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

Yeah sure it didn't actually have to happen at all, but it was cool shock value but made in-universe sense to me!

and*

I don't know what Fringe is, but I have been meaning to start Mindhunter, so I guess I'll see her there!

Fringe is available on HBO Max. I just re-watched the pilot and it's fucking bonkers.

i love Fringe so much, even when it confused me utterly

I found the museum stalking scene writhingly terrifying (non gamer here btw).

Yeah clickers are as freaky in the game as they were depicted in the museum!

I Photoshop paddington into a movie, game, or TV show until I forget: Day 688 pic.twitter.com/GAYYrNbGRr

— Jaythechou (@jaythechou) January 26, 2023

horror games are always scarier than other horror media bc of the level of immersion.

Definitely this. Had plenty of tense moments watching horror movies but nothing that compares to playing say Dead Space or Silent Hill 2.

The cold openings for this show are stellar.

Yes they are and the rest (so far) leaves me cold. But I’ll hang in there even though fungus makeup gives me the willies.

Tonight’s episode 😭

Pleasantly surprised by the show so far. I was expecting a rote Cliff’s Notes version of the game but it’s proving to be very canny with its adaptation choices.

Yes! All the changes made for this episode were for the better.

murray bartlett = deadset legend <3
and use of linda ronstadt was chef’s kiss

great episode

Found myself looking at the phone during this one, kept waiting for the show to bring some feeling into this story or for the characters to feel real and it just kind of lay there as an abstract parable.

Finding the right tune on which to hang Bill and Frank’s encounter presented Mazin with a unique challenge. In addition to something that could be played on the piano both well and terribly, the showrunner was searching for a song about “a long-term ache — the sadness of somebody saying, ‘I wish, but oh, well, I shall be forever alone.’

“Man, I just couldn’t find the perfect song,” he continues. “I texted my friend Seth Rudetsky, who hosts the Broadway channel on SiriusXM radio. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. I said, ‘Here are all the things I’m looking for. Do you know a song that would fit the bill?’ Within 30 seconds, he texted back with ‘“Long Long Time,” Linda Ronstadt.’ I played it and was like, ‘That’s the song.’”

This episode was the rare example of something very different from the game that doesn't really alter the plot. Added a lot of stuff, albeit at the cost of some stuff. That said, sweet episode though it was, it also posed something of a curious detour. The story is about Joel and Ellie and the time they spend together. With a limited number of hours with which to tell that story, it's a strange choice to spend so much time on characters that have nothing to do with that story.

Yeah this was a great episode. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop the whole time. I was not expecting that.

Just so heartbreaking, every time the time skips forward and they’re still there, still in love, literally growing old together. Absolute cruelty.

#TheLastOfUs spoilers
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episode 3 may have been devastating but this line had me ON THE FLOOR pic.twitter.com/HaWFHNOoMS

— kenny (@bvckystjames) January 30, 2023

I thought he was going to do Bill in when his guard was down singing Linda Ronstadt because I'm so good at predicting what happens in these shows!

I did too! It didn’t feel like it would go that direction, I was on edge until the time skip.

Aw:

This morning, we lost Annie Wersching, who portrayed Tess in the game.

Even though the HBO show is a new iteration of The Last of Us, our storylines, worlds and lives have become inextricably linked. We are a blended TLOU family now, and when tragedy strikes, we all feel it.

We will be thinking about Annie tonight and always, but we know that it's her family who will miss her more than anyone.

We’re talking with our respective employers about ways we can help as individuals and as companies. Those things will likely be handled anonymously. If you’re also interesting in helping, there’s a GoFundMe to support her boys: Freddie (12), Ozzie (9) and Archie (4).

https://gofund.me/f915834e

Annie was a brilliant actor, a wonderful mother, and a bright light of a human being. We mourn for her and the children who are grieving her loss. Tonight's episode has become particularly poignant in a way we would have never hoped or wished for, and we are dedicating it to Annie’s memory. It may be too late to get that on screen for tonight, but we will work to get it done as soon as we can.

