Joel and Ellie find new travel companions in a padded The Last Of Us
The Last Of Us' fifth episode dawdles with pace before its big action scene (featuring a Bloater) as Joel and Ellie try to escape Kansas City
TV Reviews Joel
The loudest noise after last week’s The Last of Us remains the Kathleen controversy. Was casting Yellowjackets’ Melanie Lynskey as a FEDRA-busting rebel queen an outside-the-box brilliant choice or…kind of underwhelming? As written and performed, Kathleen is soft-spoken but iron-willed, cool yet impulsive, and willing to shoot an elderly collaborator, while outwardly appearing a bland soccer mom, minus the fatigues. The actor herself took to Twitter to defend her casting. Commentators traded barbs. Me? In my last recap, I found Wine Club Lord Humungus unconvincing.
Did Lady K earn my respect this week? Overall, more or less, she did—even if I was okay seeing her chomped by a rather gymnastic Clicker in the fungalicous action sequence (checks watch) 43 minutes in. Truth be told, there was fat on the top and bottom of episode five as it sketched out Henry (Lamar Johnson) and his deaf brother Sam’s (Keivonn Montreal Woodard) dreadful arc.
It’s interesting how the series’ structure is becoming almost a zombie anthology. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) travel to a new place to see how folks are handling dystopia, people die horribly, and then our heroes move on. (Cue repressed memory of HBO’s The Hitchhiker.) Episode three, “Long Long Time” was a relatively emotional scenario, partly thanks to Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s performances. Kansas City? Not so much.
The episode’s running theme is basically “my brother’s keeper.” Kathleen’s bloody reign is driven by grief over her charismatic dead sibling, Michael. We know Joel is taking Ellie to Wyoming, hoping to reunite with his sibling Tommy (Gabriel Luna). And then we have Henry. He’ll do anything for his younger brother, Sam, including betraying Michael to FEDRA in return for medicine. It’s all for naught as Henry becomes his (infected) brother’s executioner. The other big motif feels familiar: How humans will do awful things to “endure and survive,” per the Savage Starlight comic book that Sam finds and shows to an excited Ellie, and whether forgiveness is possible.
Henry notes that 20 years of rape and torture among citizens in the KC QZ turned them into vengeful sadists. “If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?” Sam asks Ellie on his Magic Tablet before showing her the bite on his leg. It’s a tough question applicable to several characters: Kathleen, Henry, and even Joel. “I am a bad guy because I did a bad guy thing,” Henry admits when telling Joel he was a collaborator. Joel silently takes it in. No doubt he’s done some things that could make him a villain too.
Written by Craig Mazin and directed by Jeremy Webb, the first fifteen minutes of “Endure And Survive” are a flashback to two weeks before Joel and Ellie arrived in KC, showing how Kathleen’s group took over and how Henry and Sam went on the run to join Joel and Ellie eventually.
In an opening nighttime montage, a jubilant crowd throws flares into the sky like Independence Day fireworks, executing soldiers, and celebrating the overthrow of their fascist overlords with chants of “Fuck you, FEDRA!” trucks patrol the city trying to flush out collaborators. An especially gruesome image is of a corpse dragged behind a truck, pincushioned by a dozen knives. Henry and Sam crouch in the shadows. Henry signs to Sam, “Look at me, not at that,” promising they’ll find a way out. It’s a subtle but strong display of their bond.
In another part of the QZ, Kathleen confronts a group of dirty, desperate prisoners sitting in a cell who are FEDRA collaborators, the lowest form of life according to the rebels. Kathleen wants to know one thing: Where is Henry? One fellow finally coughs up intelligence: Henry was supposed to lay low with Edelstein (the doctor Kathleen shot last week, played by John Getz) in a safe house in the open city. “Edelstein was a collaborator?” Kathleen says with surprise. “Well, he was a lot more discreet than you fucking idiots.” She’d be funny if you weren’t expecting her to order their mass execution. Minutes later, Kathleen does exactly that, telling henchman Perry (Jeffrey Pierce): “When you’re done, burn the bodies. It’s faster,” Kathleen instructs him with the slight irritation of a housewife asking her husband to take out the garbage. I get that banal barbarity is the point, but Lynskey’s delivery edges dangerously close to end-times camp.
Henry and Sam arrive at Edelstein’s safe house, an attic he says a FEDRA officer and patient gave him as a favor. (This is the abandoned attic Perry and Kathleen discovered in the last episode, knowing it had been Henry and Sam’s hideout.) The siblings get settled and Sam beautifies the bare walls with crayon drawings of superheroes fighting the police. Ten days pass. One morning Henry wakes Sam and signs that Edelstein isn’t coming back (somehow he found out the rebels got him) and, since they’re out of food, they have to go somewhere else. Before they head out, Henry paints an orange “mask” around Sam’s eyes—he’s become one of the superheroes he’s obsessed with.
As they are about to leave, Henry hears gunfire in the streets. Their storyline is about to intersect with Joel and Ellie’s. Henry looks out a window and sees the armed rebels exchanging rounds with Joel, who crashed his truck through the laundromat. Seeing him holding off the attackers, Henry realizes it’s their way out. And so they track Joel and Ellie to the building they were hiding in at the end of the last episode, waking them up with guns trained on them. “We don’t want to hurt you,” Henry says. “We want to help you. I’m the most wanted man in Kansas City. Although now, I think you’re running a close second.”
I will admit that, at this point, I hoped the episode would have more running, punching, and shooting one’s way out of town while swearing like a sailor. I understand dystopian survival isn’t all parkour and slamming cartridges into guns; it’s sitting around for days eating flavorless canned food, peeing in buckets, and keeping quiet. Survival can be, you know, boring. This episode had me actually longing for more Kathleen, maybe torturing a collaborator with rusty scissors while making small talk.
Back to our heroes: Joel and Elle have shared some food with Henry and Sam. Joel is not keen on playing host: “Look. You ate. We didn’t kill each other. Let’s call this a win-win and move on.” Pascal’s dry delivery makes the line especially funny. (As we know, Pascal can also do comedy that’s very, very wet.) Henry convinces Joel they can exit the city through underground maintenance tunnels. “I show the way. You clear the way.” Problem is, the infected could be down there. Years ago, FEDRA drove them underground. Henry’s contact in FEDRA told him three years ago they cleared the tunnels, but Joel snorts because he knows anything could still be down there. Nonetheless, it’s their only way out. Joel has gone from “lone wolf and cub” status to “lone wolf and three cubs.”
In some ways, this episode recalls the rhythms of the previous one. The first half is occupied with tense buildup and character interaction, while the second half delivers the action. When the gang heads for the tunnel, it feels like the story is truly cooking. Then again, the journey through the tunnel isn’t particularly eventful. Just a chance for Ellie and Sam to bond more and for Joel and Henry to have a mildly philosophical discussion on ethics.
Aboveground, Kathleen stands in the ruined, mildewed bedroom she shared with Michael when they were children. Perry enters to report no sign of Henry or the man who killed Bryan. “When Michael and I were little, this room seemed so big,” Kathleen wistfully tells Perry. This little scene provides a window into her twisted mind. She knows her brother would not have been as ruthless. In fact, while in prison, he told her to forgive Henry. She idealizes him and acknowledges her own brutality. Perry points out that it was Kathleen, not Michael, who ultimately succeeded in deposing FEDRA. There’s still tons of backstory to understand how Kathleen got to where she is, including psychological shading and such, but this will have to suffice. She is driven by revenge and an idea of justice. An apocalyptic Agatha Trunchbull would have been entertaining, but Kathleen is more humanely constructed.
Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam emerge on the outskirts of town without incident. Henry was right: the tunnels were cleared (Or were they?) They don’t get far on the darkened streets before a sniper begins shooting from the upper floors of a house. Joel tells them to stay down behind a car and heads out to neutralize the threat. He finds the sniper at the top of a house, an old man with a rifle. The geezer refuses to lay his gun down and Joel plugs him. A walkie-talkie near his body crackles with Kathleen’s voice, indicating she knows, and troops are on the way. “Shit,” Joel says and gets moving.
Shit, indeed. Kathleen rolls up with her goons, bashing through countless cars left in the street. She stalks the road, telling Henry and the others to give themselves up. Henry says he betrayed Michael so his brother wouldn’t die. “Kids die, Henry. They die all the time,” Kathleen brays impatiently. “You think the whole world revolves around him? That he’s worth everything?!” Here Kathleen is critiquing the proverbial mote in Henry’s eye while ignoring the roofbeam in hers. She justifies her merciless cruelty because her brother was killed, but scolds Henry for trying to save Sam. What a moment for an actual sinkhole to open up. It’s unclear whether we should call the F/X-heavy carnival of slaughter that follows the main course or dessert, but it’s worth the wait 43 minutes in.
Hundreds of the infected swarm from the sinkhole like cockroaches or rats. The fun-ghouls hit the ground running, and throw themselves upon screaming resistance fighters. Ellie dives into a car for protection. Henry and Sam crawl under another truck to get away from the horde. It’s mayhem. Perry guards Kathleen. Joel protects Ellie from above by picking the infected off with his rifle. And then we meet a Bloater. Know your taxonomy: We have the infected, the Clickers, and now Bloaters. According to TLOU game lore, Bloaters are humans who have hosted Cordyceps since the outbreak began. Over the course of two decades, they have developed a bulletproof fungal exoskeleton, grown to the size of André the Giant, and have a fondness for ripping the heads off their enemies (so Perry learns). They’re also sensitive about their weight.
Not a lot to say about the violent end of the KC resistance. It’s dope as fu—uh, I mean, a terrible, sad waste of life. Everyone dies, and our heroes escape. They hole up in a motel. Joel and Henry agree to travel together to Wyoming. In their room, Sam shows Ellie the bite on his leg. Writing on Sam’s Magic Slate, “My blood is medicine,” Ellie cuts her hand and presses her blood into his infection. If it worked, it would be a miracle. But there are no miracles in Hell. Sam turns infected and feral the next morning, and Henry is forced to kill him, then in horror turns the gun on himself. Ellie and Joel bury their bodies and continue down the road. The moral of the last two episodes? When it’s loved one against a loved one, the story is going to end in tears.
Episode five felt padded as it dawdled on the atmosphere. The hyperkinetic battle sequence with its masses of bodies and epic carnage was thrilling, balanced by the brutally poignant deaths of Sam and Henry. The show’s production values continue to be impeccable, aided by solid acting. But I hope in the future, Mazin and Druckmann resist the urge to make every installment a mini-movie and just drive the story forward.
Stray observations
- Sam signs that he’s hungry and points to a can of Puritan Beef Stew on the attic floor. It’s a big tell for the shooting location as the product is standard in Canada.
- Every city has its underground history, but KC folks do have some interesting stuff beneath their feet.
- Viewers of a certain age (okay, me) might have racked their brains to remember what Sam’s writing device was called. It’s a Magic Slate, another reminder that in this world there’s no internet, no smartphones, no dumb phones, just analog relics.
- The underground settlement daycare center with walls decorated with kid-friendly cartoons is a visual callback to the attic walls that Sam decorated in crayon.
- Ellie and Sam’s enjoyment of games and toys (pun book, Magic Slate, soccer ball) act as meta signifiers in a story that originated as a game.
- Joel’s marksmanship in this episode is ridiculously good, to say the least.
- The end credit music is Agnes Obel’s haunting “Fuel to Fire” with these rather apposite lyrics: “Into the town we go, into your hideaway / Where the towers grow, gone to be far away.”
176 Comments
Them moving from one anthology to the next kinda is the story, at least for the first little bit
I’m a little bummed that they both died. I know it’s from the game, but I was almost expecting them to do a fake-out and have the gun be empty when Henry tries to shoot himself. They made an interesting choice to focus more on a bond between Ellie and Sam, whereas Joel and Henry . . . kind of become more friendly with each other, although Pascal plays it so low key that his emotion doesn’t change much. Infected scene was pretty awesome, including the bloater. If that’s basically our big “infected swarm” scene for the season, I’m okay with that. Also, I chuckled when I saw Ellie do Stealth Kills on the two clickers attacking Sam and Henry.
I’m glad they kept that in. Don’t want them watering down too much from the game. Which is why I really hope seasons 2 and 3 stick to the second game as closely as possible. That was a very memorable game and story.
Every time someone expresses surprise that a character didn’t survive an episode, I always point to “there are only two names in the opening credits.” When my wife was walking past the TV and saw Nick Offerman, she was like “Oh, he’s in this?” and I said “Probably not for long…”
And yet STILL… I actually thought Henry and Sam were gonna survive this and it’d turn into a foursome of traveling buddies for a while. At worst, I thought maybe Joel would make Ellie abandon them and sneak out in the middle of the night. Was not expecting Sam to show the bite at all. Damn you, show!
Yeah, I’m listening to a podcast about this show, and the podcasters have played the game, so in the first episode they caught themselves saying “Joel and Ellie” a few times and switched to saying “Joel and Tess and Ellie”. In the second episode they apologized for that and giving anyone new to the show the idea that Tess was not long for this world.
They finally did the shiv that kills but breaks mechanic, we just need cinderblock to the head and its all good.
Have a scene with Ellie floating on a wooden pallet, you cowards!
I’m sure her not knowing how to swim will come into play.
I had to stop reading at “episode three was a relatively emotional scenario.”Relatively? Jesus Christ. How jaded do you have to be to think that’s only relatively emotional?
Maybe they just meant emotional but in a different way then this episode or this show tends to operate.
Stray thoughts:1) Seeing Melanie Lynskey’s rebel force terrorize the FEDRA soldiers, shoot them in the head, drag them through the street, and run them up flag poles felt very raw. Yeesh.2) So you’re telling me the battle in Kansas City, where FEDRA lost, happened like a week before Joel and Ellie showed up? How convenient.3) There’s that drawing of Ish! 4) Wait, are we not going to get any more Ish?5) TV Henry and Sam > Game Henry and Sam.6) The show found a way to make clickers more terrifying: clicker kids. The one that chased Ellie into the SUV through that open window. The way it riggled over the seats to get to her, and then leaped on Melanie Lynskey like a spidermonkey… nightmare material.7) Oh shit. That bloater ripped open Perry’s head like Joel’s death animations in the game:
8) Okay Ellie. You want to make Sam feel better. You tell him you’re immune and have magic blood, so you rub some blood on his wound. That’s really lovely — very sweet. But do you have to slice your palm open? I can think of ten less painful body parts to draw blood from, and you need your hand to, you know, do stuff, shoot things, etc.
9) That Sam and Henry ending is still so damn heartbreaking. The person I was watching the episode with, who hasn’t played the game, asked “So is every episode just going to be them introducing likable characters and killing them off in the last 5 minutes?” …. Yes.
So you’re telling me the battle in Kansas City, where FEDRA lost, happened like a week before Joel and Ellie showed up? How convenient.Yes fiction is contrived to be interesting, though having a preconceived notion about when a QZ rebellion is supposed to successfully take place is kind of weird.
You know as well as the rest of us that fictional coincidences work as long as they don’t draw too much attention to themselves. Sometimes coincidence is integral to the format – like how the main character of a mystery has to repeatedly encounter crimes. Sometimes a story makes coincidences part of a cosmic/religious theme. Other times, we just have to accept that a rebel uprising occurred the week before the protagonists arrived. But it definitely draws attention to itself.
