In a bittersweet The Last Of Us, Ellie gets a fleeting taste of normal teen life
Neil Druckmann’s first solo script fills in a lot of emotional backstory
TV Reviews Ellie
“Do you trust me with your life?” If someone asks that in The Last Of Us, as Riley (Storm Reid) does of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), it conveys a double message. It means, I will always protect you and also If you get infected, I will kill you. Both senses were acutely present in “Left Behind.” Not many episodes (or series) would evoke such different cultural touchstones for your humble Gen X recapper: the Richard Peck YA novel Secrets Of The Shopping Mall and George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead (both 1979). In the book, two kids hide out in a shopping center at night, whereas the classic movie depicts zombies swarming a mall.
Being a survival horror story, the Last Of Us resting vibe is fear, anger, and numb perseverance. However, its emotional stealth tactic is taking viewers very, very high in order to plunge them into the depths. Prime example being the arc of romantic joy to heart-rending sorrow that made “Long Long Time” so intense. “Left Behind” showed pre-Joel Ellie getting a fleeting taste of normal teen life—flirting, freedom, games—only to have it torn away by a clicker and the specter of death.
It was an important flashback episode (Neil Druckmann’s first solo script), filling in a lot of emotional backstory for Ellie, despite technical questions that required some suspension of disbelief (see Stray observations). Anchored by smooth chemistry between the sly, vibrant Reid and the cocksure Ramsey, the storytelling followed a familiar but still potent pattern: introduce character, flesh them out, then kill them (eventually).
Framing the tale is Ellie’s heroic attempt to save a gut-stabbed Joel, and his equally valiant command that she leave him. Bella has taken a bleeding Joel to a safe spot, the basement of a house in Eastern Colorado, where she tries to stop the flow from his puncture wound. Their horse chills in the living room, shaking snow off its head. As Ellie applies direct pressure, Joel rasps at her to leave, take the gun, go north to Tommy in Jackson. “Joel, shut the fuck up!” Ellie shouts, then wraps him in his coat and heads upstairs. Is Ellie abandoning her friend and protector? As she touches the doorknob we rewind several months, back to Boston.
The brief portrait of Ellie during her FEDRA schooldays in the Boston QZ establishes a few things we already knew: She has a hair-trigger temper, a violent streak, and little respect for authority. A fellow cadet (Ruby Lybbert) makes a sneering joke about Riley during a run, and Ellie puts the girl in the infirmary with 15 stitches. So it comes as a bit of a surprise when Ellie’s supervisor, Captain Kwong (Terry Chen), says she’s officer material. He seems like one of the saner and kinder people we’ve met in the series. “There’s a leader in you,” Kwong tells Ellie. “And one day it could be your turn.” (Let’s put a pin in that.)
Riley’s sneaky surprise visit to Ellie’s bedroom telegraphs a lot about their friendship: a prank that gets violent, resolved by jokes and a faint but unmistakable current of sexual tension. “I should stab you,” the pissed-off Ellie says (which for TLOU gamers is pure foreshadowing). Riley convinces her friend to skip out for the night. She throws clothes at Ellie to change. Ellie tells her to turn around. Riley, amused, remarks that Ellie’s always weird about that. Soon we learn that Riley ran away from military school and, after meeting Marlene, joined the Fireflies. Ellie is incredulous; they talked of liberating the Boston QZ, but the Fireflies are terrorists.
Riley leads Ellie hopping across Boston rooftops to an abandoned mall that everyone thinks is overrun with infecteds and therefore sealed off. Along the way, the girls rib each other and take tugs off a bottle of whiskey they find on a dead man, probably a suicide. Riley refers to FEDRA as “fascist dickbags” while Ellie calls Riley’s defense of Firefly bombings “propaganda bullshit.”
After descending into the Liberty Gardens mall from a hole in the roof, Riley explains that FEDRA connected the city block to the electrical grid, and the mall was part of that section. “Not that they know,” she adds. Riley guides Ellie to an upper level overlooking the mall concourse, and snaps on the power, revealing the many shops of yesteryear. Riley joins her at the railing and promises Ellie “the Four Wonders of the Mall.” Incredulous and flattered, Ellie asks, “You planned stuff?” Subtext: Is this a date?
The central section is charming as heck and—as we’ve come to expect—a prolonged period of mounting dread. Riley and Ellie explore the half-looted and decaying Liberty Gardens, and along the way we realize: Malls are metaphor machines. They contain everything you need in life, for a price. Food, sex, shelter, culture, and play—in other words, society.
Riley and Ellie’s activities resonate (joyfully and ominously) with the course their lives are taking. They laughingly ogle the Victoria’s Secret mannequins, ride the carousel, get their pictures taken in a photo booth, and battle with avatars in a video game. They are falling in love and indulging in a fantasy of escape. Little gestures like holding hands and lingering looks mark “Left Behind” as the YA counterpart of “Long Long Time.” Instead of two middle-aged men over years, it’s young, female, and brief.
At Raja’s Arcade the gals are basically in teenager heaven: an empty arcade with unlimited quarters. As they yell and laugh playing Mortal Kombat II, the camera dollies back away from them and (oh, no) into the concourse. We enter an American Girl doll store (bit heavy-handed) and finally come to rest on a clicker (Ian Rozylo) splayed on the floor. The noise wakes it up.
After the arcade, Riley brings Ellie to her camp in the back of a taco restaurant and presents her with a gift: No Pun Intended: Volume Too (which made its first appearance in the third episode to Joel’s horror). Ellie then finds some IEDs that Riley has been guarding for the Fireflies, and suddenly whipsaws to a feeling of betrayal. (Never underestimate how confused a teen struggling with their sexuality can be.)
Riley next drops a (metaphorical) bomb: “They’re sending me to a post in the Atlanta QZ. I asked if you could join.” Tonight is her last night in Boston. An enraged Ellie turns on her heel and leaves. She doesn’t get far before, crying, she turns to go back. The sound of a scream makes Ellie break into a run. But it’s only an automated pop-up scare in a Halloween novelty store. That was the Fifth Wonder of the Mall, Riley admits sheepishly. Ellie retrieves her pun book and plops down next to Riley.
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of sudden, you’re alive. You give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever.” Thusly Ellie recaps their situation (and a good deal of Romeo And Juliet).
You might expect Ellie to impulsively agree to defect to the Fireflies—but she doesn’t. She’s been promised an officer’s stripes. Riley left because they had her guarding sewage cleaners. You could say their respective political stances are not yet fully formed or grounded in a set or moral values, just extensions of their youthful egos.
At any rate, girls, as the song goes, just wanna have fun. They put on Halloween masks (big bad wolf for Ellie, killer clown for Riley) and dance on the display cases to a funky cover of “I Got You, Babe.” (Riley really really planned this out to the lyrics, “And when I’m sad, you’re a clown / And if I get scared, you’re always around.”) Breathless and sweaty under their masks, they pull them off. “Don’t go,” Ellie begs in a quivering voice. Riley agrees. And they kiss.
This ain’t Friday The 13th, where teens are punished for their desires, but tropes gonna trope. The clicker hears its cue and barges in. The fight sequence that follows (bravo, director Liza Johnson) is the best close-combat, human-versus-infected sequences we’ve had: messy, down and dirty, with Ellie finally sinking her knife in the fungal baddie’s brain. Her jubilation turns to horror as she sees a bite on her arm. Riley shows the bite on her hand. They agree to wait it out, unwilling to do Bill-and-Frank murder-suicide thing. It really would be Romeo And Juliet—if we didn’t know Ellie is immune. The best night of her life turned into the worst.
Cut back to Joel shivering on the mattress. The flashback “happened” as Ellie’s hand was on the doorknob. She makes her decision. Ransacking the house for anything that could help Joel, she finds a needle and spool of thread. When Joel sees that she’s returned, he lets her take over. Ellie begins sewing up Joel’s wound. He passes out from the pain.
Stray observations
- FEDRA has batteries, like the ones in Ellie’s Walkman. But would they still work? Energizer says Energizer® Ultimate Lithium™ lasts up to 20 years in storage.