Annie Wersching, and the Tess she originated, will live on in our hearts. May she rest in peace.

--Craig & Neil

An aside, I don't remember how much the game leans into this stuff, but I like how the show keeps underscoring how this is Ellie's first time outside the QZ, first time in a forest, first time in a car, etc. (She doesn't even know what a seatbelt is, because why would she?). Helps show how she's not only just a kid, but she's a kid who has grown up literally gated away from the world. Hell, we're introduced to her locked in a single room. Her world is rapidly growing bigger. Really helps enforce that for all her world-weary affect, she's still pretty innocent.

Yeah, the "you got to go up in the sky!" bit was great, and the car scene was almost a mini callback to that.

Really liked this episode a lot. I'm not a huge Nick Offerman fan but he was very good.

I highly recommend the official HBO tie-in podcast that follows each episode.

can’t believe i’m watching an hbo show and i don’t even get to see nick offerman’s hog

Google "nick offerman three-quarter headshot"

Offerhog* content

https://vimeo.com/70792622

The story is about Joel and Ellie and the time they spend together. With a limited number of hours with which to tell that story, it's a strange choice to spend so much time on characters that have nothing to do with that story.

Have to disagree. This was a fantastic bottle episode but still had plenty of Joel & Ellie (and other) plot developments: Ellie's constant wonder at the outside world, Joel starting to change from seeing Ellie as a chore to someone he has to protect, they now have a vehicle, Ellie now has a gun, we saw raiders for the first time, we found out the infection originally spread through food supplies etc. By the end of the episode they're even wearing the same outfits from the game

Joel starting to change from seeing Ellie as a chore to someone he has to protect

I honestly think that strawberries scene is so great and illustrative of what Frank says about loving by doing. Just thinking about him acquiring the seeds, cultivating the strawberries, keeping them secret until the time is right - all for that childish glee from Bill when they’re eating them? It’s too good, lads.

And that Bill never (that we see) says any of this to him, but can put it in the letter, leaves the world on his terms with him…🥹🥹🥹

Like I said, this episode was good, and didn't alter the plot at all from where it needs to go, hence all the stuff groovy (and gyac) pointed out is otm. Just saying that all the stuff was very efficiently conveyed during the relatively limited screen time we had with Ellie & Joel, and not through any of the Bill & Frank story, lovely as it was. What the Bill & Frank story *did* do, which I have pretty quickly come to appreciate, is flip the version of their story from the game on its head. In the game, Bill's & Frank's fates are much different, and pose a different sort of lesson to Joel: if you stay bitter and untrusting and uncaring, your will waste your life. There's surviving, and then there's living. This episode showed what living looks like, which is a good message (if imo not necessarily needed for this particular story). My criticism was strictly practical; the relationship between Ellie & Joel is the crux of the story (at least in the game), so the less time we have with them, the taller the storytelling challenge of the show. Of course, TV storytelling is different from game storytelling, so I have faith they'll be able to do their magic, even if they do it slightly differently.

idk anything about the game but i feel the show is more broadly tackling "the way we live after a world-ending event" in a good, dramatically satisfying way that doesn't just necessarily revolve around the two main characters

I was trying to think about post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve seen or read that does people living, rather than just surviving, and I think this is probably the best example of that theme (which I don’t think I’ve seen that often). There’s that inherent discomfort with “everyone’s dead, but I’m happier that I’ve ever been,” but I guess it does address that sticky issue that certain people would be happy if the world ended - underrepresented pro eschatology viewpoint (lol?)

can’t believe i’m watching an hbo show and i don’t even get to see nick offerman’s hog

― flamenco drop (BradNelson)

Otm

In general tho this was a very well-scripted/acted/directed vitamin of a gay romance

Did you cry? I was sobbing. No exaggeration.

Well, someone disagrees.