It’s cool and all, but why would bloaters want to kill people? Isn’t the whole point of the fungus people to spread the fungus? What good does killing people do for this goal? They aren’t really zombies, so dead people are useless to them.
We’ve learnt by now that the infected aren’t aggressive until they feel threatened. They attack to defend themselves. If the victim remains calm, they simply walk up to them and push their tendrils into the victim’s mouth to start the infection. In the episode, the infected were ‘woken’ by, first, an explosion. Then, when they climbed out of the earth, a bunch of people started shooting at them. So naturally they reacted violently.
Cordyceps only evolved to infect humans twenty years ago, and the current crop of bloaters are probably the first generation ever to exist. So I don’t think there’s anything unusual about them being just a weird evolutionary dead end where the subject’s aggression and physical bulk outgrew its effectiveness in spreading the infection.
It would take much, much longer for random mutations to bring about a strain of bloaters who are efficient enough at spreading the infection that they outcompete the ones that just go around murdering everyone.
I like it. It’s like how the extreme lethality of Ebola actually is a force that has kept it from spreading generally, while the common cold is widely successful because it doesn’t do that much damage (and of course has had time to evolve to replicate itself without killing its host).
Every tv show and movie that has a scene where someone has to give blood has them slice their palm open.
See John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Yeah why is it always the palm! Such an impractical choice.
Which is the dumbest place to cut yourself. Hell, flip your hand over and cut the back of your hand if you must, but don’t make it hurt like hell every time you need to grip something.
I get a papercut and I’m useless for a week.
I did that by accident once, I don’t recommend it as it takes forever to heal
I think this is all we get of Ish. In the game, you don’t learn any more about him by the time you get to the sniper. I was just happy we got one mention of him.Besides Sam, I’m pretty sure we don’t see any Infected children in the game, which I think I heard was by design because they didn’t want the player to be killing children, even infected ones. So this one here was unexpected.
So you’re telling me the battle in Kansas City, where FEDRA lost, happened like a week before Joel and Ellie showed up?Why were Joel and Ellie driving through or even near any cities? Joel has to know FEDRA and QZs are in the cities even if he doesn’t know which ones remain. And he knows it’s safe enough to sleep on the ground in the rural areas. Sure, interstate highways are faster but there are major highways that go around cities. Or country roads across the plain states that are probably unblocked by abandoned cars.
I believe they were intending to go to a location in KC (they referred to it last episode, but I forget the name).
Palm-slicing is such a universal trope it stopped bothering me years ago. It’s just old stagecraft.
Re: Point #2: I don’t know why, but the timeline in my head did not have the FEDRA v. rebels battle as being recent. In episode 4, it felt to me like the rebels had been in control for a while. But I suppose that was my assumption and not anything really telegraphed in the screenplay. The rebels seemed a bit too organized for having just taking control of the city 10 days earlier. But once I got my head around the correct timeline, I was fine with it.
For some reasons fans of the game keep telling me not to grow emotionally attached to any characters except Joel and Ellie etc. etc. you guys realize this is spoiling it for people who don’t know this story right? I understand you’re excited for this beloved cult story to become mainstream but can you please shut the hell up until it’s over? You don’t need to sell us on how good it is by telling us everyone dies. Just please shut the hell up about it we don’t need information you seem to think we need to enjoy the show. The contrary in fact.
Being like “ho ho brace yourself for this story I’ve loved for a longtime and here’s 10 extra random facts about it” is the smallest dick energy I’ve ever seen.
You guys don’t own the story in The Last Of Us in the way that you think you do. Friggin gatekeepers. Get a life.
Ellie has to die to for the Fireflies to make the vaccine, so Joel rescues her while she’s unconscious and kills a ton of Fireflies along the way. After he escapes, Ellie wakes up and asks what happened and Joel lies to her and says they couldn’t make a vaccine with her. She chooses to believe him even though there’s nagging doubt. Also Professor Fig dies no matter what and Rookwood framed the goblins or whatever and you can’t change the ending blah blah blah.
Interesting choice to take out Henry saying to Joel “It’s your fault” before killing himself. Though it did always come off like he meant himself anyway.
Do you mean that line is from the game? How would it be Joel’s fault?
In the game, there’s no backstory of being an informer, and Henry and Sam are simply traveling through the city when they get roped into joining Joel and Ellie, which gets the Hunters on their trail.
Ok that makes more sense
It’s also because Henry is in an unimaginable state of grief and briefly blames Joel to try and relieve his own guilt.
In the game Henry says “It’s your fault! It’s all your fault!” but as he says this he looks to the floor, not at Joel. It’s pretty clear that he’s talking to himself when he says this, not to Joel (this has been confirmed by the game developers).
I’m the first one to call out an episode, or a whole show for being painfully plodding (Mayfair Witches and The Watchful Eye are two shows that I’m rapidly growing impatient with), but, to me, this episode did not feel like it was ‘dawdling’.
I guess I’m less critical when the writing and acting are this good (certainly far better than the shows I mentioned earlier), and there was, thankfully, an impressive payoff at the end. Nothing is without flaw, but, so far, The Last of Us is very good.
I agree. This was more a linger than a dawdle, akin to that in Better Call Saul. The only downside was spending time with the resistance leaders only for them to become fungusfodder with no real payoff.
I would say there’s a payoff. This might be subjective, but for me the Last of Us has managed to do what Game of Thrones never quite did. It manages to make the human drama feel real and important and dangerous, and then reminds you how meaningless it is in the face of something bigger.
Yeah when you realize her (and the people of KC’s) victory was very short-lived due to her obsessive need for vengeance at the end of everything…that’s a pretty solid gut-punch, to go along with the massive gut punch of an ending the episode had. For my money this is the best episode so far (I loved three, don’t get me wrong, but the payoff with the zombie sinkhole in this was just too good).
Three and five are very different so I have a hard time comparing, but they’re absolutely the two strongest episodes so far. Really good TV there.
But what my book presupposes is, the payoff is becoming fungusfodder.
I was so glad we didn’t have to deal with her for more than 2 weeks. Enough pay off for me
Seriously, where was the padding? The author complains nothing happened in the tunnels but that’s where the characters bonded. It was absolutely essential to the story. Without it there was no point whatsoever. And it was a subversion of expectations after the scene of the bulging floor last week, you definitely expected them to run into infecteds in the tunnels, so it was rich with tension as well as narrative purpose.
One thing the show is doing exceptionally well is building up the dread – you know the other shoe is going to drop but you don’t know when and how it happens (not even the game fans cause they change things up quite a bit).
There was also some cool game references in there too. The underground school they find is all taken from the game. They even reference the guy Ish from the game who created the underground colony.
Agreed. I also felt you needed some of that time with Sam and Henry to really feel the weight of what happens at the end. It felt like another really emotional gut punch.
Came here to say the same thing. Masterful pacing for me and just a hair below the outstanding Episode 3 in my book. And loved the sign language addition. A really great new angle to the themes of helplessness and dependency of the show. And Episode 3 could end up being the greatest TV episode of 2023.
I’ve been enjoying guessing what method of suicide the featured actor will use in each episode. So far it’s been bombs, pills, and self-inflected gunshot wound. I’m assuming next week they find Joel’s brother who promptly jumps off a bridge.
LOL – in the game during the Henry and Sam segments, there’s a scene where you literally jump off a bridge.
The show’s pacing is a little funny across the board. Individual scenes are well-done and get plenty of room to breathe, but they spent two episodes building up Lynskey’s character, just so that she can interact with the protagonists for a few seconds. And even getting that single scene where she’s the antagonist requires her character to personally lead and army out of town. It’s fine as writing contrivances so, but it’s bolted onto the narrative in a very rushed way.
Damn that kid was great, a fantastic performance and his character Sam playing off Ellie was so hopeful and beautiful. Mirroring that with Henry and Joel both responding to the humanity and optimism with their young charges was palpable making the tragedy of the final moments all the more painful. Honestly this was A- material even with Apocalypse Karen unable to rise to the challenge of the other actors surrounding.
Sam only being 8, instead of Ellie’s age like in the game, was just a massive gut punch. Made it that much more brutal at the end.
For me this was the weakest episode so far (though the weakest of a strong set of episodes is still pretty good.) I failed to find Lynskey’s character believable. Her henchman mentioned that she was the one responsible for the overthrow of FEDRA, telling us that her leadership has been effective in the past, but her blatant ignorance of the infected swelling underground in the previous episode makes me think that her #2 (Perry) should have been more worried about her decision making. I wish there was an additional scene of Perry talking with some others about how her focus on Henry, who isn’t really a threat at all, is blinding her to the real threat at hand and maybe they should overthrow her but then Joel and the others are spotted before Perry has time to act.
I liked how Ellie’s attempt at healing Sam was very much along the lines of kid thinking. The people trying to smuggle must have kept telling her that her blood was the key to a cure and she naively extended that smearing her blood on Sam’s wound. Also, Bella Ramsey’s delivery of “Dude!” and the top of the episode made me LOL. Also also, Pascal is the king of dry delivery while still being expressive. It’s the mark of a great actor when you can play someone very emotionally repressed and still convey their interior life (see also, The Mandalorian)
And yet another also, Lynskey was good as hell, and I really appreciated reading her perspective in the linked twitter thread.
I loved her disappointed elementary school principal voice when threatening the collaborators:“Did it make you feel good? Did it make you feel powerful? Aww, but how does it make you feel now? 🙁 “
Yeah, that was just brilliantly twisting the knife.
To be fair, healing fungal zombie bites with magical blood doesn’t seem any less realistic than does running a vehicle for an extended period of time on 20-year-old gasoline.
This is very true. They could at least show people using old diesel engines which are more forgiving of bad fuel (although after 20 years, that’s probably also not realistic).
It’s very strange how if it is a female death they cut away a lot faster like in house of dragons when Daemon kills his wife. Kathleen’s death felt very anti-climactic while her second in command gets his head ripped off. I know it is a weird thing to nitpick about, but Kathleen’s death wasn’t as impactful as it could have been.
literally white male genocide, gamers rise up, 1984
People tend to take issue w/ women and children dying graphically so you generally won’t see those things too often outside of slasher films.
I thought that there were two things the episode could have done to elevate itself a bit more. The first would have been lingering on Kathleen’s death a little bit more, sort of like how the camera did on Bob Newby in Stranger Things when the demodogs get him. Second, I would have accompanied the ending shots of Joel and Ellie walking away with a pan over the destruction of KC by the infected horde. I think both of those events needed a bit more consequence. The development of Joel and Ellie was good again this episode, but the “hero’s journey” grand narrative often means that the impacts on the places they path through get elided. Spending just a minute on the implications of the infected swarm on KC would have mitigated some of that “gotta move on” energy for a moment to give some real weight to what a swam of infected means for the actual people populating the city.
Was Kansas City destroyed? My dad and I were debating that at the end of the episode. It did seem like a huge horde, and reasonable to assume that a significant portion of their fighters were killed, but I thought that it was pretty heavily fortified. Didn’t Kathleen or Henry say something to that effect at one point?
I don’t know, and I think that was one of the small weaknesses of the episode. We spent so much time with Kathleen and understanding what had happened in KC, with FEDRA and the undergound (both people and the infected). I felt like with all that buildup, there was some considerable weight given to KC and what happened there. To leave without at least pulling back from Joel and Ellie a bit to see the aftermath felt like a missed opportunity.
There was a subtle camera move, where the camera pans upward to show the KC skyline at the top of the frame, while the infected are swarming in that direction. I think alone with the reveal last episode that there’s a big bulging basement floor somewhere inside of the city, we can infer that the city is done for. But it’s not really the protagonists’ fault that the city’s leadership was violently inept.
Why do these “reviews” read more like episode summaries?
Does anyone have a recommendation for a site with better reviews and critical analysis of new episodes of The Last of Us? These recaps are awful and add nothing to the experience of what we all just watched.
Check out Vulture or Den of Geek. Vulture has been a bit more plot-heavy than I would like, but it at least does some analysis. Honestly, so many of the commenters down here have great insights, that at this point I would just love to see many of them/us just rattling off our own 1,500 word essay after the episode. That would have some great analysis. Writing reviews like this is a balancing act between recapping the plot and analyzing the themes. A good reviewer will tell you that the themes come first—they form the backbone of what you’re arguing the episode was about. Then you use the plot points to explore those themes and their complexities. But we’re not getting that here. It’s plot forward to the near exclusion of analysis. It’s easy to get the balance wrong if you’re writing on a deadline or haven’t gotten advance access to the episode. Thoughtful analysis takes time, and what we’re getting here feels like it was written in a hurry.
Darren Mooney at the Escapist is excellent
Mixed feelings about the episode.I loved Lynskey’s performance; the middle school teacher gone bad (I originally was going to say insane, but that doesn’t feel right) will be a highlight for the season. So for that matter was the portrayal of Henry and Sam.The problem for me is that if you combine the last two episodes, we had something like 70 minutes in Kansas City as to serve effectively as a bottle episode – and in it, I’m not sure we learned all that much new about the world, the characters, or much of anything else.There was good action at the end, sure, but is the world that they live in shown to be any crappier than we already knew at the end of Episode 3? Is Ellie shown to be more hard hearted? Is Joel further along the path that he’ll to do anything to survive? Do we have a better feeling of what the average survivor goes through? And do we get any lessons from the infected horde munch that can be tied into everything else we’ve seen during the episode (like, oh, Kathleen ultimately being a terrible choice for leader by getting the entire city killed off because she was so busy pursuing vengeance instead of doing what a leader should have done, which is dealing with the tunnels of love first?) I don’t think we really do.Then we layer in that (as I suspected was going to happen) we were told almost everything of note in this episode a week after the major tell versus show that took place with Kathleen that required some serious suspension of disbelief of why her people followed her so blindly when it was clear she was making bad decisions. Sure, we get a couple of good lines about how she did what her brother couldn’t, and FEDRA being worse-than-normal here and what it does to people, and the end conflict between her and Henry, and Lynskey does so well with the performance that you almost forget how badly that was set up – but the show’s decision to take a shortcut to middle school teacher broken bad really sucked the air out of what our detour to Kansas City could have been.So I didn’t outright dislike either of the episodes, but they definitely weren’t up to the standards we got used to in the first 3 or so hours of the show.
if this was a 10 or more episode series it wouldn’t matter so much, but considering the season is over in one more episode i agree.
There are nine episodes in this season.
oh! well awesome! for some reason i read there were only 6. my point does not stand!
I really only had to read one more comment below to see the correction. Egg on my face. Hooray.
Wait really? Aw ffs. I always forget this about expensive TV shows. You get to episode 4 and its the season finale and ur like aw fuck thats right things dont make themselves.
That’s not what a “bottle” episode is.
People really seem to think that bottle episodes are “episode that tells a full story”.
This is not a bottle episode.A bottle episode is an episode that shoots on pre-existing sets to save money. Even though they were in Kansas City in the previous episode, aside from the hotel room, every location was a new one, making this the opposite of a bottle episode.
Then we layer in that (as I suspected was going to happen) we were told almost everything of note in this episode a week after the major tell versus show that took place with Kathleen that required some serious suspension of disbelief of why her people followed her so blindly when it was clear she was making bad decisions.You must not have been on this planet between 2016-2020.
A bottle episode would have had them in the attic the entire episode
Is Joel letting down his guard and getting more attached to Ellie? That’s the question you should be asking.