- An even more important power question: If FEDRA is hooking up parts of the Boston grid, wouldn’t they notice a massive surge in usage when Riley switched on the mall?
- Ellie drinks from the dead guy’s bottle and jokes to Riley, “it’s great.” In “Kin,” Ellie got a nip from Joel’s flask and confirmed that booze tastes “gross.”
- Items in Ellie’s bedroom: cassette tapes of A-ha’s greatest hits and Etta James; movie posters for Mortal Kombat II and Innerspace; Will Livingston’s No Pun Intended and a Savage Starlight comic.
- Also from the Department of Suspended Disbelief: Surely the film in the photo booth would be completely useless, not simply faded?
- Ramsey is giddily awestruck as, to “Take On Me,” she experiences “electric stairs.”
- Captain Kwong provides the series’ first defense of FEDRA: Without them, civilians will murder and loot. After seeing the chaos in Kansas City, some might agree. But the KC FEDRA was notoriously violent and oppressive.
- Movie playing in Liberty Gardens cinema: Dawn Of The Wolf, Part 2. An allusion to Ellie’s mask? To Dawn of the Dead? Also: handwritten sign in the box-office window has understatement of the century: “Back in 5 Min.”
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FEDRA has batteries, like the ones in Ellie’s Walkman. But would they still work? Energizer says Energizer® Ultimate Lithium™ lasts up to 20 years in storage.See also: Rechargeable.Nice showcase for Bella, fills in some pieces. Like she probably had to kill Riley, or see it done. I know some will complain it didn’t advance the story, but I liked it.
Not so great…
The obsession with advancing the story is really weird for those of us who grew up in an era when most TV shows just hit the reset button every episode. You can enjoy things besides plotlines!
we don’t get reruns anymore so that got higher on the complaint totem pole.
The game (or this episode) doesn’t come out and tell you, but it’s pretty clear that Ellie had to kill Riley once she turned. They both expected to turn at roughly the same time, so when Riley did and Ellie didn’t, she would have attacked Ellie, leaving Ellie no chance but to kill her.
I will say — having not played the games, I was expecting this backstory to be muuuuuuuuch worse than what we saw. It was still rough, but really only out of a sense of angst knowing how it was going to end.Also, Captain Kwong was actually… pretty great for a military school administrator under a fascist rule — understanding that if The Hole is a deterrent if it’s not working you need to try something else, etc. But, let’s be real — I totally expected him to start talking about trees and plants? Who’s with me, fellow Expanse fans?
It’s significantly toned down from the games, presumably for budget, with just that one infected rather than a whole swarm.
I meant emotionally — I don’t actually care how many infected there are… :p
In that case, the one big change is that in the game, all the arcade games are broken, and Riley has Ellie close her eyes and talks her through imagining playing it, creating much more intimacy between them. I have no idea why they changed it, as needing to get the game footage probably just made it harder to film. There’s also the same ending where it’s left to our imagination what ended up happening to Riley, though in this case we have Ellie’s earlier line that the kid in Kansas City wasn’t the first person she killed.
I mean, I … get it? In translating to a visual medium, unless the game itself had them showing you what Ellie was seeing in her head as an actual video game — it’s probably cheaper to license a game and have them play it.When the whole experience you’re having is interactive (i.e. playing the game), it can make sense to slow it down and create a scenario that’s a break from that. I see why in a non-interactive medium translation they’d want to actually show-not-tell the scene. YMMV, of course!
I think the fighting game thing worked in the original largely because it was in a game. Riley is giving you instructions on how to play, and you’re following them with a clear understanding of how videogames work. It was superior, but I don’t think it would translate to a passive medium all that well, especially when you consider that at least part of the audience won’t really have the experience to “know” what’s being imagined.Plus, Ellie’s birthday gift features a similar sequence that’s presumably coming down the line and which might feel too much like a retread if they’d done Mortal Kombat II/The Turning that way here (whereas the fact that one of them is semi-interactive in the games makes them stand apart).
Druckmann has said that he originally wanted Mortal Kombat in the original game but they couldn’t afford it, so they created the fake video game (The Turning). But with the show they could afford to pay to get MK here.As far as not being able to play the actual video game in the DLC, that was mostly done to add a mini-game for the player to do.
…presumably for budget…I presume it is for story. This show has a big budget. That mall set was big budget stuff.Hordes of infected, leaping, climbing, running-and-gunning all make sense in a game. Not so much in a TV episode. One infected was enough to tell this story.When I played the game (most games) I am the greatest mass murderer in history. Joel killing hundreds of random goons. Good for a game.Doesn’t make sense in a drama.
And because one was all that was needed.
Bingo. And it is much more believable to have a couple wet-behind-the-ears teenagers actually win (but really fuck up) against a single infected than elude a whole swarm.The game’s DLC only went the swarm route for virtue of being a game, where mechanics (usually) dictate the flow of action.
Also arguably for realism. If there were hordes of infected in the mall you’d think somebody would have encountered them before. I doubt Riley was the first person to explore the mall. But I could see one lone infected being there and nobody encountering it before.
The mall was sealed because of the Infected, but of course Riley had to go there to set everything up and if there were a whole bunch of active ones there’s no way that she wouldn’t have roused them in the process. Makes more sense that there was just one dormant Infected that only woke up from really loud noise and still took a long time to actually get moving.
The one infected felt a bit more realistic- they also emphasized how overall locked down the mall was and how it wasn’t really a giant security gap like it appeared in the game
It’s always nice to have Terry Chen pop up in things.
All I could think about was The Expanse lol.
As for difference in emotional impact, the game has a much longer time to play with which helps, and the past stuff is shown in segments; interspersed between present day stuff that takes maybe 50% of the play time. So you can sort of have cliffhangers in the past as you play through the present (also in a mall,) and poignancy of contrasts between Ellie’s past joy versus her present grim determination.
Still I think it’s a very good adaptation for a different medium.
I yelped “Prax!” when he showed up on screen.
No kidding, I also did this!
Good ol’ Prax. Love seeing Terry Chen in stuff, he’s such a cool guy.
Ha, I forgot he was Prax in the Expanse. I just saw him recently in The Lake on Amazon.
Good grief, props to the set design. That was exceptional. No Orange Julius or Cinnabon kind of shattered the verisimilitude but hey we’ll let that go.Bella Ramsey was at her best here (with great support from Storm Reid.) Her longing was palpable and so genuine, just a remarkable performance. Can’t wait to see what her future brings.
This show’s production reminds me of Roger Ebert’s line about Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle: I don’t want to know how they did it, I prefer to think it’s just real.
What’s even interesting and maybe slightly disturbing is that some abandon malls really look like that even without an apocalyptical event:
Well, an economic apocalypse, just not a zombie one.
Yes, after a surprisingly short number of years after abandonment, too. The “Fallout” idea that most buildings will be standing albeit ruined hundreds of years after the apocalypse isn’t very accurate.
Ironically, a real abandoned mall is probably too dangerous to shoot in
Ramsey and Reid (sounds like a law firm) were both great. They’ve really done a great job through the writing, directing and acting of showing teenagers as teenagers without veering into making them too dumb or annoying like so many shows do. Yes, they’re impulsive and Ellie definitely is purposefully annoying to push Joel’s buttons, but they still come off as real people and not caricatures of teens dreamt up by a 40 yo screenwriter.
Ramsey should win an Emmy. Probably will.
Her longing was palpable and so genuine, just a remarkable performance.I mean, I played the DLC and knew how it was going to pan out and was still shouting “just kiss her already!” throughout the episode.
No chocolate chip cookie kiosk, either.I’m reading the (incredible) ‘Meet Me By The Fountain’ right now so this episode was pure catnip to me.
Speaking of “Meet Me By The Fountain” (a history of shopping malls), I’d also recommend “Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream” about Victor Gruen (a Viennese Jew who fled the Nazis to settle in America and created the enclosed shopping mall as we know it in the 1950s, basing it in part on Vienna’s Ringstrasse walkable shopping and dining district).
Until I watched the behind-the-scenes, I actually thought they shot in a real, closed down mall, or at least the wing of one.
