The Last Of Us is a little bit country, a little bit urban hellscape
Civilian rebels have Joel and Ellie rethinking “power to the people”
TV Reviews The Last Of Us
Last week’s episode, “Long Long Time,” was…a lot. An emotionally racking 75-minute epic about the once-in-a-lifetime romance between two middle-aged survivors of the fungapocalypse. We follow Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) from their meet-cute in a trapping pit to an agonizing euthanasia-suicide pact 16 years later. Offerman superbly matched Bartlett: both sexy, vulnerable, spontaneous. Craig Mazin’s script was a marvel of condensed storytelling, creating a layered, private history of two bearded gents and the gated world that was their own personal Eden. In the end, love triumphed over death and mushrooms.
Audience reaction was quite a lot, too. Folks screamed from the social media rooftops that this was THE SINGLE BEST EPISODE OF TV EVER FOREVER. Hypothetical awards were summarily thrust into actors’ arms. Tattoos parlors were overrun with orders of Bill and Frank toasting strawberries. I graded it “A,” and was excoriated for omitting a plus. (The A.V. Club grading system tops at an “A.”)
So forgive your humble recapper if he hoped this episode would not break his heart into tiny ugly-crying shards. Joel and Ellie are heading west in Bill’s truck, great. Let them take in the scenery, drive past remnants of civilization, maybe whack a funghoul or two as they get to know each other.
My wish was somewhat granted. Half of Episode 4 was a road trip, which fit nicely with the task-based nature of the gaming source. You drive, you camp out in the forest, you find a way around an automotive mega-pileup, you drive some more, and so on, until you fight an infected or malicious humans. The other half was dealing with said malicious humans, a populist uprising that had taken over Kansas City, essentially perpetuating the same conditions as the FEDRA troops: rule by fear, total obedience, and constant paranoia. Comparing the KCMO mess to the domestic bliss of previous episode recalls Agent K’s line in Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.”
Written by Mazin and directed by Jeremy Webb, the episode begins with Ellie (Bella Ramsey) doing her best Travis Bickle in a gas station bathroom mirror (not that Ellie would know what Taxi Driver was, or what a taxi was, or that she’s Jodie Foster, sort of). Ellie is practicing holding the gun she secretly pocketed at Bill and Frank’s place. She aims the pistol at her reflection and makes “pew! pew!” noises. She and Joel are on their second day driving to find Joel’s brother Tommy in Wyoming. They’re stopping every hour or so for Joel to siphon gas from other cars. Apparently gas breaks down over time; you burn through the stuff faster. Learn something new every day!
Before they hit the road again, Ellie zings Joel with puns from a raggedy paperback she carries around: Will Livingston’s No Pun Intended: Volume Too. What did the mermaid wear to math class? An algae bra. A teenager with a book of puns on a cross-country road trip. This job is becoming more horrific than even Joel imagined. He smiles a millimeter, which Ellie clocks.
In the car, Ellie shows Joel a cassette tape from the back: Hank Williams. Joel pops it in and the doleful “Alone and Forsaken” starts to play. Ellie next digs out a gay porn magazine called Bearskin, jokingly asks why some pages are stuck together, then obeys a flustered Joel to toss the mag out the window. Ellie’s irreverent, unembarrassed reaction to the male nudity, first, is funny, but second, indicates she may not be into boys. A straight girl finding that skin rag would probably not wave it around to tease Joel.
Cruising along deserted, mossy highways as Williams croons makes a for a few poetically spooky moments. Toward the end of the day, they pull off the road to set up camp and eat (20-year-old Chef Boyardee Ravioli). As they dine, Joel notes that their forest location “is too remote for infecteds.” Clearly the government response to the outbreak was a colossal mistake: by herding citizens into bombed-out urban Quarantine Zones, they contained the fungal pathogen but also created death traps for survivors. If the countryside is relatively free from infecteds and fungal networks, do the rich and powerful live in compounds there? Or is it just roaming raiders and slavers?
Pascal modulates Joel masterfully as he sheds layers of accrued emotional armor—thanks to Ellie’s persistent mix of humor and decency. He visibly relaxes as they share bits of their past, Joel assuming the role of surrogate father, explaining trucks or the physics of siphoning or, eventually, how to hold a gun. When Ellie tells him his morning coffee tastes like “burnt shit,” he takes loud, defiant slurp and gives side eye. At last, Pascal the actor has a chance to spread his wings with glimmers of humor and warmth, the traumatized, reluctant father-figure (a lesser series would have flashes of misrecognition, Ellie “becoming” Sarah from Joel’s POV).
Joel’s brother Tommy is two days away in Wyoming, he thinks. The last radio contact with him came from a tower close to Cody. At Ellie’s prodding, Joel tells her about Tommy. He enthusiastically signed up to fight in Desert Storm, but “didn’t feel much like a hero.” Twelve years later the outbreak happened, and Tommy convinced Joel to join a group heading to Boston. That’s where he met Tess. Then Tommy met Marlene and joined the Fireflies. “Same mistake he made when he was seventeen,” Joel grumbles. “He wants to save the world.” Joel reports that Tommy recently quit the Fireflies; he’s driving there to join him.
Last episode we discovered that Joel and Tess had been partners for more than a decade. In “Long Long Time,” they’re shown in a lunch meeting with Bill and Frank in Lincoln, having slipped out of Boston Q.Z. Certain aspects of their relationship remain murky, at least to me. Was it sexual? True, they share a bed after an exhausting day in the pilot, but to sleep. Can we expect flashbacks that show intimate moments between the two?
Joel doesn’t believe in the Fireflies or FEDRA—of course. And he certainly won’t approve of the jittery, heavily armed rebels they’re about to encounter in Kansas City. “If you don’t think there’s hope for the world, why bother going on?” Ellie asks quietly. “You haven’t seen the world so you don’t know,” Joel growls. He does believe in family. But “you’re not family,” he informs Ellie, “you’re cargo.” Not a lot of layers to tease apart here. Joel is the Hero Who Gave Up. Unwittingly, he is on a path to broaden his humanity, to extend sympathy to the whole human race, including himself.
Outside Kansas City, countless abandoned or wrecked cars block the highway. Joel gets out with his rifle to scout the way forward. A Sara Lee 18-wheeler has jackknifed at the entrance to the underpass, impossible to get through. Trying to drive around the underpass, Joel ends up taking them into the city (a bad move that recalls the pilot prologue). As they cruise the streets trying to find a way back to the highway, they get ambushed. A cinder block nearly shatters the windshield, Joel drives over spikes and they get pinned down by gunfire after crashing into a laundromat. Joel manages to shoot two of the attackers. A third (Juan Magana) surprises him and pins him to the ground, choking him with his rifle. Ellie crawls out of her hiding hole and puts a bullet in the guy’s back. Identifying himself as Bryan, the bleeding and desperate kid begs for his life. Joel tells Ellie to walk away and finishes the guy off with his own hunting knife.
Next we get a glimpse of life among the civilian authority that has wrested control of the city from FEDRA. Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) interrogates an older doctor (John Getz) in an old prison cell. The latter is accused of helping others (a splinter group, perhaps) escape. Kathleen ominously wonders if this was the cell where her brother was beaten to death by FEDRA agents. She pulls a gun on the doctor, who appeals to her sense of decency: He delivered her.
Lynskey is a counterintuitive choice to play this dangerous figure. Her thin, folksy voice evokes more Midwestern substitute teacher than a cold-blooded rebel leader. All due respect to the New Zealand-born Yellowjackets star, but I’m waiting to be convinced. One suspects Mazin and Neil Druckmann were going for a slight shock effect, like Marge Gunderson in Fargo, but with a banality-of-evil vibe.
Kathleen’s standoff with the doc is interrupted with news of the men that Joel killed. Her top lieutenant (Jeffrey Pierce) reports the killings were probably done by outsiders, maybe “mercs.” Kathleen speculates that “Henry” called in the killers using his radio. She strides back to the interrogation cell, shoots the doctor dead, then instructs her people to “find every collaborator and kill them all.” When, later, Kathleen is shown evidence of fungal forces pushing up through the concrete in a basement, she tells her lieutenant not to tell anyone; they need to deal with Henry first.
