The Last Of Us introduces its most terrifying monster yet
Scott Shepherd gives a masterful, delicately etched performance in “When We Are In Need”
TV Reviews Bella Ramsey
The narrative motion of “When We Are In Need” depends on two elements that might irk persnickety plot-watchers and fact-checkers of fiction. Still, The Last Of Us aspires to a level of naturalism and we should take them (somewhat) seriously. They are: 1) Could Joel bounce back so fast and take down three healthy, youngish adversaries? and 2) Is David’s overture to Ellie plausible, even knowing his predilections?
Both are worth discussing, but neither plot point was a deal-breaker to me; I was too busy admiring the direction and acting.
Especially Scott Shepherd, whose David begins as a gentle man of god and ends as a cannibal pedophile who gets Lizzie Bordened by a berserker Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Dude’s got range. You may recognize the lean redhead with the folksy voice from Bridge Of Spies and as Jean Grey’s father in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but New York theatergoers have long been applauding the magnetic Shepherd in downtown shows. From his years doing avant-garde plays, Shepherd learned how to pull off even the most preposterous text with grace and gravitas. His portrait of David is masterful in its wry, understated charm. He draws you in until he reveals himself as the series’ most degenerate monster.
The actor who memorized every word of The Great Gatsby for a verbatim marathon performance of the novel recites from quite a different tome as “When We Are In Need” begins. It’s Revelations, chapter 21: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away…” Behind him a handwritten banner reads “When We Are In Need He Shall Provide.” We’re at a memorial service in what appears to be a Western lodge. A father has died, and his teenage daughter (Sonia Maria Chirila) weeps, finding little comfort in scripture. She wants to know when her father will be buried. “The ground is too cold to dig,” David replies sadly. “We’ll bury your father in the spring.” David assures the girl she still has a father. Presumably he means him, the others, god.
This would seem to be the first time faith has come up in TLOU. We’ve seen human communities organized around corrupt authoritarianism (Boston), anarchy (Kansas City), isolationism (Bill and Frank), and utopian socialism (Jackson), but here is a town held fast by faith and one decent, godly man.
Correction: David does not believe. Nor is he good. He should be nowhere near the grieving girl. And her father isn’t going to be buried; he’s going to be fricasseed. The narrative beauty of this 51-minute gothic thriller, written by Craig Mazin and impeccably directed by Ali Abbasi, is that you grow more horrified as you read it backward from the ending.
Our sermon this week is perverted appetite (the title’s “in need”). Whether it’s Silver Lake villagers resorting to cannibalism or David’s yearning for teenagers, hunger is a demon that must be controlled or destroyed. Life consumes life; it’s not personal. That’s David’s brutal, transactional creed; it’s why he admires Cordyceps. Ellie and Joel, despite all the gruesome violence they commit, are serving a higher purpose than their next meal.
Winter is relentless in Colorado and starvation is at everyone’s door. Silver Lake has perhaps two weeks of rationed meat. Famine is also creeping into Ellie and Joel’s safe house. Joel lies semi-conscious on the mattress, his wounds healing and not appearing to be infected. But he hasn’t spoken or opened his eyes. Ellie is at the end of her jerky. Hunger drives her into the snow to hunt a buck, and the wounded, dying animal is what leads Ellie to David and his lieutenant, James (Troy Baker), also stalking the snowy forest for game.
Again, the construction of this episode is fiendishly impressive. We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone. Instead, the sociopath has begun the process of grooming her. “I found god after the apocalypse, which is either the best time or the worst time to find him,” the preacher jokes dryly. It’s a good line. And you realize later: That’s all it is, a line. David’s deeply humane, thoughtful earnestness (in Shepherd’s delicately etched performance) is a nauseating ruse.
Here’s where the story (not just our stomachs) begins to turn. We learn that the dead father from the memorial service was killed at the end of “Kin.” He was among the raiders who attacked Joel and Ellie on the University of Eastern Colorado campus. David sent them there scouting for food. “Everything happens for a reason,” David tells Ellie, his folksy drawl turning sinister.
