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

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.

swear to god if you guys digress into a whole sidebar about shitting i will burn this thread down

I heard they went to the spread via bites vs spread via spore inhalation because they didn't want the actors hiding behind masks for teh duration of the show. it's a good move but I wonder how much of that is also Pedro Pascal saying "I ain't doing another show where you can't see my face, fuck you"

i'm kind of hoping for flashbacks to Joel and his daughter. I'm expecting Ellie will accidentally drag that out of him one episode, because I'm sure that's the main thing that shattered him

xpost lol that seems v otm

"Pedro - the good news is they've agreed to get rid of the masks. Bad news is they won't budge on all the shitting scenes."

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.

When you can make your episodes as long as you want, this seems a non-problem. First and third episodes were movie-length, while the second was only 50 minutes.

huh, there's another set of media based on a Cordyceps infection?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts_(film)

I enjoyed that movie; check it out if you have time. I think it's on Netflix.

Cool!

When you can make your episodes as long as you want, this seems a non-problem. First and third episodes were movie-length, while the second was only 50 minutes.

Not quite - first episode was 81, third was 76, the future six episodes reportedly run an hour or less - but point taken.

Because honestly, so far, neither Joel nor Ellie are super-fascinating characters.

This is how I'm feeling with the show currently, though I'll say that even at this point in the game, they're still very vibrant and engaging. Maybe the indifference I feel to the show characters right now is premature, but partly knowing some of the big story beats drains the dramatic tension (like the death in episode 2). That's why I found episode 3 so riveting, because it's a 180 from the game.

Twinkies remain Twinkies, though.

As, apparently, do bears.

what survival tactics guy is not drinking filtered well water, is what I am asking you weird haters thinking he is in municipal water. natural springs, bitches

Anyone who complains this recent episode somehow violated video game lore should notice:

Video games are very loot focused, and the entire denouement of this episode was the note reading “I didn’t like you but I respected you, here is the code to the loot”
very video games

Not quite - first episode was 81, third was 76


RULED: Dumbo and Run Lola Run are NOT movies.

lol, I thought of Petite Maman (72 min) when he posted that

Tbf, "Run Lola Run" is about as close to a video game as you can get. But yes, there are short movies. And long movies, too! And movies that are both, like "A Short Film About Killing."

yeah mh, I watched this episode and aside from being touched, laughed at the videogameness of it when the end of the episode was basically "Item unlocked! TRUCK"

The most video gamey moment of it was imo when they passed some beat up lockers and shelves. I turned to my wife and told her that's a big part of the game.

it was nice that all the ingredients to juice up the truck battery were in one spot. it'd be bad television if he had to hunt for the components across several locations and complete side quests

And then there's a power cut and he has to go back to Bill and Frank's again

https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2023/01/30/the-last-of-us-10-miles-west-of-boston/

i liked the third episode a lot, and i haven't seen anyone really mention this, but i am curious to see how the show continues to dialog with video game storytelling tropes. for example, plotwise, this week's episode amounted to an arsenal upgrade lol, the part of the game where the player goes from struggling to survive to wielding a bit more firepower. i haven't played either game, but it seems to arrive at a similar point in the plot as where you get the gravity gun in half-life 2.

but obviously they made a beautiful, character-driven story out of it. seems like a pretty ideal way to make a video game adaptation.

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?

― 龜, Tuesday, January 31, 2023 2:57 PM bookmarkflaglink

loling that they address this in the first five mins of this week's ep. unexpected coincidence

They are clearly reading this thread and tweaking as necessary.

Anyway, another good one, and another quality example of sticking closely to the game (sometimes extremely faithfully) while simultaneously adding and changing little things. One of the biggest changes of course is the way violence is being handled. In the game it does the very game-y thing of throwing a bunch of NPCs at you, which makes you come off like Rambo as you fend them off. Here they scale things down, which allows it to play out more realistically, and makes the impact of the violence (which you get kinda numb to in the game, at least in the first one) more jarring.

I very much am interested that, Offerman aside, no major characters are played by Americans in this very American show. Or was the Firefly leader an American actor? I can’t remember.