Not seeing a lot of steady leadership from ol’ Comandante K. Execute the camp doctor? Ignore a possible fungal breakthrough? How the holy heck is she in charge? Did no one else apply for the job?!
Joel and Ellie break into a building and climb 33 flights to find an abandoned office to sleep on couch cushions. In the morning, they’ll get to the roof and scan for the way out of the city. We learn a few things. Ellie pensively admits that shooting Bryan wasn’t her first time using violence on someone. As they bed down, Joel asks what she means, but Ellie doesn’t want to talk about it (TBF = To Be Flashbacked). Ellie notes that Joel is a little deaf in his right ear. He says it’s probably from years of shooting. As they drift to sleep, Ellie tells another pun joke, this one about diarrhea. Joel can’t stop from laughing. Beautiful to see. Fade to black.
By federal law you can’t end an episode of The Last Of Us on a poop joke, so in the closing moments, Ellie tells Joel to wake up. He does and sees a stranger (Lamar Johnson) training a gun on them. He turns the other way, and sees a boy (Keivonn Montreal Woodard), also armed, with a red bandit mask painted on his face. This must be Henry and his younger brother, Sam. Another character parallel of Joel and Ellie, as were Bill and Frank, in their own way. Next week I assume they’ll be getting the hell out of Dodge. I’m calling the title now: Escape From Kansas City.
So far, this one’s the most pulpy and formulaic episode, with a too-subtle concept for the villain (regardless of whether it follows the game) that strains credibility. Still: sick action, a blossoming Pascal, and killer fungus on the way.
Stray observations
- R.I.P. actor Annie Wersching, far too young at 45. Wersching voiced Tess in The Last Of Us Naughty Dog game (not to mention 37 episodes of the show 24).
- Given that the U.S. has a ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, the Kansas City uprising is plausible. How is the fungdemic unfolding in less gun-crazy countries?
- As Joel and Ellie try to sleep in the forest, composer Gustavo Santaolalla provides evocative, spidery music, silvery strings to send a shiver down the spine.
- As a magazine veteran who watched the internet ruin everything, I was pleased to see printed matter represented as a vital connection to our past. Even if it’s lowbrow stuff, puns and porn humanize us.
- Speaking of which, in the game, the Bearskin with sticky pages has a cover features a URL, bearskinworld.com. As noted here, the address leads to an animal rug manufacturer. Bill probably wouldn’t have had a problem with that. Frank, on the other hand… No URL visible in the episode, but there is a piece on “College Hotties.”
- Per the Globe Cinema marquee in Kansas City, Underworld and Matchstick Men were playing during the outbreak. Significance? Underworld is about monsters fighting each other; Matchstick about a phobic con artist and a teenage girl who helps him out of his shell.
208 Comments
Kathleen’s quest for vengeance kind of reminds me of when the Allies liberated Europe in WWII and the collaborators were rounded up for payback.
Yes, exactly. She’s not evil, the *collaborators* are evil. The doctor and Henry, unless we learn otherwise, were effectively Nazi collaborators that sold out their friends and community. Sorry you don’t get to pretend things can go back to the way they were once the Nazis are overthrown. The rebels are the good guys here who think Joel is a raider or mercenary. It’s an unfortunate misunderstanding.
I bet Henry had his understandable reasons, too. That’s sort of the trademark of The Last of Us—who the bad guy is depends on where you’re standing.
Except that the revenge that people took on “collaborators” included targeting women who slept with Nazi officers in order to get food for their starving families. Or, you know, just women that were raped by Nazis. Or otherwise were thought to have not suffered enough under Nazi rule, they must have been getting some help.It was a fucking witch hunt, and it did not only target the actual collaborators: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day-landings-second-world-war
“The rebels are the good guys here who think Joel is a raider or mercenary.”Then it was a really stupid plan trying to get him to stop to help an injured man. No, it was a plain old ambush trying to get a working truck and any supplies they can off of an outsider.
And the bad guys literally announced their intent! One of the guys yells to Joel during the standoff that if Joel and Ellie just give them their stuff they will let them go unharmed.
I’m reading about the history of the Czech Republic right now and everyone knows about the atrocities the Germans committed during WW2, but we talk less about the 30,000 German people killed by the Czechs right after the war, some by the government, but mainly by armed partisan groups in the post-war chaos. Many of them had absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis, they were just Czech families who had lived there since the Middle Ages and happened to have German last names.
Hell, there was a radical Jewish group who had the full intent on poisoning 3,000,o00 German civilians to death as a revenge for the Holocaust. Practicalities eventually forced them to dial back to a few hundred imprisoned SS troopers, partially because they were afraid of accidentally killing masses of Allied soldiers with the full scale plan.
All those people pissing and moaning last week about the show cutting the scene with Bill’s magazine are pretty quiet all of a sudden.
Bye bye, dude(s)!.
Were people really complaining about that? That scene in the game takes place *after* Joel and Ellie leave Bill and his town and are on the road. Last week’s episode doesn’t get that far – it ends just as they’re leaving Bill’s Town. So that scene wouldn’t have fit into last week’s episode.
Probably worth noting that Jeffrey Pierce is Tommy from the game, that’s pretty cool. Also the Hank Williams song Alone and Forsaken is both an underrated song and a really good moment from the game that I’m glad got adapted well.
Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson are supposedly cameoing in the show too at some point.
Correct. I know who they are playing, checked IMDB once. Its very well casted and quite cool.
I hope Shannon Woodward shows up too
Alone and Forsaken was featured prominently in the show’s trailer, so those that played the game assumed it would be featured in the show.
Oh I remember, I was just curious if it was going to be played similar to the game which it ultimately was which I feel was the right call.
Small easter egg if you know the Pittsburgh area.They mention taking 76 to 70. That is a good way to remain south of the city when heading west.It felt like an apology/explanation for switching cities.
It is weird that that they changed cities. Is it that they thought the general public wouldn’t know anything about Pittsburgh? It actually is a quite appropriate setting because the classic George Romero “Dead” movies that basically invented the zombie genre as we know it were set (and filmed) in Pittsburgh and its surburbs.
Is it that they thought the general public wouldn’t know anything about Pittsburgh?
They explain in the post show that they couldn’t make their filming location in Canada to look enough like Pittsburgh, but felt KC was a good substitute
Which is a great laugh when we consider what they think a few miles outside of Boston looks like.
The early montage of their road trip was fairly schizophrenic, too, geographically speaking. The series has done a lot right, from casting to pacing to production design. But the geography depicted so far has been weak, perhaps hamstrung by shooting in Calgary, which doesn’t easily approximate the eastern and midwestern US. In that travel montage, you didn’t get the sense of the truck moving from the NE down to PA through New York and Jersey. I went back and rewatched the travel montage after I heard the “take 76 to 70″ line because it was so disorienting to me. When they leave the gas station after siphoning gas, they cross a flat plains land that could conceivably pass for rural PA, although much of that open land in PA would have gone back to forests in 20 years without cultivation. And then immediately following, there’s a shot of them driving past a herd of bison. Now, there are a handful of bison farms in PA and OH, but that’s not exactly what viewers think of then they see bison. They’re so strongly associated with the west, that I immediately thought they were much farther along on their journey than they were. I figured they were in the plains states. But the bison shot cuts to a shot of them driving through what looks like the Appalachian mountains. Truth be told, this is much more like the drive along 76/70 in PA. But given that I was still thinking about buffalo, I was like, “Why the fuck are we back in the Appalachians?” The next stretch of the montage tracks a bit better with my knowledge of I-70 through Ohio and Indiana. They go over a bridge that looks like many around PA and into Ohio, and then they have the Love’s/Arby’s sign in decay. That tracks. It’s also better at showing the forest reclaiming the meadowlands, with young trees growing up among the abandoned trucks. But then they cut to these rolling hills with the train hanging off the crumbling trestle bridge, and that geography just doesn’t look right for the drive to Kansas City along 70, which is quite frankly flatter and more boring than a pancake. All of this is very nitpicky, but it did affect how I felt about the first act of the episode. It just felt sloppy.
You’re not nitpicking as much you’re on to something, which is that the show has been asking viewers – especially those who haven’t played the game and thus aren’t entranced by knowing where the main plot is going so they can more easily ignore this – to suspend disbelief for things that if they were written more tightly it shouldn’t need to.Now, by and large so far a lot of this has been minor stuff like the ‘10 miles from Boston’ laugher and such, but “sloppy” just feels apt for a lot of the little things. The show has been good enough so far that it’s not mattered much – yet – but it’s the underlying reason why the tell-not-show bit for Kathleen bothered me as much as it did, since I’m hoping it doesn’t portend that this trend is going to start impacting bigger plots.Or maybe I’m just traumatized from For All Mankind and seeing what happens to a show that asks you to do this too often, but I think you get the point.
Oh man, don’t even get me started on For All Mankind. I mean, I suppose my expectations of Ronald D. Moore shouldn’t have been that high. My only experience with him previous to For All Mankind was Outlander, which had two solid (yet melodramatic) seasons and then really went downhill, sustained only by its very attractive cast. Sure enough, For All Mankind did the same thing. So many stupid subplots. So many characters that stick around way past when they should have been ushered out. I thought the second season really started to find some good footing, and then season three just annihilated all of that work.
It’s a shame, because the actual concept behind For All Mankind is brilliant, and it has stretches where it shows you exactly how good it could be, if it only would commit to being prestige rather than a soap opera. That said, I’ll still watch it because, well, I’m in it now.
Just envisioning all those bison taking a bridge across the Mississippi River at some point…
Apparently British Columbia….
It’s outside Boston in the same world where Jackie Chan has his Rumble in the Bronx.
Pittsburgh is a fairly unique city geographically, and KC is more of a generic Midwestern metropolis. But the game didn’t care that much about Pittsburgh geography since the whole level was crammed in between or inside buildings, up until the jump off the Fort Duquesne Bridge. The best route from Massachusetts to Wyoming doesn’t go through either city, anyway. I guess nobody wanted a Buffalo or Cleveland level.
It was filmed in Calgary. The producers felt they couldn’t make any part of Calgary look like Pittsburgh. Kansas City (a place I know nothing about) was…more Calgaryesque?
Maybe they wanted them to be farther west for the pacing of the show (eg maybe they’re in Colorado in the next episode and didn’t want to warp-speed them from Pennsylvania)
Is there an amusement park along the highway on that stretch? They came through Ohio/Columbus and there isn’t one along there. There was a shot of a broken down roller coaster in the road montage.
The part I know (New Stanton to Washington PA) is mostly rolling farmland with the occasional truck stop or titty bar.No rollercoasters.
Are they sincerely trying to drive from Boston to Wyoming in three damn days? Even if you drive 24 hours each day, is that even possible?And they most likely changed it from Pittsburgh in the game to KC in the show to solve its breakneck pacing. I admit to being a bit of a geography stickler in shows, and while this isn’t as bad as Game of Thrones’ characters practically teleporting to wherever they needed to be in the last season, it still irked me.
But why are they even that far south? Why not just take something like 90 to 80. It is almost a straight shot to WY. Now they are going to probably head north when they reach Denver. They have added 300 miles to their trip. They clearly were not avoiding big cities as the are now stuck in KC. It is possible to complete avoid KC using county roads.
That’s also well south of where they should be coming out of Massachusetts— the most likely route would be across the Alleghenies in southern New York.
Henry and Sam are brothers.
We don’t know that yet in the show.Even in the game we don’t learn this until Joel and Henry have their conversation in the office hideout where Henry tells him the plan to get out of the city – that’s the first time he identifies Sam as his brother. There are bunch of scenes of them before this where most players assume they’re father and son.
I always think Lynskey’s power as an actor is in her ability to evoke a lot of darkness below what may seem an unassuming surface. she seems to make sense as a leader, someone with a foot in the old world of things and in the new.
Melanie Lynskey’s career literally started with her being an unknown cast in Heavenly Creatures because she conveyed this rare quality of being unassuming on the surface and being able to convey dark thoughts and energy underneath that
we love a full circle
And it’s still the best thing she and Kate Winslet have ever done.
Lynskey? Arguably, but definitely not Winslet. Heavenly Creatures was great, but Sense & Sensibility, Eternal Sunshine, and Hamlet were better performances- and that’s in no way a ding on her performance in Peter Jackson’s film.
They might be better performances by Winslet but are they better films?
I still can’t quite believe that Bella Ramsey is almost 20 years old. She is terrifc as a 14 year old. Ellie’s childlike enthusiasm—for arcade games, broken down cars, stupid pun books—is a damn delight. The emotional bonding between Joel and Ellie in this episode wasn’t anything original, but still heartfelt to see because of the writing and the quality and chemistry of these two actors.
I don’t know any of the characters from the game (never played it), but I don’t think Lynskey is miscast from what we learn about her in this introduction to her. Her brother getting killed would turn a nice, substitute teacher type into a merciless radical. Lenin didn’t become Lenin until the Russian state executed his brother.I don’t know if Joel and Ellie were ambushed by those guys. They seemed genuinely angry that Joel was firing on them; I think he started it. The guy could have been hurt by Henry right before and was sincerely asking Joel for help. And Joel has a very hard time trusting people so he could have been justifiably paranoid, and since now he has to protect Ellie.On last week’s episode’s IMDB page, the negative audience reviews usually said something they thought spending time with Bill and Frank was too much a distraction from the main story, that the plot wasn’t advancing. Since a TV show is the longest narrative medium, I think it would be perfect for stories and characters outside the main plot, so I hope this series does more of what it did last week to much great effect.“I’m 56 years old, you little shit.”
“I don’t know if Joel and Ellie were ambushed by those guys. They seemed genuinely angry that Joel was firing on them; I think he started it.”They literally dropped a cinder block on his car and started shooting at him.
After he almost ran over the first guy who looked wounded and called for their help? I’d have to watch the episode again. In any case, it probably doesn’t matter for the story’s sake.
It was unambiguously an ambush in the game.It was pretty unambiguous in the show too.
Alright, then I stand corrected. From a complex character pov, it might be interesting–or trite– to have Joel be so traumatized that he initiates violence because that’s all he knows, and he often gets it wrong and kills innocent people.
Yeah, in the game seconds before the ambush Joel says something like “that guy is not hurt” regarding the guy in the middle of the street asking for help. A line like that would have benefited the TV show too.
In the game, it’s an ambush without question. (And the scene in fact, matters quite a bit to some important characteristics about Joel.) I can understand it being less clear on the show because they omit 1 line, arguably the most important thing from Joel that needed to be said: “He ain’t even hurt.”
That guy…wasn’t actually injured. It was an ambush.
Bruh remind me not to join up with you in the APOC. You would not last long….
The wounded guy wasn’t really wounded. You can briefly see him sprint out of the way of the truck. And Joel mentions later that he used to run the same kind of ambush years ago.
The wounded guy was the bait for them to stop and help and kick off the ambush.
The “I’m hurt, please help” move is so clearly an ambush that I am embarrassed for you for your naivety.Also it is basically a trope at this point. See Thor: Ragnorok for a great example.You be an easy mark in this world. lol
yeah there was a guy ready to drop a cinderblock and another with a gun, of course it was an ambush; why would he ask for help alone otherwise?
Don’t bring a gun to a cinderblock fight!
Kathleen is an invention of the show. In the game, they’re just a bunch of generic evil guys.
I mean I think the homemade stop strip and cinder block to the windshield was pretty unambiguous.
“I don’t know if Joel and Ellie were ambushed by those guys. They seemed genuinely angry that Joel was firing on them;”They’re angry because he kill one of them instead of falling into their trap or surrendering when they told him they would let him go, regardless of whether they would have.It’s the natural reaction of bad people for whom the plan has gone horribly wrong. They’re hardly going to blame it on themselves.
in the game, whenever there was any type of firefight, the NPCs were always swearing while they shot. But yeah, it was an ambush.
Even without the cinderblock coming down on the car, they had also laid down a makeshift tire-spike trap. Just based on Joel and Tess’ smuggling history, one could safely assume, he can smell a trap when he sees it. Not to mention, a guy walking out into the middle of the road, is total bait.
He admits later on he did that kind of thing before getting to Boston.
he also explains that ‘he’s been on both sides of it’ so he correctly assessed it was a trap.
The problem is that the goal is for the show to last one or two seasons overall. You can’t just go and get into the back story of every character. Specific ones sure. We will probably get one for Henry. And Tommy. That’s two more episodes. Expanding further, we likely are going to have an Elle backstory episode. Season 2 is supposed to track the second game. And quite frankly, there is a lot that needs to be done that you can’t let every single character with lines getting a backstory. If you do, then all you get is something similar to the final two seasons of GOT.
Nah it was an ambush. The point is Joel recognized the tactic because he’d done it before.
It’s definitely a trap. The hurt guy in the street suddenly stands up straight as Joel floors the truck to run him over.
You don’t need to play the game. Go to Youtube and search for Gamer’s Little Playground. They have edited the games into movies. No drawn out gameplay, just the cutscenes. There are a lot of channels that do cutscene movies, but GLP is the best. I love their Telltale Walking Dead movies.
I also think it is weird when they do things like have characters directly state their age and then it isn’t the actor’s age. Pedro is and looks a decade younger than 56.
Yeah I had a problem with Melanie Lynskey as well. In fact I could not figure out Jeffrey Pierce looking all mercenary-badass would be following her—or for that matter everyone else. In the discussion after the episode one of the producers describes Lynskey as a “ruthless leader” and something to do with Pierce being a former soldier and willing to follow her lead.That was a weak band-aid commentary and for me was not translated in anyway on screen. I think they too recognized a disconnect.Also the way Ellie was pointing the gun, I thought Joel would get injured by the bullet ricocheting within the attacker’s body. Might have made an interesting commentary on gun violence but hey maybe not the right time or place in a fungalzombiepocalypse.
Same. This KC militia is basically being run by a Karen, and I’m not sure I buy in.
OH fuck off
I think one of the themes of the episode is that when people lose everything, they still reach for the closest match for what they used to have (hence the reference in the title of the episode: “Alone and forsaken by fate and by man / Oh Lord, if you hear me, please hold to my hand”), so maybe the idea is that everyone follows Kathleen because of what she used to mean to them, presumably freeing them from FEDRA, and ignores the fact that she’s gone a little nutso-crazy since then?I dunno, it’s the first episode that feels a little incomplete without knowing what’s coming next, since there’s so much we still haven’t been told about how she became the warlady of Kansas City and why exactly she has such a hate-on for Henry and Sam.
Probably not so much nutso but more paranoid, which kind of tracks with people who overthrow regimes.
To me, Lynskey’s role is the first poorly done tell rather than show that we’ve had for the series. I have no problem with a Midwestern middle school substitute teacher breaking bad, but there’s zero setup for why she in particular can order what seems to be an extraordinary overreaction to someone disappearing (‘they must have got mercs in, let’s break down every door that’s left!’) along with a temper tantrum choice to murder someone that’s extremely valuable to a post apocalypse community – and who isn’t even clear worked for FEDRA. It kind of makes the ‘but I delivered you!’ tie between them feel almost like a desperate reach by the writers to create an emotional stake in the conflict that’s not earned.All we have is that we’re told by the character herself that FEDRA tortured her brother, and somehow in the process she’s amassed massive power to the point of not just leadership but having completely unquestioned authority. Not good writing even if we get a bunch of backstory next episode, likely in Henry’s story – which I hope will not be an infodump, but suspect will be.
Are you saying there’s no setup for why she leads this group of strangers from 1,500 miles away from where our protagonists started? I mean, yeah.I have a funny feeling next week will contain flashbacks of her.
I can imagine a world in which Kathleen’s brother was the hard-boiled rebel leader and she was a sort of Imelda Marcos / Evita Peron during his reign. After his betrayal, torture and death, she stepped into his shoes a la Raul Castro & now commands his militia. I love Lynskey so going to keep the faith that it isn’t a narrative misstep.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine a corrupt FEDRA being hated by the citizens, killing Kathleen’s brother, and her using that event to spark a rebellion against FEDRA. She’s not a leader because she’s qualified as much as she’s probably the instigator that lead to FEDRA being ousted.
I will say I think the fault is the writing and not the casting or acting I don’t think even peak Charlize, Sigourney or Linda Hamilton could have sold that character as written so far.
I think we should wait until her story’s complete before coming down one way or another on her performance. It seems highly unlikely that we’re going to be seeing her for the whole season, particularly with how this episode ended it has more of the feel of “Part 1 of 2″ than anything. Don’t get locked into a stance right now when we’ve only seen a bit of her.
I kind of liked the Warlady Karen conceit as an on-the-nose deviation from the expected Negan archetype in that role, but I agree that the nature of the story implies that Joel and Ellie will be moving on from Kansas City by the end of next episode. It’s a little bit silly, but I’m cool with it because we’re obviously not being set up to spend 60 episodes with Warlady Karen.
Agree. It might be a casting mismatch, but we might getting lured into a pleasant surprise when the other shoe drops with her character.
If the years since 2016 have taught us anything, it’s that people who identify as tough-guys-with-guns will follow anyone who tells them it’s ok to hurt the people they don’t like, regardless of how effete, soft, or obviously smooth-brained that “leader” might be.
When the episode ended, my wife looked over and said “In no world does that dude (Pierce) follow that lady. And it is even less likely in a post apocalyptic world as LOU.” I chuckled. Of course I was thinking the same, but I am just used to shows in 2020+ having absurd casting choices because of the current discourse in the country. Usually very easy to gloss over a nd move on to enjoy the show.This one though seems utterly foolish and really forces you out of the “immersion” in the show.
Is it really an absurd casting choice to have a known and excellent character actress play such a part?Sure, Lynskey’s demeanor is more low-key, but do we really need every leader figure in post-apocalyptic media to be gruff gung-ho military man?Charisma exists and you’d be surprised the type of people folks can follow. Especially when they say exactly what people want to hear.Granted, we know little about Kathleen and what really makes her tick (aside from her brother’s death). From the few scenes we got with that group, it’s clear that they’ve been around for a while and Kathleen’s emergence as their leader could’ve easily happened before things really went to shit and her brother was killed. But that’s just my interpretation. I hope I don’t come off as antagonistic, but if I do, I genuinely apologise. I just feel like such criticism is typically in bad faith because of “discourse.”
It has zero to do with the actors ability. Zero.I am not spending my lunch break expounding any further.It is not a “bad faith” argument I am making. It is a logical one based on the basic principles and instincts of our kind.Enjoy your day.
Touchy, touchy…
Agree. I could easily infer that she was at one point some kind of leader/pillar in their community. I imagine maybe even before the fungal pandemic. Maybe they could have dropped a little more if a hint in the episode. That scene with the doctor would have been a great way to inject a little needed exposition there, but there was also already a lot going on.
She was probably chosen after Mazin saw her in Yellowjackets, a show where she can properly seethe and be taken as conniving and dangerous. We didn’t really see that in this episode, besides her shooting the doc, but I have a feeling it’ll be further revealed.
And it’s not like this character can’t work, because we’ve seen The Walking Dead do it all the time. But this might be the first instance between the shows where TWD is a little better than TLoU at finding the right fit.
I have faith in Lynskey and the rest of the crew. I think they will bring us around on the character. Admittedly, it felt a little off to me too.
Just like you don’t get rich by spending your own money, you don’t become a warlord by fighting all your own wars.
I dunno. Last 25 years or so, I’ve been thinking I’ll let Melanie Lynsky lead me anywhere.But seriously, the sweet murderer in Beautiful Creatures, Rose who never stopped smiling in 2 1/2 Men (and she killed Charlie), she’s specialized in playing those who are unexpected. I think if she’d come to this after playing Rose, there would have been less of a question.
this sucked sooo bad holy shit lol. without the “important” boost that last episode got this show is giving me mid walking dead or possibly high-budget CW vibes
Still mad about the gheys, huh?
Weird how many movies have people who on the run just a wavin’ their flashlights around like “Come find me! And I have endless battery supplies.”
I can only assume they’re all using rechargeable batteries which they’re re-powering with intensive handcranking, done basically constantly when they’re off-screen.
In the game they use shakelights – flashlights that don’t use batteries but you shake them to recharge them. This was so you didn’t have to continuously find batteries to keep your flashlight going and to make it realistic that you could play the entire game with your flashlight on without it running out of power.Shakelights were sold to the public in 2002 so they would be available in this world.
-Wow that episode just flew by-I swear there’s more tension when there’s no’s clickers, because every time they open a door I expect something to jump out-I love Bella Ramsey, but Elle drives me nuts, I would go insane if I were tethered to someone who doesn’t worry enough in a world full of nonstop danger, someone who never…ever…stops…talking…
From my clock, it was 46 minutes. (And ended exactly where it needed to end.) I assume because the last episode was more than 70, almost a movie. I like shows being this length–it certainly is better than padding and bloating an ep and a series. And as part of the structure, Joel and Ellie’s adventures going slowly.
It is so rare that television lets creators make episodes the length they need to be to tell the story. Both this episode and the one before it would have greatly suffered if they were forced to be 60 minutes. Maybe the season as a whole will clock in at a perfect 600 minutes or whatever but since this isn’t network television with a strict schedule that effects all other programing they can make some episodes longer and some shorter.
I just look at the context. Children ask questions about the world alot and shes completely sheltered by the state as well as grew up like an orphan. I think shes just curious and excited about actually seeing the world rather than being taught about it and learning it from a state run school.
It is so wild to me how much tension this show maintains. There are few to no jump scares, none in this episode, but you’re just always ready for the other shoe to drop.It’s impressive.
It’s snark. I hate snark. It’s that attitude as if they KNOW they are an invincible character in a fantasy, so nothing ever really matters. Injuries, destruction, monsters, even imminent death…just crack a quip and move on. I blame Bruce Willis for making it really trendy with “Die Hard”, then it never went away.
someone who never…ever…stops…talking…Yeah but it’s annoying in-universe, too, so it’s not like we’re meant to find it pleasing. What’s great is how realistic it is, she really nails being a sheltered 14-year-old.
“I swear there’s more tension when there’s no’s clickers, because every time they open a door I expect something to jump out”This is what “The Walking Dead” squandered. Instead of giving us the silence of the world and treating us like we understand human emotions and reactions they concentrated on 1000s of CGI zombies and gore. The Telltale “Walking Dead Video” games have that same tension and frankly despair of a broken world where meeting new folks is hell. So far “The last of us” is nailing it.
Certain aspects of their relationship remain murky, at least to me. Was it sexual? True, they share a bed after an exhausting day in the pilot, but to sleep. Can we expect flashbacks that show intimate moments between the two?*Sigh* why do you need this spelled out? Tess even said something to the effect of “I never asked you to feel the way I felt.” They boned. Let it go.Good episode. Though I feel they are giving Ellie a harder edge a little too soon. It’s hard to explain (especially without spoiling anything), but it subtly changes the dynamic of how Jole and Ellie’s relationship develops. It feels a little like they’re playing her already with the foreknowledge of where she goes.
I know! The ambiguity around this relationship is whether or not Joel had any feelings for Tess, not whether or not they had sex (because they obviously did and we don’t need a picture drawn). It sure seems like Joel just had sex with Tess because she was around and they got along, whereas Tess had serious feelings for Joel, and they stayed together for a decade or so because it was the apocalypse and it’s hard to date. The length of their relationship is interesting because it’s difficult to understand being with someone for that long while remaining emotionally walled off — so did Joel love Tess but wouldn’t allow himself to admit it, or was there really just nothing there?But that’s what we’re meant to be discussing, not whether or not two age appropriate adults who spent all their time together did it.
Loved her and wouldn’t/couldn’t admit it, because then admitting it would mean he lost someone he loved, which he probably swore to himself he’d never do again after the death of his daughter. Somewhat parallels his insistence that his brother is alive: since he loves his brother, he can’t admit he might be lost.
I’m sure all of the storyline purists who were upset that Sara was not white in the premiere, and that last week’s episode strayed from the story in the game to focus on Bill’s same sex relationship, are equally upset this week that they strayed from the game again and moved the story from Pittsburgh to Kansas Citu, right? They’ll be review bombing this episode too because they’re not bigots, they just really want a 1:1 transfer of the game’s story to the TV series.
Sir, this is an Arby’s?
But no free lunches, Arby’s was a restaurant!
Were people really upset about the change in Sarah’s ethnicity in the show? We never see Sarah’s mother in the game or learn anything about her beyond “she was married to Joel, they had a daughter, she’s gone when the game starts” so she could have theoretically been any race.
if Sara was Joel’s daughter’s mother she seemed white to me. the family picture had Joel, the daughter, and a white woman. unless i was seeing things.
The movie choices were a “tribute” of sorts by the locations team and The Globe is a still operational theatre in downtown Calgary.https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/television/the-year-of-the-zombie-how-hbos-mega-budgeted-the-last-of-us-took-over-the-province-from-waterton-to-grand-prairie
Have a Dawn of the Wolf Part 2 movie poster, you cowards!
No way was Episode 3 of The Last of US as good as Battlestar Galactica’s 33 or Agent of SHIELD’s 4722 Hours and a good chunk of Angel and … (long list from the last century give or take).
Minor correction: Mazin wrote the episode but didn’t direct. Episodes 4 and 5 are directed by Jeremy Webb. This was a serviceable episode. It was good to see Joel open up a bit, and one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in reviews was the nice moment where Ellie shows some vulnerability and Joel does respond. In the forest Ellie asks if there’s any way that people could know they’re there, and Joel says no. He’s in his sleeping bag with his eyes closed. But in the next shot, we see Ellie asleep and Joel standing with his back to her, keeping watch on the forest. He sacrifices the sleep he so desperately needs to make one big push to Wyoming to make sure she feels safe. It’s a really touching moment. That moment repeats itself in the high-rise, with a different result. The two have grown more comfortable with each other, they share that nice moment of laughter, and then fall asleep feeling more secure, even though they’re objectively in more danger and in closer proximity to people than they were in the woods. Joel lets his guard down, allows himself to relax around her, and it leads to them being taken by surprise. I’m anxious to see how it unfolds next week and how this lapse in protective instinct affects Joel.
“But in the next shot, we see Ellie asleep and Joel standing with his back to her, keeping watch on the forest.”I didn’t watch that detail closely, but I figured he was just up taking a whiz.
He’s holding his rifle across his chest in that shot, if I remember correctly. So probably not peeing.
The letdown after last week’s All Time Episode was inevitable, but this was not a good episode of anything. I appreciate what the episode had to do and the information they had to dump, but it was not all that compelling. Mazin should have directed his own script here.The only thing I DID like was the choice of Lynskey as an unlikely rebellion leader strangely enough.
“Her line before she died, “never even asked you to feel the same” (or
something close) made it clear they were physically intimate, and she
wanted to be emotionally involved as well but he’s too shut down.”Joel even had a line to Bill during the “lawn party” scene, something like “if mine…”, referring to Tess, in parallel to Frank, “brought random strangers over”. Implying not only they were intimate, but fully living together. Not to mention, Bill’s letter to Joel about keeping Tess safe. The one person he needs to save, like Bill needing to save Frank. Not sure how the author needed more confirmation about their relationship than that.
We don’t know that Joel and Tess lived together. We see her get into bed with him but we don’t see anything to indicate that she lives there. The little we see of that apartment makes it look like Joel lives there alone.In the game they definitely don’t live together. The first scene set in the “present” has Tess knocking on the door to be let into Joel’s apartment. If she lived there with him she would have had her own key and let herself in.
Last weeks episode, while a great and emotional hour plus of TV, really did not do much for the actual story IMO. We spent a lot of time with 2 people we will never see again….and for what? The truck? Ok, cool, I guess?Lynskey as the leader is also a silly choice. Look at some of the hardened roughnecks she has doing “work” for her. In what world do those dudes follow this lady? The answer is none. There is no world where this would happen.
In what world do those dudes follow this lady?The answer is none. You watch too much shitty fiction. Not every leader is a “bad ass” in real life. You have no idea what they went through together and how that informed their dynamic.
Sure. Shitty fiction. Or I just know that in this type of world where the base of our instincts and survival are heightened, STRENTH, specifically of the physical kind, is what most will gravitate towards for survival.
Wow you really told on yourself twice over.
Oh did I? By what, not falling in goose step with the flock? Please. One can have a dissenting opinion on a fictional piece of media w/o being labeled either a bigot or sexist. Which is exactly what you are inferring, so don’t walk it back too quickly, pal.
You are indeed bigoted and sexist, and I’m guessing you’re quite familiar with goosestepping to boot.
Sure, if you say so pal. This is why we can’t have nice things btw, people like you.
If you watched episode 3 and feel that the only effect on the overall plot was that they got a truck then I guess you skipped the scene where Joel and Ellie read Bill’s letter and Joel’s reaction to it.
I guess.
– You thought Tess and Joel’s relationship was vague? They were absolutely lovers. I felt more like they were lovers in the show than in the game. Her line before she died, “never even asked you to feel the same” (or something close) made it clear they were physically intimate, and she wanted to be emotionally involved as well but he’s too shut down.
– I’m still bummed there’s no a “before the end” prologue each week still, that would have been awesome. A limited-series prequel full of a bunch of them or something would be my dream. Like World War Z, but TLOU.- They’re still going hard on those “previously on”s though, huh? Yeesh
– The word-for-word porn magazine scene in the truck was a delight. Actually, the whole truck part was a delight. Seeing Joel slowly open up even over just this episode is incredible acting, and the “I’m not tired” smash cut to sleeping was *chef’s kiss*- I mean, I get WHY they do it (because it’s realistic), but it makes me roll my eyes and feel LESS sorry for the enemies when they’re ambushing them, crashing them, shooting at them, Joel pops one, and the baddie goes “You motherfucker!!!”. Like dude, what? You were just doing the same thing to them! Double so for the kid Ellie capped who was suddenly VERY cooperative and pleading for his life while bleeding out. Buddy, you made your choices. – I know they basically had to, but keeping the joke book makes me so happy. They’re so incredibly dumb and add just the right amount of levity. The final joke where they laugh uncontrollably was so heartwarming I could barely stand it. – Are they shying away from showing human-on-human violence in this? I noticed that every time there’s going to be an execution or a gunshot or anything there’s a lot of blocking and cuts that stop us from seeing it. I mean, I’m not exactly clamoring for it, it was just obvious enough that I’m curious (especially since from here on out it’s a LOT). – It’s crazy how much deja vu watching this creates, where they make a set look SO similar or have the action go in such a way that I either immediately recognize it or go “this seems insanely familiar”. I can’t believe how well-produced the whole thing is. – A short episode after they spoiled us last week! The only consolation is the next one is a few days away already, but I hope they stick to the longer cuts for the rest of the season. It’s been such a happy change from the habit of other streamers giving us 35-44 minute episodes. Gonna have to zen myself out before next week’s episode, every time I see a new set piece I remember how relentlessly traumatizing this story is.
Are they shying away from showing human-on-human violence in this?Very much so, especially regarding Joel compared to the game, and it’s obviously a conscious choice on the showrunners’ part. I assume they thought if they showed Joel being as relentlessly, and casually, violent as he is in the game they may risk having the audience not be able to sympathize with him. I assumed this would be the episode, knowing the ambush was coming, where the audience would really see Joel go off and we’d get a shocked, “Jesus, Joel,” exclamation from Ellie. Yes, Joel does kill the wounded ambusher but it’s off screen.Frankly, I haven’t loved this choice so far. I mean, obviously the show can’t have Joel caving in someone’s skull with a brick every few minutes. The game is a different medium and there’s a very different perspective between a TV viewer and the immediacy of a player controlling Joel. Still, I feel like they may have gone too far the other way on the show.
At the same time, my experience of the show is admittedly influenced by my familiarity with the games. It’s hard for me to gauge what a viewer who hasn’t played the game’s perception of Joel currently is.
I was disappointed there were no bricks involved in the fighting this episode, lol. Still time I guess!
Give us a brick or a bottle being thrown at an enemy, you cowards!
I really hope Joel whips a brick at someone’s head next episode
I had the same feeling at first, as I was used to game-Joel just fucking up dozens of people. But in real-life terms, he and Ellie at this point have spent…what? 3 or 4 days together? Less than a week certainly. And she’s seen him kill two people with his bare hands and shoot two more. I think that’s a pretty significant violence toll when you’re not looking at it through a video game lens.
At 3 or 4 days together, in the game, Ellie had seen Joel wipe out a couple dozen people, at least. Obviously, I don’t expect to the show to match the game’s body count though. I was more referring to, as greycobalt mentioned, how the show is framing the human on human violence, how it’s shot, what is or isn’t shown onscreen, etc. This is especially in regards to Joel (and Tess for that matter). The showrunners chose to change how Joel and Tess are portrayed early on by changing their interactions with Robert, for instance. Instead of Joel quite casually torturing Robert by snapping his arm, and Tess then casually shooting Robert in the face, they omitted all of that. I specifically note the casual, matter of fact, aspect of those scenes because it immediately tells you so much about who they are and what their lives have been like, just from inured to violence they are. In the show, the first time we see Joel kill someone it’s because he emotionally snaps due to a flashback, not because it was just the most expedient way out of the situation. The show mentions that Joel and Tess have done some bad stuff through dialog but it seems reticent to show it. The show presentation of Joel is quite different from the game in that regard. Show Joel is presented as more bothered by violence, and much less callous, than game Joel. I can understand the show writers maybe worrying that that presentation of Joel risks viewers possibly not being able to connect/sympathize with him, but there’s no shortage of prestige TV main characters that are awful people yet the viewers still find them, and their choices, compelling.I just find the show’s differing starting point in Joel’s portrayal to be a bit questionable, as though they were afraid to show Joel in an objectively bad light to the audience. So it does make me question where they intend to go with this show portrayal. In the game, Joel being a callous, murdering, lying bastard when it serves his goals, is intrinsic to the theme and what made so much of the game’s story (especially the ending) the object of endless debates. The show seems to be heading towards a more typical Hollywood story of, ‘man ends up doing questionable things to selflessly protect his surrogate daughter.’ Obviously, time will tell.
I actually find it refreshing after shows like The Walking Dead. Keep most of the on-screen violence to fighting the mushbies and restrict anything between humans hopefully to when it’ll make the most impact. It’s just a little thing that’ll hopefully stop this show become a depressing slog like TWD.
Keep most of the on-screen violence to fighting the mushbies and restrict anything between humans hopefully to when it’ll make the most impact. Therein is the rub though. As I said, I don’t expect the show to have Joel mowing through as many humans as he does in the action sections of the game. That would be ludicrous. I was more talking about how the show changed the early portrayals of Joel and Tess in the story portions of the game. They’re both nonchalant about torture and murder at this point in their lives to make ends meet and protect each other. The show eschews those earlier scenes and makes them far more sympathetic. I only question this change in the show because the game makes you question if Joel has even changed by the end. The show has softened Joel so much that it’s hard to see any basis to even ask that question. Without that, you’re left with a rote Lone Wolf and Cub style retread.
I expect we’ll get some of the more startling graphic violence at the end when they want the big climactic points to hit harder. As you say, in Naughty Dog games even the wisecracking heroes are unstoppable murder machines due to gameplay loops, and at some point I think it would be desensitizing as well. I think The Walking Dead provides a good example about how you have to constantly escalate things to diminishing returns in that vein.
At the same time, my experience of the show is admittedly influenced by my familiarity with the games. It’s hard for me to gauge what a viewer who hasn’t played the game’s perception of Joel currently is.I know so far that the series has been hurt by having very few scenes of Joel putting a ladder into place.
If this series doesn’t have at least one scene of Ellie floating on top of a wooden pallet then what was the point of this series?
I’m still bummed there’s no a “before the end” prologue each week still, that would have been awesome. Same. These things functioned well as a replacement for finding notes and audio logs and stuff in the game, that fleshed out the world.
Yeesh the was a D a filler episode and a bad one and worse it’s going to take 2 episode, a tedious video game side adventure. When a civilization breaks down women do not do well the biggest strongest most brutal guy takes over. This pg level, were just hunting informers community doesn’t ring true.
When a civilization breaks down women do not do well the biggest strongest most brutal guy takes over. Decades of shitty fiction have given you evo-psych brainworms.
LOL at this being “a tedious video game side adventure”. There are no side adventures in the game, or this show (so far). It’s a straight shot getting them from the Boston QZ to delivering Ellie toe the Fireflies. It’s not like Joel and Ellie are stopping along the way to go sight-seeing, or help out random strangers. Everything they’re doing is to get them to their goal.
The car ambush comes off as kind of clunky and contrived as a cinematic action sequence v. a way of driving the player to the next shootout in a video game. The dude calling for his Mom was a little OTT too. Really reminds you of the source material in a bad way when they stoop to that level of ham fisted nonsense.
In the game when you fight a group of humans, the last one (if you don’t kill them right away) will almost always beg Joel for his life.
Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen is an interesting character. I also found her acting choices to be a little… unexpected, given the kind of character she’s playing, but based on the behind-the-scenes info, I think it’s more of a deliberate choice. Lynskey, whose voice is already pretty high and soft, said she purposely played Kathleen as “sweet and soft-spoken” to contrast her violence, so as to suggest she was forced into being this hardened warlord because of the death of her brother (whom Mazin described to her as some kind of “Jesus figure” in their community – I hope they expand on this.) Kathleen does come across as incredibly vulnerable and full of pain, and the episode seemed to make a point of showing how she has to convince herself to commit acts of cruelty and violence, like killing her doctor. Some would argue this makes it hard to believe her as the leader of an armed movement, but my guess is that this is a community of people who all knew each other before and were forced to take up arms to survive. Maybe Kathleen’s “Jesus” brother was the former leader and the respect they had for him has now been transferred to her. I don’t know what changes they’re gonna make to Henry and Sam (other than Sam being deaf), but Kathleen’s arc so far seems like a self-contained take on the “ethics of revenge” theme that TLOU Part II is all about. So far they’ve not given us much to go off of, though, and I’m getting a strong Walking Dead vibe from this whole group.
That’s a key bit of info about her brother’s role in the community. I hope it is revealed in-show next week.
Is Sam deaf in the show? This is the first I’ve heard of this.
The preview for the next episode showed Henry talking to Sam in sign language about 12 seconds in.
It’d be nice if these recaps were less play-by-play scene summaries and more insight, commentary, and speculation on what’s ahead. A few other shows recaps on this site are like this and reading though them just feels like I’m rewatching the show rather than discussing ideas presented from the show. Or the recap is using summary to reach a word count Assume that we all watched the show and paid attention without live tweeting or texting though it.
If they did reviews like you describe where they don’t recap what happened in the episode you’d get lots of comments complaining that they didn’t tell you what happened in the episode.
You are absolutely all over these replies, breathlessly defending the show from even mundane criticism, and here you are doing it with the actual article. What is it that drives you to do this? Ever considered a hobby?
A question: If the infected don’t go to rural areas – to such an extend that you can sleep out in the open and not be massively worried about your safety – why would ANYONE bother living in or even visiting a city? I mean, there are bison and there are deer, find a secluded enough river, a bow and some arrows and aren’t you basically sorted for the rest of your days?
‘Raiders and slavers’ – which is a bit of a weak reason but it’s the one they give. I’m with you that I’d rather deal with a few evil people (especially if I had a small community) as opposed to hordes of runners, clickers who are damn hard to put down even if a single bite *didn’t* spell doom, and the worse variants.
They end up addressing this when they get to Wyoming, but basically, word travels very slowly in this world, and folks in the QZ only know dribs and drabs of the outside world, some of which may not be accurate. So why bother making the dangerous trek out when you are in relative safety where you are?I would expect the KC group will eventually figure this out, as the QZ is not longer containing them, but it does seem to be early days for the revolution there, so it may not have happened yet.
Wasn’t the implication that the infected focus on areas where people are? If people started bunching up in rural areas, seems like the infected would follow them there eventually.
How many urban and suburban people do you know have skills in bow hunting and butchering?
I’m sure I could work it out if it was learn to do that or have my brains eaten by zombie fungus people.
According to this woke nonsense, likely very few, but about 50% of gay guys. Makes total sense.
And, relatedly, why would you drive right through the heart of a mid-sized metropolis’ downtown? Take a fucking detour, guys.
Yes. People try to avoid doing that TODAY, and we’re only almost a post-apocalypse.
A question: If the infected don’t go to rural areas – to such an extend that you can sleep out in the open and not be massively worried about your safety – why would ANYONE bother living in or even visiting a city?The Infected are where the people are. If you moved masses of people to the wilderness, some of them would be infected along the way and would become threat at their new destination. In episode 2 Joel explained that most of the Infected surrounding the QZs haven’t been there for twenty years, but are the result of people seeking out shelter and getting infection in the process. If you moved the QZ, the same issue would follow it. As Joel says, there are people living in the wilderness, just not the sort that you’d want to run into. Incidentally, a few thousand people could kill all the deer in a secluded area to extinction if they tried to survive by hunting. That’s a good plan for a small family group, not for a whole new civilisation.
Sure, but we’re working on the assumption that 90% of the country is already dead, right? There’s already a shedload of empty wilderness space in the US with 330 million people, I’m sure you could fit 33 million into the countryside without worrying about rubbed elbows.
Didn’t they pretty much cover this in the previous episode? To be able to live on his own without the benefit of modern society Bill had to have an incredible level of skill in a ton of different areas. He could, hunt and raise animals (and then butcher them) he could grow crops, he could build security fences, and install natural gas piping and he could maintain a vehicle. Most people probably couldn’t do most of those things and there are a lot of ways you can die in the wilderness. Sure you could have a group of people do them, but then the more people you get in an area the higher chance of it attracting infected.
Interesting column in the NYT about how Bill & Frank were extreme conservatives. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/the-last-of-us-conservative.html
I mean, the Times is right: Bill was a QAnon-style doomsday gun nut who believed the government was a force for evil coming to destroy freedom – and the show makes him unequivocally CORRECT! Having all those guns WAS essential! He literally had a Gadsden flag in his house. The Right is so obsessed with identity though, that they just see “f*g” and don’t recognize that he’s on their side.
Bill was a 2003 era Libertarian. An ancestor to the modern QAnon types, but far less into Right-wing bootlicking. He hated the Bush regime and probably thought the 9/11 was an inside job. Also, Bill wasn’t right. He thought that the evil government deliberately unleashed a plague to kill most of the populace and control the rest. But in reality all of FEDRA’s evil stemmed from a total lack of preparation for a global disaster. Bill managed to survive because of his paranoia, but none of his conspiracy theories were actually real or rational.
That’s true – I lived in Boulder, CO, in the 90s-00s and I remember when “the government is putting mind-control chemicals in the tap water” was a far-left position. Today’s armed paranoiacs make less sense. They say “don’t tread on me” and support the capitol rioters, but also say “Back The Blue.” They arm up to fight the “government overreach”, but also love when Trump/DeSantis crack down on people, ban books, etc. They were easier to understand when they were just hardcore bunker libertarian-anarchists.
Also, Bill wasn’t right. He thought that the evil government
deliberately unleashed a plague to kill most of the populace and control
the rest. But in reality all of FEDRA’s evil stemmed from a total lack of preparation for a global disaster.hu that seems vaguely familiar
NYT columns are stupid.
Strange relic from those days, lot of 9/11 truthers were on the left. Not all of course, but a decent number were like Jimmy Dore, have a lot of left wing opinions but also Bush did it was a default answer.
Yeah, I’ll take this kind of episode over last week’s diversion. I thought focusing on two characters with whom we have no connection and die at the end was largely a waste of time. In the third episode of the series, no less. Heck, the truck our two obtained didn’t even survive this episode. Here we got to focus on the main characters while expanding the scope in a way that actually matters to the present story.
100% agree, but don’t say it too loud….next thing you know we are both bigots for not 100% fawning over an episode of a TV show…
The previous episode was “largely a waste of time”?
This episode yawned for me. With the exception of Episode 3 – which somehow managed to be not just a superior episode of the show but a superior episode of television in general – this show just does not do well with new material.Pedro and Bella are generally great, but both the plot and their relationship is feeling rushed (hence Ellie getting Joel’s approval to use a gun so early, when in the game it took much longer). Outside of those two there’s a lot of clunky, mostly expository dialogue underscored by wooden performances. The first episode looked great, but ever since then the “video game” feeling of the sets has really stood out to me, with some ugly green-screening that seems more Sci-Fi channel than HBO. I think this show would be a lot more poorly rated if it weren’t for the pedigree of the source material.
I was wondering if ‘Harry’ was a made up boogieman she used to keep her people afraid and in line.
Do you mean “Henry”? That’s the name that Kathleen uses to describe the person her group is trying to find.
Whatever the name was, I was wondering if it was just a boogieman.Probably have ‘Harry’ on the mind because my daughter has been pointing out Harry Styles everywhere for the last few days.
Clearly the government response to the outbreak was a colossal mistake: by herding citizens into bombed-out urban Quarantine Zones, they contained the fungal pathogen but also created death traps for survivors. If the countryside is relatively free from infecteds and fungal networks, do the rich and powerful live in compounds there? Or is it just roaming raiders and slavers?Where there are people, there are Infected. If there are no Infected in the wilderness, it’s because there aren’t any people to infect. There’s a constant if slow stream of people seeking out the Quarantine Zones, and a portion of them always ends up getting infected along the way, Joel explained that in episode 2. So no matter where you put the QZ, the result would be the same.
AV Club caps all review ratings at “A” eh… https://www.avclub.com/curb-your-enthusiasm-seinfeld-1798207508
Dude, that was 14 years ago. If you have to go back 14 years to find an A+ grade, chances are that they stopped giving them out since then.
lol yeah i know, I’m being a goof.HOWEVER, I only need to go back ELEVEN AND A HALF YEARS TECHNICALLY!
ALSO FOR CURBhttps://www.avclub.com/curb-your-enthusiasm-palestinian-chicken-1798169033
Updating your argument from “14 years” to “11.5 years” isn’t the improvement you think it is. 🙂
correction: it’s EXACTLY the improvement i think it is. ( v;
I think the acting and everything else is amazing, but this episode just felt dull. I think it feels like I’ve seen all of this before (and no, I have not played the game(s))? I don’t know, the last episode was so moving, and I will watch the show til the very end, it just feels very “business as usual” to me (even if, once again, the “business” is indeed excellently acted and filmed etc etc).
I had to look up the gasoline thing since Last Man on Earth (easily my favorite post-apocalyptic show by leaps and bounds) posited a world in which most gasoline was corrupted within about 2 years. It turns out most sources say gasoline has a lifespan of 3-6 months before it degrades. Ethanol mixes degrade first. Gas stored with petroleum preservatives can last up to 3 years. Yes, I know it’s a TV show, but 20 years seems too long for gas to work (outside any settlements that might be actively producing, of course). Commercially canned goods, meanwhile, apparently never go bad as long as they remain sealed. The taste, however, degrades within a couple of years. Truly cannot imagine what those raviolis tasted like.
I haven’t played the game, but I was surprised that Bill didn’t have a 4WD diesel truck, since diesel fuel lasts much longer before it goes bad, and biodiesel can be made with (I believe) biomass and/or cooking oils.
I’m also wondering where they’re getting ammunition after 20 years. Are there still ammo plants churning out bullets so people can shoot away with abandon?
There’s a moment. When Ellie pulls out the joke book (the true star of the episode), and starts reading off, there’s a moment on Joel’s face, where its as if he’s looking into the future, and he knows how long this journey is going to be and realizing this is his life now, lol. Before finally saying “nope!” It is the most amazing beat from Pedro Pascal so far
Just jumping in on the Lynskey-train: Love her, but this was not great. Can’t tell if it was her, the writing or both. Probably both. However, one bright point is the Ellie/Joel relationship was fun and believable this ep.
Lynskey is a counterintuitive choice to play this dangerous figure. Her thin, folksy voice evokes more Midwestern substitute teacher than a cold-blooded rebel leader. She sounds like a Karen, a PTA member, someone who rolls their windows up and locks their doors when there’s a homeless person on the sidewalk. Nothing like a supposedly ruthless and badass leader.I wasn’t convinced.
Nothing like a supposedly ruthless and badass leader.So it was realistic.
It just makes absolutely no sense for anyone to take 76 South and then 70 West through KC to get from Boston to Wyoming. 90 and 80 are right there! Use Chicago if Pittsburgh is problematic. It’s a too-dumb decision for a show that hasn’t been making them and kept me annoyed the whole episode.
If you wan to take Interstates but not go through the middle of big cities, 90-to-80 is even worse than 76-to-70. Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver all have loops well out from downtown but for Cleveland and Chicago even the “diverting” routes are still pretty built up.Even today no one wants to go to Gary.
It’s not difficult to see how Kathleen became the leader.She was probably a local do-gooder, a conservative member of a schoolboard, local church, low level local politician who used to get into everyone’s business and dictate things like what can and can’t be done in schools/local home owners association type.The grunts are grunts, anyone higher up in the military will be on the other side. grunts need someone to follow, they don’t lead; so ,if there’s a person the local populace is already used to having order barked at them from, they’ll fall in line.The alternative is a firefight that would probably end badly.
“Certain aspects of their relationship remain murky, at least to me. Was it sexual?”In the game this relationship is left deliberately vague. Druckmann said they did that on purpose so players could interpret it as they wanted.Personally, I feel that Joel at this point is incapable of being in any relationship that involves real emotions. He’s completely shut down after Sarah’s death.
“Not seeing a lot of steady leadership from ol’ Comandante K. Execute the camp doctor?”Pretty sure that the doctor was not a member of Kathleen’s group, just a civilian living in the city. And he was a collaborator with the enemy (at least the enemy of Kathleen’s group) so she knows that she can’t trust him. Plus her execution of him is pretty clearly an emotional reaction to the deaths of the 3 men killed by Joel.
Did I mishear/misunderstand things or was Bryan supposed to be Kathleen’s son? When he pleads for his life he mentions going to see “my mother” who will let Joel go, so I assumed Kathleen was his mother. Although I don’t think anyone in the group (like her second-in-command) ever says “Sorry about your son’s death” to Kathleen, so maybe I’m wrong.
Per the Globe Cinema marquee in Kansas CityThat is the real life Globe Cinema in Calgary, probably our best old theatre.
I was okay with Lynskey, she plays a similar role in Yellowjackets. The part that rang real false to me was Joel and Ellie running into the very two people Lynskey’s character was looking for in one abandoned building 33 floors up in a huge city, and AFTER Joel put down noise makers to wake them, which the same two people magically avoided.THAT was the contrived part.
“They’re stopping every hour or so for Joel to siphon gas from other cars. Apparently gas breaks down over time; you burn through the stuff faster. Learn something new every day!” … this isn’t true, though. Right? I thought gas did the opposite — basically turned into jelly, or napalm — if you left it lying around for 20 years.
Folks who have a problem taking Lynskey seriously as an amoral monster have clearly never seen Heavenly Creatures or Yellowjackets.
Let us count the ridiculous and entirely unnecessary odes to wokeness…1. Joel’s daughter is race-swapped from the original game.2. The pandemic has something to do with climate change allowing fungi to live as parasites in humans when before, throughout all of human existence, they could not.3. Bill is a closeted gay gun enthusiast who can fix and/or build anything and has vast knowledge as a survivalist/doomsday-prepper…you know, like most gay guys.4. Frank ends up in Bill’s trap/pit, proves he has exactly ZERO skills of any kind, unless you consider turning-out closeted gay guys some kind of superpower. Naturally, in an end-of-the-world dystopian hellscape, he too is gay (of course), having somehow managed to be the last surviving member of his original part of ten. Sure, that tracks.5. Joel and Ellie run-up against a civilian rebel group led by Melanie Lynskey—a dough-y middle-aged suburban soccer mom with the commanding voice of a 7 year-old girl amongst a city of aggressive, well-armed men. Totally unreasonable, but girl-power—am I right? Sheesh.6. Let’s see, who have we left out of this exercise in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? The episode ends with 2 black boys pointing guns at our main characters.This is didactic ideological indoctrination masquerading as entertainment. So naturally, Rotten Tomatoes–a site that Nina Jankowicz should have shut-down as misinformation while in the position of Minister of Truth for about 6 minutes–gives it a 96% approval rating. Is it any wonder that decent, normal Americans despise those of you in the cultish bubble in which you reside? My guess is you have no idea what I’m talking about, which only serves to prove my point.