On The Last Of Us, it’s a slow, deadly road through Boston
Clickers and crumbling architecture challenge our weary zombie dodgers
TV Reviews The Last Of Us
Apart from the hero’s journey-cum-quest narrative that doubtless will occupy much of The Last Of Us this season, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are bound to keep doling out back story as to how this fungal apocalypse began. And thus the second episode cold open takes us to Jakarta, Indonesia in 2003, a short time before the outbreak went global.
A middle-aged woman’s afternoon lunch (beef satay!) is interrupted by a pair of cops who escort her to a car. The dignified lady is assured she has not committed a crime. They confirm she is Ibu Ratna (Christine Hakim) professor of mycology at University of Indonesia. Ah yes, the unwitting scientist dragged in by government officials because some Weird Shit Is Going Down, a beloved and necessary trope for end-of-the-world narratives.
Dr Ratna is taken to a lab, squints at a sample of the fungus Ophiocordyceps through the microscope and is told it was taken from a human. She knows (and we know from the last episode’s cold open) the fungus can’t live in the heat of the human body. She then examines the corpse it was taken from, and extracts white, writhing tendrils from deep in the throat. The female subject, shot through the head by police, had been bitten on the ankle and subsequently bit a few coworkers. Who are all now executed. Where did they all work? A flour and grain processing factory. Dr. Ratna puts it all together in a tense debrief with a military official (Yayu A.W. Unru). Clearly a fast-spreading mycotic (fungus-to-human) event has occurred. The good doctor’s terse advice: Bomb the city and everyone in it.
Let’s pause a moment and consider, in a fit of wildly premature speculation, where The Last Of Us is ultimately headed. Yes, it’s a zombie-adjacent survival epic with a grieving-father-surrogate-daughter emotional through-line. Yes, it’s a narrative pretext for chases, gunplay, gore, heroism and horror. But where’s it going to leave us after season two or three, after the game’s 2020 sequel has been digested in another 18 or so breathless installments?
My money’s on: Humans lose. Joel and Ellie (or whoever replaces them) put up a good fight, they maintain their dignity and ethics, and die of natural causes—maybe because both are immune? In any case, humanity becomes extinct. The fungus flourishes. The Anthropocene ends, and nature begins to heal. That’s what I posit as Mazin-Druckmann’s long game: it’s the end of the world and we feel fine. All the gross stuff with undead cannibals and gruesome Clickers and so forth? All a beautiful part of Gaia’s epic reset. No demons. No aliens. No God. Just fungus and root systems and a happy planet for the next few billion years. Posthuman cli fi in Romero drag.
Okay, back to the zombie blasting! Post-credits (Game Of Thrones meets Time-Lapse Mold) we see Ellie (Bella Ramsey) curled up in fetal position, on the floor of a house overgrown with grass and weeds. Her bed is a mossy green patch and light streams down from the busted roof. It’s a pretty pastoral image of rewilding nature (the episode was deftly directed by Druckmann).
Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Anna Torv), now that they know that Ellie has been bitten, have keeping watch over Ellie, guns out, all night. Exasperated, Ellie points out that she hasn’t turned into a “fucking monster.” Joel, with possibly fractured fingers from pummeling the soldier to pulp last night, is still on high alert. Tess argues they push on, bring Ellie to the State House and get the car battery and other booty from the Fireflies. Joel wants to return the girl to the Quarantine Zone (QZ) and continue without her. Neither knows what’s so special about this girl.
Which seems a bit improbable. You don’t have to be a mycology professor or epidemiologist to know that if a person appears to be immune to an insanely infectious agent, they are of humongous scientific value. But okay, years in the smuggling racket have hardened Joel and Tess beyond normal reason. At any rate, Ellie has to explain that there’s a Firefly camp out west with scientists who are trying to create a vaccine and the need to study her immune system. Joel scoffs that he’s heard about miracle cures for years. But Tess wins out: whether or not the girl is for real, the Fireflies think so, and they need the gear. They head out.
The bulk of the episode that follows is a trek-and-fight through the bombed out, cantilevered wreckage of downtown Boston, buildings Tower-of-Pisa’ed into crazy angles and festooned in miles of moss, vines, and ferns. Shoutout to cinematographer Ksenia Sereda, production designer John Paino, and a reported squad of art directors for engineering such a haunting, painterly Beantown Without Us (Tarkovsky’s unforgettable Stalker was easily in the image library).
As they walk in daylight through the open city, no infected around, Tess asks Ellie questions: age, family, how she got bitten. Ellie in turn marvels at the lack of infecteds and asks about some of the beasties we are sure to encounter: super-infecteds who spew spores, and ones with burst-open heads who lurk in the shadows.
The trio enters the lobby of a semi-submerged grand hotel (cue random frog plonking keys on a piano as it leaps away). They wade through the green mucky water. Ten floors up, they find a collapsed mass of concrete that bars the way forward. Tess clambers over it to scout the way, leaving Ellie and Joel to get to know each other, a bit of human interaction that goes nowhere fast. She learns he’s from Austin, Tess is from Detroit, the infecteds can live for a month or 20 years, and he’s killed lots of them. When the girl asks about the soldier last night, Joel can’t find it in himself to say, He triggered a memory of my daughter being shot when she was your age. But I hope Pascal gets to act that highly emotional scene in a later episode.
Tess reappears through a side door and guides them on an alternate route. From the rooftop, they look down and see scores of undead prone in the street, groaning and writhing. Tess has a short speech about how the fungus isn’t only in the infected, but growing underground (“long fibers like wires, some of them stretching over a mile”), creating a network in which all the infected are connected and sharing information. (This mycorrhizal framing of zombies reinforces the deep-ecology theory of Last Of Us; they are of the Earth, whereas humans are the mutation.)
Their way blocked by Sleeping Uglies, Joel and Tess take Ellie to the museum. Here’s the haunted house part of the episode. They walk tensely through the creepy place by flashlight, find a dead body. Joel mime-orders that they’ll continue in total silence. Very creepy climb up a staircase. Don’t touch the ‘shrooms, Joel! We are so ready for a Clicker to appear.
And one obliges. The three are stopped in their tracks (after a sudden collapse that conveniently occurs after they get through a doorway) by the sound a strangulated glottal cackle coming from a hallway. The raspy ghoul enters the room, stalking around glass display cases. Joel signals to Ellie to be totally silent; they are drawn by sound. But when Ellie gets a glimpse of the thing, with its braised-cauliflower head, she gasps and it pounces with a scream. Joel fights off the creature. The noise draws a second fried artichoke, and Tess and Ellie get separated.
The Steadicam work in the ensuing sequence is quite effective, controlling how much we see the Clickers, making use of wildly swinging flashlights and panicked bodies in motion. Joel steers Ellie to safety; wastes a Clicker before it can French kiss him with its mycelium tendrils; Tess buries an axe in the head of another that Joel finishes off with a few bullets. (Clickers can take more rounds before dropping.) Ellie was scratched or bitten on the arm—again—but she’ll survive. Tess, on the other hand, looks stricken.
Our group gets to the roof of the museum, makes their way across a rickety looking plank bridge to the next building, and continue on their way to the gold-domed state house. When they actually get there, they find the bloodied bodies of numerous Fireflies in the lobby. What happened? Joel reads the scene and deduces that one got bit and the infected and healthy killed each other in firefight. Tess frantically searches through the Firefly supplies for anything they can use: a radio, a map. Joel shouts at Tess it’s over; they should go home. Tess refuses. “I’m staying,” she says. “Our luck had to run out sooner or later.” That’s when Ellie realizes the truth. “Fuck,” the girl says. “She’s infected.”
Somewhere during the fight in the museum, Tess was bitten. Joel demands to see it. Tess shows a nasty, livid infection on her neck and shoulder. “Whoops, right?” she jokes (same as the game, btw). Just then we see tendrils on the mossy ground, like parasitical worms, stretch out and burrow under the skin of dead men’s fingers. The fungus is waking up the infected (which we saw earlier having a nap), giving them a boost of vitamin Cordyceps. Untold dozens of the flesh-eaters leap up and start running toward the state house.
Tess doesn’t have much time. She tells Joel to promise to get the girl to Bill and Franks. Tess then dumps several barrels of gasoline in the lobby, scatters some hand grenades on the floor, and commands Joel: “Save who you can save.” Joel pulls Ellie away, who protests and curses him for leaving Tess behind. Tess makes a heroic last stand against the marauding undead mob, finally igniting a zippo and blowing up the state house, mid-tendril kiss with a Clicker. Joel and Ellie, a safe distance from the Capitol, see the conflagration, register the loss of a comrade, and keep going.
The episode’s emotional arc among the three characters goes something like: hostile mutual mistrust melts incrementally into wary allegiance. Tess, like a friendly aunt, made the earliest overtures to Ellie by way of bonding, while Joel remained stony and silent on the outside. Once Tess is bitten, she can’t afford to deepen any emotional attachment to the girl. Joel’s raw grief over losing Tess can convert either to bitter resentment toward Ellie, or a fresh sense of paternal responsibility. Or an anguished meld of both. When and if Joel allows himself to feel for Ellie as he did for Sarah, it’s going to be explosive stuff.
And so, another fine episode in which the world-building emerges organically and persuasively, the visuals and acting continue to be top-notch, the tension builds to a bloom of satisfying violence. Still unclear whether the series is slickly repackaged horror tropes or a deeply philosophical (forgive the term) game-changer. But we’re in no hurry to find out.
Stray observations
- Last recap, I included a full disclosure that I’m not a gamer and never played the Naughty Dog version of The Last Of Us. However, research was conducted over here, for those with ten hours to kill.
- In the previous episode’s extended prologue set in 2003, Joel, Tommy and Sarah were having breakfast when a news report came on the radio about an emergency in Jakarta.
- Ellie waking up on the ground is an elegant call-back to Sarah waking in bed up at 2am when the outbreak hits Austin.
- As someone from New Hampshire who has lived in New York a long time I must say, Boston has never looked so livable.
- The Last Of Us is the furthest from z comedy (where my Return of the Living Dead fans at), which makes Ellie’s wisecracks and teen sass all the more welcome. Her “twitch” gag and then muttering okay, if she can’t have a gun she’ll throw a sandwich is low-key but refreshing comic relief.
- Tess’s line, “It’s the long or way or the we’re-fucking-dead way,” is one I plan to use on my next car trip.
- Art direction kudos: One-second shot of empty restaurant: tablecloths covered in moss, water glasses brimful of green. Nearly every shot has a verdant splash, even when the trio cross the hotel roof bar, plastic chairs are bright green.
- Is the idea of a Zombie Siesta new in z lore? When the undead aren’t actively chasing lunch or out for a nice shamble, do they take a grumbly disco nap?