They did shoot in a real mall. Northland Village in Calgary, Alberta; the mall was closed for a refurbishment at the time. Stuff was added (like the carousel and Victoria’s Secret) and I think the second floor is digital. I applied for a job at the Best Buy you can see in the background several years ago, lol.
I wondered about that — there’s an A&W in the food court, which is a common thing in Canada where A&W is still a major franchise, but the past couple of decades have not been kind to A&W in the US and most US locations have closed.
Coming Soon: Starbucks!
I’m more impressed that from first glance, nothing in the mall was from post 2003. I even checked and the Pearl Jam song she was listening to on the Walkman was from right before the pandemic started.
Amusingly the only inaccuracy I saw was in the photo on Kwong’s desk. The two girls at Six Flags in New Jersey, both those rollercoasters were constructed after 2003.
Those could have been in a different part of the mall, or they may not have given permission to use the logos.It’s expensive and a lot of wrangling to get companies to allow their logos to be used.
Definitely my least favorite episode so far. They spent way to much time just goofing around, and I just had a hard time paying attention to it. I really didn’t feel like I gained anything from this episode about Ellie or about the main story.
this episode is for the heart my sweetie. Ellie has known a real loss. loss of a future with Riley and a loss of a past childhood she was never given. Her vulnerability towards Joel feels much deeper.
On one hand, yes, but on the other, her performance last week did that just as good. This week was just a long drawn out version of that.
I loved episode 3 (also ‘for the heart’) but this one just didn’t hit at all for me. I thought the young lady playing Riley was fantastic, though.
We already knew though. This episode didn’t tell us anything new. I found it a unnecessary episode. It wasn’t bad. But I want to see where the story is going. We already had an episode for the heart and it was better.
its ok in the game because youre playing a game, theres lots of action-the show, bleh
Wow, apparently somebody thought this show was an action movie. Dang.
Wow, so strange i thought a show based on A VIDEO GAME about ZOMBIE TYPE MONSTERS AFTER THE APOCOLYPSE would pick up the pace a bit.
Some people just genuinely can’t grasp character development and it baffles me what the inside of their minds must be like.
Exploring a character with flashbacks is like screenwriting mistake 101. Exploring a character with dream sequences is probably one page turnt earlier than that. It wasn’t a bad episode. But we already knew. Ellie’s character is literally already moved on beyond the point we saw – and yes, sure, we know a bit more about feeling “left behind” – but again, she literally told us previous episode already.
Spend those precious screen time minutes on something else, I say.
A little of thats ok but you can take it too far.
I feel like an issue with this show is that it does all the prestige-y stuff if tv very well- and this was very prestige- but not so much the tv part. This and episode 3 were freest but that’s two episodes of a limited series run not devoted to the actual plot. Their being a three month gap in between the previous two episodes are revealing in that they don’t actually have that much plot.
Have they left out any key parts of the game’s narrative yet? I don’t believe so.The actual plot of the game (i.e. all the non-interactive parts plus the cut scenes) is three-and-a-half hours long — you can watch it all spliced together on YouTube. Season one of the show is going to be about nine hours long, perhaps a little less, which even if you add back in a significant part of the interactive sequences (mostly avoiding and/or shooting infected and assorted bad guys), is plenty of time to adapt the entirety of the source material, and add in a bunch of flashbacks not in the original game.There really isn’t much more plot to cover, and the season-long gap two episodes ago is taken directly from the game. Obviously they could have chosen to add more material like the Kansas City rebel story involving Sam and Henry, but they chose not to, and I’m happy they didn’t.
i hated ep 3, i didnt turn into Last Of Us for a gay soap opera.
And there it is. You ‘phobe clowns just can’t keep the mask from slipping for very long, can you?
And you online liberal warriors cant resist calling everyone a homophobe, can you?
uh oh here we go
beautiful episode, I enjoy the post-civilization kids reminding us that there’s a lot of wonder in the world we built. two story-lines with queer characters where they get to choose how to bury themselves when death does come knocking.(although ellie is going to live in this case).
FEDRA is manufacturing it’s own batteries out of tiny lemons and potatoes.
FEDRA is indeed manufacturing batteries and ammunition. It’s a line in the first episode.
Wouldn’t surprise me is they’re manufacturing fuel, too. They’re also manufacturing car batteries (episode 3).
The line was bullets and pills, not batteries.
Yes sure. But combined with making batteries in Episode 3 it is very much clear that basic production of technology hasn’t completely halted.
They have to manufacture batteries to keep cars, walkie-talkies etc. working.
Also pharmaceuticals. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still refining oil into gasoline in some FEDRA zone.
They need to be careful. If you mess with tech and potatoes too long, you get Glados. This society can’t take any more world ending events…………..
After seeing the prints from the Photo Booth, I presumed it was thermal paper. It’s the stuff receipts are printed with. It’s not an ink or photographic process. No idea on the shelf life.
I think it was supposed to be a barely-working version of whatever process Photo Booths used at the time.
It was 2003, correct? It would just be a digital camera with a thermal color printer in it at that time. Seeing as the toner would long be a brick by then, the only thing working being the thermal black was likely fairly accurate.
Those machines would have been insanely expensive. We were in the decline of Malls in 2003
I recently had three undeveloped rolls of film in an old box that must have been at least 15-20 years old. I assumed they would be unusably ruined by now but thought I’d get them developed anyway. To my surprise, the color was mostly desaturated but the pics were pretty clear — some old college pics I had totally forgotten about.
Very well-acted, but slow. And being that it was backstory, it didn’t really move much along… I guess Ellie tied Joel to the horse and just dragged him to the suburbs like a cattle thief in 1883?One repeating detail that’s weaking a nerve – hiding from authorities (and monsters) then next minute swinging around ultra-bright flashlights like it’s the Fourth of July. I get suspending one’s belief in regards to the relative decay of the world, (Station Eleven was much more realistic about that) but behaviors in the face of years of death threats SHOULD be pretty rational or you start killing the tension of the show. (see too much “snark” too) I would think humans would be more like nervous squirrels and meerkats by now.Continuity thing – who turned off the mall lights when Ellie was initially storming out and Riley was still sitting in the Halloween store? (Which should have been seasonally located in a bankrupted K-Mart building, but I digress….)
Not all the mall was lit up — like the branch where the infected was lurking.
…suspending one’s belief…Disbelief, for future reference.
…point mistaken 🙂
Hard agree about the slowness. It wasn’t a bad hour of TV, but it felt pointless in the grand scheme of things. And this comes from someone who thought episode was amazing.
“I guess Ellie tied Joel to the horse and just dragged him to the suburbs like a cattle thief in 1883?”There was a shot of a snow-covered road and you could see a trail of blood in the center of it, showing how Ellie would have dragged Joel along behind the horse.Apparently after the main game came out there were a lot of players asking “How did Ellie get Joel back on the horse after he fell off? She’s a 14-year-old girl and he’s a ~200 lb adult man.” Apparently in a game with mushroom zombies, this was the part that was too unbelievable for them.
I guess you make certain levels of allowances for the narrative – like a catastrophe happened and now there are zombies, but it was never portrayed that a catastrophe happened and suddenly 14 year-old girls have super human strength. You just go with some of it, but other things just make that record scratch noise when you see it – or don’t see it. Actually the whole conceit that they made it to Wyoming on foot, in the middle of winter, with no supplies, apparently none the worse for wear, was pretty ridiculous itself. They made no effort to show any wear and tear on those two after what should be an epic struggle. The risk with that kind of writing is you can start viewing this like ‘Meh, whatever” if shit don’t matter. I mean, if you flip the station over to “1883″ an entire wagon train with horses , food, weapons, and gear were dropping dead like flies within a few weeks -and that was in the middle of spring and summer. And it’s a minor quibble, but I keep getting thrown by everyone’s cavalier use of battery power and bullets in a world without manufacturing. It’s in the realm of plot armor at this point, like they magically have all they need of some things, and magically don’t require others – like sustenance.