The episode, “Long Long Time,” follows Nick Offerman’s Bill, a gruff but meticulous survivalist who’s managed to make it through the Cordyceps plague by booby-trapping his home in the wilds somewhere outside of Boston. One day, he accidentally captures Frank (Murray Bartlett), a sweet, hunky guy trying to make it on his own. Depending on your tolerance for sentiment, their resulting romance is either sweet or incredibly obvious: They have a lovely dinner, Frank draws Bill out of his shell by complimenting his choice of rabbit paired with Beaujolais, they flirt over a piano, they have sex and grow old together in a sort of cottagecore postapocalyptic bear fantasy. By the end of the episode, Bartlett and Offerman are in old-age makeup, and an ill Frank has decided to die, having lived the best possible life in a world now run by fungus. Bill prepares a meal for him with poison served in the wine (pairs well with Beaujolais!), and the scene closes with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a piece of music deployed to signal big emotional catharsis in everything from Arrival (where it cost the movie Oscar consideration) to Castle Rock and The Handmaid’s Tale. Later, after the main characters Joel and Ellie discover Bill’s goodbye note, there’s a needle drop of the song they bonded over at the piano, Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time,” that’s — surprise — cued for dramatic, emotional weight.

Like that use of Max Richter, nothing in “Long Long Time” is innovative. Television, especially if it’s genre, is fond of pairing off characters to grow old in some story line, often shunting them off to a cabin in the woods or a timeline separate from the main action. I’m fond of The Magicians’s “A Life in a Day,” where two male characters fall in love while stuck in a magical puzzle, and of Other Space (a Yahoo! Original that no one watched but I loved) sending up the “growing old on another planet” trope by having two characters bicker relentlessly as they age.

...“Long Long Time” positions Bill and Frank’s story as an alternate, happier vision of life among the mushrooms than the general misery of Joel and Ellie’s journey, but the plot is rote and the writing obvious. The show makes a lot of metaphorical hay of the notion that Frank is going to get Bill to open up by way of getting him to grow strawberries; as soon as the episode depicted them bickering over Frank trading for seeds, I let out a groan anticipating the moment where said strawberries would be dramatically shared as a symbol of emotional and actual growth. (That’s Pixar-style manipulation, a dark hybrid of Up and Wall-E.) The episode has the opportunity to subvert expectations somewhere along its hour and fifteen minute runtime but seems uninterested in providing anything unexpected, and Bartlett and Offerman seem at sea as actors, repeatedly hitting the same character beats, whether gruff and paranoid or angsty and flighty. They’re stuck in wooden roles acting out maudlin dynamics.

The larger issue for The Last of Us, however, is that it’s bringing this kind of obvious and sentimental storytelling to a genre that’s been thoroughly worked over. We’ve seen plenty of postapocalyptic films and movies and games make the same points, from Children of Men (released in 2006, so The Last of Us characters, with their 2003 collapse, never have to acknowledge that they’re doing the same thing) through The Walking Dead, I Am Legend, The Road, et cetera. Station Eleven, just last year on HBOMax, took the premise of a pandemic and used it to unspool a series of existential meditations about how art survives and why. The Last of Us doesn’t feel as if it’s adding to the conversation as much as regurgitating what has already been chewed through.

I think this criticism is bullshit, ftr. Just because this critic has seen something done a thousand times, that doesn't mean a) the audience for this particular show has or b) that it's been done better elsewhere (the examples he cites sound insufferable to me).

cottagecore postapocalyptic bear fantasy

you have to log off the internet if you write all of these words in a row, it's the rules

and of Other Space (a Yahoo! Original that no one watched but I loved)

I didn't dislike the episode (I thought it was okay, am I allowed to think something is simply okay in 2023?) but I agreed with a lot of this: https://www.primetimer.com/features/the-last-of-us-episode-3-queer-love-story-condescending

xpost It's a subtle distinction. Bill obviously has had strawberries before, so it's reminding him of what he's missed or lost or had forgotten. In Ellie's case, it's what she has never experienced. Two different sides of wonder.