Our sense of unease only grows in a later kitchen scene, as a man enters with a tub of chopped raw meat and the woman who’s cooking asks, “What is it?” After a pause he replies, “Venison.” Perhaps you are sensing a faint Donner Party vibe. (What happened to the buck Ellie shot?)
The episode settles into action-adventure mode as David and a posse follow Ellie’s footprints in the snow back to the safe house. Seeing them approach, Ellie leaves the still-immobile Joel with a hunting knife on his chest and rides out on the horse. Drawing the posse away from the house, Ellie is quickly brought down when her horse is shot under her and she crashes to the ground. David lifts her unconscious body and carries her back to the village. Three others stay behind to locate and execute Joel.
For the simple pleasure of tension and release, of course we love when a raider goes down into the basement and Joel is not on the bloody mattress. He knifes the guy in the back of the neck and faster than you can say “Savage Starlight” Joel has two more of them tied up and ready for torture to find out Ellie’s location. Yes, we get a heroic thrill akin to Agent Dale Cooper finally coming to his senses in Part 16 of Twin Peaks: The Return, but how did Joel go from semi-coma to one-man-army? When Ellie left him, it was hard to imagine him even sitting up. How are those thread stitches not ripping when he rears back with the pipe? Pascal does sell the pain. Let’s move on.
Back in Silver Lake, Ellie is caged. Trying to escape, testing out the nuts and bolts around the lock, she catches sight of a dreadful object lying on the ground: a severed human ear. Perfect timing for David to arrive with meat stew on a tray. Realizing that Ellie has clocked the auricular organ, he reassures her the meal is deer meat. Riiiiight.
The ensuing contest of wills between David and Ellie is the episode’s most satisfying set piece. Even when it comes to David’s villain-talking-to-imprisoned-hero palaver. Paraphrasing, but: “I see myself in you. We are the same. Join forces with me and we will rule the [whatever].” We’ve seen the tropey boilerplate from Star Wars to MCU. Still, an actor as subtle and smart as Shepherd pulls it off. Fact is, David is driven by more than power. He wants Ellie, and that makes him careless as well as loathsome.
“You’re smart, a natural leader, loyal, violent,” David says, echoing Captain Kwong from last week’s “Left Behind.” This reinforces the motif that Ellie has an important future ahead of her—not only as source for a vaccine, but to save civilization. Also like Kwong, David makes a morally repugnant argument. Kwong justified fascist FEDRA as the only thing standing between civilians and chaos. David articulates a quasi-religious belief in Cordyceps as a force that humans should emulate, perhaps even worship: “What does Cordyceps do? Is it evil?” he purrs hypnotically. “No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence if it must. It loves.”
Ellie is freaked out but plays it cool. “They need god, they need heaven, they need a father,” the fake holy man continues, referring to his flock. “You don’t. You’re beyond that.” It’s here we realize that David is a pedophile on top of being a faithless fraud. (He wouldn’t be the first cult leader to prey on underage girls.) He want Ellie to be his—what? Child concubine and co-cultist? Ellie, acting like she’s falling under his spell, holds hands with David through the bars, only to break his fingers and go for his keys. She fails, David bashes her head against the bars, and leaves to get James and the recipe book.
What follows—sensationally acted by Shepherd and Ramsey, who was pushing herself to the damn limit—was pure horror brilliance. Opening shock: Ellie grabbing the meat cleaver and chopping James in the neck. Then a cat-and-mouse chase, attempted rape, more cleaver action, and Joel showing up as a bloodied, frantic Ellie escapes the burning lodge. Talk about fire and brimstone.
When he grabs her from behind, Joel is exceedingly fortunate Ellie did not hold on to that cleaver. “It’s okay, baby girl, I got you,” he murmurs, throwing his arm around her shoulder as they stumble away. Bad father is gone. Good father is back. God is still dead.
Next week it’s all over. I’ve read spoilers from those who know how the game ends (hard to avoid). I have no idea how Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are going to pack everything into one episode. But I am so hungry for it.
Stray observations
- Rejected sponsor tag: “This week’s episode brought to you by Field And Stream and Broadway’s Sweeney Todd.”
- Surprised the cold open wasn’t Riley’s fate, then cutting to Ellie shaking off the horrible memory. Will we ever see it? Do we need to?
- Does Ellie have a compass or incredible sense of direction, because hunting in the woods without leaving markers is a good way to get lost.
- David orders James to fetch penicillin and says, “It’s not code.” So when they talked earlier about “venison, elk, rabbit” supplies, that was (gag) code.
- Only Pedro Pascal could make us thirsty with the line, “You focus right here or I’ll pop your fucking kneecap off.” Yes, zaddy, pop it.
- The Mayo Clinic advises injecting penicillin into “muscles, usually in the upper buttock or hip area”—but ain’t nobody got time for that!
- Director Ali Abbasi’s camerawork in the David-Ellie showdown is a great example of ratcheting tension by cutting to closer and closer shots until it’s unnervingly intimate.
- Last ten minutes goes hard on The Shining vibe: Colorado lodge in winter, injured “father” hunting child, holding weapon, calling out “Ellieeee…”
- Joel’s lewk is fire, but before leaving for Silver Lake, he should have borrowed some dead goon’s winter hat and gloves. It’s cold out there!
455 Comments
You go, girl.
This episode was absolutely brutal, but I really enjoyed it. I give The Last of Us a lot of credit for not sugarcoating its violence. The physical and emotional consequences of this level of brutality feel real.
The replication of the diner and fina confrontation was incredible. The show has done such a good job of knowing when to match the game visually and this was one of them. That was one of my favorite set pieces in the game from a tension perspective and they nailed it.
So David was a cannibal and a pedophile, was he also a pyro? Apparently burning buildings gets him all riled up? You’d think self-preservation would win out over deviant urges, but whatever.If anyone asks what “going HAM on someone” means, just show that clip of Ellie with the cleaver.
they shoulda just had a scene of him masterbating into a pie made of dead babies. then we’d really get the picture that he’s a naughty man!
That wasn’t ham. It was the full pig.
The long pig?
Never much cared for it.
Ellie burned the building accidentally after throwing the torch at him
For me the key to David’s character is that he really isn’t much into survival (his own, or the group’s) at all. He’s an absolute creep who had found himself in a perfect situation to get his rocks off by controlling, hurting, killing, eating, and raping other people. The entire setup with him leading and seeming to protect this group is a big misdirect: they are his cult, his cattle, his toys.So his disinterest in getting out of the burning building is reasonably consistent, IMO. What he really wants is to dominate and scare Ellie. If he can do so by forcing himself on her as a building burns down around them, that’s fine. The game depicts this a bit differently, with his group being so decimated that it seems like he just wants a last chance at revenge. Standard villain stuff. The show rendition made me consider how his mind was working, and I ultimately think it works, for me.
^^^^THIS. I thought the show did an amazing job getting us into his head in very little time. He’s clearly a narcissist from the start, but when his people begin to question him, he lashes out. And then Ellie just pushes him over the line.
In the game, at this point David wants to kill Ellie, not capture her alive and have her join his group. Whether he fully believes or not, he knows she is infected and now potentially he is too (a lot of people playing the game for the first time ask, when Ellie bites David, “Wait, if she bites someone do they get infected?”). So when the restaurant starts burning down he’s not thinking of his own survival – he just wants to kill her.
You’re missing the part where he clearly says he doesn’t believe she’s actually infected and asks here how she pulled off the scar/bit marks.
In the game the fire is an accident – a lantern knocked over when Ellie is struggling with David. But in both the game and episode, at this point David is more concerned with killing Ellie than saving himself (and he half-believes that he is now infected now from Ellie’s bite).