- Random thought re: the colonial history we glimpse in the spooky museum: White European settlers were an invasive species in the Americas.
- Calling it now: Tendril smooch with Anna Torv? Most sex in all of season one.
324 Comments
Kinda figured Tess wasn’t in it for the long haul, considering I didn’t even know Anna Torv was in this until the pilot aired, but at least she went out like a badass.
she also got a pretty hot mushroom king to kiss goodbye to. very romantic scene.
I think this has been the most times I’ve heard Anna Torv say “fuck” in a series. I liked it!
Docked a point for the trying to get the zippo to work when there are a floor full of grenades right in front of her.
Also, why isn’t Joel stuffing his pockets full of grenades on the way out? Or at least Ellie, who doesn’t have a gun, shoulda grabbed a few.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought that. When they spilled out out I though “Oh good, they don’t have to rely on lighter or matches that would probably actually go out as soon as they hit the gas”
Overall I liked the episode, but yeah that bit really irked me. She starts to panic because she can’t get her lighter to get a flame after knocking over a case of grenades to scatter them in the fuel on the floor. Maybe pick one of them up?
She is rock solid in Mindhunters. She’s a great actress and fit the part very well from the game.
She’s fantastic in an Australian series she’s doing at the moment called The Newsreader. Season 1 aired in 2021. Season 2 is coming out soon.
I have not heard of it. I shall watch it tonight.
I absolutely loved her in Mindhunters.
It’s funny watching playthroughs on YouTube done back in 2013 when the game first came out and hearing players saying “I don’t recognize this Sarah girl, she’s not the one on the box” and “The box just shows Joel and Ellie, not Tess”.
I honestly think I liked that more than the premiere. It showed that they can do more than just adapt the cutscenes and are able to take the actual gameplay loop and make it compelling to watch. The premiere was really good, but outside of the cold open (which please let every episode have some kind of pre-outbreak cold open) I couldn’t shake the whole “I’ve already seen this” feeling.
Yes! This! I was watching it thinking … Haven’t I seen this show before? It looked great but man have we seen this escape the city , don’t get killed stuff a million times before? Still, it was done beautifully.
Okay, so far with every episode having a flashback episode. I think that’s how Abby will be introduced in the season finale.
I hope Joel dies in episode 3 so that a bunch of man-baby incel fucks will complain about it forever!
great episode, aside from the opening 30 minutes of episode one, I wasn’t hooked last episode. this did it for me.it was visually beautiful, tense and still filled with a lot of humanity. Ellie makes sense to me, the funniest and quippiest people I know were also surrounded by a lot of trauma in their developmental years.I think Ellie being Queer is clever in rooting her as someone that would have grown up in a hostile environment regardless, and still some shit she has to navigate despite there being a zombie apocalypse.
She probably is – a girl “not having a boyfriend” is TV/Hollywood shorthand for being a lesbian. But honestly, she’s just 14. Not everyone is even thinking about what sexuality they are at that age.
believe me, as a Queer person, you know and are panicking that you are Queer long before 14, and it’s a lot more than who you are attracted to. It’s a big part of her character.
For sure. I didn’t fully realise I was Queer when I was 14, both because I was a late bloomer of sorts but also because asexuality wasn’t well understood at the time (It’s really improved in the past few years). It took me until I was in my 30s to understand it. Though looking back at 14-year-old me with hindsight, holy shit was it obvious.
i wonder if growing up in a post apocalyptic, zombie-invested environment would hinder one’s ability to look inward and figure that out, or if it would have the opposite effect and you’d come to these conclusions much earlier. doing my best to phrase that inoffensively haha.
I think you always know, since as soon as you’re able to start formulating an idea of the self as a little sprout, no matter the environment. I don’t think a zombie apocalypse would reduce people’s queer and transphobia though, and people might try to align with the conservative ideals of the past world even more so as some sort of way of handing off blame for the state of things.
“Ya know, we got these dang mushroom zombies cuz too many woke libs but their dang pronouns in their dang twitter bios!” – 40% of Americans in Last of Us, if the apocalypse had started today instead of in 2003.
Santos be full Princess Peach drag queen of the mushroom kingdom, ordering hits on his own people. I just finished reading the Trans zombie survivalist book, Manhunt. And it just felt sadly apt that even in zombie apocalypse that America just gonna act like America and double down on its hate.
Da gay frogs bit the people from trans laboratory can’t you see!!!
yeah like, you would ‘know you’re different’ but i wonder if even socially it would be like ‘being gay is selfish we need to repopulate’ or something.
The FEDRA fortress cities are overpopulated for the resources they have at hand. Repopulating is the least of their concerns.
I was on the Battlestar Galactica IMDB boards back in the day and there were gay people who did post on the forums that if it was needed, they would do their part to help repopulate society.
There are definitely still homophobes in the TLOU world. One is in Part 2.
It’s hard to know. Everyone’s different and figures it out at different times because of a range of factors. Some people know quite early on in life, others figure it out later. There’s no one universal experience.
I am not queer, but I definitely knew who I was sexually attracted to at 14, and well before that. Is it a case of knowing, but not really wanting to know, or not having the framework to understand when most things are hetero based, or something else?
I can only speak to my own direct experience but for me it was not having the framework or the words to understand it. As a teenager I always thought girls were pretty and I loved being around them and wanted to date them but the critical thing that wasn’t there was that I never thought about them in the sense of wanting to actually have sex with them.Through my 20s I dated and had several relationships with women which were sexual but I never had any particular drive to do it, not was it something I especially enjoyed doing.In my early 30s I read an article about an actor from a TV show I watched coming out as Ace and describing her experiences and it was like reading my own thoughts and feelings.Further research confirmed it for me and I accepted that I was Ace.That’s the thing – Without the language or knowing that it was even a thing, I always just assumed I was straight (because I was hetero-romantically attracted to women) and that everyone who talks about sex and talks about how horny they are etc are just exaggerating.With that language and after reading others’ experiences, the benefit of hindsight showed I was quite clearly asexual as a teenager. So many signs and so many experiences made sense in hindsight.Honestly, I wish I’d had that language and that conversations around sexuality were as diverse as they are today because there sure as shit wasn’t anything about that (or even really about being anything other than cishet). It came be confusing as absolute fuck when you realise you genuinely are different and don’t experience the world the same way that most do. Similar things have happened to people I know – Someone I grew up with figured out she was gay in her late 30s and came out when she was 40 after being married for the better part of 15 years. A friend of mine came out as Ace and Trans in his early 30s after only realising he was different.
Like I said, everyone is different and some figure it out much earlier than others.
Nah, she’s gay. It’s not something she “has to think about” anymore than a straight kid with a crush ever did.
I liked how the scene in Jakarta was actually scripted in Indonesian. I could actually follow some of the dialog as I’ve studied the language a bit.
Bravo to Christine Hakim for making, in a brief role, Dr. Ratna a compelling, dignified character with an inner life. The way she even protested her being picked up by the cops told us something about her.
Last week I typed in “Anna Torv” into YouTube and saw a Last of Us press junket interview with a comic book site. The interviewer’s second question was on how since Tess doesn’t last that long in the game, how did that factor into Torv playing the character. So I got spoiled that Tess would die in the series. Thanks, thoughtless interviewer! At least it wasn’t later on in the series, to which I would have been more pissed.I liked this episode. We’re getting the standard zombie tale, but it’s pretty well done, with some del Torro like touches and emotional beats.
Minor characters who still get to show a spark of personality, are a sure sign of excellent writing
Chernobyl was full of those, not coincidentally!
100%. I see so many of the actors who played smaller roles in Chernobyl pop up all over the place now, and I instantly remember what they did in that series. Just last week I was watching Inside Man (terrible, don’t waste your time) on Netflix, and Alan Williams played a very small part. But the second I heard his voice I pictured the KGB chairman from Chernobyl. That character’s part was so perfectly tinged with menace that I can’t hear the actor anymore without associating him with the very few scenes he had in Chernobyl. So many actors gave memorable performances in small roles in Chernobyl, in part because of their efforts, but also equally because of how Mazin wrote them and how Johan Renck shot the series.
Before I watched Chernobyl someone spoiled me by telling me that the plant would have a nuclear meltdown.
HA!
“So I got spoiled that Tess would die in the series.”Oh get the fuck over it, you fucking crybaby. The game is nearly 10 motherfucking years old at this point. Go fuck off.
*raises eyebrows* You know, for a guy with “Chill” multiple times in his username, you’re taking an innocuous comment a bit overdramatically. Well, glad I gave you the opportunity to vent about nothing to do with me or the show.Sorry I wasn’t clear. I really like Anna Torv. It was a delightful surprise she was on the show, and so I wanted her to stick around a while, and not know in advance that she wouldn’t.
Pardon the gamer, you know how they are.
Cry harder, dipshit.
The only person crying here is you. Notice how you (and I truly encourage you to actually read the responses to you) got so flustered with being called out that you ignored all the valid points brought to your attention and instead chose to spoil the ending as an unwarranted retaliatory measure, similar to how a 16 year old who gets asked to leave the classroom for being a jerk explodes in anger at everyone around them for not tolerating their poor behavior. All that said….Cry harder, dipshit 🙂
lol keep on whining and writing novels about me, it’s hilarious that i’m living rent free in your head. fact is the OP is a fucking moron and whining about spoilers in a 10 year old game. It’s irrefutable, along with the fact that you don’t deserve the fucking oxygen you breathe. 🙂
You seem to lack awareness, critical thinking skills, and intelligence if we’re being honest. Aside from one user calling you a lunatic, you’re simply attacking people calling out your overreactive (and honestly senseless) original comment. You’ve attempted to spoil the game for multiple users as a retaliatory measure.You know how that comes off as? Like a 16 year old being thrown out of class for being rude and obnoxious to the whole class, but you continue to kick and scream cause you don’t like being called out. All that said….
Cry harder dipshit 🙂
dismissed motherfucker! 🙂
Eh, not really. You’re trying far too hard for someone who got upset over a completely valid comment. Blah blah blah rent free blah blah you still responded with two comments so we’re living in both of our heads rent free. That was a mid insult at best, and not well thought out (again, you lack critical thinking skills).
Upset implies anger, which is hilarious. keep projecting though!
So you lack basic reading comprehension too lol. The only person who’s been upset so far is you, you legitimately told someone to off themselves because you’re sitting here raging over something as pedantic as this. Even OP cares less than you.Ur mad bro, but hey thanks for also responding cause I’m glad to see if I’m still living rent free in your head, funny how your low level insult backfired on ya!