“I guess you make certain levels of allowances for the narrative” We don’t see the characters going to the bathroom but we can assume that they do, we just don’t see it. Allowances are made all the time when watching a TV show. We don’t see everything that happens, but we know that events happen between the scenes.“suddenly 14 year-old girls have super human strength.” Neither the game nor the show infers that Ellie has super-strength. The trail of blood in the snow clearly shows that Ellie did not lift Joel back onto the horse, but dragged him behind the horse. That would require some rope, not “super human strength”.“Actually the whole conceit that they made it to Wyoming on foot, in the middle of winter, with no supplies, apparently none the worse for wear, was pretty ridiculous itself.” Why? Like any apocalypse story where characters are travelling, they would be stopping in any building they found to look for supplies. We don’t need to see this to know that it happened.
“I keep getting thrown by everyone’s cavalier use of battery power and bullets in a world without manufacturing.” In the game the flashlights are shake-lights so no batteries are needed. We haven’t seen that the flashlights in the show are also shake-lights, but if you don’t use a flashlight very often the batteries can last for a long time. As far as “a world without manufacturing” that’s not the case here – we have been told in previous episodes that FEDRA is continuing to manufacture things. In the game Bill tells you that the military are the only ones still making new vehicles and car batteries.
FEDRA has batteries, like the ones in Ellie’s Walkman. But would they still work?That presumes that there’s no post-pandemic batteries being made by FEDRA. And given how useful batteries are for a lot of things (like flashlights), and how cheap alkaline batteries can be to make, it makes sense that they’d try to have at least one battery manufacturing plant in one of the QZ’s.I believe they were stated to be making pills and such down in Atlanta back in Episode 1 that distributes them up north, after all, why not a different QZ making batteries?An even more important power question: If FEDRA is hooking up parts of the Boston grid, wouldn’t they notice a massive surge in usage when Riley switched on the mall?I wager they would. But that doesn’t mean that they’d notice immediately, and even if they did, that they’d react in the middle of the night (instead of waiting for daylight for better visibility with better rested troops). And since Riley’s leaving town in the day, I don’t think she’d mind all that much, not compared to being able to say goodbye to her bestie/girlfriend…
I’m pretty sure that was Alexander Skarsgard as the dead guy in the building hallway who had the booze and fell through the floor. Craig Mazin now has had two Skarsgards in two of his shows.The photography and production design in this ep were beautiful and superb. Loved director Liza Johnson’s close-ups of Ramsey and Reid as they went through turbulent emotions. Lesser shows trained me to think that Ellie would kiss Riley, who would be freaked out, walk away, and then get bitten by the Infected. But that nicely didn’t happen. A parallel story to Bill and Frank. Almost everything Ellie experienced in this ep comes back later: the pun book, riding on a horse, the gun, the choice of staying with a friend.That last shot was a doozy, a close-up with that exciting music. Ellie smiling as she gets good at suturing, triumphant, no doubt feeling the redemption of helping her beloved friend instead of likely what she had to do to Riley in the past.Loved the instrumental cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven on the merry-go-round
I can see where you’d think it was Alexander Skarsgard, but it’s actually Ian Rozylo:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1870927/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t23
Not the Infected in the mall, but the guy in the building they climbed to the roof of, who had that bottle of booze next to him. Look again at his face. Looks very much like Alexander Skarsgard. Hoping the IMDB credit is a fake.
Hmmm… it does kinda look like him, but the forehead lines on the guy in TLOU are markedly different from e.g. this photo of Skarsgard.
Absent any direct evidence that it’s him (e.g. the showrunners or Skarsgard asserting it) I’d say it’s just someone who happens to look like him.
Yes, that’s the guy. They have similar features but it’s definitely not Alexander.
That’s not Skarsgard.From TLOU wiki for this episode:
Sorry, that wasn’t Alexander Skarsgård.Shane Pollitt … Dead Man (uncredited)
Lesser shows trained me to think that Ellie would kiss Riley, who would be freaked out, walk away, and then get bitten by the Infected. But that nicely didn’t happen.And doubly nice that Ellie’s reaction to the lack of a freak out was “Shit, now what do we do?” (especially given her age).
I thought it was the singer from The National.
This is an obnoxious comment, but that wasn’t a clicker. It had functional eyes and wasn’t clicking. It was more like a stalker.I thought it was a good episode. Very good acting and very tense throughout.
It was a runner
I was kind of questioning all those arcade cabinets still working so perfectly (and I still don’t think they would all have been working that well), but they seem to have been pretty well insulated from the elements, and to be fair, my PS2 still works after sitting in my closet for about 2 decades.
Interestingly, in the game, the arcade cabinet in fact does NOT work, but Riley still gets Ellie to play it- by describing it to her. It’s a moment constructed totally by the use of imagination, and I like that it both distances us the from the world we’re longing to remember, but also underscores the profound connection the girls have with each other. Imo, it’s a far superior version of the scene.
Oh, I know. Huge fan of both the original game and the sequel. And I don’t entirely disagree that it is the superior interpretation, I just don’t know how well it would have carried over to live action? Hard to say.
Imo, it’s a far superior version of the scene.It absolutely is and I’m shocked they didn’t use it for the show. I was looking forward to it then it was, wait, the arcade machines are working?
Its unique but harder to make work without player control. I understand the show changing it.
Funnily enough, Druckmann said in an interview that the main reason the cabinet didn’t work is because they’d have had to program another game for it, which would have taken up too many resources. But hey, limitations breed creativity, so I’m not complaining!
Dude, my NES still works. And I’ve had that for over 30 years.
My Atari 2600 still works from 1982 – hooked it up for my young nephew to play. He loved Activision’s “Freeway,” which is like Frogger but with a squawky chicken. He didn’t care for much else we tried. Kids today.I also realized how much I dug River Raid (also Activision).
Wow, and I thought I was getting old.
LOOOOOVE me some river raid my friend
Early in covid I tried to fire up my old Mac SE from 1990. It did not work. I gave it to a guy who restores them as a hobby. The inside was a mess. Capacitors leaked. I didn’t know that was a thing.
Fair. I can’t even recall when I got rid of my last NES, though, lol
My NES still works, but more impressively, my GameBoy still works. While it’s a bit newer, it’s been dropped a hell of a lot more by child me.
I still have my Pong game (somewhere). Should I try it?
Having them all in working order was a bit of a (forgivable) liberty. My initial reaction was why would they all be powered up when the mall’s power was restored? But I quickly realized that Riley had set things up beforehand — a point neatly made by Riley herself when talking about how she’d spent an hour breaking into the change machine.
I agree with you. The game and the show have a lot of these kind of liberties, like pretty much every society collapse story. The stray observations this week are full of them, and there are lots of others (all the gas would have degraded to unusable form by this point etc).I know there are people who really enjoy thinking about that kind of stuff (and I am never going to tell anyone how to enjoy things), but to me none of that matters. They are just necessary tiny, insignificant liberties so that a great story can be smoothly told.
That’s actually something the game gets across better than the show. Though it’s mainly in optional things you can read or listen to. FEDRA actually has a decent amount of infrastructure up and running. Factories, gas refineries, etc. There’s regular supply routes between the functional QZ’s, there’s schooling, etc. That’s why the national war between FEDRA and the Fireflies is even a thing. This episode is actually the first that showed that a bit more. From showing the schooling, to Riley talking about supply runs between QZs, and being moved by the Fireflies to the Atlanta QZ. With the population so small, and now concentrated almost entirely QZ’s, FEDRA runs them not much differently than work camps, with the excuse that it’s necessary to keep things running. The Fireflies want a freer, more democratic system and have their own enclaves outside of QZ’s.
This was actually the only part of the episode that made me go “no ‘f’cking way”. That the rest of the mall was looted but the change machine was untouched seemed preposterous. Obviously money lost its value pretty quick, but somebody would not have cared or realized that.
I was kind of questioning all those arcade cabinets still working so perfectly (and I still don’t think they would all have been working that well), but they seem to have been pretty well insulated from the elements, and to be fair, my PS2 still works after sitting in my closet for about 2 decadesThey’re just computers after all. I know of some old first generation MacIntoshes and PC XTs that still work perfectly.
Plus, those games probably weren’t plugged in for 20 years, so you don’t even have to worry about burn-in on the screen. The most you’d have to worry about is just dust and dirt on the buttons. And if Riley was there already, she probably just got the buttons working by playing the game.The least realistic part was really Belle mastering the finishing movies so quickly and Belle memorizing them/figuring them out. I NEVER remembered most of the moves in MKII
Basically the only thing that kills old computers is leaky capacitors or leaky batteries (even desktops often had button batteries to keep the clock working when when the power was off before computers were Internet enabled and could set their clocks that way).
There is no reason why the games wouldn’t still work due to simply time.As long as there wasn’t flood damage or power surges, they should work just fine. I still have a working Atari 2600 and original NES.
I know people who collect arcade machines ( and PCBs) , while some have a thing called a suicide battery in them that would cause a problem, a lot of older machines would be fine if kettle out of the elements …an MK II machine would probably be fine ( it might fail some of the chip start up checks it had ( along with similar board NBA Jam) but would still be playable)
A “suicide battery”? Consider my curiosity piqued.
Less exciting than it sounds . Basically some arcade pcb boards(the interchangeable part that stores the game ,) , and in this case mostly Capcom designed ones (CPS-2 ) , had a chip that encrypted the data stored on the pcb . It was there to stop people copying data from boards to make bootlegs , or messing around with the boards in general . The chip would constantly have power going to it from a battery. If it lost power ( i.e. the battery died or was disconnected) it would “brick” the board , and it wouldn’t work , even if you swapped the battery out. Back in the early 2000s when the batteries started failing through old age ,you could send boards back to Capcom to have the board resurrected , but you paid a hefty enough fee for it. Over time , all the arcade machines with those games using that board would lose battery power , and “commit suicide” hence the name.Nowadays some collectors have found fixes for the problem , but its a pain in the ass.https://cps2shock.emu-france.info/suicide.html
All of them weren’t working, there were plenty of dead ones in there. Having the one that both girls really liked was a bit of a plot contrivance, but with a TV show it’s always better to show not tell and the contrivance served it’s purpose in showing us how bonded these two girls are.
I mentioned that to my teen son. When these games were brand new they were frequently “out of order” in Arcades and pizza shops. I think maybe a 1/3 of them in an arcade that size MIGHT function but in the game they didn’t work.
They seemed to have a higher percentage of working cabinets in that arcade than in any I’ve been to in the past twenty years. Maybe Dave & Busters would benefit from a bit of apocalypsing.
Kids…more detrimental to Arcade Cabs than the apocalypse.
Though I’ve played the games, I’m unfamiliar with the comics, so I quite liked the school scenes. FEDRA High. I’d watch that show. Fucking Bethany needs to mind her own beeswax.
Oh I so wanted to see Ellie smack that little B
Last of Us x Yellowjackets when“Looks like this town ain’t big enough for zombies AND cannibals”
Needs to mentioned, the lullaby rendition of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” during the carousel scene, which was perfect.
That was Ah Ha – Take On Me
A-ha’s “Take On Me” was played during the escalator scene. The carousel scene is clearly “Just Like Heaven.”
Some excellent references to Uncharted here, with Raja’s Paradise and the Macho Nacho. Great episode!
My only real nitpick of the episode is a continuity one: a conversation that Ellie had back with Joel and Tess in episode 2 (I think) made it seem like she didn’t know whether Clickers were actually real or not until their encounter inside the Bostonian Museum, which doesn’t make sense now that we know her first bite had also been by one.
Also, Dawn Of The Wolf, Part 2 isn’t an Easter Egg from the first game and a parody of Breaking Dawn Part 2 (the joke being sexy werewolves instead of sexy vampires), which came out around the same time that the first game did.
Stalker, not a clicker.
Runner (recently infected ordinary human)Stalker (fungus begins growing up and out of face (stalks, get it?))Clicker (fully blinded by facial fungus growth ecolocates)Bloater (an absolute unit of a clicker)__________ (see you in season 2!)
As others have pointed out, this was not a Clicker. If it has fungus completely covering its head (and is therefore blind) then it’s a Clicker. This Infected had some fungus but not covering its head and could still see. It was a Stalker.In the game when Joel, Tess and Ellie are escaping Boston they enter a building and you find the body of a dead Clicker. Ellie does not know what it is so she has never seen a Clicker before.
Ellie staring at the Victoria’s Secret mannequins a little too long is SUCH a queer girl rite of passage, I couldn’t stop laughing. Even the apocalypse couldn’t stop it!
That’s interesting. The way I experienced that moment was this sort of awareness of her own 14-year-old body in comparison to “other” constructed mediatized bodies for the first time. The way the glass was both showing other bodies and also reflecting back her own at the same time. Which is a girl rite of passage in an image-focused, body-focused, perfection-focused capitalist world she didn’t grow up in. The moment had a weird echo to it, like it was from the past but was powerful enough to still effect her.
I’ll have to take your word for that, but I did enjoy Ellie’s response to Riley not freaking out about being kissed — basically “What the fuck do we do now?”
Her mocking it but still looking was very relatable.
I loved her taking a few extra seconds to check her hair in the window before going to catch up with Riley.
(which for TLOU gamers is pure foreshadowing)Can we fucking quit it with the game spoilers please?
Yes, I really couldn’t give a flying f about what happened in the game. I am watching the TV show.
you know the game came out in 2013, that’s a LITTLE past the “please respect my spoiler aversion” thing by nowalso Titanic, it sank
LOL. The fuck man. What about people who don’t play video games? Or don’t own a PlayStation? What classist bullshit is this?
This was not a game spoiler – it was referencing that for those that played the DLC they already knew that Riley was going to get bit and that Ellie would have had to stab her when she turned.
You may have noticed that Ellie very much does NOT stab Riley in the show.
If you played the game you may have noticed that Ellie very much does NOT stab Riley there either.Neither version tells or shows us that Ellie kills Riley. But we know that’s what happened based on the information we’re given – both of them are bit, they both expert to turn, so they decide to stay together and enjoy their remaining time with each other until they both turn. What do you think happens when Riley turns and Ellie doesn’t???
• Has that slow clicker noise always been at the end of the recaps? So eerie.• I think cutting to an ambiguous time when you don’t know if Joel is ok or not was incredibly effective in the game. I was bummed to not see it here.• “All or Nothing” was a little on the nose, huh?• Absolutely no shade to Storm Reid, because I really like her and genuinely enjoyed her performance at the end of the episode, but sticking her next to Bella shows what an insane talent Bella is.• The joy Ellie has at the escalator is infectious; I was grinning like a doofus. Trying to imagine growing up not knowing about simple things we take for granted is so sad.• The Venn diagram of carousel riders in 2003 and fans of The Cure would be something I would love to see.• $5 pictures in 2003!? I would barely pay that now.• I forgot myself for a second and fully expected an infected doll on that zoom shot.• The screenshot confusion was adorable.• They were mighty brave to be dancing on those glass countertops. I’ve leaned on some before and worried they were going to shatter.• Really odd time to cut back to the present. I feel like it would have been way more effective to wait until the end of the flashback since they didn’t cut back at all the rest of the time. I get what they were going for but it was still jarring.• The hand hold between Joel and Ellie at the end gave me a lump. I love them so much.• Beautiful ending but not very satisfying. With Ellie having told Joel it wasn’t her first time killing someone in KC, I figured we’d finally get a coda to Left Behind. Seemed to me that statement confirmed that Ellie killed Riley when she turned. That poor kid has been through the wringer.I loved the episode, but it was the first one that made me antsy about running out of time. There’s a LOT of stuff to cover, we only have 2 episodes left, and we spent an entire one on Ellie’s first kiss and when she got bit. We moved the main story forward maybe 15 minutes. We gotta move, people!
I was getting kind of anxious about only two episodes left as well, but really they can do Winter/the David stuff next episode (looks like that’s the plan from the “coming next week” montage), and the final episode would be arriving in SLC and the hospital sequence. That’s pretty much the end of the game/Season 1, so they can conceivably do that in one episode, especially if it’s a bit longer due to being the season finale.
Is there really that much left to cover? All that’s really left is [SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY] Ellie’s conflict with David’s group and then Joel and Ellie reaching Salt Lake City. The preview for next week shows that episode will contain the entire David segment from the game, and the season finale will have more than enough time to cover the last segment of the game, especially since the episodes haven’t been constricted to 60 minutes.
I think cutting to an ambiguous time when you don’t know if Joel is ok or not was incredibly effective in the game. I was bummed to not see it here.In the game, you’re jumped forward immediately into the next section of the game. In the show, you have to wait for the next episode and it wouldn’t have bookended the episode as effectively. Different rules for different media.There’s a LOT of stuff to cover, we only have 2 episodes left, and we spent an entire one on Ellie’s first kiss and when she got bit.
I was curious as to how much of the first game has been covered so far, and watched a supercut of all the cut scenes from the first game. At this point in that 90 minute video, they’re into the last half-hour, so it seems they’re on track, especially since season ending episodes tend to be longer than average and episode 7’s flashback wasn’t even in the original game (it was DLC).
and episode 7’s flashback wasn’t even in the original game (it was DLC).Uh, yeah, so that makes them even further off track, because that’s an entire episode that’s not the supercut. That means they have a third of the game, narratively, to go in the last two episodes which have short running times. The finale has the shortest running time of any episode this season at 43 minutes (which includes credits). And that doesn’t even take into consideration that those last 30 minutes of the supercut are the most narratively, cutscene dense, portions of the game. Proportionally they are much larger than what the show has covered. It’s a lot to fit into two remaining episodes.
Jeezus, the finale is only 43 minutes? I was figuring on a solid 1:20, 1:30.
Looks that way. When the screeners were given to reviewers the titles and runtimes of every episode leaked. People questioned the veracity of it because the finale was so short but, to date, every reported runtime has been correct.
If the finale doesn’t contain a certain scene containing some specific wildlife, then what was the point of making this show?
You’re not at all wrong, but they’ve done such a good job so far, I trust they have a plan to handle it.
$5 pictures in 2003!? I would barely pay that nowBoston isn’t as insanely unaffordable as NYC or SF, but it is still one of the priciest places in the US.
There’s not a lot to cover at all, just the encounter with David’s group and events in Salt Lake City, so it will presumably dedicate an episode to each.Remember, the game is necessarily structured around tons of action (or gameplay, if you prefer). Cut that back, as the show has been successfully doing throughout its run, and two episodes should be plenty of time to get through what’s left.For example, the game’s version of “Left Behind” cut back and forth between Ellie’s flashback and a huge sequence in the present where she was searching a mall for medical supplies to help Joel, and they reduced that to going through a few cupboards and finding a needle and thread. Solving puzzles and fighting infected and raiders moves the game forward, but is only sometimes important to the story.
As already mentioned, in the main game you go from Joel being stabbed to a time jump of a few months and then Ellie is seemingly on her own. For awhile you don’t know what happened to Joel as Ellie doesn’t tell you.The DLC came out after the game, so most people play it after they have finished the game, even though chronologically it takes place immediately after Joel is wounded. So when you play the DLC like this you already know that Joel survives this wound and how the game ends.
“Seemed to me that statement confirmed that Ellie killed Riley when she turned. That poor kid has been through the wringer.”I mean, this is what pretty much everyone figures out when they played the game/DLC. You know that they both got bit, they both expected to turn into Infected together, and that Ellie didn’t turn. They don’t have to tell/show you that Ellie would have been forced to kill Riley when she turned and attacked Ellie – it’s pretty clear that’s what happened.
“… only to have it torn away by a clicker and the specter of death… and finally come to rest on a clicker (Ian Rozylo) splayed on the floor… The clicker hears its cue and barges in…
I’ve seen this mistake made in a lot of articles about this episode… It’s not a Clicker, it’s a Stalker, the second infection stage. Clickers had fungi covering their eyes, therefore the moniker (they use echolocation).An even more important power question: If FEDRA is hooking up parts of the Boston grid, wouldn’t they notice a massive surge in usage when Riley switched on the mall?Not immediately. Restoring the power grid in a post apocalyptic world is one thing. The system to measure eletricity consumptiom is a whole different one, specially at this level (parts of a single mall in a whole town aren’t spike enough to call immediate attention).Ellie drinks from the dead guy’s bottle and jokes to Riley, “it’s great.” In “Kin,” Ellie got a nip from Joel’s flask and confirmed that booze tastes “gross.”The late statement is the true one. At the mall Ellie was just trying to not look “uncool” in front of her crush…
Another neat mythology gag: In the second game, Ellie plays Take on Me the first time she finds a guitar.
I reckon the reason for the Ellie’s inconsistent palate for booze is this was real, properly brewed liquor, where as the stuff Joel was swiggin’ back was most certainly moonshine.
I also got the impression she was acting tough to impress Riley, and holding back some disgust on the taste.
Another great episode. Everyone involved with this show is just crushing it. Left behind wrecked me-just like when I played it years ago.One change from the game I am torn about: In the DLC, it was such a great moment of horror when the dance was interrupted by a lot of infected and there was a panicked flight toward escape. One infected causing the action was more grounded and less “video gamey” and there is something to be said for that. But I really missed that moment of “They are everywhere!” terror from the game. I still don’t know how I feel about that choice.My wife has not played the game (but is loving the show) and thought more infected would have been over the top.Still, this was a really good episode. Reid and Ramsey were so great, and just like the game the story of their characters was beautifully told. It has been great to see Left Behind integrated into the series (not just here but in hints along the way) in a way that was not possible in the first game. The events are such a huge part of Ellie’s journey.
…and thought more infected would have been over the top.I played the game and agree with your wife. One infected would make for a boring game, but a hoard of infected would make for an eye rolling moment in the show.
I think a hoard of infected could have worked very well here if done right.But in terms of one vs. many, from everything I have read so far I think yours is the majority opinion.
It’s clearly a deliberate choice to limit the number of hordes in the show. The “zombie horde” trope is so overplayed after countless zombie movies and Walking Dead shows, that I welcome the decision to use them sparingly. Given there’s only a couple more episodes left, I would be shocked if they’re not saving the next one for the season’s climax.
I would say I agree with you in principle-and especially for TLOU, where character development and story is rightfully where the emphasis is. But, I really have missed some of the big infected set pieces from the game, a good many of which the show has skipped. The biggest infected set piece the show has done was all of them pouring out of the ground, which was so highly effective-and wasn’t even in the game!I knew that some of that would have to be removed to be an effective TV show, but sometimes I think that infected threat is off screen for too long. But, I wonder how much of these feelings are just from me playing the game and having certain expectations from that. I love both the games and the series, but I have been interested to find that I have different reactions to a lot of scenes than the non-gamers (my Mom and my wife) I am watching the show with. I want to be clear this is all nitpicky stuff-I think everyone has done a fantastic job bringing TLOU to television, and I am really enjoying the show.If you are a gamer: Have you ever played Days Gone? There were a lot of things about that game I didn’t like, but it is the best use of Zombie hordes I have seen in any media. They are simply roaming the map, and you can go in and destroy them. Defeating them in the game was so tense-and fun! It may restore your love of the Zombie Horde Trope!I noped out on Walking Dead after Season 1, and I was a fan of the comics. I could not stand the writing on the show.
I have to say, as far as Left Behind vs. the show, I was disappointed that the arcade games were actually working and we were robbed of the scene of Riley having Ellie step up to the controls, covering her eyes, and have her play the non-working game while Riley described to her a imaginative version of what would be happening in the game. It was incredibly sweet and heartfelt.
I agree with you that the imagination scene with The Turning in the game was highly effective, probably more effective than what we got in the show (although Ramsey and Reid still did a very good job with what they got for the scene).But I think this was one of the sacrifices that was kind of inevitable for television. I think it would be very hard to do an effective scene for TV audiences who cannot play through the imagination sequences like we could in the game. Limited to visuals, it would be much harder to make the imaginary playing of a game interesting.Also, it has been clear since Joel and Ellie stopped at the rest stop early on that Mortal Kombat II would be used as a stand in for The Turning, so I had come to terms with it a while ago.There is an article on Kotaku today arguing your point of view on this very subject if you are interested!
Druckmann has said he wanted to use Mortal Kombat in the original game but they couldn’t afford it, so they created the fake The Turning game. But with HBO money they could afford the rights to MK here.
Well then for once I am glad a creative project was short on cash, because The Turning game in Left Behind is a fantastic moment. But it is a moment that I think would have been really hard to duplicate for a television viewer, so hooray for HBO cash!
One correction: in the DLC they don’t dance (and certainly not with masks). Riley takes Ellie’s Walkman and plugs it into a stereo and starts playing music. A second later, before any dancing can commence, an infected pops out and Riley draws a gun and shoots. Scene then cuts back to Ellie in “present” time. When it cuts back to Ellie and Riley, they are on the run through the mall, and specifically trying to barricade a door as they are pursued.
Huh, thanks for the correction. I could have sworn they danced in the DLC, and I thought that before this episode came out. But I am sure you are right. I have played through TLOU three times and Left Behind two times (which is a big deal for me, since I don’t usually play games twice), but it has been a few years since my last playthrough of each.
They did dance in the DLC – xaa9ss’ version was wrong. Except for them wearing the masks while dancing, and a bunch of Infected showing up instead of just one, that scene was almost identical to what was in the DLC.
I appreciate you posting this. Not because I care who got what details right or wrong-who hasn’t been mistaken about the details of something they watched here before? I certainly have a lot. But I had what I thought was a clear memory of that being in the DLC, and it is good to know I am not totally losing my memory in my old age. 🙂
No, that’s not what happens in the DLC at all.In the DLC the Halloween store (and the masks) does take place earlier, but at the end of their mall-adventure they plug the walkman into the stereo, the same version of I’ve Got You, Babe plays, and they get up onto top of the display cases and dance. Eventually Ellie stops dancing, says “Don’t go”, they kiss, Riley says “We’ll figure it out”, and *that’s* when the Infected (a bunch of them) shows up.
Except for them wearing the masks here, it’s almost identical between the DLC and this episode.
Good to know! I’ve only watched a walkthrough and it must have been poorly edited. That makes more sense
I found this episode so underwelming. Just di dnot connect to it at all emotionally. To giddy, childlike, “Stranger Things” And yet, I knew The A. V. Club would give it a high rating. Ugh..
One more post after reading the stray observations:1.”Ramsey is giddily awestruck as, to “Take On Me,” she experiences “electric stairs.” This song was also a really nice nod to the two games.2.The review says that Ellie and Riley were attacked by a Clicker a few times. I could be wrong (and I don’t want to be that guy even if I am right), but I don’t think it was a Clicker that attacked them. It was a Stalker right?
In fairness, the show has only named one level of infected. If you don’t know the game everything is a clicker.
In the museum episode, didn’t the characters specifically describe what a Clicker is? And this infected had none of those characteristics? I could be filling in blanks here (because I played the game and DLC ), and I am certainly not invested enough in this minor point to go back and check. But I could have sworn that Tess and Joel went out of their way to note that a Clicker was a different type of infected……..
My point was that the non gamers watching this show have only heard one term. Clicker.So them calling all of the infected “Clickers” makes sense.As a gamer I know Riley and Ellie were attacked by a Stalker, but the show hasn’t told me that (yet.)
I understood your point. I was saying that I thought they differentiated between Clickers and other infected in the second episode of the series, even if they didn’t explicitly call the regular ones stalkers. But I could be wrong about that.
It somewhat has, because in episode 2 Ellie thinks clickers are basically a myth. Her only experience before then is an infected that hasn’t reached that point. Plus, clickers… click.
The show has said “Infected” many times to describe the infected. Most of the infected we have seen on the show have not been Clickers. They are the most “famous” infected, since they have the most unique look and abilities.
My comment was an attempt to explain away what the author of this blog post (possibly others) made/are making a very specific mistake.That attempt has clearly landed like a wet fart.Fuck this thread.
FEDRA has batteries, like the ones in Ellie’s Walkman. But would they still work? Energizer says Energizer® Ultimate Lithium™ lasts up to 20 years in storage.Alkaline batteries are easy to make and/or recycle (lithium batteries are a bit more complicated) and the QZ’s obviously have multiple factories of different types working for things like ammo and machinery. They clearly aren’t dependent on finding old stuff and hoping it’s still working.An even more important power question: If FEDRA is hooking up parts of the Boston grid, wouldn’t they notice a massive surge in usage when Riley switched on the mall?That would depend on how much of the grid is up and running. Normally automatic substations would smooth that demand out. Really, that’s a very complicate question because it’s not clear how the grid is even functioning. Where is the power coming from? The only big station at that time close to Boston was the Mystic station, but it’s a fossil fuel plant. These grids are also complicated and interconnected. Every connection outside of Boston would have to be turned off at substations and auto switchers, a large number of which would be outside of the QZ proper. Then there’s the problem of balancing supply and demand. You can’t just “turn on” a power station and then everything is good. You can’t over-supply or line frequency will spike. You have to match demand. If you don’t match demand line frequency drops. This isn’t a big issue for things like incandescent light bulbs but most every other modern devise requires 60 Hz (in the US) to function correctly or even work at all.
That was like sub-CW quality teen romance show. I’m laughing so hard at these gushing comments. This show is terrible and watching people convince themselves they like it is very amusing.Why would the kid have a walkman and an ah-ha tape and a mortal kombat poster? Why wouldn’t she have a first-gen ipod and a bunch of crap from the 2000s? Probably because the show’s aesthetics are geared towards the 40-something male nerds that make up the audience? It’s certainly stupid and distracting.I would describe Bella Ramsay’s performance in this show as “autistic” in a bad way. And Craig Mazin is incredibly cynical for loading his terrible show up with queer romance in order to make sure internet worms applaud it. once again: there are no stakes and no excitement in this show. the leads are boring and badly written. The show is cheap and canadian-looking.
Just because you’re a homophobe doesn’t make this any less of a great show. Craig Mazin did not load anything into this show, all of the queer elements in the show were in the original game. If you don’t like it just don’t watch it and go back to your basement you snowflake.
You should tune into a CW show. They are nothing like this. Craig Mazin is incredibly cynical for loading his terrible show up with queer romance Neil Druckmann is the man you want to speak to, because all this is in the games.
It’s a hopeless situation
And I’m starting to believe
That this hopeless situation
Is what I’m trying to achieveBut I try to run on
It’s all or none
This was, for me, the worst episode of the series. The pacing was glacial, Bella’s personality was bordering on bi-polar, and even for an HBO show where the network’s mantra is people in room’s having conversations… they didn’t really have any conversations. There “falling in love” was more “let me describe facets of a mall to you”. Even the looks back and forth were barely inviting – like they’re friends who want to be more but literally barely know each other.It’s also a little frustrating where “representing underrepresented voices gets a complete pass in criticism because we’re allies” is becoming ex-Gawker media sites mantra. Bill and Frank’s (arguably the best episode of television in the past 12 months) story was moving with ups and downs. This was move from point a to point b with a narrator. No back and forth, no tenderness, no longing looks – like I understand they have an hour but they could’ve done the time jump or at least have conversations like they’ve met before not play 3 straight games of Mortal Kombat.
one thing i think is interesting is the use of 80s songs instead of, yknow, songs from 20 years ago. we’ve been through so many 80s revivals that the songs that best speak to 2003 are songs from 20 years before it.i could say they’re making a statement about recycled nostalgia, etc, but really we just culturally don’t know how to capture or reference the early 2000s with any specificity.
see also the walkman. it should have beeen a panasonic shockwave!
Idk, I was a teen in the early 2000s, had an off-brand cassette player and listened to tapes with 80s music all the time. Especially Depeche Mode and A-ha which are both featured so prominently on the show. So that all rings true to my personal experience. I think the simple truth is the 80s never really left. lol
I’ve always wondered if that’s because we don’t even have a name for the 21st century decades (except for now; I guess it’s the 20s again). It was easy to (perhaps stereotype) decades in the 20th century because you could refer to the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. There was some attempt to try that in the early 21st century (the “noughties” etc.) but it never really caught on.