So the warning of “brief nudity” in the parental guide notes was the decapitated human dead hanging upside down in the shed. Who said irony was dead?This was a huge emotional leap for Joel. When he hugged Ellie close and said “Baby girl” as he did to Sarah, he is leaning into the fear again of being loved and giving love and frankly, it’s beautiful. And that would not nearly be as convincing if it wasn’t for their performances which have now reached masterclass levels. This was an exceptionally potent episode on several levels and it was handled exceptionally well.
Well, it was only nudity from the neck down. Or, rather, from the neck up.
Agree, that scene was the one that almost had me tearing up.
Well, the show certainly raised my bloodlust sky high. If I were Ellie, I would have stabbed him a bunch more times. They kept increasing David’s pure evilness. First he’s a violent, narcissistic authoritarian, then a cannibal, then a pedophile. (Real world priests and authority figures are usually two out of three of those things.) I didn’t find him gentle or decent in the first scene; an actual caring preacher wouldn’t leave a body to rot in the cold. There was something very creepy and insidious about him. Of course David thought he could seduce Ellie; he’s a malignant narcissist; they have a very high opinion of what they think they can do, mixed with a core of deep, deep insecurity. I got offended for all the math teachers of the world that this guy used to be one. Kudos to Shepherd who I hope doesn’t get abuse from morons who can’t tell TV from real life.Bella Ramsey is definitely getting an Emmy. I mean, come on.
Aren’t they all cannibals? I mean if they take their mythology seriously that wafer is the flesh of a mystic zombie.
This was Martin Luther’s take as well. Catholics believe in transubstantiation — that the wafer and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. Luther called that cannibalism. Protestants who participate in the Eucharist treat it as symbolic.
Well don’t you worry – they DEFINITELY didn’t leave his body to rot in the cold.
Yeah, this was a giveaway to anyone who played the game and knew cannibalism was in the cards for David’s group. “We’ll bury the body when the ground thaws”= that guy is already getting filleted.
“I didn’t find him gentle or decent in the first scene”This is one of the times where I feel the game did it better. In the game you don’t know if Joel is alive or not until Ellie asks for medicine, but even then you feel like the game is trying to make David your new partner and you don’t trust him. Then a bunch of Infected show up and you have to work with David to fight them – there’s a lot of running around and more Infected to kill (including a Bloater!) so by this point most players are feeling good about David because you’ve saved each other a dozen times by now. So when he gives you the “everything happens for a reason” speech it hits that much harder.
I loved every episode of this season, but now that it’s almost over, I feel like it would have benefited from at least one more episode, preferably one with infecteds (we haven’t seen that many for a zombie show, especially one that won’t last very long) and that focuses more on Joel and Ellie (who have been apart as much as they’ve been together). But still, wow! It’s one great guest performance after another!
I think the point is that it’s not a zombie show. Even the games, you fight and kill far more humans than you do infected overall.
I agree it’s not a zombie show, but the context of it is still a zombie apocalypse. In a video game, if you have one action scene where you have to kill a few zombies, you can spend a lot more time than you can on a TV show which makes those scenes more impactful, and it’s the same for the quiet scenes. This 9 episodes season has been very good so far, but an extra episode would have given the characters more time to breath, and a zombie-focused episode would not have hurt the balance. Anyway, it’s the feeling I have right now.
I haven’t played the game, but presumably they’re saving the next big infected scene for the season finale next week.
There is one possibility for a big infected scene left…but the main antagonists in the game were the humans
Yeah humans, good and bad, are the story. The infected are just a plot device.
I’m fine with them being a plot device, I just wish they weren’t such a tedious one.
Joel: “We are the walking dead! -er- I mean, we are the last of us!”
I do prefer that they maintained Christianity as the “cult”, I always think it’s silly in dystopias when a new belief system is created when you know people would just lean harder into puritan horribleness. The sexual assault during the fire felt a little silly, we knew his intentions, not sure if that was necessary. For a show with a lot of subtext regarding anti-globalization and anti-capitalism, I was hoping for a more nuanced approach to religion being another insidious evil America is built on (and maybe the point is that there’s no nuance, it always brings the same results of abuse of power).