I find a lot of post-apocalyptic things (aside from truly, truly bleak stories like The Road, or It Comes at Night or whatever) feature fleeting moments of happiness or positivity. What sets this episode apart is that it's a *sustained* depiction of happiness in the post-apocalypse. Whether that works or not is really moot, since it more or less ends in the same place, story-wise. In the game the message iirc is "be careful or you will end up like me," in the show it's kind of "be careful or you might not end up like me." Both boil down to the same message. How it's delivered ultimately probably ultimately comes down to preference, but this episode gets plenty of points for the novelty of tilting positive. I wouldn't expect many more like it this season, but you never know! It's nice to be surprised by big changes now and then.

I annoyed my girlfriend by predicting most of the plot points in this episode, from the romance itself to the romeo and juliet ending, so while I can grant that maybe the story wasn’t particularly fresh or challenging, it was nicely executed I thought

I disagree with Juan Barquin’s assessment, but maybe there is an overabundance of gay bear romance films/TV through the past 20 years that I have somehow been unaware of

In fact I definitely felt when I saw Murray Bartlett kissing Nick’s giant Jim O’Rourkey beard: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen two hot 50+ bears make out before, in the context of reputable entertainment”

they don't mention them being bears even once? are you confusing the two pieces that've been linked recently

Did you cry? I was sobbing. No exaggeration.

― here you go, muttonchops Yaz (gyac), Tuesday, January 31, 2023 10:32 AM (two hours ago)

yeah I was crying too

my question is how did ellie know about Mortal Kombat II? i'm guessing one of the older kids in her fedra camp told her about it. did they have old consoles? zSNES and ROMs?

Pretty sure said detail will be explained this season ...

Need to catch up on the thread but this:

I was trying to think about post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve seen or read that does people living, rather than just surviving

Station Eleven (both the book and the series) grapple with art in the age after apocalypse (and the book makes hay out of the slogan "survival is insufficient").

I'm not a crier anymore because Effexor effectively shut off that function, but let's just say I felt the emotions w/ ep 3 that would have triggered such an episode in the past.

i had trouble settling into the show, at first, because apocalyptic fiction is something I've dove into so much, that any trope in the genre feels 'familiar' to me from the jump (I didn't have any experience w/ the game).

but once I just let myself take it in, i'm very much enjoying it now. not least because the 'zombies' are more of a pre-Romero definition of zombie (via fungus mind control vs undead-reanimation), as well as the character work and the sheer look of towns with actual pronounced fungi growth serving as also a graveyard for the world.

From Juan Barquin:

Watching the episode, it feels as though the writing became stuck in 2003, which is when the fungal pandemic hits in the show, resulting in the kind of gay love story that would have been groundbreaking TV back then, but is now just wearisome.

That's what I was referring to. I haven't seen any convincing onscreen older gay male romances, me. Not now and not since 2003. "Happy Together" is convincing but they're not older. That Jane Fonda show with Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, I mean, it's fun to watch them I guess but they're not at all convincing by any measure; that's more the kind of TV to which I'd apply Juan Barquin's criticisms.

I really enjoyed The Last of Us as it aired, but it has not remained in my mind whatsoever since finishing it. I'll definitely watch the next season but if you told me it was still two years away I wouldn't really be bothered.

It's two years away.

OK theory tested and confirmed.

Pascal getting a SAG award for his role in an upset over the Succession candidates and coming to accept it looking like this and saying “I’m a little drunk. I thought I could get drunk" is now all-time great award ceremony material.

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GettyImages-2036530546.jpg?w=850&h=638&crop=1

Long game campaign paid off
https://absurdink.com/cdn/shop/products/voteforpedro_2048x.jpg?v=1663771136

dammit
https://www.cantonrep.com/gcdn/-mm-/0dd9230c6c4a30f8962f38e8bb74b16d3186694c/c=184-0-2515-1317/local/-/media/2019/03/11/USATODAY/USATODAY/636879209675940780-e0-napoleon-2shot-phenom-wkcov-12.JPG?width=1320&height=746&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

Wait, wut? Dead link de-deaded itself?

A group of researchers in India have discovered a mushroom sprouting from the side of a golden-backed frog. https://t.co/GEUU19gmCg pic.twitter.com/V8PEGONJHa

— ABC News (@ABC) March 2, 2024

D: