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

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.

the performances were very important to the quality of the ep too. Offerman is getting a lot of the credit but Murray Bartlett's performance is perfect, just the little choices he makes. the astonished look of gratitude plus surprise at the meal placed in front of him, the moments where he's fighting through excruciating pain to be present for Bill but can't hide the toll it's taking on him.

cynical side of me was expecting Frank to be not who he said he was and one of the two to wind up murdering each other, or (like apparently in the game) Frank bolting and Bill coldly lamenting his loss for the latter half of the episode, was pleasantly surprised to see it be exactly what it was.

and lord, the Ronstadt moments. I wonder if her discography will see a bump.

yes perhaps we can finally find some of her records in record stores now

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").

the whole 'living, not surviving' is always what I'm thinking of when I watch apocalyptic fiction. like if every one of my days involved eating dead roadkill, watching people around me die, being unable to sleep for fear of being eaten/dying of infection, and having PTSD put everyone at each other's throats, I'd probably just let a zombie/virus take me.

or as the band All put it, 'not alive, just living'

OK maybe this is super-obvious but is the fungus - which eats away its victims' brains but connects them into one hyperaggressive consciousness - a metaphor for social media ... which kind of really kicked off around 2003, the year zero of the end times of The Last of Us?

it's a metaphor for how the fungus is among us

but in seriousness, it makes sense at least for teh show's presentation

And to this episode... beyond all the stuff already discussed, I really liked it just as a signal very early into the show's run that it was going to do interesting things with storytelling. I like being told clearly in Episode 3 that this show will take its time and pacing, that it will tell side-stories, that many characters we get to know and like will die, that it will ruminate on the philosophical questions that arise from living in a world in decline (questions that feel less and less academic). The whole eye-rolling (from critics quoted, not so much from people on the thread) about this being somehow familiar or same-old same-old is pretty different from how it hit me.

quite honestly I was refreshed because if every moment of the show is just the two taking their journey, it'll get old. I enjoy watching flashbacks to the world as it is collapsing and other people's stories in addition to the main thrust.

now granted I have no idea how the game handled that but

That's the (neutral) criticism I had, that a limited single season adaptation of the first game doesn't necessarily have the luxury of taking its time with side characters, as there are a finite number of episodes with which to tell some very important story beats. That said, given that this episode was very different from how it played out in the game, maybe there is other stuff from the game that they will cut, though iirc they said that this episode was the only significant deviation from the game. I can only assume there will be other small details added here and there that will similarly get us to the same endpoint.

quite honestly I was refreshed because if every moment of the show is just the two taking their journey, it'll get old. I enjoy watching flashbacks to the world as it is collapsing and other people's stories in addition to the main thrust.

Exactly. The more I think about it, the more I want every subsequent episode to be like this one. I don't care that it's Not How It Was In The Game — it's a more interesting and expansive show if every week we get to see someone else's life, someone else's version of the apocalypse, and then see how that life intersects with Joel and Ellie as they come driving/trudging through on their quest. Because honestly, so far, neither Joel nor Ellie are super-fascinating characters. They're vehicles for plot advancement/goal achievement. So if they're used to bracket smaller, more interesting stories, I'm all for it.

Yeah - the talk show and the Indonesia vignette were compact versions of that willingness to explore the edges of the world too. I'm not someone who knows anything about the game so I may be wrong, but it feels like this type of digressive storytelling would be tougher to do in gameplay focused on the central quest. Unless there's a whole part where you have to hide strawberry seeds and secretly plant them for your survivalist bear life partner segment in the game.

the Indonesia vignette was great. just the realization by the scientist that cordyceps has been pulled from a human being

To Josh's point - do we know yet whether the plan is to tell the whole story of the original video game this season? Gameplayers would know better than I if it's on track to do that in 6 more episodes.

my biggest inability to suspend disbelief so far relates to gasoline, which goes bad after a year or two. the fact that everybody's driving around surely means that one of the QZ's is drilling for and refining gas, yeah?

xpost On track? Sort of. Again, it depends on how they tell the story. To that point:

Because honestly, so far, neither Joel nor Ellie are super-fascinating characters. They're vehicles for plot advancement/goal achievement.