Attempted sexual assault. As soon as they captured Ellie, that horrible thought did flash through my mind, but I figured the game never did that and the show wasn’t going to, you know, to a 14 year old girl. Still, very, very traumatic to Ellie and she’s probably gonna be haunted by her own justified rage: you could see her shocked eyes after she’s done stabbin. As for David doing that amidst the fire, it fits his monstrous solipsism. It doesn’t matter if the world is literally burning around him; he’s getting what he wants.
Why does David go from “you broke my finger, im gonna killll uuu!” to “the fight is my favorite part, now i’m a pedo and i’m going to rape you” in the span of an hour?
That doesn’t seem contradictory to me. He gets off on dominating young girls, not being humiliated by them, so he only likes the fighting when he knows he’s going to win.Indeed, that’s probably the main reason he goes all “I’m gonna to keep you” at the end. He’s trying to regain the upper hand in his own mind.
But he has her in a cage… and he has guns/weapons etc so he could easily “win” if he wanted to. Yet he decides to kill her, and is so goofy and incompetent that he allows her to overpower two full grown men. It really doesn’t help the case that he’s this terrible villain. Also its pretty weird how he just decides to let the building burn. Makes a dramatic set piece, but doesn’t make much logical sense in context of the story. Like that’s your shelter bruv, and its negative dickity two degrees outside.
and its negative dickity two degrees outsidewell for a moment it wasn’t
I feel like we’re so used to seeing a scene with the one with Ellie on the table many times and I actually expected the credits and that this was a two-part finale. The last ten minutes did make me go “oh he’s not as competant a villain as I thought” but that could still happen. I believed Ellie’s rage that she just had this adrenaline moment and she probably didn’t care if she got injured while she was killing etc. totally primal.
It did seem a bit too easy but sometimes things happen that way. It’s really just our familiarity with scripts that don’t end that way that make us think this. This outcome was a lot more realistic. Shit just happens in the heat of the moment.
David decides to kill Ellie because he realizes that she will never “come around” and join his group. Having two grown men take on a 14-year-old girl is not “goofy and incompetent” – the only reason she escapes is because they see her wound and don’t know how to react, which gives her enough time to kill James and run away. If Ellie doesn’t have this wound to show them, David and James easily kill her here.As far as David “let the building burn” he thinks he might be infected and therefore already dead. At this point he just wants to kill/rape Ellie as revenge.
What I liked about that scene is Ellie thinking fast on her feet and using the element of surprise to her advantage. That’s the only way it’s believable that a young woman could effectively attack two men. And I think the show has demonstrated her fierce survival instinct throughout the series. She wants to live.
He seemed to be pretty sure of himself when he told her he didn’t believe she was infected and asked her how she did the scar.
We don’t know who he was before the apocalypse. I’m guessing he was actually a sex-offender / possible inmate who cleaned up and looked the part of pastor.
Once Ellie bites him and he sees her wound, David thinks that he may be infected and therefore a dead man walking. So his only goal here is to find Ellie and kill her (and rape her first).And David was always a pedo, he didn’t *become* one at this last scene.
There’s no such thing as “attempted” sexual assault. It could have been much worse, but she was still sexually assaulted.
Oh, it’s still a violent, very traumatic experience, but it’s not rape, which would have been more violent and traumatic. Both are terrible of course, but rape is worse.
Agreed, but attempted rape is still sexual assault.
Oh, sorry, I thought you were equalizing them. Yes, attempted sexual assault is still sexual assault.
Wait why can’t it all be on the same equal playing field? This is the same bullshit as people claiming that Smith/Rock slap wasn’t an act of violence. Yes it fucking was!!!!! Saying some violence isn’t so bad and some is bad is fucked up because we need to create these distinctions for courtrooms.
You’re all a bunch of Johnny Depp fans aren’t you?