Nah man, I feel pity for you and the OP. Fucking kill yourselves already because it’s pitiful watching you waste oxygen like this. 🙂
Wow, took you 5 days to come up with the same response you say to everyone else, it might’ve come off as a little more hostile if you weren’t a parrot repeating the same thing over and over lmfao. Good luck little buddy, this argument was dead in the water when you started it and you thought THAT response was gonna do something. Again, critical thinking, work on it 😉
You’re just blathering into the void fuckwad. Dismissed again! only you’ll see this. 😀
You ever get frustrated being a one trick pony? Best wishes kiddo, you claim to be the father of two children and here their father is talking shit on the internet instead of caring for them. But hey, at least you acted tough on a Gawker blog and that really counts for something 😉
I made more than 500k this year shitwipe, mostly working from home. I’m doing just fine, kids are fine. But hey, keep projecting your own insecurities and the utter fucking failure at life you are. :DSeriously, just fucking kill yourself. We need the oxygen.
Go take of your kids and stop posting fake salaries on the internet lmao
lol they’re fine, thanks for your fake concern. i’d be more worried about your pathetic shitpile of existence if I were you. go off now sparky. p.s. sorry to burst your bubble but that’s actually was on my tax filings for last year. 🙂
I mean I genuinely feel bad for them. You waste your time on the internet lying by claiming to make $500K (idc about your taxes sorry buddy) instead of spending time with them, think about that as you type out your next response ;). Also, you spend your time on the internet insisting people off themselves over the most pedantic shit (sometimes it’s valid tbf to you but this instance was not), you are not ok and they definitely aren’t safe with you lol
LOL it takes 30 seconds to respond to a piece of shit like you. Kids are taken care, lots of time spent with them. Attack me all you want, all you’re doing is projecting your own failures in life buddy. It’ll be alright if you just off yourself, you’ll do the world a lot more good than what you’re doing right now. Also – sorry that you’re poor as shit. 🙂
Not poor, not rich, doing just fine and can happily admit it. Also no kids, don’t want them, can’t project failure when there’s nothing to fail. I just want you to do better as a parent.Regardless we’re just at the point of saying the same thing back and forth, moreso you cause you’ve just repeatedly told me to off myself in no creative, hurtful, or thoughtful ways lol. Genuinely was hoping you’d come up with something that was shocking or humorous, but I gave you like 7 chances and you’re just not creative or abrasive. Anyways, if you want the last word I’m granting you it, you’re welcome!
Here you go: smother yourself in some peanut butter, cover yourself with bees, light yourself on fire and jump off into a molten vat in a foundry. You’re 100% lying, but it’s ok – whatever makes you feel better about your pathetic, shitty life. 🙂
lol I follow his comments every now and then (I made the mistake of engaging once, realized he’s just this character all the time and decided I had better things to do with my time) and I think you win for responding the most number of times. I am looking forward to the news story that will be coming (“local man’s horrible internet life exposed!”) as so often happens with these people that think the internet is anonymous, which, you know, means they can be as horrible as they want. You know, just so I can say “Oh man I made the mistake of responding to that idiot…once”
Tbh I was just seeing where the discourse would go, but you can only be told to KYS so many times before you realize it’s their only line of defense and then it begins to get boring. I just don’t understand the extreme malice towards this particular individual, but it sounds like this is DarGars MO unfortunately. Weirdly enough he started apologizing to some people? But hey, maybe growth is happening.
Haha maybe. Who knows–it would be a surprise, to be sure…but a welcome one. I think I got KYS AND die a horrid painful death in a fire. It was right around there I realized it was a pretty pointless (and repetitive) interaction. ah well, I hope you don’t KYS! or die in a fire for that matter!
I wish you well too! The user just stopped posting after those apologies…makes me wonder if someone caught them lol
There’s something SERIOUSLY wrong with you, Dude!
There is. I’m sorry for my behavior. I’m trying to get better, seriously.
No there isn’t, if you take care of your kids as well as you say you do, then getting better isn’t gonna be that much of an effort. You just overreact to certain things, some of your responses to people about injustice were spot on.Now if you’ve made everything you told me up, then maybe it’s time to delete this account and start fresh cause you were unnecessarily shitty to a lot of people for a long period of time.
None of it was made up. My family is fine. I’ve just been an asshole and I’m sorry, for real. Not much more to be said.
Apology accepted, I just hope you’re in a better place now, and glad to know your kids are fine. I wish you well!
Joel gets Ellie to the Fireflies but they casually inform him that the procedure to create a cure will kill Ellie (since they have to slice her brain open). Joel has a hissy fit, goes on a fucking rampage and fucking kills ALL of them, including doctors and tons of innocent people, and pretty much dooms humanity, just so Ellie doesn’t have to die. Complete horseshit.Oh, and then in the next 4 years after that along the way Ellie learns about and hates Joel for doing that. Then the daughter of the main doctor (Abby) who was supposed to operate on Ellie, tracks down Joel and bashes his head open (like Negan->Glenn in the Walking Dead). Ellie goes on a quest of revenge, LOSES badly, goes back again and almost kills Abby but then lets her go.HOPE YOU LIKED ALL THE SPOILERS!!!! 🙂
Right? What’s his problem?
How dare you not be a socially-retarded man-child who plays video games incessantly?
Gamers learn to socialize like a normal person challenge (impossible)
Reaction level: Nuke the city
As lung as they mention radiation levels of fifteen thousand Roentgen
Reaction level: die in a fucking fire. kthx 🙂
Oh I see–you’re always like this. Well…good luck with that.
Good luck dying in that fire that you deserve to. Hopefully it’s the most fucking painful thing possible.
Hey now, I didn’t play the game but I also was unaware of its existence until recently upon hearing about this show. Just wait until the season is over to be open about spoilers and let everyone enjoy the story, damn. That really isn’t asking the world. You sound like one of those people who needed to tell people about the Spider-Mans after opening day of No Way Home.
Joel finally gets Ellie to the Fireflies, who let on that they will have to kill her to try and make a vaccine. He flips like a fucking moron and kills everyone and takes her away, thus dooming humanity. In the 2nd game, the daughter of the doctor he killed smashes Joel’s brains out and Ellie spends the rest of the game seeking revenge and not getting it. There ya go, you wanker.
The game isn’t some pop cultural icon that everyone and there mother knows about. It’s not the Planet of The Apes, or The Sixth Sense. Calling him a crybaby and telling him to fuck off makes you sound like a lunatic.
20 million+ copies says otherwise, asswipe. It’s 10 fucking years old, spoilers are not a problem any longer. The end. calling someone a lunatic is rich coming from someone who is leeching valuable resources on this planet (you, motherfucker). go fucking kill yourself already.
There are a lot of people watching this show that never played the game or know what happens in it. We shouldn’t spoil the big plot points of the game for those people just because the game is 10 years old.
Joel finally gets Ellie to the Fireflies, who let on that they will have to kill her to try and make a vaccine. He flips like a fucking moron and kills everyone and takes her away, thus dooming humanity. In the 2nd game, the daughter of the doctor he killed smashes Joel’s brains out and Ellie spends the rest of the game seeking revenge and not getting it. There ya go, you wanker.
Wow, so tell us you live in your mom’s basement and dream of murdering her in her sleep without telling us you live in your mom’s basement and dream of murdering her in your sleep.
Jesus Christ…..internet or not, some people have no interpersonal skills whatsoever.
projection much? reported as you’re definitely a postal case waiting to happen.
Turns out being an incel gamer who lives in his mom’s basement makes you quite angry and just a tad abrasive.Who knew?
I adored the intro and liked that the doctor got a more dignified ending of probably blowing up with her family and not the specimen not being dead crap. Also hell yeah Anna Torv. Always a pleasure when she appears whether its something big like Mindhunters and Fringe or a smaller role like this.
Apparently IGN mentioned Torv’s death in an Instagram post about the show…this morning.
I never played the game, didn’t even know it was based on a game, but if you watch the first five seconds of the opening credits, you’ll notice there are only two names. If you saw any promo photos, there are only two people. If you read any of the briefest synopses, it’s summed up as a “lone wolf and cub” story. Anyone other than those two people aren’t getting more than an ep or two.
Joel gets Ellie to the Fireflies but they casually inform him that the procedure to create a cure will kill Ellie (since they have to slice her brain open). Joel has a hissy fit, goes on a fucking rampage and fucking kills ALL of them, including doctors and tons of innocent people, and pretty much dooms humanity, just so Ellie doesn’t have to die. Complete horseshit.Oh, and then in the next 4 years after that along the way Ellie learns about and hates Joel for doing that. Then the daughter of the main doctor (Abby) who was supposed to operate on Ellie, tracks down Joel and bashes his head open (like Negan->Glenn in the Walking Dead). Ellie goes on a quest of revenge, LOSES badly, goes back again and almost kills Abby but then lets her go.HOPE YOU LIKED ALL THE SPOILERS!!!! 🙂
Between her, and the general, conveying their just stark, absolute terror in understated ways just on their faces, and specifically with their eyes… those are some fucking fantastic performances.
They nailed the clickers. My reaction to that scene was basically a lot of head-nodding and finger-snapping approval 😁Prosthetics, audio design, and movement all replicated perfectly. And I think Bella Ramsay has been an awesome Ellie so far. Her lovable sass is the whole deal! (I can understand viewers who have seen this type of character before a million times not thinking anything of it, but if I may get in the weeds a little bit, in gaming, for a NPC companion, her characteristics felt special and unique. Ellie was a far cry from escorting Ashley in Resident Evil 4.)I liked this episode better than the premiere, but I’m still not sold on axing the spores. Craig and Niel are falling on the sword for this one, but I suspect the decision came from higher up, because it sounds like the type of thing an exec would want, because they don’t want masks, and they are paying to see actors’ faces. It’s whatever. Just don’t make the presumption that the audience wouldn’t be able to suspend their disbelief a little by using them. (when I’d argue more suspension of disbelief is actually required the new way they’ve done it.) The show is weirdly more supernatural now, but spores are literally how fungus reproduces and makes better sense for how easily the pandemic could spread so far so quickly, rather than the level contact required as is.
On the one hand, yeah, it’s a bit less believable that the fungus wouldn’t be spreading spores all over the place, given the real-world knowledge of how fungi work. On the other hand, if that were the case, it would be less believable that any humans survived the outbreak, much less the amount of people in the QZ. I can easily see the arguments for both, and how it could be difficult creative choice.
Right, I think my question would be – “Why wouldn’t the spores drift on the wind over the top of that 3oft wall around the QZ? Wouldn’t they need to live in some sort of airtight biosphere?”
Yeah frankly the amount of time everyone was running around without masks on in the game, and the amount of close-quarters combat where they walked it off absent an actual bite, is sort of ridiculous. Taking it outside video game logic into live action would make that doubly obvious. I dunno if this was the best part around that, but I can see why they decided on a change.
