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

right!?

Yeah, so boring fanwankery about bicycles aside, good episode, yes?

I liked the dad jokes recurring through the episode. Really warmed to both main characters a lot.

the jokebook stuff was great - i was similarly obsessed w a jokebook at ellie’s age & drove my family crazy w dumb jokes on car trips

him cracking up at the end was cute as hell

The jokebook, fwiw, is in the game, too.

Like I was saying earlier, Joel and Ellie are key to this, so it was so nice to get some time with the two alone.

agree

Yeah, solid episode for sure - felt a tiny bit straight-ahead after the last couple, but I don't see how that could be avoided. Nice character development for Joel and Ellie, and I want to know more about this whole Kansas City post-FEDRA situation. Kinda hoping we'll get a flashback to what exactly went down. Seems like they've freshly liberated the city and are settling scores, maybe becoming the oppressors they just defeated a bit? Interesting dynamic. Is the Melanie Lynskey character in the game, or a show-only thing?

Show only, and I wouldn't get your hopes up for much of a backstory of this location. In the game there are lots of locations like this one, run by militias or people otherwise independent of whatever government exists.

I love Melanie Lynskey! I hope there is more to her character than this “i have seen the face of the devil and his name is Henry” thing

Also if there is a place in Georgia that is capable of making smuggleable drugs up to Boston as was indicated in the first episode, I would hope that humanity had the wherewithal to also make contraband canned ravioli while they’re at it

found what I was looking for

https://www.cracked.com/article_19325_6-technologies-conspicuously-absent-from-sci-fi-movies.html

A couple of those things can be sort of hand-waved away, but definitely not the absence of bikes.

Someone should make a thread about that so people interested in boring on about it can go there.

Something that had been underwhelming about the series was Joel and Ellie, as in the game, the way they interact in the game is electric from the start. With the show, Joel is so much more muted that I found him dull to watch (maybe he just needs more sleep), and Ellie just didn't have anyone tip bother off of. Thankfully he's letting loose more, and the back and forth with the puns is charming. Lovely episode, with loads of nice little touches, like how when they go top sleep in the woods their backs are to each other, but in the office building she's facing him and he ends up facing her.

I also really appreciate when the show goes off script, since then I'm watching something for the first time. That said I was looking forward to the magazine gag.

sigh

xpost That was the only issue I was having, especially knowing there are so few episodes left (relatively speaking). And going counter trends, it looks like the final episode is ... a shockingly short 40 minutes. But this episode showed how quickly TV can catch up, Joel and Ellie relationship-wise.

looks like there's some twitter bullshit going on about Melanie Lynskey's character/type as being insufficiently post-apocalyptic: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/melanie-lynskey-last-of-us-criticism.html

twitter is full of reactionaries now

i wish petty fans like that could somehow be banned from watching the show

"you could have, you know, not posted it" good advice for about 95% of the world including me

When a show gets popular it becomes grist for everyone and their bullshit. Like the organized downvoting of the episode with the gay couple.

It's maybe not a coincidence that the few things that have attracted objection in this show so far are the things/characters new/different from the game. Just wait until you see their reaction to season/part 2, lol. They'll be complaining that the show is too faithful to the game.

I do feel a bit like "single out a dumb tweet" is basically part of every PR strategy now... but Lynskey's comeback was pretty good, and I think does offer some insight into what's interesting about the show in how it imagines who and what would thrive after things fall apart.

Did people complain about Aunty Entity? I never questioned her qualifications.
https://media.gq.com/photos/55a0142fdab0df6312e267b3/3:4/w_1256,h_1675,c_limit/mad-max-thunderdome-01.JPG

that dress seems very practical for the desert, unlike Lynskey's grim late fall yard work style

Well, that was fun.

They give Lynskey's character that much setup and backstory for...that? And was that King Kong Fungus-y dude in the game? Cause he felt more Resident Evil to me.

Groot went evil

This was def more an action EP but the pursuit at the end was epic.

I liked Lynskey's death because it illustrated that the monster she became rotted her and her resistance out from the inside. It was no longer about giving people freedom, it was about settling vendettas, and by needlessly pursuing Henry above all else, almost her entire army got overrun and killed.

I was very not ready for the downer ending

Big Fungus is in the game, but in a different context (one of the changes from the Bill story). Lynskey ... that's one of the challenges of this TV show. All the extra color not in the game is just that, extra. And all the setup and backstory not spent on Joel and Ellie is exactly that, too. Scenes from next week imply a few more tweaks as well.

I thought the actors playing Henry and Sam were great, very compelling.

lol boss fight

i know what they're trying to do here, but it's starting to feel a bit black mirror-ish when trying to fit so much backstory and emotional beats into 1-2 episodes (and i say this as a fan of ep. 3)... unavoidable defect of the medium i suppose

I don't think it's a defect of the medium, I think it's a problem (relatively speaking) with how they are telling this story. That is, the emotional beats are very important, but the backstory/stories ... not so much. Bill and Frank, Lynskey, Indonesia, none of them are important to the story. They're nice or lovely or important or sad or all sorts of things, but they are secondary to the story of Joel and Ellie, who have gotten shockingly little one on one time for a show at the 50% (!) mark. I totally get that they are telling the story a different way, but that way seems a little rushed. I really liked this episode, but mostly for letting us watch Ellie have fun and be happy and be a kid (and also because the encounter with Henry and Sam *is* important, at least in the game). I know Ellie will be foregrounded soon enough, but a lot of the times in the show so far she and Joel almost seem like secondary characters.

I think i like this version of the story more than the one you’re describing from the game

It may very well end up better! It all depends on how it, well, ends up.