Yo…. saying one version of sexual assault is worse than another form of sexual assault is the exact thinking that leads to “yeah but she didn’t get sexually assaulted that bad. She should shake it off and be tough”.
So if you’re supporting that narrative I think ur a fucking idiot.
Not what I was saying. Both are horrible and very traumatic. I don’t think a person who is almost raped feels any less trauma. But maybe actually being forcibly penetrated, violently, for however long, is worse than not going through that. The attack itself is very traumatic, but I think the actual rape would make it much more so. If it’s only the attack it doesn’t mean the person can “shake it off” easier or should be expected to. Not at all.
This could be problematic, yes, but there are degrees to this crime. And it works the other way. If you deny that there are degrees to sexual assaults, then you deny that the person who is actually violently raped hasn’t experienced more trauma than the person who got away.
ahhhh I don’t like the suggestion that their are tiers of sexual assault… That can bring about the implication that “it could have been worse” and stuff in the courtroom. That is not okay dude.
I realize you didn’t mean to step over the line with your comment but think about what you just suggested about some sexual assault “not being as bad as others”.
Yup. This. Thanks for addressing. Even acknowledging it’s a discussion about a fictional character…
‘Tiers of trauma’ thinking facilitate judgements –
by assinine, never-personally-been-violated, misogynist, abjectly ignorant or themselves rapey judges
(looking at you, you inordinately entitled, self-pitying, possibly-’dry-drunk’-but-probably-hung-over pathetic cry-baby, Justice “I have daughters” Kavanaugh) –
of short or non-existant punishment for college rapists, say, because ‘they were both drunk’.
(But only one assaulted the other, so…no they don’t ‘both bear some responsibility’ for one’s violent act. FFS.)
If you hold someone down and tell them you’re going to sexually assault them, but then don’t end up sexually assaulting them, is that not attempted sexual assault?
She is 19 in real life if that makes you feel better. I too was like “could this scar Bella Ramsey?” I was genuinely shocked how far the episode went. Amazing but just shocking.
Yea there is definitely an audience that will lap this up because it easily feeds into how they already feel about it. Personally, I didn’t care for it (David’s religious fervor is an invention for the show- and a redundant one, since they will also be the ‘villains’ in TLOU pt 2) because the evil preacher/church, etc. has become as much a cliche as anything else we’ve seen over and over. But other than that, this ep is another solid adaptation of events.
They subverted the usual evil pastor trope somewhat by David basically admitting the preacher thing was just a ruse to maintain control over the sheep who followed him.
They subverted the usual evil pastor trope somewhat by David basically admitting the preacher thing was just a ruse to maintain control over the sheep who followed him.So basically – the writer nailed it.
Yeah, I’m not Christian but I don’t think Christians should take offence to this episode due to David’s faith being a ruse.
Cliches are cliches because they’re true, at least in this instance. Religious cults, psychotic leaders, pedophilia, stop me when you’ve heard any of this before.
There were hints he was in the game too.
I didn’t get immediate sexual assault vibes, more that he was trying to subdue her while spelling out her future as his child bride — almost as horrific, of course.
I could be wrong but I think from what I remember, in the game the sexual assault vibes were a bit more explicit? Either way that part was hard to watch for me. Glad Ellie chopped him up into a fine paste in both mediums though
I mean, he went to open his pants with one hand while restraining her with the other.
The fact that he specifically mentioned “I like the fighting/struggle the most” indicated yes, he was trying to SA her.
Dude literally says, “the fight is my favorite part,” while on top of her??? You think that doesn’t give immediate sexual assault vibes?
If they used Islam we could’ve had a real beheading!
Interestingly, my feeling about that revelation was exactly the opposite. The series has leaned so hard into the idea that the fungal apocalypse has caused people to cling to old desires and values or fall into old patterns of oppression and violence, so it was refreshing for it to finally acknowledge that it would also give rise to new ways of thinking and fucking things up.
“I always think it’s silly in dystopias when a new belief system is created when you know people would just lean harder into puritan horribleness.”You mean, as is happening right now?