There’s a novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, that came out about a year after the game and has a ton of similarities to The Last of Us: cordyceps mutation zombifies most people, one immune girl emerges, and a convoy has to take her across England to hopefully reach a place where she can be studied to find a cure. In the novel, there comes a point at which (and I don’t want to say too much more to avoid spoiling the book) cordyceps releases spores, and basically that one event means that any remaining humans have to live in bubbles because they’ll become infected as soon as they breathe the air. Suffice to say, very few humans survive this. And so yeah, I agree with you. The choice to not include spores in the series makes sense to me. Spores would present an insurmountable challenge to the internal logic of the narrative. Better to build out cordyceps in other ways, like the roots/hivemind they’ve given it, I think.
That’s the thing though, spores aren’t an insurmountable challenge if dealt with in somewhat ‘realistic’ way. The reason the real world cordyceps species haven’t wiped out all the insects in the world is because spores need very specific conditions to propagate. Fungi release many, many thousands of spores because the ratio that will actually propagate is minute. That’s where high concentrations of spores indoors, like in the game, would more ‘realistically’ be dangerous to humans.Obviously, none of this is particularly realistic, but the show has a fungi that suddenly took the impossible evolutionary leap to having actively motile “tendrils” like an animal. That’s a lot less realistic than having spores, which a real world human’s immune system deals with daily, being dangerous in high concentrations.That’s not to say the game made a whole lot of sense in having the infected retreat into buildings and underground areas to ‘die’ and go into their fruiting form where they released spores. That’s the opposite of what cordyceps species do in the real world. They impel their hosts to climb upward so when the fungi gets to its fruiting stage it’s spores are spread as far as possible on the wind.
There’s a certain fun irony in the whole premise – the talk-show scene in the first episode lays out the idea that humans will “win” against viral pandemics but not against a fungal pandemic. It leaves out the part where vertebrate species “won” against fungal pandemics when they evolved a cellular immune system. Anyway, they probably don’t have spores because Stranger Things already did the “big chunks of toxic dust floating in the air” thing.
Wait what it sounds like that book plagiarized the game.
I can’t say anything definitive because I read the book without even knowing The Last of Us existed. (I liked the book a lot, for what it’s worth, and a pretty decent film adaptation was made a few years later starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine and Glenn Close.) I’m not a gamer and I didn’t know it was a thing until Mazin started working on the adaptation. But from the little I’ve read in the last few days there is a definite similarity in how both use cordyceps. I think there are some key differences between the novel and game, particularly with regard to the girl at the center of things. I think the two are different enough that I don’t think you could easily make a case that the novel ripped off the game. But there are a lot of similarities. Some of that could just be attributable to the complete flood of zombie narratives in the early aughts. A lot of similar ideas got bounced around and some similarities are inevitable.
They’re similar in the sense that the entire “zombie” genre has similar tropes. Plus, I think Thundercats might be misremembering the book a bit. They’re not transporting the girl to a research facility. They START in a research facility, which gets overrun, and the genesis of the roadtrip is the survivors trying to escape. Also, the girl at the center is not immune at all. She’s something else entirely.
Eh, maybe I misremember a bit. It’s been about 10 years since I read it. But I think my larger points still hold: I would say that Melanie is a kind of immune, or at least viewed as the key to humanity’s survival in a way that is similar to Ellie. In that regard, both characters serve similar functions in the narrative. And while yes they start at a research facility and fleeing heading toward Beacon, it is still with the hope (at least on the humans’ side and to Dr. Caldwell in particular) that Melanie will help to unlock a cure.
The author, Mike Carey, claims he’d finished writing before hearing about the game, and I don’t disbelieve him. If you can accept that he independently came up with the idea of cordyceps infecting humans, the other elements in common are not a huge leap.It’s actually a great book, and there’s a movie adaptation starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, and Glenn Close which is very decent too.
It’s also the idea that, once you exit a heavy spore area, it’s masks off immediately and away we go, with no need for any sort of decontamination process, despite presumably still being caked in the stuff and with no real way to achieve decontamination out in the world either. It works in the game as a visual cue for a different part of the experience, but it only makes partial sense.But I believe they’ve hinted that spores will be still a factor when bloaters show up, they’re just a much rarer vector of infection in the show’s world.
I always wondered in the game when Joel was in a spore location and wearing his mask and then moved a few feet away and said “Ok, it’s safe now” and took off his mask why it was suddenly safe. He didn’t close some hermetically-sealed door – if he turned around he would still see the spores a few feet behind him.
Ellie ain’t an NPC companion. Have you actually played the game?
Filming a bunch of scenes with masks on not only makes it more difficult for the actors, it makes it harder for everyone, from the director down, to get a high-quality product in the can (or the digital equivalent, anyway).And if they had stuck with spores and masks, it would still have been difficult to use them consistently. Which buildings, which areas have spores? What happens if someone accidentally trips over or breaks an infected (as happens in this episode)? Does the resulting cloud contains enough spores to be dangerous? And so on. People always find something to complain about.
They did the right thing making infection a contact bite. From this episode along, they’ve shown they don’t need the added, mostly invisible and impersonal threat of spores to keep the tension at a high simmer throughout. Battling infected is always going to be more entertaining.
“And if they had stuck with spores and masks, it would still have been difficult to use them consistently. Which buildings, which areas have spores? What happens if someone accidentally trips over or breaks an infected (as happens in this episode)? Does the resulting cloud contains enough spores to be dangerous?”They explain all of this in the game pretty well. It’s basically any room and place with poor to no outside ventilation. So windowless rooms, basements, tunnels, anything subterranean which is where you also encounter the most clickers. And yes, touching or breathing in too close to the infected releases enough spores to get you potentially infected. It’s why you see the big buildings abandoned and derserted. Too many poorly ventilated areas where spores can spread.While you both make good arguments, I agree with Capeo overall that this would’ve made things more suspenseful. I’m sure they could’ve worker out something with the masks.
You make a good argument for keeping the spores. That could’ve worked. My lack of knowledge of the game’s world contributed to my thoughts on the matter. I only played the first few hours of the game on PS3, so memory of the lore is both incomplete and lost to time.
And the real world thing with spores is the vast majority of them never actually propagate, hence why fungi release so many to begin with. They need to happen to land in perfect conditions. With cordyceps, even when spores land on an insect, it takes the perfect level of humidity and temperature for it to propagate. That’s why real world cordyceps strains don’t wipe out every insect in the ranges they occur in. That’s also why I don’t really buy Druckmann and Mazin saying stuff like, “this is a more realistic approach.” Obviously, neither approach is realistic, but spores are a hell of a lot more realistic than a fungi suddenly evolving motility with these actively moving “tendrils.” That’s a quantum evolutionary leap that’s far beyond the leap of cordyceps infecting humans in the first place. They could’ve stayed with something along the lines of concentrations of spores are dangerous because the high exposure rate makes it far more likely you are infected. Humans inhale thousands of spores (and pollen, etc.) everyday depending on the season and a healthy immune system deals with that just fine. So the could’ve still been somewhat realistic in saying something like, the concentration of spores is infectious because the sheer number of spores overwhelms a humans immune response, while the small amount of spores that might be floating about in the open air isn’t enough. That would be much closer to ‘reality’ than a fungi suddenly developing motile tentacles.
Yeah, but “masks on” (or “finding ways to navigate a toxic environment”) is a tried and tested game mechanic that’s been around since the early days of gaming — e.g. Half Life, Fallout, etc. — where it often adds another dimension to the gameplay with very little production overhead. Once the code is written, pretty much all you have to do is modify a few data files to add it to various parts of the game. This works because you can weave it into the narrative without worrying about how it plays to the (non-playing) audience or any additional technical aspects of directing and shooting the scenes. I suspect the production team didn’t want any additional headaches over trying to decide which rooms/tunnels/basements required masks to navigate. I’m sure the set designers had plenty to say on the decision too.Also, spare a thought for Pedro Pascal. I mean, the poor guy is already permanently masked up in one TV show he’s starring in…
I honestly got tired of the mechanic in the metro games. At least in the last one, you only had to wear it sometimes.
If only they’d had the foresight to hire someone with a proven track record of giving high quality performances while wearing a mask…
Has he? How many of those performances actually featured him?
I also think it would be tough to convincingly portray the spores on an already dark set without resorting to potentially wonky CGI to pull it off.
The spores would literally just be backlit dust, like is already in bunch of scenes, sometimes unintentionally. It would be way easier to do than the CGI they need for the tendrils. Not making a judgment either way on the changes, just saying, spores are far, far, far easier to do practically.
The backlit dust in scenes are anything but unintentional. Also I’m not sure why people think there will be no spores, when it was literally mentioned in the full season review that there is?
I think like you said, backlit dust is already present, sometimes unintentionally. To portray spores you would have to make it distinguishable from dust. More prevalent and dense. That would cause production issues(breathing it in, needing to clean it between shots, getting it in the production equipment, etc.) if done practically and not look terribly convincing via VFX.
Doing practical on set particulates is very easy and the norm. I’ve done it (over 20 years ago now) and from what I’ve seen the process is still basically the same. There’s a bunch of different types of particulates made of natural and synthetic materials depending on how much you want it to float in the air. It’s delivered simply with a Dustin-Mizer type tool and there are attachments that give the dust a positive or negative static charge depending on whether you what it cling to things or get that swirling in the air effect. You have the mizers on one side of the set and exhaust ducts on the other side. The talent doesn’t actually walk through it. You have flexible ducted air directing the particulates and they are between the camera and the talent, making it appear like they are in it. It’s standard stuff. Frankly though, it would also be very easy to CGI.
That’s pretty cool. I mostly thinking of artificial snow machines as a way of conveying the spores. However, can you point to examples of CGI air particles? Not arguing with you there, just wanted a point of reference, but it was probably done seamlessly, that it didn’t look like CGI.
A specific movie? Probably not, because it’s pretty ubiquitous. Just the bare bones After Effects pulls off volumetric dust (not to mention the game itself): You’re seeing it a lot more than you likely realize.
Masks certinly didn’t hurt Pascal in The Mandalorian. Can’t imagine some scenes would kill them here either.
No, spores is a Mazin decision. You should listen to the podcast, it’s informative.https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hbos-the-last-of-us-podcast/id1660320068
I’m already subconsciously adding ‘this is the way’ to everything Pascal says—if he were to wear a gas mask through most of the show with the added ‘muffling’ of his voice that would only be worse.
The no spores thing is a curious choice but one I’m down for. It’s an adaptation. If I wanted the game recreated, I’d just play the game again.
I hate horror movies so much, even in the slightest of conditions I get way too nervous (I was sweating just watching Dr. Strange 2).
But for some odd reason, call it some form of self inflicting harm, I am super excited and rooting to see all the clickers from the game while I’m watching this. I’m basically rooting and begging them to scare me like they did in the game 🙂
I’m holding out hope that when Ellie mentioned Infected that could spew spores I’m hoping that we actually get to see a version of that. I’d be alright with concentrated spore spewing.
I don’t buy the “the show doesn’t want to cover up the actors’ faces with masks” excuse. In the game I think Joel and Tess are the only main characters we see wearing a gas mask because of spores – Tess only does it once (when you’re going through the tunnels looking for Robert) and it’s very brief. SPOILER The character we meet in next week’s episode is wearing a mask when you meet him, but there are no spores around – he’s just being safe.After that Joel only wears a mask a few more times – in the subway after Tess’ death, SPOILER in the hotel basement, and at the university. Other than those times, every time you fight Infected or are just walking around you aren’t wearing a mask. So even if this show was a 1:1 translation of the game, there would be very few scenes of the actors wearing gas masks.
Not sure if you’ve heard, deep inside your Covid cult, but masks don’t, and never did, work. It was always simply a virtue-signaling accessory to let everyone know what a good little boy you were, following the authoritarian directives of the most evil entities on the planet—the government and big pharma.I hope you received your cookie and a nice little pat on the head.
The fight definitely did a good job of driving home ‘this is not an invincible hero’ (even if plot armor says otherwise). As much hiding as fighting – and getting easily trounced when doing the latter.
Hakim did an amazing job as the professor – her body language really sold the doom and despair to come.
As a note ‘phytonotic’ is incorrect because fungus are not plants. In fact, in terms of divergence, they’re closer to Animalia than they are to plants.
Yep, fungi are our fellow opistokonts!
NEEEERRRRDSS!!!!
Ahem, you’re the poster with the word ‘valedictorian’ in their user name. Also, Jason Bourne was no slouch in the book learning department either. He needed to be, his life depended on it!
Valedictorians need things presented in a particular way. Here, let me try:Flagellum : Opisthokont :: ___ : EukaryoteAnd yes, I know that opisthokonts are also eukaryotes.
What did you call me?
Doesn’t seem to be much circling tables excessively and doubling back on empty shelves in case they come across random screws or pills. Starting to doubt their commitment to the source material.
There was a nice swapping ammunition scene. Although he was kinda slow about it – Joel clearly needs to map tab to cycle weapons/ammo then spam r to reload.
Also, as anyone that has played the game knows, when an enemy is after you, you reload your gun while running, not while standing still.
For real. And I swear, if I ever see Ellie or Joel carrying more than 9 rounds of ammunition for any of their guns, this show is dead to me.
If this was an Uncharted adaptation, I’d say there weren’t nearly enough needless forward somersaults done up a flight of stairs for my liking..
ironically, i thought this episode looked more like a videogame than anything. i laughed for a moment when i saw the boarded up hallway. not because i thought it was dumb or bad, but it was just so clearly videogame logic.
The locked doors were what did it for me. Classic video game “you’re in a building with 50 doors to check and 48 of them are locked” move.
It WAS a hotel, though, where all the guest room doors would in fact be locked by default.
The stairwell was just one long disguised loading scene.
I genuinely went “Awwww, shit” when they got to the flooded room and Ellie said she couldn’t swim.
When she said “I don’t know how to swim” I was hoping that for this series they would change it to “I can’t swim” and give a physical reason why she can’t (i.e. inner ear infection was something I heard a lot when I was a kid for someone not being able to swim).One of the biggest plot holes in the game is that, during all the months they’re traveling when nothing is going on, they don’t take a day or two for Joel to teach Ellie how to swim. They should have given her a physical reason why it was impossible for her to swim.
well said, iowa state legend and former NBA coach jeff hornacek. go cyclones!
Also, Joel didn’t need to carry a ladder or a board to pass from one building to another.2/10, bad adaptation.
No, but there were boards to walk on between buildings at one point. You know, when the adults let the Most Valuable Girl On Earth wander off into Zombie territory.
Right? That’s like 75% of the game for me lol. Also no floating pallet scene yet.
I actually thought they were going to do that when they got to the hotel.
I need a five minute monologue about the importance and versatility of rags
No bottles, no bricks, no shivs.WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE?
Also, where was my automatic weapon when fighting Clickers in the museum? I would have loved to have had that weapon there!
When Joel broke out the tape to use on Tess’ twisted ankle I wanted to shout at him “Save that tape to make a shiv!”
The reviewer seems really up his own ass about how smart he is.
Yep, this material is clearly beneath him; smarmiest A-minus I ever saw
Clickers and crumbling architecture challenge our weary zombie dodgersFor some reason I speed-read this as “womble dodgers” and thought zombie Wombles was the pop culture crossover we didn’t know we needed.
It’d certainly be a different take on teaching kids about recycling.
Saying “weary zombie dodger” five times fast would be a great newscaster voice warm-up.
“Womble Dodgers” would be a great 1980’s era British punk band name.
It’s at least on par with Chumbawamba.
Aww I was hoping Anna Torv would last a little longer at least. Though it was obvious it was coming. I haven’t played the games so I’m going in cold. Though it makes me wish AVC was doing what they did with GOT and having a book reader/game player review, and a non reader/player review. I don’t want y’all fools spoiling shit for me! Ya hear!?
Yeah it’s super annoying – especially interviewers, articles etc. that spoil too much these days directly in the headlines.P.S. Joel gets Ellie to the Fireflies but they casually inform him that the procedure to create a cure will kill Ellie (since they have to slice her brain open). Joel has a hissy fit, goes on a fucking rampage and fucking kills ALL of them, including doctors and tons of innocent people, and pretty much dooms humanity, just so Ellie doesn’t have to die. Complete horseshit.Oh, and then in the next 4 years after that along the way Ellie learns about and hates Joel for doing that. Then the daughter of the main doctor (Abby) who was supposed to operate on Ellie, tracks down Joel and bashes his head open (like Negan->Glenn in the Walking Dead). Ellie goes on a quest of revenge, LOSES badly, goes back again and almost kills Abby but then lets her go.HOPE YOU LIKED ALL THE SPOILERS!!!! 🙂
They’re doing a bit more of a comparison for the reviews over at Kotaku. Or at least they did for the pilot, haven’t seen an episode 2 review up yet but it’s early yet.
Yeah, but there was also a Kotaku article from someone who admitted said they only played the prologue who spent the whole time shit-talking Troy Baker’s Joel, one of the most acclaimed video game performances of all time, as bad.
You’d think Troy Baker slept with his wife after reading that article.
Whaaaa. Troy Baker is a talented VA and 2013 was a damn good year for him, he also did Booker DeWitt in Bioshock Infinite and the Joker in Arkham Origins.
Well I’m learning something today, as all three of those were very good performances–and it never occurred to me for a second that they might all have been by the same person. Bioshock Infinite is one of my all time favorite game’s, and his performance really sells it.
Ah nice! My nickname might give away that I like the series and my previous profile pic was the Infinite cover art. He really does sell his role as self loathing Pinkerton.
There are other sites doing that, but I’d avoid them. Even when trying their best to avoid spoilers, it’s nearly impossible to write comparisons that wouldn’t tip off an attentive reader to something that might be coming. Keep going in cold and watch the show for what it is and then sake your curiosity later. There will be no shortage of articles across the internet that dissect the minutiae of differences after the season is over.
Wow, they did not put it all in the pilot, what an amazing second episode! The game shoutouts were great too, the classic “boost me up this ledge so I can unlock the door for you” and even walking over a plank between buildings and prying a door open! All without making me smash X
I get that they were trying to emphasize to apocalyptic nature of it all, but man was that mycologist willing to give up quickly. Do they not have any antifungals at all in this world? Are athletes foot and yeast infections similarly incurable?
You have eleven people unaccounted for that might be infected, one dead, and the original host still at large. Given that those infected start trying to each other, I imagine see saw exactly the kind of chaos that happened in the premier in her head, and realized it was too late to do anything.
It’s basic disaster movie scientist methodology, I guess.“We’ve tried nothing, and we’re out of ideas. Looks like it’s time to nuke the city.”
Only if you have an economy of characters where there can’t be the 0-100 military type to propose that solution, instead.
Lol. My thoughts exactly. Imagine if Dr. Anthony Fauci walked in the room, looked around, and immediately said time to pack it all up! It’s over. Well thanks for coming by, I guess.
I imagine this is how some people at the start of Covid felt minus the firebombing. Too late, cannot be contained we are fucked.
Yeah, you have an incurable outbreak on the loose in a densely-populated city of 11 million people…Of course, any successful, preemptive firebombing of a major city would be viewed as a historic atrocity, since no one would really no what they had averted and there would probably not be any convincing argument to be made.
It’s kind of the series’ whole wonky thing with fungi. The first episode implied the only reason fungi hadn’t conquered humanity in the past was that prior to global warming they hadn’t evolved to survive in warm blooded animals. Not only do things like athlete’s foot show that’s not true (they can infect warm blooded animals just fine) it ignores that the main issue is that invertebrates like ants don’t have an adaptive immune system and that means that when a fungus gets established in them they are basically fucked (they do have a simple non-adaptive immune system but that’s more helpful for preventing infection rather than fighting one). Even ignoring antifungals we have the ability to fight the infection thanks to our adaptive immune system (B and T cells)
I read an interview with a mycologist who I remember correctly did enjoy the first episode and wouldn’t mind if it got people more interested in learning more about fungi but effectively said the premise is nonsense and could never happen in real life.
well, thank god for that.
A premise isn’t nonsense if it’s self-consistent. Fiction isn’t nonsense just because it’s fiction. “It doesn’t work this way in real life” isn’t some noteworthy observation.
Christ. Its a show, dude. About fungus zombies. Based on a video game. Its not going for the Oscar in realism. Same type of people who tried to shit on Top Gun Maverick because some of the abilities of the jets were exaggerated. Its a movie…starring Tom Cruise..being a fighter pilot…thats the selling point. Not aviation documents and specs. If you want unparalleled realism, join the air force.I mean i get – you appreciate when things are well thought out and you dont have to suspend your disbelief TOO much to enjoy it, but you obviously have a threshold and i get that. But your threshold is abnormally low for a show of this type.
Not everything has to be inch perfect.
By wonky, do you mean “based on actual scientific evidence?” because this is one thing the show gets right.
There’s a lot of evidence that after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event wiped out the dinosaurs and caused global cooling, warm-blooded mammalian and avian species were more likely to thrive in a variety of enviroments because they weren’t succeptable to severe fungal infections. Having an average internal temperature that ranges between 37° C to 40°C is typically lethal to most fungal spores, so fungi was a threat that warm-blooded species never had to worry about for survival.
What a lot of mycologists are concerned about now isn’t just that climate changing is causing some fungus species to adapt to higher temperatures, but also, for some reason, humans have started to have a lower average body temperature over the last 200 years. That defense that we’ve had for 66 million years is starting to disappear.
We’re obviously not going to get a fungus that will actually turn someone into a zombie, but there are credible concerns about emerging fungus species that could be both deadly to humans, able to survive in high temperatures, and resistant to current medical treatments. In fact, we already have a recent example of this type of fungus: Candida auris, a yeast that has emerged on multiple continents in the last decade and can cause severe infections human organs, circulatory, and nervous systems. If more fungi like this begin to become endemic we could be in for some really unpleasant times.
To be fair, I’m actually an immunology researcher, so when I’m talking about the difference between the immune systems of humans vs insects that is actually coming from a place of knowledge. Global warming is obviously important for other things and the cooling of human body temperatures is an interesting bit of trivia, but neither are particularly relevant to infection or our bodies’ ability to fight off infection.
While it’s very true that someone with a healthy immune system has an almost zero chance of getting a fungal infection, it is worrying that some species seem to be quickly evolving heat tolerance. C. auris did it in likely a span of decades. Species of Cryptococcus have also shown that same propensity. Experiments have shown that many fungi adapt to gradual increases in ambient temperatures, to the point that you can increase survivability 1C in shockingly few generations depending on the species.Obviously, that doesn’t mean we have to worry about endoparasitic fungi making human zombies. It is worrying for healthcare settings though, where immunocompromised people are common, the elderly and the very young. Fungal outbreaks are getting more and more common and can piggyback on outbreaks caused by more typical pathogens. We really only have four anti-fungal infection treatments and they are all pretty brutal on the patient, if they work at all. C. auris has a 60% mortality rate and was already tolerant to azoles, presumably because of their common use in agriculture. Now, it should be a massive evolutionary jump for currently infectious species to go from being opportunistically infectious in the immunocompromised to being able to survive a healthy immune system. That said, there are alarm bells being rung from researchers, and organizations like the CDC and WHO, that warn newer studies of infectious fungi show some of these fungi reproduce quite well, and adaptively, within the human body.
We’re obviously not going to get a fungus that will actually turn someone into a zombieNot with that attitude we won’t!
Thanks, Dr. Fauci!
You’re leaving out most of the story – Candida auris evolved as a terrible pathogen among immunocompromised people. The rapid emergence of drug-resistant fungi in the last few decades is tied to the rapid emergence of cancer treatment and supportive care for people with compromised immune systems. Drug-resistant fungi are already endemic, and we are living in dark times, but those dark times only impact a small segment of the population that lacks cellular immunity. The rest of us have been breathing fungal spores constantly without needing to care.
“The first episode implied the only reason fungi hadn’t conquered humanity in the past was that prior to global warming they hadn’t evolved to survive in warm blooded animals.”
It does nothing of the sort.
Athletes Foot and other ones like thrush are surface infections. As far as anti-fungals for internal infections, or even for eating some kinds of poisonous mushrooms, we don’t really have anything.
Agreed, it’s sci-fi movie logic, but I do think one key distinction is that in the real world among otherwise healthy individuals, fungal infections like athlete’s foot, yeast infections, oral thrush, etc can only grow on the surface of the human body (and some internal epithelial surfaces).Currently, the only fungi that grow inside a human’s bloodstream or lungs (afaik) are things like invasive candida, pneumocystis, histoplasmosis, fungal meningitis, etc that can only infect severely immune-compromised individuals – longterm hospital residents, the very elderly, AIDS patients, etc.The universe of the show/game shows a fungus that can rapidly get into the bloodstream and brains of healthy adults, so that’s the difference. And maybe it happened too quickly for our immune system to adapt yet (and Ellie is the start of that adaptation).
Common anti-fungals are used only topically for surface infections. There are very, very few anti-fungal medications available today that are effective on internal fungal infections because the biology of human cells is much more similar to fungi than that of bacteria. Due to this, it’s very difficult to find effective medications that kill a fungal pathogen without having serious negative effects on the human host.A good example is that for most people, yeast infection is only a minor inconvenience. However, for the immunocompromised such as those undergoing chemotherapy or those with AIDS, yeast (genus: Candida) can enter the lungs or bloodstream. Systemic candidiasis has a mortality rate of 30-50%.
Well great, now I’m terrified.
Lol, well you don’t have to start doom-prepping quite yet. As episode 1’s prologue scene explains, fungi generally do not survive the internal body temperatures of human hosts……yet.
Also, cryptococcus and aspergillus too.
There have been some amazing advances in topical creams
“Are athletes foot and yeast infections similarly incurable?”
Does the fungus strike you as being similar to athlete’s foot or yeast infections?
> Clicker charges> Joel blasts it in the face with a can of Dr. Scholl’s Instant Cool Athletes Foot Spray with Cooling Menthol like it’s police-grade pepper spray.
Perfect. No notes.
I really liked that scene because, fundamentally, a mycologist would have no idea how to handle a fungal outbreak. They aren’t epidemiologists, pharmacologists, or physicians. “Bomb the whole city” sounds like the exact kind of thing that a nervous person without any practical solutions would say.
Things must get hairy when she’s trying to clean out her lab.
If she could use some grant funding and pay a post-doc subsistence wages to handle the fungal apocalypse, it would be no problem.
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Clearly a fast-spreading phytonotic (plant-to-human) event has occurred.Except that a fungus isn’t a plant. In biology, plants and fungi are catagorized as two completely different kingdoms.If you’re going to try to use a fancy word, at least make sure to use the right one. In this case, it would be a fast-spreading mycotic event.
A little odd to read the reviewer having a weird Malthusian/misanthropic fantasy half way through the piece.
I think I’ve lost interest in the series. I had difficulty with the first “major” character death in the premiere. I really liked that girl and the tone her relationships with others set for the series—it made the apocalypse seem more apocalyptic, more heartbreaking, more grotesque, for those few minutes she was dealing with the situation. Then it went into some cookie-cutter tropes and I got bored and unattached.Now I’ve lost Anna Torv and there’s just not enough new or effective in this show to keep my eyes on the TV. I watch it and I think, Children of Men or Blood Quantum or the first few seasons of the Walking Dead or even, like, Attack on Titan, did this or evoked that better.
cool story
If it makes a difference the next episode has been singled out by previewers as the best of the run.
Kind of the same. I can see how this whole story plays out and it’s just gonna be stuff I’ve already seen elsewhere. Yeah, it’ll be done in a prestige way, be acted well and and look good, but rote all the same.
So you haven’t played the game, but you think you know how it’s going to play out? I’d suggest you stay with it then. It’ll likely surprise you by the end.
For those of us who have played the game and know the story, I really doubt your guess on how the story plays out is correct.The ‘zombie’ stuff is secondary to the story.
I haven’t lost interest, but I wasn’t enthused with this episode; unlike the pilot, this felt so much like a video game that you were half expecting to have button options pop up periodically. (Given it was helmed by Neil Druckmann who cowrote and directed the game, that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.)We’ll see what Episode 3 brings, but I agree that they need to move away from oft-treaded ground even if it results in a less than exacting adaptation.
lol
You’re getting Nick Offerman if you stay until next week.
Better stop here then, because about 2/3 through you’d really be mad.
But Ron Swanson, Apocalypse Version, is coming!!!
But we get Nick Offerman in the next ep! If they can keep cycling in likeable guest stars for one-ep shots and make this like an apocalyptic The Love Boat, I’d be totally satisfied.
I feel like if you’re a clever enough viewer, me telling you “it’s not going the way you think” is itself a spoiler which will let you figure out the way it’s going to go, but truly, it’s not a cliche story and the ending will move you. The clickers are just set dressing for the actual story.
Welp…I have really bad news
I have not played the game or anything so this is simply a person who watched the show up to now saying things. But… I mean, it’s just another zombie show. Yes, they tweaked the stuff so that technically if you follow a very strict definition of “Zombie” that isn’t what they are but… it’s just a zombie show in the end. “The Walking Dead” drove that entire genre into the ground to the point where it’s kinda boring…. and then TWD went on for another 7 years after doing that to make sure it was not just double tapped, but triple and quadruple shot in the head. Basically unless the show goes in a truly unique direction by episode 3, I’m out.
Thanks for letting us know.
It won’t.The “thing” going for it in the game was the connection between Joel and Ellie and it was very good for a game, but done again and again in many movies and tv series and books.It’s just “we are a family” in zombieland. And zombies are booooooring. The stupidest monster ever.Cheers
Might as well just say, “I’m done being entertained by stories featuring characters in dramatic conflict.” No one is going to be reinventing storytelling anytime soon.
i even felt that way 10 years ago when the game came out haha.
I think this is less going to convince people who are really done with the genre to come back to it because it’s a really new unique take. I think it’s more something for people who enjoy the genre but are tired of the bloat want it to feel fresh. So it’s pared down to the basics (zombies, human relationships, except the humans may be the real monsters all along etc etc), slap on a new coat of paint and execute it in a lean, slick miniseries.
I have similar feelings. I watched “The Walking Dead” faithfully, long past the point where I should have stopped.I hope something happens to make me change my mind, because I really do like the two lead performers.
They’re moving pretty fast if they already got to the capital and killed Tess by the end of part 2. I’m guessing maybe a dozen episodes for each game and a third for the dlc and some filler will be it. They already said somewhere it would be finite, which is smart. Also, somewhere around episode 7 or so, people are going to be really mad.
Since I’m not familiar with the game, I can’t comment on this. I like the actors; I’m just hoping the story keeps my interest. Since I have OD’d on plucky people battling the un-dead, I’m waiting for some new characters to appear.
When did you stop? I feel like I was mainstream by dropping out soon after Negan showed up. The episode when he kills Glen was exciting but I just totally became disinterested after that. I’ve checked back in sporadically.
I never stopped. I stuck it out through the series finale. I kept hoping it would get better.
wow, really??
It’s a zombie show, but with actually well-written and acted, compelling, very human characters you grow to care about. You know, a good story—that thing that humans are entertained by, not genres. If you check out at episode 3, you might as well not watch at all. It only works as a whole.
This show was made so that people could proudly point out the differences between the video game and the adaptation.
Source: every comment thread about this show.
It reminds me of the Walking Dead but more the first season which was good. Aiming for the Darabont first season of TWD is I think very good.
ok, enjoy the 498th season of CISNCISwhateverthefuck
for now it’s a bit more interesting than the walking dead; but that’s a low bar.
I’m curious how they avoid it after the first 2 seasons which will be full of flashbacks to Indonesia and a harrowing journey west. It’s going to take some serious writing talent to avoid going full Gimple.
There is a key narrative turn in the game that sets it apart from the stories it takes inspiration from, but I’m not sure it can be executed as well in a different medium like this. Seeing how they handle it is maybe the thing I’m most excited for about the whole series.