Pedro Pascal was born in Chile and lived there briefly but grew up in Texas and California and went to NYU. If Wikipedia can be trusted he's a US citizen. Dude is an American actor!

Have to admit my interest is flagging a bit and the suggestion that this is going into a "bare-bones society built by survivors is Actually Bad" direction is somehow none too thrilling -- I think what I'm learning is that the character in this show I find really interesting is the fungus, and the fungus hasn't been very present in the last two episodes. More fungus!

enjoyed this ep - i like how a lot of the tension is in not seeing so much of the fungi whatevers and yeah just having one or two sparse survivor encounters adds to that, vs randos around every corner which would def get boring xxposts re Josh’s observations

plus i just like how ellie has her shit together but am also intrigued & concerned by that

Appreciate them giving Pedro Pascal more personality, 12% more warming up to Ellie. A little more fungus would be fine but battling through a horde of fungo-zombies every episode would get dull real fast.

I haven't played the Last of Us game but the Telltale Walking Dead game with basically this same story was the second-most affecting video game plot ever IMO (most - the love between a man and his horse in Red Dead 2).

played by Americans in this very American show.

Don't forget that America itself is being played by Canada.

This felt closest to the "Walking Dead" the show has gotten so far, but maybe that's a bit unavoidable. I like the casting of Melanie Lynskey. The character reminds me a little bit of her traumatized soccer mom/potential cult leader character in "Yellowjackets" but hey. The bit with her questioning the doctor with a list of names - suggesting an endless cycle of revenge killings - was intriguing. Looking forward to learning more of the Kansas City backstory.

Bryan screaming for his mother and wailing to be spared was gut-wrenching. this particular civilian army (which they took pains to explain weren't Fireflies) seems to be forcing or at the very least highly encouraging very unwilling young people to participate, as Bryan seemed in over his head. most of the Fireflies or even FEDRA that are killed sort of just seem to accept it in their dying moments as part of the territory.

the hesitancy to kill the doctor shows this is probably more of a fledgling operation, unlike the Fireflies.

Bryan screaming for his mother and wailing to be spared was gut-wrenching.

Yeah, that was rough — it reminded me of Unforgiven, honestly.

I like the way this show nudges right up to the edge of the expected and then fakes you out, like when they were in the woods and Joel was like, "Don't worry, nobody will find us," and then...nobody finds them. (Which is of course a fakeout leading up to the cliffhanger ending, but it was well done.)

it also is another depiction of his warming up to Ellie. if he was sleeping outside by himself, with no Tess, he probably woulda just slept, but he responded to Ellie's very visible anxiety of being found.

is a shame he spent multiple episodes getting to Bill and Frank's for working battery/vehicle, only to like, have his truck tires shredded days later and in a dangerous area where he can't realistically use it anymore.

similar to that BBC show Survivors (the one from 2008) where it seems like every episode, someone's car is blowing up or getting the tires shot out and they just go "ok we'll just get another one' and pick another off the street. which they can't do in this show because the batteries are all dead and fuel degraded

As far as subtle character beats go, it's of course implied Joel didn't sleep in the woods at all, and stayed awake vigilant, but in the later scene, having grown a little more comfortable with Ellie, he *does* fall asleep, and *that's* when they get caught.

The game, fwiw, is told more or less exclusively from the perspective of Joel and Ellie. I do appreciate how this show, while not opening super-wide, does open up enough to offer some stuff from other perspectives. Kathleen, for example, is not depicted in the game, but it's definitely plausible that she still "exists" in that world of militias and whatnot, even if we (players) didn't see her operating.

they should be looking for bicycles

lol otm

it's too bad in the show the outbreak occurs before E-Bikes were big, could have been hilarious bottle eps of someone trying to figure out how the unlock the damn things

I always thought that back when I even bothered with the Walking Dead. I want to say I've only ever seen one zombie thing where they had bicycles, and it might have been ... World War Z? Like, the dumbest one.

scores and scores of people evading zombies in pedicabs