's questioning is dumb or means they weren't paying attention.

but grandma goes zombie without being bitten

They addressed that in one of the early episodes:

"Best guess… cordyceps mutated and some of it got into the food supply — probably a basic ingredient like flour or sugar," Joel says. "There were certain brands of food that were sold everywhere. All across the country, across the world. Bread, cereal, pancake mix. You eat enough of it, it'll get you infected."

And apparently if you rewatch the premiere, there's several occasions where Joel & his daughter narrowly avoid eating pancake mix, cookies etc

Maybe they're shopping for a spin-off a la Better Call Saul... Last Of Us universe DLC expansion.

This is now HBO's most watched show since Game of Thrones apparently - finale had almost twice the number of viewers as the premiere - so I guess HBO milking it for all it's worth is sadly a distinct possibility.

the gratuitously fanfic ep 3 was OTT enough to trigger both game loyalists and homophobes (the intersection of which is probably larger than I imagine)... An epic counter-troll by the show producers perhaps? In the game Bill plays a significant plot partner for Joel & Ellie while you only briefly encounter Frank post-mortem hanging from the rafters in a warehouse a few beats after you've parted ways with Bill. Again, I enjoyed the artistic freedom taken but it was clearly a departure from the game leaving short-shrift for the more essential plot-driven episodes

"I wish the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies were more faithful to the amusement park ride."

Again, Bill and (to an extent) Frank are in the game. That episode is not some total deviation, just kind of ... a distraction? Because the story is about Ellie and Joel, and I felt it detracted from that story a bit, in the literal sense, strictly minutes. Same with Kathleen. I get (and liked!) what they did and why, but I think it might have been better balanced with more Ellie and Joel, who, like the hundreds of documents you explore in the game, also interact more in the game, and not just in cut-scenes. The game is more than its cut-scenes (many/most? of which made it into the show more or less line for line/scene for scene);if you try watching just the cut scenes it's a bit like dozing off in the middle of a movie and only catching bits and pieces of the story. For example, the (non cut-scene) interaction between Bill and Ellie in the game is a highlight, iirc, and for obvious reasons none of it made it to the show.

Re: the infected, one of the few big changes from the game, probably to the show's detriment, is the way the infection spreads, not just through bites but also via spores. So there are a lot of scenes in the dark or damp where the threat is literally hanging in the air. Having a mask fail or break is about as bad as being bitten.

(Honestly, the show is a surprisingly faithful adaptation! That is, pretty much the entire "game" is in the show. Any quibbles I've had are really re: small tweaks and changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes less successful, imo, but generally always small.)

There is significant creative license to change Frank from an unanimated corpse who hung himself from a bite and turn him into fighting a lengthy Lifetime channel battle with MS and have he and his caring lover kill themselves together in solidarity. In the game Bill and Frank don't even interact but more importantly don't even like each other. Bill makes an offhand negative comment about his former partner Frank in passing dialogue and in Frank's page-long suicide letter you find next to his hanging body it contains a sentence or two about Bill, mainly that he hated his guts and was a waste of a life. There is innuendo that their bad blood may have stemmed from a possible lover's quarrel or misplaced feelings, but the show turns less than 30 seconds of obscure references in a 12 hour game into the bulk of a 75 minute episode. Even Jack Sparrow would be confused.

I do enjoy that the show's producers flipped the script on the long-besotted trope of fanservice in video games where you normally encounter oversexualized young women and instead offers this soft focus middle-aged bear seduction spending their days pairing wine surrounded by watercolors. But as many people ITT are confused about SOP of dystopian vaccine manufacture/distribution in a society that's turned into paranoid Goth tribe factions, the threat of which after 20 years is much more a threat to daily life than cordyceps. While the (non-game) Jakarta doctor 20 years earlier offered the solution of total annihilation, Ellie's (also non-game) approach to the vaccine was to become blood siblings with Sam (unsuccessful but perhaps a foreshadow that she cannot undo the virus despite theories that she was "the one"). I'm rambling but there was a lot left of the world and plot to explore and esp.after the last few episodes being so light on storytelling and the all-to-familiar panic rush to wrap things up makes the casual lingering in earlier eps 2 & 3 feel a bit superfluous.

I wouldn’t personally judge a show on its unexplored plot points or opportunities by the things people in a TV thread get hung up on tbh.

I mean, I would like to see the argument that episode 3 - about how people can not just survive but thrive in this world (adding even more fuel to Joel’s decision, the knowledge that people can not just live for the sake of living but live for the sake of someone else) offers less to this show than, idk, actors dead-eyed reading out detailed logistics descriptions for the satisfaction of people who miss the wood for the trees? The fact that even in a world without a cure people can carve out their own little slice of happiness? No?

The show is about potential as much as it’s about anything. Joel saves Ellie for the potential of how her life - their life together - might play out, we are shown in every episode her childish happiness at something, and the show giving us Sarah’s future and those of so many others suffocated by the cordyceps contrasts sharply with what Joel sees as his rare opportunity. They survived and they can be happy. It is selfish like Bill and Frank’s survival is selfish, but it’s also completely understandable. That’s the stuff that’s interesting about this show to me.

The show does not remotely need to have a ready to go vaccine rollout plan for it to matter, it’s total nitpicking and again, show me the argument that this adds more to the show than the stuff you feel was fanservice (for whom btw? You already made the point that a lot of homophobic fans had a problem with it.)

Lol while thinking about corrupted tropes I just remembered in the second game, there is a (hetero) sex scene that is so OTT cringe/ick, awkward, unnecessary and unflattering (to all parties involved). It just comes out of nowhere and you're forced to endure it...

I can't wait to see what the producers do with that, probably turn it into a 3 episode sidebar?

The (hetero) sex scene in the second game is totally cringe/ick/unnecessary to a distracting degree. I forgot it even existed.

I'm willing to bet the expansion of Bill and Frank is this season was done with an eye potentially on specific events/plot points/parallels in the second season/game. Describing that episode as "about how people can not just survive but thrive in this world" is fair but maybe underscores a disconnect. Or perhaps an even greater thematic question: is there really a place for happiness in this (fictional) world? Or might that happiness be a fiction as well? For sure Joel envisions some sort of happy, or at least happier, future, but it's based on a lie.

Wait do you have to press buttons during it

I am very upset about that final episode

the guy who created the game is also working on the show. he is completely open to exploring ideas not in the game! and making changes to minor characters that expand the universe in a different way!

there’s this vibe like “a bunch of non gaming snowflakes wanted to adapt a game and made it too gay” ~frowny face~

bill still ultimately serves the same purpose for joel at the end of episode 3

i don’t see what the problem is beyond “it’s not the game” if you gave even a tenth of a shit about good storytelling (which if you played the game surely you do) this episode would stand as good storytelling!

oh they spent a whole episode living a life and having feelings how terrible

give me a goddamn break