Couldn’t agree more. Episode 3 was so good it may overshadow the rest of the show, but the two episodes now telling another story of things happening around the Joel and Ellie that serves as stand in for the main characters themselves (this is noted with some pride on the accompanying podcast so isn’t just my take) is getting very video-gamey. Oh hey, here’s another set of Joel and Ellies to serve as cannon fodder once we’ve spent a minimum appropriate time to get attached to them!
What’s funny is the fate of Bill and Frank in the game is very different. By introducing a significant change they inadvertently made Bill/Frank feel very similar to Henry/Sam.
Without spoiling anything ahead, this episode was actually terribly important to the whole story. Not in terms of moving the plot forward much, or even moving the characters further along their arcs (though I think the journeys of Joel and Ellie are long and move incrementally, and this episode moved them as far along as most of the others have done or will do). Rather, this episode was thematically important—about as direct a thematic statement as possible, really, and absolutely freighted with foreshadowing. Far more so than episode 3 (which I loved btw).Once you’ve seen the whole season, revisit this one. I think you’ll see it with new eyes.
Part of what makes the Kansas City stuff feel “off” is that Joel and Ellie have minimal interaction with Lynskey’s character. We get why Henry is so frightened of her, but she’s a few steps removed from the main story. That would be fine if Lynskey’s subplot were interesting in itself, but it’s very loosely sketched. Basically she overthrows the fascists, holds power for less than two weeks, and then her personal vendetta against Henry gets everyone killed. She comes out being inept, and she doesn’t seem to have any politics besides revenge. There’s some bitter satire or even black comedy in that scenario – a vindictive, power-hungry incompetent stages a violent uprising and ends up making things worse – but the show doesn’t go there.
That’s a good point about how the lack of interaction is one reason why the Kansas City stuff doesn’t work.I’m not sure how far along you are in the series given you responded here so I’ll be a little careful, but one conclusion that I’ve reached after finishing it is that Episodes 1 and 3 gave significant cover to what was a somewhat disappointing writing approach over next 5 episodes. There were some genuinely fascinating stories to be fleshed out about the people they ran into along the way, but instead they made a choice to hew relatively close to game lore.I’ve not looked into this save for the Ars played-not played dual review series – it’s hard to tell from the comments here – but I suspect there’s probably a divide between game veterans and those who are coming new to the show as a result. If you played the game, you were thrilled seeing it brought to life, you could skip sloppiness and plot holes since you knew where it was going, and even the tiny bit of expansion provided probably felt huge. If you came in cold, you wondered multiple times why potentially tremendous characters like Lynskey’s were paper thin as they more or less served as a game quest checkbox along the route.
That makes sense. I watched the first couple of episodes, and I wanted to see what the to do was about this one since it got memed a lot. But mostly I’m waiting for the game to come out on PC this month. It’s a little disappointing to hear that they hit the same beats, honestly – not because they’re bad beats but because I assume they’re going to work better as cutscenes.
With that perspective, I’ll be interested in your reaction to the series after you’ve played the game.
I’m cautiously optimistic – I haven’t finished a triple-A game in years, but one of them is bound to hook me one of these days.
-The show continues to press all the right buttons-The bloater looked cool, do you think we’ll get the Rat King?-By the end of the episode Elle looks like she finally has had enough, fun times are over-I love Kathleen’s snarkiness-Those people back in KC got a big surprise headed their way
Rat King won’t be until Seasons 2 or 3.
Ish.
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I’m not sure if you’ve played the games or not, but the character work they’re doing is essential, not ‘padding’. TLOU was never a Walking Dead-style hordes of zombies game (or show), the heroes’ relationship is the reason it exists, and it’s also as much about evil humans as it is about the infected. I’m really surprised you disliked it, as I thought it was excellent and had zero fat to trim.- Ellie’s impersonation of Joel the few times and calling it his “asshole voice” had me laughing out loud. Absolutely fantastic.- Watching Ellie and Sam interact was incredible. They were so sweet, and it was such a bright point of joy since this world has none. I realize that’s the point, but it hits different in live-action for some reason.- The deja vu that slammed into me when they walked into the daycare part of the settlement was unreal. There are many parts of this game that I can’t recall of my own volition but come rushing back when I see how well they translate it.- Kathleen ended up being…interesting? I guess? She never got really got scary, besides being a sociopath. It wasn’t clear why the entire city followed her either unless it was just out of loyalty to her brother. RIP Kathleen, I guess.- The music is so good it gives me chills. Every time I hear a track or cue I recognize from my obsessive listening of the game tracks I grin like a dummy. It’s just fantastic, I hope it’s among the laundry list of Emmys this takes home.- Boy that sniper was a bad shot, huh? I guess it makes sense because of his age. Joel is somehow 2 for 2 on jamming his rifles in Kansas City, so hopefully, his luck improves.- I love when Joel watches Henry save Ellie through the sniper scope, he had massive *Joel will remember that* eyes. Pedro is doing insane work with his eye-acting all around, especially at the end in the motel.- Those infected had impeccable sinkhole timing.- Their judicious use of infected so far made it extremely effective to see hundreds pouring out of the hole. The chaos that ensues, and then the bloater climbing up, was such a visual treat. It also had huge escort quest energy with Joel sniping them all away from Ellie. Amazing scene.- Whoever played that little girl clicker needs an award. The movement was so terrifyingly unnatural, and the way she climbed and fell over seats gave me the jeebies.- The motel scene made me unexpectedly emotional. I thought because I knew what was going to happen I was prepared, but I choked up a few times when they were writing back and forth, and had a few tears slip out when they hugged (and at the grave site). That was ROUGH. Anyone anywhere in this fandom who gives Bella Ramsey a hard time over her casting should now be firmly shut up because she was phenomenal this entire episode.- Something I noticed for the first time this week is how well the pacing has been set up. The passage of time doesn’t feel noticeable until they want you to notice. Last week’s episode feels like a long time ago, which is a great thing in a show with only 10 episodes that has so much content to cover.- The preview had winter!! Winter is when all the shite goes down! I can’t wait!This was the first episode you could tell Joel’s attitude toward Ellie is changing (and his attitude in general). Between how horrified of losing her in the battle he was (the shaking was incredible), and his offering to let Henry and Sam come along, ol’ grumpy-pants is finally opening up. I am intensely excited for the next episode.
and it’s also as much about evil humans as it is about the infected.That’s been true of every zombie movie and show starting from the original Night of the Living Dead, and was probably even taken there from J.G. Ballard’s “catastrophe” novels of the 1960s (The Drowned World, The Burning World, etc.) in which survivors of various apocalypses find their greatest danger is other bands of survivors.
It wasn’t clear why the entire city followed her either unless it was just out of loyalty to her brother. RIP Kathleen, I guess.Her brother for one and the fact that she was willing to be more ruthless. She got results her brother couldn’t so that’s why they’re all following her now.
It’s not a 1-for-1 comparison, but given the KC FEDRA was apparently a group of fascist monsters who committed horrible atrocities, I can absolutely see why people would follow Kathleen if she’s the one who spearheaded the resistance and overthrew them. It’d be kind of like if the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had been wholly successful and led a movement to overthrew the Nazis occupying the city; whoever was leading the movement would be a hero to literally everyone left. They’d follow that person into Hell.
Also, vengeance is a pretty good motivator. Once her brother was beaten to death, all bets were off for her.
Your points are so well made! I have a special needs daughter and my empathy exploded for Sam and Henry. I loved the episode, cried like a baby. I’m all in for the rest of the season.
I think the clicker girl had to be played by some kind of gymnast. The movements she did were incredibly creepy, and worked very well.
“Anyone anywhere in this fandom who gives Bella Ramsey a hard time over her casting should now be firmly shut up because she was phenomenal this entire episode.” Is this a thing? I’m ignorant of any sort of controversy. Bella Ramsey is pretty awesome.
I’m not directly aware of any controversy but I did read on either kotaku or giz that some commenters saw complaints about Ramsey not being as pretty as game Ellie somewhere.
Jesus H. Christ. So it’s all about the boners of male gamers?
On it’s face it seems gross and problematic because of the character’s age but I think this criticism is born more out of seeing like Sears catalogue families and stuff. Wanting to see attractive children (or people in general) on screen doesn’t mean someone wants to have sexual relations with them whatsoever. It just means they wanna look at pretty stuff (in the way that TV and media have already trained us to with most of the media from the last two decades). So I don’t necessarily think it’s like neckbeard basement dwelling pedophiles making this complaint. I’d never seen Bella Ramsey before (not a Game of Thrones person), and her acting and humour/sass has been absolutely delightful, but I’ll admit my first thought when I saw her was “this kid is less attractive then kids I usually see on TV”. That thought occurred to me because I’m a human that’s been conditioned to only accept seeing attractive people on screen not because I’m some pedophile with a hard-on. To assume people making this criticism are creeps is so basic.
I’ve totally changed my mind on her because of how charming Ramsey has been in this but yeah if there’s still people grouchy that shes not an extremely attractive person by this point in the shows run that probably means they’re a crappy person. But what I’m saying is I get the criticism and I had the same thought when I first saw her, so what.
I interpreted the complaint similarly.
I think the difference is that I kept my opinion to myself until this very moment when it came up. I think to vocalize and complain on the internet about Bella Ramsey’s attractiveness is the step over the line.
But I wont deny that I silently had the thought “oh that’s not as attractive of a person as I’m used to seeing on TV” when I saw her. But no it didn’t bother me enough to actually voice complaints – that seems shitty. But it’s not unfathomable that they thought that.
I think it may be in line w/ cosmicghostrider’s point, but you never know.
Congratulations! You are now qualified to be a video game developer!
Pascal’s work while Joel is in the sniper’s nest is just incredible. The desperation with which he wants the old man to surrender, the pain at having to shoot him, felt so real. And then every time the camera turns to him taking a shot to protect Ellie you see him fighting the battle between panic and determination. It’s wordless and wonderful. I deeply appreciated the use of real people instead of CGI to create the swarm of infected coming up from the sinkhole. Their movement had a physicality and a weight that CGI wouldn’t have done justice to, in my opinion. When I was watching it in real time, I sort of recognized how good it looked, and when they talked in the “making of” segment about using movement artists for the scene that made total sense to me. It was a good choice. And yes, all the awards to clicker kid because she gave me the heebie jeebies.
– Whoever played that little girl clicker needs an award. The movement was so terrifyingly unnatural, and the way she climbed and fell over seats gave me the jeebies.Her name is Skye Cowton, a lot of people noticed her.https://www.gamingbible.com/news/the-last-of-us-clicker-girl-054139-20230213HBO has a companion podcast where the guy who voiced Joel in the game talks with Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, their tale of casting Cowton got used for the article, too.
This is a much better review than the AVC review. Kudos.
Easily B+ or A- for me, I didn’t think there was any padding whatsoever. Loved it.
I know it’s just based on a video game or whatever, but I think this show deserves more than a speed-written 10th grade essay level of analysis.
AV Club doesn’t pay for the sort of writers who can pull off analysis. Not anymore.
Adios, Karen! Lasted two eps. Horrible character. Sorry that Lynskey has to go through with this, but I guess you can’t hit a home run every time. Hopefully there’s no flashbacks of her in the rest of the season.
There’s one theme I’m missing in all the reviews this week: “What is a child worth?” and of course the different answers of Henry (everything) and Kathleen (nothing, because everybody dies). And after losing one child already, it’s of course a big deal for Joel, too.
With Kathleen’s old childhood room and the underground daycare it was a big theme this episode, I thought.
Also I loved that Kathleen was killed by a child clicker of all things. ;D
This is the kind of thoughtful inquiry I miss from AV club recaps now.
Thanks! Just found out they even talk about this in the official podcast. So it was definitely no coincidence.
Yes, as I was considering the episode after finishing it, this is the theme that I landed on as central to me. If I were writing a review, I would have focused on the development of this theme. Everything you note is bang on. I also think there is an element of direct comparison between Ellie and Sam. The show is asking us if Ellie, because of what she is, is worth more than Sam. Henry would say no. In the beginning of the episode, Joel would also say no, but by the end…that’s less clear. And by making Ellie and Sam bond so quickly, you see how in many ways childhood is childhood, regardless of whether you’re “special” like Ellie. Childhood and fatherhood. That’s what this episode revolved around. And that leaves Kathleen, who is neither a child nor a parent, does not understand childhood as sacrosanct in this world where so much else has died. Henry recognizes that Joel is a parent, even if he’s not Ellie’s parent, just by observing him. They see reflected in each other the pain and panic of having the responsibility for a child in this world.
I can only agree with all of that. Great thoughts!
“The show is asking us if Ellie, because of what she is, is worth more than Sam. Henry would say no.”
Would he, though, if he knew what Ellie was worth? (Don’t think there’s a definitive answer to this which is what makes your point so interesting.)
That is a really interesting question! And it also opens up discussion of how Joel’s view of Ellie transitions in this episode. Has she been a kid to him before this? Or was she a resource? Does the resource or the kid need protecting more?Seeing Ellie with Sam definitely showed Joel that, despite his assertion that she’s “cargo,” she is actually still just a kid when it comes down to it. She wants to goof off and play soccer and make friends, in a world where none of those things are really possible. In seeing her as a kid, Joel grows more protective and more invested in her protection–not just protecting her physically, but also trying to protect her childhood (like when he sent her away to not look while he killed the young attacker in episode 4. There was so much interesting going on with the ideas of childhood in that two-episode arc. So much good stuff.
Its a theme that will come back to matter by the end and into season 2 as well. Alongside how lust for violence over family is blinding and forgive and forget is perhaps wiser.
Ellie and Sam’s enjoyment of games and toys (pun book, Magic Slate, soccer ball) act as meta signifiers in a story that originated as a game.oh come on.
That bullet point definitely has big rshittymoviedetails subreddit energy.
Ellie and Sam’s enjoyment of games and toys (pun book, Magic Slate, soccer ball) act as meta signifiers in a story that originated as a game.oh come on. Or maybe they’re, like, kids?
“Padding”. It’s basically 40 minutes of well-written, well-acted and important character stuff followed by the biggest action scene the show has had so far. If this is “padding” I don’t want the show you’re looking for.
with crayon drawings of superheroes fighting the police.
He would not have been born into a world with cops. There is no police anymore. That’s FEDRA, yo. One could argue its the same difference, and I think the show has been laying it on a little thicker than the game, which is why images of the rebellion executing these guys, hanging them, and generally burning the city is so… loaded.Speaking of laying it on thick, Henry and Sam were both really great, and I even liked the idea of making Sam younger so as to have someone who looks up to Ellie. But making him deaf AND giving him leukemia felt like a bit much. It’s putting a hat on a hat. Our sympathies are already with them, so these additions feel like cheap ways to manipulate our emotions even more.
I guess I agree with the B grade. It was fine. The Bloater was cool, and if it took some contrived plotting to unleash him, so be it. Kathleen, (being told she’s a better leader than her brother ever was- despite no indication of a single smart decision) did not work for me. Her ‘sweet-but-sinister’ type can be effective. Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter for example. But the believably just wasn’t there.
loss of hearing is common for medications for leukaemia. it sounded like he was in treatment for awhile before the meds ran out.
Platinum-based chemotherapy leads to hearing loss, but that isn’t used for childhood leukemia. Or maybe in the show’s world it is – there’s no chance that a child with ALL or AML is going to get access to multiple chemo drugs, blood transfusions, and antibiotics in an apocalyptic wasteland, so anything’s possible.
He was deaf BECAUSE of the lukeamia
That was not confirmed on the show at all. Sam is deaf, and Henry says that he got leukemia. The way he said it implied that Sam was always deaf, and that it was only recently that he got leukemia.
“This episode had me actually longing for more Kathleen, maybe torturing a collaborator with rusty scissors while making small talk.”Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool.
‘Dawdles with pace.’ That shit is redundant. It’s not great. Nor is this review great. ‘The Last of Us’ is about the agony, uncertainty, and terror of personal responsibility. Joel, Henry, and Bill choose to live with not knowing but being all too capable of imagining the end of their responsibility for those in their care. The show has to take its time with its characters so that viewers feel that agony, uncertainty, and terror. Has there been schmaltz? There has. Is there a bit too much on-the-nose-ness? Yep. Overall, though, the show works extremely well. The fifth episode was great. That shit is an A.
Excellent episode. It was very exciting and very moving. When Ellie cut her hand to give blood to Sam, my heart broke, and I said out loud, “That’s not going to work, Ellie.” Before that, a knockout action set piece. Never played the game but I could imagine you’re Joel trying to shoot these fuckers before they get Ellie. I had completely forgotten about the Bloater, who had been in in the ads before the show premiered, that scene. What a concept.
I didn’t get the criticism against Lynskey. She was perfectly cromulent. The character never came across as unconvincing in her ruthlessness nor in her leadership, and neither did the actress playing her.I loved the little screenplay touch of contrasting Kathleen and Joel’s characters by how they dispose of bodies. Earlier in the episode, Kathleen instructs Perry to burn all the people he’ll kill—“it’ll be faster.” At the end of the ep, Joel and Ellie take the time to bury Henry and Sam; it’s a sign of their humanity vs. Kathleen’s lack of it.The frames and compositions this show delivers are gorgeous. Love the lighting, which is painterly.
“I didn’t get the criticism against Lynskey. She was perfectly cromulent. The character never came across as unconvincing in her ruthlessness nor in her leadership, and neither did the actress playing her.”
I agree. I thought she was a different take on that type of character, type of leader. If the revolt had only taken place 10 days ago of course her troops will be fiercely loyal to her. She’s succeeded in their main goal of overthrowing FEDRA. Sure she’s starting to make some questionable decisions since then, but she’s got them this far and she hasn’t been wrong yet!!! Wait.. what’s that coming out of the ground ? OMG My head is missing ! oh well..
Given the response to episode 3, I thought everybody loved padded episodes.
The underground settlement daycare center with walls decorated with kid-friendly cartoons is a visual callback to the attic walls that Sam decorated in crayon.No shit.
I agree this episode felt slow. The characterisation, acting and story arc of Kathleen was also disappointing. They dropped the ball there. And the action scene was derivative (Saving Private Ryan bell tower anyone?) and missing the requisite tension. Seriously, I’m really not seeing what all the fuss is about with this show – and it sux that the internet will shoot me for saying so.
If this were The Walking Dead we would have been stuck with these fuckers for like 2 seasons.
I wouldn’t mind us keeping Henry and Sam around for two seasons, but yah.
Nothing in this episode dawdled.
Having played the game, there was an ever-growing sense of dread creeping through this episode that parts like the underground school almost alleviated.
It was nice seeing the drawing if Ish.
But then that ending hits you like a ton of bricks…
The underground settlement daycare center with walls decorated with kid-friendly cartoons is a visual callback to the attic walls that Sam decorated in crayon,It’s not. It’s an area from the first game with a VERY tragic backstory, but since this review sucks (yes, character work is certainly “padding”), I wouldn’t expect you to know that or have done any research on the subject.
This episode convinced me more than any other episode thus far that this show is truly capable of greatness. Honestly felt like I was watching Deadwood or something for a second there. I really don’t like how often criticism of television (stories in general but tv in particular) resorts to things like “padding” and “repetition” if a narrative isn’t uber-economical. It potentially demonstrates to me a lacking understanding of the artform. If you watch any of the great dramas from The Sopranos to Mad Men, they are absolutely padded and repetitive, but you also learn that those terms are actually a lot more neutral than is typically prescribed to them. Spending a considerable deal of time in a world with a group of characters is where television derives so much of its idiosyncratic power, and the best shows are usually the ones that know how important the quiet in-between scenes are. I really felt close to the characters in this episode, and I can only imagine that connection deepening at this point.
“But I hope in the future, Mazin and Druckmann resist the urge to make every installment a mini-movie and just drive the story forward.”This sentence brought to mind one of my all-time favorite lines about art: “If you’re a joyless pure plot-watcher, if you care most about “moving things forward” because apparently a story is a train that is late to Philly, if you’re just into watching clockwork spin and you’re immune to crushing horror and desperate hope and fucking tragedy…”
This episode really bummed me out. They spent so much narrative effort in the first four episodes world and character building. Giving this apocalypse authenticity. And then this stupid fucking episode hits. Suddenly it’s the same ‘ol Walking Dead tropes of a world of fucking morons that I guess survive out of sheer luck So twenty years have passed under a communicable fungal pandemic and nobody has developed the single protocol post-infected altercation to go “alright, everyone check each other for bites like we’ve all learned to do automatically after each battle.”No. Sam and Dipshit just blunder around and act shocked and surprised that there are monsters after an an entire society evolved around where there have been monsters for twenty years. I hate plots that rely on characters behaving as stupidly as possible to get them from A set piece to B set piece. It’s fucking boring. It’s fucking cynical. And it tells me the show runners are going to fuck the suspension of disbelief over and don’t care about the intelligence of the audience. I guarantee you this show will fuck you over by the last two episodes.
accurate except the first four episodes were also garbage
This is such a weird, petty criticism. Sam and Henry are young enough to have been *born* in a quarantine zone. Never lived outside of it—never even BEEN outside of it. FEDRA protected the zone for their entire lives. As we were told, the infected were driven underground when the QZ was established, and quietly driven away (Henry thought they were exterminated, though it turned out they were apparently just forced to tunnels outside the zone). The same is more or less true of Ellie. Regardless of whatever the post-apocalypse schools might have tried to teach them, they have probably never once had an altercation with an infected before—maybe not even seen one that was still alive. This idea that they would all be experienced, hardened survivors with a protocol to follow in case of zombie incident is thoughtless; these characters are not Joel (who predates the apocalypse and has moved somewhat freely through the world outside the quarantine zone he eventually settled in). Though Sam, Henry, and Ellie live in the same world as him, they have benefited from—and in a way, been softened by—a kind of protection. He is the only one who I would find it believable if he insisted on checking everyone over. But I can also imagine he would be so shaken and relieved by what had just happened that he could forget for a few hours to ask–especially in the case of Sam, who is not his responsibility, and can really only communicate with his brother.I would also suggest that focusing so much on plot and world-building stuff is blinding you to some really well-done character and thematic writing in the episode.Anyway, hope you stick with it. If the season ends as the first game did, it will be very much the opposite of disappointing, to me.
There’s some nice symmetry between Henry and Lynskey – the idea that she lost her brother so that he could keep his, the idea that she wants to stay where she grew up and rule it, while Henry just wants to leave. But Lynskey is so unequivocally bad – both morally and in terms of leadership skills – that she doesn’t have room to develop. Also, by boiling the story down to a personal conflict between Henry and Kathleen, the writers push the main characters to the background, and they also push the (heavily implied) destruction of Kansas City to the background. That’s all to say that there are some cool ideas at play, but they don’t gel into anything thematically coherent. A lot of the show’s storytelling is “and then this thing happened.”
“One morning Henry wakes Sam and signs that Edelstein isn’t coming back (somehow he found out the rebels got him)“I don’t think Sam found this out. He just realized that it’s been 10 days and Edelstein hasn’t come back. He (rightly) assumes that he’s been captured and/or killed.
“and have a fondness for ripping the heads off their enemies”As those who played the game and had to replay the high school gym scene many times, a Bloater doesn’t “rip your head off”. It puts both hands into your mouth – one on the top and one along the bottom jaw – and pulls them apart. It’s a pretty graphic death scene in the game, one that most players see many times the first time they encounter a Bloater and are trying to figure out how to kill it.
Sewers
Drawings outside sewer hideout entrance.
Rules
Ish
Soccer
Sniper
Henry abandoning Joel and Ellie, then coming back (much quicker than in the game)
ScorpionsJust keep putting these little references into the show and I’ll be happy.Still waiting for a brick though.
sewers and soccer, wow incredibly rich tapestry of references
Although I enjoyed the episode overall, it’s the first that felt predictable (I haven’t played the game so I don’t know how much of what happened comes from it). I get the whole “unavoidable fate” angle but the only surprising element was the safe passage Joel etc had through the tunnels – it felt like we were missing a few scenes.Eg. If we’d seen some Infected waking up in the darkness of the tunnels that would suggest they’d followed them to the suburbs rather than conveniently pop out the ground at the most dramatic moment. Likewise, Joel etc seemed remarkably chill in the motel despite narrowly escaping the Infected – were they not chased or followed? How much farther did they go to get to that motel? It was like they ran around a corner and everything was suddenly safe.Despite all this, the acting across the board was stellar! Belle Ramsey comes across as a very naturalistic actor in particular; Ellie becoming an immediate big sister to Sam was lovely to see.
In the game the 4 of them go through the sewers but it’s to make it to a radio tower on the other side (where Henry is meeting up with the rest of his group – no one is after him in the game). Also in the game there are a LOT of Infected in the sewers you have to fight – they aren’t following you, they’re just the remaining people from the ones that used to live in the sewers (you find a note saying that someone forgot to close the door one day and Infected got in and killed most of the people and infected the others).As far as Joel acting “chill” he does this a lot in the game – mostly to keep up his emotionless exterior but also to make Ellie (and Henry and Sam) think that everything is ok and that they don’t have to be worried.“were they not chased or followed” The Infected were attacking Kathleen’s people so it was easy for Joel’s group to slip away unnoticed. And Kathleen’s group were in no shape to follow them.Pretty sure the hotel is outside of Kansas City. They would not have stopped just around the corner from the Infected attack to spend the night – they would have kept going until they knew they were safe to stop for the night.
Cheers for clarifying some stuff! I didn’t think they’d just popped round the corner at the end but it sure felt like it haha
Watching a few breakdowns of the show on Youtube several of them note that the locations on the show are all real places (the roller coaster they passed a couple of weeks ago was a real one in Kansas, for instance, that my son who watches with us now wants to go ride).
The narrative ran into some trouble because their safe passage through the tunnels means that the writers had to attach some third-act conflict. Lynskey finds them because of the sniper, but she only catches them because – at night in a depopulated post-apocalytptic wasteland – they can’t hear four or five diesel engines until the army is almost on top of them.
this is a bad show in many ways, but it might have the least inspired, most forgettable HBO title sequence ever
Sooo, David. You get paid to basically recite the plot points of an episode. That seems to be all. You have almost nothing to add, critically speaking. “Dawdled on the atmosphere” might be the most useless ‘critique’ I’ve ever read. You realize that the “atmosphere” is kind of the point, right? That relationships don’t exist outside of said “atmosphere?”Here’s a ‘fun’ example that doesn’t even involve current politics — Google Ceausescu’s last speech (he was the dictator of Romania) and how someone like him might relate to FEDRA and how his ‘successor’ basically became the same form of tyrant. The “atmosphere” shaped all of Eastern European politics for decades to come. But establishing an “atmosphere” of how society breaks and twists isn’t important, right? Let’s go back to the VERY FIRST scene in the show — it’s established that a slight change in the environment (“atmosphere”) can have devastating impacts. Maybe, JUST MAYBE, good storytellers set this up for a reason.You are FAR too amateur to handle this show. There is SO much to delve into beyond “They’re sensitive about their weight.” Ugh. Did you even watch Chernobyl? Do you even lift? I don’t even care if you’ve played/remember the game — you didn’t get it, if you did, you don’t get it now.“If it worked, it would be a miracle. But there are no miracles in Hell.” — 12 year old writing in her diary about the dumpster fire the AV Club has become.
lmao
Fantastic emotional episode.Palate Clenser for you all with Sam.Proud to say he’s from down the road a bit from me here in Bowie, Maryland.Not only a gifted actor at 8 but a hell of a hockey player too. His mother is also a deaf actress. Could not be prouder of the kid everyone is calling “Hollywood”https://www.wusa9.com/video/entertainment/television/programs/great-day-washington/9-year-old-from-bowie-guest-stars-in-the-last-of-us-lisa-marie-presley-is-laid-to-rest-in-graceland-fbi-hq-rated-ugliest-building-in-us/65-17967e4f-c801-4a9a-869c-bf481c5e99fb
Did not know that. I’m just up the road in Gambrills. Go Bowie. Waiting for the B&A trail bridge to be completed so I can bike over there.
I feel like the show is painfully underlining themes that were done more subtly, and this feels insane to write, in the video game.
Personally, i found this episode more moving than overrated episode 3. Mostly because we’re actually following the main characters, not dawdling thru a romantic drama. I was affected by Ellie’s friendship with doomed Sam
Wow I didn’t even read the review this time but as I scrolled passed it the whole thing just looks like a short story. Is there any critique in there or is the assignment just to retell the entire episode within a specific word count? It’s training me to just come to the bottom to see what the community is saying about the episode. That can’t be sustainable for website traffic.
Vulture does a marginally better job if you’re interested in more substantive recaps/reviews. Sadly, AV Club’s recaps have been heavy on plot retelling with very little analysis for a while now. You used to be able to identify a thesis, a main argument each review was making about the episode, in AVC recaps. But now it’s basically just plot.
It’s rare seeing the AV Club go out of its way to outdipshit Kotaku in attention-whoring contrarian clickbait.
I never played the game (which is kind of crazy since I am both a gamer and a huge zombie/apocalypse person) so I really started this show just hoping I would like it. So far I do, but man this episode absolutely gutted me. I have Lamar Johnson’s face from the last minutes of that episode seared into my brain. If this is how the game is I feel like I’m too emotionally fragile for it.
the old man sniper was missing on purpose, in an attempt to pin down Joel and the rest until Kathleen showed up. This much was evident when kathleen said something to the effect of ‘thanks for holding them there.?
This show will be something to behold whenever it burns off the plot it has to cater to from the games. I wish the creators felt free to break out of the bounds of the game beyond backstory flourishes.
“Not a lot to say about the violent end of the KC resistance. It’s dope as fu—uh, I mean, a terrible, sad waste of life. Everyone dies, and our heroes escape.”
Lol. when did the AV club become Buzzfeed? Please no more reviews that are paragraphs just re-explaining the epsiode and then saying what you WISHED had happened. If that ‘reviewing’ then yikes, this site is in trouble
Yah I cringed, was hard to finish reading.
Just gotta say Lamar Johnson was EXCELLENT. This production is landing some side-pieces even if the main thread gets a little boring and tropey. Those two were amazing together. I got a MUCH better sense of the danger and desperation of that life from them than I am getting from the leads.I do however like how Sam and Henry’s shocking demise shocked her character a bit out of her snarky, devil-may-care tropey behavior. She played those resultant scenes very well.