I was considering this and what The Last Of Us is doing for the zombie canon is somewhat unique in the sense that a lot of zombie stuff usually only provide vague if not supernatural handwaves as to the cause of the virus. What I like / find unique about this is that they are actually giving us lore based on somewhat real world stuff (fungus etc.). Much in the same way the The Walking Dead was unique when it came out because it wanted to examine “the middle part” of a zombie apocalypse movie and stretch it out so that there was no cure at the end etc. and see what human life looked like surviving with that.
Likewise, I assumed society was sort of exhausted of zombies after The Walking Dead went on forever plus I didn’t think people wanted more dour apocalyptic type stories after the COVID lockdown but…. I’m surprised that I’m game for this.
The real story isn’t about zombies (or even fungus-y zombies). But to say more, would be in spoiler territory.
Joel gets Ellie to the Fireflies but they casually inform him that the procedure to create a cure will kill Ellie (since they have to slice her brain open). Joel has a hissy fit, goes on a fucking rampage and fucking kills ALL of them, including doctors and tons of innocent people, and pretty much dooms humanity, just so Ellie doesn’t have to die. Complete horseshit.Oh, and then in the next 4 years after that along the way Ellie learns about and hates Joel for doing that. Then the daughter of the main doctor (Abby) who was supposed to operate on Ellie, tracks down Joel and bashes his head open (like Negan->Glenn in the Walking Dead). Ellie goes on a quest of revenge, LOSES badly, goes back again and almost kills Abby but then lets her go.HOPE YOU LIKED ALL THE SPOILERS!!!! :-)P.S. You’re a fucking moron.
It really amazes me how many more seasons The Walking Dead went on after everybody I knew who watched it stopped watching it. I worked at Universal Studios there was/is a whole attraction for it and it was a big part of Halloween Horror Nights every year and nobody cared LOL
People love Episode 3, but the first and second episodes were a serviceable zombie story with a decent ending. The rest of the series kind of looks like “The Road” without the religious overtones.
Shudder. I read the book “The Road” and that was depressing enough. Pretty sure if I were to watch the movie I’d start looking at my wrists and searching for sharp objects.
I’m hoping there aren’t any more flashbacks to the past. I want a story told in the present, don’t need the extra context. I get it. Seems like a weak device to pad out the series.Full praise to the show though for doing the ‘character going round a dangerous bit to open a door from the other side’ mechanic like in the game.
Interesting, the opposite for me. I am more interested in watching the outbreak unfold than the present day. Present day is just cliche Zombie stuff I’ve seen before, but with mushrooms. Watching an outbreak happen without a time skip is rare in zombie fiction and the part I’m interested in, and was disappointed when the time skip kicked in during the first episode.
I get your argument for it but the flash back was also cliche outbreak stuff. Grabbing scientist as shes trying to relax, autopsy scene with dawning realization and then that ridiculous “bomb the whole city” like she was prepared to die rather than find a cure. Still loved the episode though
Oh agree 100%. The show has been cliche so much that I am unsure on what it’s purpose is other than to make money. Which I guess is fine, but it’s not making a case to me for why I should keep tuning in.
That was the point she’s the expert and she knows there is no possible cure.
I agree. The Walking Dead mostly skipped the beginning of the Apocalypse, actually most zombie media do a skip because its the hardest to depict. Well, I think we know what that looks like a tad more with covid so I’m fine with more flashback starts.
Hard agree. I think that was the promise of Fear the Walking Dead, which I was actually keen to see, even after going off the original show. But then it skimped out. World War Z, I also expected this from, and didn’t really get.
Yeah, I remember that being the marketing hype: we’re gonna go back and actually show the breakdown, and they did a bit of that, but it was overall a disappointment and dropped that idea relatively quick. The best parts were seeing the military come in and try to establish control and it breaking down.
The entire dlc is a flashback and supposedly, they plan to cover those events also, and probably will in a similar manner.
“Calling it now: Tendril smooch with Anna Torv? Most sex in all of season one.”What a pointless assumption to be completely wrong about.
Never trust a Zippo to work when you need it most. I have been using Zippos for 30 years and I can attest to that.
There were crates of weapons in that room. Why didn’t they take any?Why didn’t Tess just use a grenade (there were a bunch of them on the floor) instead of the Zippo?
Yeah that last bit was my issue with the moment. Sure the zippo is dramatic… but grab a fucking grenade.
I’ll chalk it up to the infection taking over her mind.
Plus, the pin flying off a grenade is just as cinematic as dropping a zippo.And wouldn’t just firing your gun against the floor provide enough spark at that point too?
Yes to all of these points. I was put off by how Tess’ death was “re-imagined” since this new change seemed only in service of being needlessly exploitative. Instead of going out like a boss in the original, they’re pinning her against the wall and evoking images of violation. What is going on in Niel Druckmann’s head these days?
Tess is already infected so it doesn’t matter if that Infected puts more fungus into her. She was just buying time by not running away or fighting back until she could get that lighter to light.
She didn’t go out like a “boss” in the game…she bought them maybe 2 seconds…Fedra comes in and kills her in 2 seconds…way more “boss” in the show
It’s all portrayed very seriously, but a person, given the information they’re given, doesn’t goes straight to committing crimes against humanity and bombing an entire region. Yeah, we get it in hindsight, but at the moment, with the info they had, is just poor writing.
I couldn’t disagree more.The preeminent expert in her country saw that the unthinkable was actively occurring. She thought it through to the inevitable conclusion (a civilization ending event (spoiler alert, she was right)) and she offered the only option that may have worked. Then, because she was smart enough to know that no one would ever follow that advice, she accepted that would be dead in a matter of days.The captain knew the Titanic would sink long before it obviously started to sink. So did she.
It also conveyed the doom. I thought the cold opening of the pilot episode was unnerving and I have played the game. The way she kind of shakes with fear with her cup of tea really sold just how bad this really is.
It’s good TV writing but it’s also inherently silly – there isn’t ever a single expert on a particular topic, and there’s no reason that a mycologist would have any idea how to handle a large-scale disease outbreak. It’s like asking someone who researches the intestinal microbiome for advice on your diarrhea – that isn’t really what the person does.
It’s not poor writing it’s poor thinking on your part. She is an expert she understands what has happened and that there is no way to stop it short of complete annihilation of the entire infected zone.
She knows there’s no chance of a vaccine, and that 14 infected people are already on the loose. She knows there is no chance of containing this to just those 14. Her solution is to try to contain this to this city and try to prevent it from spreading elsewhere. It’s sound logic.
I am unfamiliar with the game but if you ignore the fungus being airborne wouldn’t you still have to worry about it getting into your blood through any injury, not just a bite? It looks like it’s growing on surfaces. My first thought when they were walking through the flooded hotel lobby was “Don’t step on anything sharp.”Also, in the first episode they went through the tunnel to Haymarket. Haymarket is in the city so wouldn’t that be outside the QZ? Why would they then have to sneak out? And Haymarket is not that far from the statehouse. Or Quincy Market which appeared to be the view below them from the hotel. It’s like they left downtown only to have to backtrack.
The QZ is just around the North End of Boston, not the entire city. Haymarket is right on the edge, outside the walls.
I assumed the QZ was in the suburbs because they said the cities were bombed. If Haymarket is adjacent to the QZ then that tunnel is a serious weak point in the defenses. And if that horde was “sleeping” at Quincy Market (sure looked like it) they would be right next to the QZ. And still, the had a view of the skyline from a distance so they basically doubled back.I’m nitpicking because I used to live and work in this area. It’s like watching an old episode of Spenser: For Hire and he’s chasing a bad guy on foot across the Common. They round a corner and are at the aquarium. Then Spenser tackles the bad guy outside Fenway.
Oh the QZ definitely encompasses the North End, and they bombed the cities but didn’t flatten them. I would guess the walls are just around the NE and everything, like Haymarket, Quincy Market, and Faneuil Hall, outside that is outside the QZ. So everything Southwest of 93 is outside QZ.
I thought that looked like Quincy Market, but I haven’t been to Boston in a few years and definitely not to Faneuil and that area in a bit longer than that. Glad I can at least still recognize some of the basics.
To me, the weirdest part of the Boston adaptation is the juxtaposition of somewhat exacting details with Hollywood geography.It’s been years, but I do distinctly remember that one cramped single stair T exit, and the inside of the “Bostonian Museum” is from my faint recollection not terribly far off from the exhibits and staircases inside the Old State House.But in addition to your point about Quincy Market being suddenly elsewhere, just from this episode they also deliberately avoid calling the museum the Old State House (along with omitting the balcony where they read the Declaration every July 4th) and afterwards have a bizarre path to a flattened Beacon Hill with the Statehouse now somehow appearing at the end of what looks to be a relocated Comm Ave.It’s nothing new – the best movie geography deconstruction I’ve ever seen is a very careful one of the Bullitt car chase, which is outright hilarious when you learn how far apart the various segments of it are – but it’s just odd when they put the effort in to get a few things right and then wave a magic wand for bigger things.
It went by too fast for me but I thought the “museum” looked like the building that used to house Louis, an upscale clothing store on Newbury at Berkeley Street. The building itself was at one time the Boston Museum of Natural History.
I recall a similar abuse of geography in X-Files where people were driving from downtown DC all over Northern VA, across bridges jammed with panic-stricken people, all the way down 95 – in like 5 minutes. Also like “24″ several times where they could drive for MILES and MILES in 5 minutes – in LA and DC.
Haymarket is in the city so wouldn’t that be outside the QZ? Why would they then have to sneak out? I say this with all the genuinely earnest respect I can give an internet stranger: no one outside of Boston gives a shit
I don’t live in Boston. I did live there for a time so I know the geography. If the creators are going to make the effort to recreate landmarks and make very specific references to locations (e.g. the building they sneak into was referenced by the intersection of two real streets) it seems odd to place a hoard of clickers literally blocks from the QZ while also saying “Hey, if you step on something it can wake up clickers a mile away.”
This recap is a step-up from last week, especially the first third. But by the middle it gets too bogged down in a beat-by-beat retell. I think you’re at your best when you summarize instead of recount every step, and do so within the context of analysis, instead of offering up the analysis at the end of a sequence. Also I know you didn’t play the games but the almost direct-lift of the art direction from the games is a bit bold. It seems the first step when adapting is to desaturize the source game’s look. Not so with this show. Keeping things almost cartoonishly bright is surprisingly compelling, and not as cheap as i would have thought if someone described it to me. But it’s 1000% from the game with almost no real change in the adaptation.
Excellent plot blow-by-blow plot summary, as with last week. Where is the review?
There’s no zombies in TLOU, you tool.