Really it's because in the game you are, of course, playing as the central characters, so everything is more or less exclusively from their perspective. On the one hand, that generally doesn't allow for much development of other characters, as they pop up. But it does allow for a deeper development of the central pair, possibly in a way that this show can't achieve, which may explain the deviations. Little asides, conversations, interactions, discoveries. The biggest complaint I've heard about the changes to the Bill storyline is that in the game, Ellie and Bill have a really funny, character-building rapport. Likewise iirc Joel and Henry.

As far as gameplay goes, it's a weird brain thing, where you're playing *as* these characters while simultaneously recognizing them as something outside of you. So they don't win, the story doesn't move forward, there is no success, as such, without your input. And yet, the plot is preordained and totally external to you. A scripted show is obviously totally passive, so the experience becomes pretty different.

I think i like this version of the story more than the one you’re describing from the game

This is kind of the impression I'm getting too. Like, if I wanted to watch a playthrough of the game, I bet there's one on YouTube. This Andrea Long Chu piece, which delineates in some detail the way the game apparently limits the player's options the better to drag them toward the creators' desired finish line, makes me think they could have gotten a two-hour movie out of its action beats and big dramatic stings, but to do it at series length you need to create a wider world, which they seem to have done a really good job of doing.

I'll have to watch that, but that's almost the exact opposite of my feeling. First, and I don't know how much difference this makes, I've been pretty careful not to spoil the game, and by extension spoil the show, so while it may not change your opinions, don't go by my mentions of the game as somehow indicative. But second, these games, and these in-game stories, are very carefully designed to get you to that desired finish line a very specific way, which by necessity limits the wider world, forcing you to focus on very specific things (including character development). You are constantly being
channelled and directed, and in this case, the game is very very smart about it. (As I talked about on one of the game threads on another board, I just played the Last of Us sequel, after staying spoiler free for two years, and belatedly looking into reviews and whatnot, I was shocked/surprised at how closely my reactions were to the creators' specific intentions, happening exactly when and where they designed them to be. It was kind of uncanny.) So if anything, this show is an interesting experiment in disassembling a perfectly calibrated video game story and reconfiguring it into a more conventional show. Which tbf is a solid creative compromise; TLOU game takes maybe 15+ hours, so a movie would be too short. Whether the show, with its detours and new characters, pulls it off is tbd, though who knows, it may pull it off again, just differently. It's definitely been good so far.

I haven’t played the game and have no intention to. I’m mildly interested in how the show contrasts but honestly I’d love more takes that ignore the game.

As such the thing I’m most cautious about in the show is that they’ve done the same trick four or five times now, in only five episodes—which is to introduce characters who seem like central protagonists or antagonists, only to kill them off right away. It was powerful in episode one, surprising in episode two, predictable yet heartbreaking in episode three… now we’re at episode five and I guess this will just happen every time. It’s impacting my investment in the show. Even if the overarching framework is necessarily Joel and Ellie’s picaresque journey, does every character have to meet the same fate?

I'm quite enjoying that aspect of it. If Lynskey and her cronies stuck around all season it would just feel like The Walking Dead.

I honestly appreciate all the takes from people that have not played the game as well. Interesting to see how or how not the story hits differently.

yes I was just complaining about the “single use” characters, particularly given how good Henry and Sam were.

A Corpse of the week show

In the game (sorry), it's mostly been a long, lonely journey. The arrival of Henry and Sam offers the promise of companionship, friendship, opening up, which Ellie of course likes but even Joel seems to appreciate (iirc), only to have those hopes dashed. It's pretty impactful in the game, but I thought perhaps a little less so in the show, because yeah, it's done that a few times now.

I'm a game player, and it is in fact my favorite game full-stop, but yeah, I wouldn't mind talking about the show on its own merits!

That said, I do want to note that the show is illustrating the different effects that each medium has, and even though the game leverages the same storytelling techniques of live-action films/tv, it has access to other avenues of audience connection that go beyond anything possible in film/tv (which I'm finding that the official podcast also delineates, albeit from a more film/tv perspective).

Speaking of which, having a slightly angle to the basic story shows is really starting to distill/outline the fundamental bones of the story, which in all incarnations never been particularly novel, but the execution is where it comes to life.

Game-free post for a change.

I've been thinking about the timing of episodes 3 and 4, and how that plays into the building relationship between Joel and Ellie, and how frozen it is in the first couple episodes, but how quickly it thaws. It might've felt unearned because of how quickly it starts to happen, but we're primed to it because the warmth of the Bill and Frank story lays a lot of the emotional structure that eases us into the next phase of Joel and Ellie's relationship. It feels organic, like strawberries.

On the topic of their thawing relationship, I still chuckle at Ellie’s diarrhea joke in episode 4, after the crazy intense day they had.

that was a great episode. adaptations should be different from their source material. the end

one thing post-apoc shows can struggle with is endless journeying in an empty world, which can be interesting if there's stakes or at least some sort of rumination over the collapse of society, but it can get old fast. But this didn't.

Besides the great casting of Henry and Sam, the pursuit was well done and built perfectly in intensity. Joel hearing Lynskey on the radio indicating they were nearby was a great touch, as well as the anxiety of the moments where he's shooting their attacking fungus people to try and clear their way to safety.

Big mistake killing off ALL the new characters we've learned about AGAIN.
feels very video game-y - level complete, on to the next, no looking back.
They really gotta stop pulling the same trick every single episode. Almost felt self-parody this time.

Loved elements of it, but this was the first episode that really made me doubt the show.

feeling a little like charlie brown and lucy with the football at this point - especially since the likeable characters die at pretty much the same narrative beat in every episode.