Well, I mean, Britney Spears and Boy Bands. They would be a bit jarring for this show, though.
They did such a good job building a sense of dread in this episode. We already know what’s going to happen so I spent half the episode looking in the background for any sign of movement from that Clicker.
That wasn’t a Clicker. It could see.
After further review, you are correct.
No fungal growth: it’s a Runner.Some fungal growth but it can still see: it’s a Stalker.Fungal growth covering head, can’t see: it’s a Clicker.
I’m a bit worried about the amount of plot remaining they they are going to have to fit into the two remaining episodes.
i presume the last episode will be least 90 minutes like the first.
The finale is going to be the shortest episode of the season according to leaked runtimes from screeners.
There are a few reviews that say the ending is a bit rushed.
Another good episode, Bella is really talented. Storm seems more like a disney channel actress to me, not really a fan. And this show needed a couple more episodes. The central thing that makes the Last of Us special is Joel and Ellie’s relationship and honestly we’ve barely had them together throughout this season. They need to actually show it (significantly more than they have so far) rather than telling us about how strong their bond is. The games story is about 3 hours minus the gameplay, so I understand the need to pad the run-time a bit. What’s been shown has been good, but it just feels like its missing pieces.
Not one to wax poetic on such a topic generally, but the acting in this show is insane. Bella, Pedro and Nick have seemingly wrapped up Emmy’s already, but seemingly everyone they introduce is fucking amazing. The quality of this show is off the charts; off the charts.
Republicans thinking they’re about to watch a zombie show—
Kinda surprised that Riley didn’t fire up the movie theater for one of her Wonders of the Mall. Also wondering about the logic, if the mall wasn’t actually crawling with infected, surely there were some dead there that were cleared out by someone for some reason, but the mall was then left abandoned anyway? Except they missed one somehow?
Riley only had 1 night to spend with Ellie and seeing a movie would have eaten up 1.5-2 hours of that time. Better to do a bunch of things that only took ~30 minutes each.I assume Fedra cleared out the mall (but missed that one Infected) but after that they abandoned the mall. They say in this episode that they’re focused on opening up new buildings to make room for people to live, so they’re likely focused on apartment buildings instead of shopping malls.
That first scene of Ellie jogging in the gym was VERY Jodie Foster in the opening titles of Silence of the Lambs. I’m enjoying all the details of post-apocalypse youth — not knowing what screenshots are, for example — but it’s distracting how all the remaining pop culture seems to have ended in the 1980s. No Nirvana? No Backstreet Boys paraphernalia? No Sony Discmans? No iMacs? Everything is A-Ha, 80s Cure, cassette Walkmen, etc.
quick and not fully formed hypothesis to explain it: perhaps because much of those things are analog?
Well the song Ellie was listening to in the Walkman was a Pearl Jam song (All or None- off their Riot Act album).
Not everything is 80’s. At the start of the flashback when she was running laps, Ellie was listening to Pearl Jam’s Riot Act album, which came out in 2002.
And, of course, Mortal Kombat II is peak mid-90s.
The cassette thing seemed weird. Nobody used cassettes in 2003 (well, maybe some retro-hipsters but not typically). People had mostly portable CD players like the Discman, with less popular choices being MiniDisc and MP3 players. Early iPods were around in 2003 as well.
Magnetic tape degrades much slower than optical discs
I’ve jokingly said that one of the biggest plot holes in the game is that after you leave Bill’s Town and Ellie gives Joel a cassette tape to play, Joel puts it into the truck’s cassette player. I can accept a fungal apocalypse and mushroom zombies, but a 2013 truck with a cassette player? Come on!
If you loved this episode and episode 3, you should binge Station 11 right now. Every week was an episode 3 and 7.
this!!! watch Station Eleven EVERYONE!!
Station Eleven (the novel and the series) is SO GOOD. HBO keeps suggesting I watch it after each episode of The Last of Us, and I’m always like, “You should already know, HBO Algorithm, that I’ve watched it twice!” The series makes such smart choices about how to adapt the source material, in particular with regard to Jeevan’s character. I’ve recommended the show to so many people, and I don’t think any of them have followed through and watched it, which is their loss.
FEDRA is producing at least some items like batteries. Joel also mentions rumors of a factory producing Oxy and other things in ep. 1.
Re: batteries… They had rechargeable batteries? Maybe that explains the glitchy power in the flashlight? The rechargeable batteries are just about worn out?And I’ve used 30 year old film that I found in an old camera someone gave me, and the photos, while not great, still looked a lot better than what they got from the photo booth.
Lithium Energizer batteries that can last up to 20 years? Cool! But did they exist back then? I doubt it.
“only to have it torn away by a clicker and the specter of death.”
“and finally come to rest on a clicker (Ian Rozylo) splayed on the floor.”As many others have already mentioned, this is not a Clicker. Even if you haven’t played the game and don’t know about the classifications of Runners and Stalkers, the show has told you that a Clicker is (a) blind, and (b) has their head completely covered by fungal growths.
“Their horse chills in the living room”It’s clearly a garage – you can see a garage door behind the horse as he shakes the snow off of him. How many living rooms do you know that have a garage door in them?
The “Dawn of the Wolf Part 2″ poster is in the game. It can be seen at multiple locations as you explore various cities. It was a new film when the apocalypse hit, and is a reference to the Twilight films.At one point in the game you can have Joel tell Ellie that he saw the film before the pandemic hit and he describes it as “a dumb teenage film”. When Ellie asks him who he saw it with he says “nobody” (but it was obviously Sarah).
I LOL’d at Riley telling Ellie to “just mash the buttons” when playing the arcade game, considering that’s how a lot of people play TLOU game.
Everyone seems to have missed the point of this episode. The only reason this episode exists is because it’s the origin story of the joke book.
Mortal Kombat II is the best one, those girls are lucky as hell that was available to play!
For me the cutaway to Joel at the end undermines the episode. Stay with Ellie and Riley and let the full horror of what’s about to happen (and not happen) sit with the audience.
Apparently this episode was originally going to be all flashback, but HBO asked them to add in the present-day scenes of Ellie taking care of Joel.
They were right. Don’t set up a cliff hanger and make us wait 2 episodes for the next scene. I think they little bits they added were the right call.
I think this was my favourite episode. Really friggin cute. Bella Ramsey nailed the bit on the escalator.
Something that gets forgotten sometimes when you’re playing the game is that Ellie was born after the outbreak. She knows nothing about the pre-outbreak world except for what she’s been told or read about. So I love the reminders the game/show throws in now and then to remind you that she knows nothing of the “before times”.Like in the DLC, when they’re in the photo booth it tells them they can share the pictures on Facebook and Ellie asks “What’s Facebook?” and Riley replies “Maybe it puts your face on a book?”
They should actually submit this episode for award consideration for Bella Ramsey. That was impeccable.
The only thing that bothered me was listening to the officer talk about the benefits of being an officer. It was a teensy bit triggery. Fuck cops.
Technically, they’re the military, not cops. In this world the military has gone from a group that fights wars in other countries to the only thing keep society together and from falling into anarchy.
This is not a reply but was the only button available. What an enourmous waste of time. We understand her personality well enough. This is supposed to be a suspenseful story of searching for those who could make a vaccine out of Ellie’s blood. I don’t want to see the past, I want to see how she finds a way to help him. I kept jumping ahead and realized this was crappy flashback. I did not watch. It left me with a bad taste. Don’t know if I will watch again.
It’s jarring that the author refers to them self as a recapper. I wonder what the skill requirement is for an A.V. Clubber these days this seems like a job a second grader could do.
Which makes me beg the question, why haven’t we just made our own community generated version of A.V. Club yet? A lot of the people on here could write better material then these scab recappers they’ve been hiring. These people are akin to Daddario’s character in White Lotus S1.Michael Martin’s reviews of Atlanta last year were outrageous. He continually misunderstood episodes, there was better review in the comments, and he would actually visit his own comments and comment on better insights “I wish I had thought of that”. The concept that he was being paid baffles me.