Am I an outlier for wishing we got actual episode reviews instead of just beat for beat recaps?
boooooooring as fuck unfortunately
I can’t tell you how many times my mind caught itself instinctively waiting for the cut scene to end so you could start the next part.
Trying to find my controller lol
You may be the worst ‘reviewer’ I’ve ever come across. All this article was, was a recap with almost zero analysis. Find a new job because you’re clearly terrible at this one.
kotaku has real reviews, believe it or not
You sound like a cunt.
And you’ve been flagged for profanity. C’est la vie!
kombucha mushroom people sitting around all day
-I hope they keep doing those little flashbacks before the credits.-Impressed with Ramsey’s American accent. As well as her profanity, I’m sure Lady Bear would approve.
Any scene set in the pre Apocalypse days makes me unreasonably nervous. I remember March 2020 all too well, the its all fine and suddenly not within hours. Perfect time for this show to come around.
there’s nothing crazy original about this show (maybe the mushroom twist to the zombie apocalypse) but damn they nailed the artistic direction and aesthetic.
THEY’RE NOT FRIKKING ZOMBIES!
I still don’t understand why this is a minute-by-minute summary instead of just a review. I knew Anna Torv wasn’t long for this world but I had hoped she would stick around a bit longer…the show is going heavy on world-building but it is going to need more character adding and building…which is something The Walking Dead was, in the early days, intermittently good at. Funnily, I looked at an old post I wrote and at the time The Mist came out I thought it was terrible…I mean, it does exactly what it is trying to do and the horror effects are fantastic, no idea what I was thinking. Maybe it was the budget? Because now it looks like a B-movie classic to me. More than the pretty backdrops, I LOVED the frog and the production design on the hotel lobby and that balcony with the green couches, really impressive. But yes, it does seem like we are going to watch a bit of a copy of a copy with them going through every fucking trope ever.
You though The Mist was terrible? Damn. It’s a great horror movie. Especially for a high budget movie where Darabont made the bleakest ending possible (that isn’t in the book, that has a fairly happy ending) and fought to keep it. Back to this show, set your expectations to a road movie. Joel and Ellie are the main characters. The rest are people they meet on the way.
b-b-but the rest of my post where I say I love it now?and yes, I’ve played many a similar game, I just hope they find some way to have more sustainable characters…otherwise there are diminishing returns, which is what caught up with Walking Dead.
Stop with The Walking Dead. That isn’t this game, or this story, which was so widely acclaimed it won SGA awards on top of all the game awards. There is no similar game that does what the end of this story does in this medium.
The book of The Mist doesn’t have a fairly happy ending! It all but said that the Mist would pour out from the dimensional breach until it engulfed the entire Earth and killed billions in the process.Meanwhile, the film just made it out that the Army Corps of Engineers were just going to clean it all up in an afternoon. Sure, the movie was going out of its way to heap increasing misery on Thomas Jane past the point it was believable (there was no way Carol was making it 3 feet let alone to her kids who would also have been dead) but for the rest of the world …. or even outside Maine, eh. Hardly bleak in the grander scheme of things.
“Fairly happy ending,” may not be the best way to put it but it ended with David an Ollie on the road with some chance of reaching Hartford. There’s ambiguity there. As opposed to David shooting his own son in the head, along with everyone else in the car, and finding out moments later that he didn’t have to. That’s a million times more bleak than the novella.
I’m actually kinda glad they’re clearing the deck of any non-Joel or Ellie characters, for exactly the reason of character building. We know none of these other people are going to last long (i’m just going by the only two names in the credits), and we’re two eps in and they haven’t really done much character development with the two main leads. Let’s just get them on their own already since that’s where the story is obviously going.
I also wish there was more analysis and less recounting of the plot of an episode we all just watched. But that seems to be the way that AV Club does them now, sadly. Vulture’s reviews have been a bit better.
what about the half hearted snark every couple of paragraphs despite this being an A- review. That has to count for something.
I honestly just make a note of the reviewers who do no analysis and I skim their recaps just to get down to the comments, where there is usually some pretty cogent critical analysis going on.
I still don’t understand why this is a minute-by-minute summary instead of just a review.I skipped over that in my last reply and just wanted to join in your bafflement of “recaps.” They’ve been a thing for well over a decade now from publications big and small. I don’t know exactly when it became the norm, from recollection at least as old as early Breaking Bad.The useless scourge that are minute-by-minute recaps are the norm now. I don’t even blame the writers, who are almost all freelancers, trying to get their recap out, minutes after the show airs, so they stay high on the search index for the site that’s paying them, because that’s their job. It doesn’t leave room for actual criticism, which takes more than a few minutes. What we’re left with is the “recap.” As though what you’d want from a writer is a moment by moment description of what you just watched.
These shows should publish an official synopsis on their webpages that writers can either cut and paste or justify why they didn’t if they’re filing the same thing. And fuck, maybe they do already, I’m not checking. But agreed…I didn’t fall asleep during the show, I wasn’t high, I don’t have a TBI, I don’t need to read the show I just watched.
Strap in cuz I’ve only seen this author do minute by minute recaps and I’m pretty sure AV Club assigns specific shows to specific writers. I’m just gonna make a habit of coming straight to the comments for these. It just provides a space for us to discuss that’s….. fine. I went back to look at some old AV Club articles from like 12 years ago and the magic is just totally gone here anyway so we might as well make the most of it. This is the last of us. We are the walking dead.
(straps in)
Wasn’t a big fan of that cold open, despite it getting Christine Hakim some well deserved screen time as Dr. Ratna. The first episode already implied that the infection spread through flour mills in Jakarta (home to the largest flour mills in the world). Ratna says flour is a perfect substrate, but somehow assumes it would be contained if they burn Jakarta? Literally, hundreds of thousands of tons of that infectious flour is on trains and cargo ships by that point. She, and many others would know that.It’s a less is more situation. The more you drill into into the nuts and bolts, the more the audience gets more logistically knowledgeable. Which you generally want to avoid when dealing with imaginary fungi zombies. In the game they were barely explained, and that was correct, because they weren’t the focus.
Insanely good show. They’re totally knocking it out of the park.
– Even as someone who’s intimately familiar with the games, my heart was racing during the clicker fight. The tension is incredible. I was crying out every time they didn’t try for a head shot though, ugh. I think if pop culture stopped for me in 2003 I’d still know to try to headshot any monsters.
– Fringe is my GOAT show and Anna Torv is a huge reason for that, so I was absolutely psyched when I saw a headline she was cast in this. Then I saw it was as Tess and my heart dropped. She did an incredible job, but losing her so quickly sucks! I really like the rewrite of Tess’ death, making a stand against a huge horde instead of Fedra is a much better exit.- The way they can literally 1:1 scenes from the game and still blow me away is unreal. I wonder if the success of this is because of the template they had, or if these guys are just stupendous adapters. Either way, I’m excited for everything that’s coming.- The little flashback intros are what I crave from post-apocalyptic media. I love the media itself (usually), but my brain craves answers about the how/why, and I was not expecting to get any of that in this. The Walking Dead would have benefitted massively from this kind of thing.- The music is fantastic, obviously. It’s such an integral part of the game and I’m glad they knew that and got the same guy back.
The prologue of this episode was chilling – it was incredibly well acted and her sense of understanding, acceptance and then just mournfully asking to go home to die with her family was startling.
God the writing of this reviewer is insufferable. I’ll bring it up every damn week if I have to. Reviews aren’t just recaps, or at least, they weren’t once upon a time at this site.
Last of Us Part 1’s main storyline is very well worn in popular culture – zombie dystopia, an older character destroyed by loss learns to love and care for a child again, etc etc. It was well worn when it came out in 2013. What made the game (and it appears, the show) work so well is the execution. Should the show get a 2nd season to adapt the 2nd game, I think it will feel a lot less tropey. That game tackles the theme of revenge (also well worn) but using a structure that feels fresher and more interesting than other more typical explorations of that theme, with a wider set of perspectives and some very dark set pieces. It was controversial for a vocal minority of gamers, but I think it would be less controversial on TV because the audience is much broader.
I liked that little moment when Joel was tapping Tess’s foot up and the look she gave him. Anna Torv was able to speak volumes with that look, more than a page of dialogue ever could
Where was my automatic weapon when I was fighting Clickers in the museum? I would have loved to have had that there.
No mention of the Infected “storming the Capitol building” at the end of the episode?
“Is the idea of a Zombie Siesta new in z lore? When the undead aren’t actively chasing lunch or out for a nice shamble, do they take a grumbly disco nap?”In the game, when you stumble across Infected that don’t know you’re there they are either (a) “patrolling” i.e. wandering around in a set pattern on a loop, or (b) “hibernating” i.e. standing in one spot motionless – they don’t “activate” until they hear something.
Joel gets Ellie to the Fireflies but they casually inform him that the procedure to create a cure will kill Ellie (since they have to slice her brain open). Joel has a hissy fit, goes on a fucking rampage and fucking kills ALL of them, including doctors and tons of innocent people, and pretty much dooms humanity, just so Ellie doesn’t have to die. Complete horseshit.Oh, and then in the next 4 years after that along the way Ellie learns about and hates Joel for doing that. Then the daughter of the main doctor (Abby) who was supposed to operate on Ellie, tracks down Joel and bashes his head open (like Negan->Glenn in the Walking Dead). Ellie goes on a quest of revenge, LOSES badly, goes back again and almost kills Abby but then lets her go.HOPE YOU LIKED ALL THE SPOILERS!!!! 🙂
I liked the build up of Episode 1, and the prologue of Episode 2 much more than the cliched, snark-driven action 23 years later. It was really intense watching the little bit of build up – the radio reports, freaky Grandma, the crazy city residents. Really well written and directed if all too brief. They could have spent an entire episode or two working that to better effect – like show the devolution of Grandma and the citizenry in more detail. The same thing happened with Station 11. The beginning was a better story than the future. Next thing you know people are strapping on plot armor and doing the same old same old zombie shit, with a hint of Quiet Place thrown in.
“Journey-cum-quest” sounds a bit like a memoir written by one of the band’s groupies. An alternative descriptor should have been chosen. Also, “White European settlers were an invasive species in the Americas,” should alert you to the fact that these recaps are being written by a woke #BlueAnon cult member—if his Covid/airborne virus misinformation from the previous recap didn’t clue you in—and it’s nice to see someone with, most likely, a degree in gender studies, actually working (albeit part-time as a shitty AV Club recapper).The only thing that would have made the whole thing complete, would have been if he had described the awakened and charging zombie horde, who were also unarmed, but minus the requisite pajama pants and Viking helmet necessary to properly perform a coup, as a violent insurrection of the State House, worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11…combined!The AV Club has fallen if this is what’s left of it, following the “go woke, go broke” methodology to a T. A complete and utter joke.