And honestly, this is why I'm enjoying the discussion, especially among those unfamiliar with the game. There's a reason the game is beloved, and it hinges 100% on the relationship between Joel & Ellie. I'd argue that should the show fail to make them compelling to anyone not familiar with the game, then the show fails as an adaptation (or at least as an adaptation of the game's story). Unless it does indeed go different directions than the game went in, but there is no indication that is the plan. Every piece on it says it follows the first game to its conclusion. (The second game will supposedly be broken up into two seasons.)

also, bella ramsey is generally good as a secret britisher but her accent does leak through a few times imo.

xpost lol when Frank was taking a shower I was like DUDE THERE'S NO MORE PURIFICATION OF THE WATER SUPPLY ARE YOU NUTS.

i always wind up having to give a Jedi-handwave away on post-apoc shows/movies where people are grabbing obviously perishable food that is probably ten years past expiry and eating it and not dying from the bacteria pouring out of it. or in Terminator, where there seems to BE no food in a nuclear contaminated land, like what the fuck were they eating, rats (as seen in the segue in the first Terminator)?

re: characters... Ellie's got potential to be pretty compelling - weird mix of sheltered and feral, with a cruel almost sociopathic streak (which might be a pretty reasonale response to her environment). She's pretty interesting already, especially for a potential saviour figure. Joel started strong but could use some more character development at this point.

tbf with post-apoc shows you're never going to get a satisfying amount of that in the first few eps, because they're settling a baseline, usually showing you what this person was like before things went south, and their new, grizzled demeanor, and naturally folks in this situation tend to be have little motivation other than getting to the next day alive, which makes them boring to the viewer.

i can already see Joel opening up a bit, with him getting excited about Linda Ronstadt. Ellie seems to be dripping with personality but nobody to latch it onto since Joel's been closed off, so Joel's opening will help w/ that.

right, their whole relationship stakes are that he's terrified to open himself to the relaxed affectionate dynamic he had with his daughter in episode one because he couldn't take another loss like that... but we know the ice will melt eventually. Must be killing him keeping all his dad jokes under wraps.

Anyway the strawberries scene is as much about Bill’s childish giggle (that is reflected back by Ellie’s later wide-eyed wonder at the plane and the car) as it is a metaphor.
― here you go, muttonchops Yaz (gyac), Tuesday, January 31, 2023 10:50 AM

You get either the Offerman hog or the giggle--not both.

this will sound super dumb but I already buy that there *will* be a relationship btw Joe & Ellie even if there’s not much of one yet, mainly bc Pedro Pascal pulled off a relationship aship with an animatronic puppet while wearing a mask & i bought that shit hook line & sinker.

also as he proved w Chernobyl, imo, Mazin can be a patient storyteller. He showed w that that he has a good sense of character & a confidence in the bones of a story. he’s not trying to quickly hamhandedly exposition you into caring for ppl: he’ll show you stuff you think you don’t need that serves the moments better, and that serve thd overall story better & (hopefully) give you a much more emotional, memorable payoff.

And I have no reason to believe the whole team won't pull it off here. After all, Neil Druckmann wrote and (essentially) directed the game and had a huge hand in every last detail. It's great thanks to his efforts, instincts and diligence. He's almost as involved with the show, as a director, writer, all around co-creator and overseer, so the idea that given his track record he would suddenly allow the ball to be dropped is pretty much out of the question. For example, I'm not entirely sold yet on Bella Ramsey, but I know she was cast for a reason.

That Beaujolais really would have been past its best

I just figure in all these post-apocalyptic stories that standards have been lowered to a few pegs below the bare minimum. Like, everything, from medicine to wine, is expired, so the question is, how expired? There's no way that dog food that Max digs into at the start of "Road Warrior" is still any good, even assuming it ever was "good" to begin with.

Twinkies remain Twinkies, though.

i'm just sayin, it's gotta be hard to quest on when yr shitting into a bucket 1 out of every 3 days

I'm fine with keeping the bacteria-related bucket-shitting and depictions of spoiled food and sewage water bathing related illness at the current low levels in the show myself, even if credulity is strained.