Precisely.
(spent the last 2 years asking why the majority of anti-vaxxers I meet are hardcore Christians) *perks my ears up*
They can’t go full “Christianity is a cult”. Don’t want to drive away those True Blue American advertising dollars. Although the opposite was true for Yellowstone. More viewers watched because of the controversy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
{Yellowstone Viewership} – “All in all, the
series grew an impressive 53 percent among viewers 18-34, 25 percent
among ages 18-49 and 15 percent among ages 25-54. For reference, the season 4 finale brought in 9.3 million in live-plus-same-day viewers and climbed to more than 11 million viewers with the addition of simulcast airings.”
“ The sexual assault during the fire felt a little silly”Well to be fair for folks who haven’t played the game, me, I think it just went to show HOW bad a guy he was. I knew something was up when he slapped that girl and said something along the lines of don’t interrupt when father is talking and we knew he wasn’t her dad.
“we knew his intentions, not sure if that was necessary.”
What the fuck does this even mean?
Every episode of this show delivers, but it goes way beyond that for those that played the games. So much of the show matches the story beats and character arcs from the game, and it really underscores just how masterful a job was done telling that story in the game.
Funny I think it highlights the flaws of the game, and shows how the sloppiness of the source material’s plotting can’t hold up in a serialized tv show.
I
feel the opposite. It makes me appreciate the game far more and see how
the tv series will never be as good as the 2 episodes prior to this one
really highlighted. The game is an all timer while the show is good but not even the best show on HBO currently (Succession)
I feel like the show is at its best when its retconning the game, and at its worst when its slavishly true to it, despite glaring issues with character motivation/plot.
I was happy that this episode didn’t feature a scene that screamed “video game action sequence”, like Joel watching the fight through a sniper rifle, or the characters having to pass through a dimly lit chokepoint corridor.
Episode 6 was much better in the show, Episode 7 was a bit better in the game. It’s interesting thinking about what the alternative would have been in the game and it usually being, “Oh, 40 nameless dudes run in and start shooting after a two-minute conversation.”
This is one time where the game did it better. When you meet David in the game you are attacked by Infected so there are multiple battles where you and David fight together to kill the Infected, including lots of times where you save David and vice versa. So when David gives his “everything happens for a reason” speech most players have started to trust this guy a bit, so when he reveals that he’s behind the group that wounded Joel, it hits that much harder.
“It goes way beyond that for those that played the games” Woah there, speak for yourself! I like the show but to me it’s just demonstrated the limits of videogame adaptation. I still felt *much* more strongly about the Joel-Ellie relationship in the game because I experienced so much of it though gameplay. But even ignoring that, the show just hasn’t given us enough of them on their own. It just hasn’t.
The most terrifying monster yet?
And yet don’t forget that humblest of all God’s creatures, the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Or as God called him “Jack”. Lingua Latina isn’t gods prefered language.
Very neat piece of foreshadowing with the dead man’s daughter wanting to kill Joel. Though I do hope that’s all it is, and they’re not actually setting this up to have her take Abby’s place.
Context: I didn’t play the games, but I did read every spoiler because I thought I’d never get to experience the story otherwise. Anyways: I think that Abby being the daughter of a random “goon” makes a better argument in favor of the second game “thesis”, which I understand is “violence leads to more violence” and “random violence is not that random”
They should name the franchise Daddy Kills Daddy: When Daddies go bad::: Lil baby Sissies Revengence
Abby is just one of a zillion people Joel has “wronged.” That it was Abby who finally did something is just a whim of circumstance, his trail of bodies finally caught up with him.
Ellie doesn’t need an incredible sense of direction not to get lost. She had footprints in the snow. The same way the group managed to track her down so easily.
Scrolled down to see if anyone else posted this. I mean, the bad guys tracked Ellie by her footprints in the snow.
And I thought: didn’t it snow overnight?
More likely Callus’ hoofprints.
On top of that, it’s mentioned numerous times in the show how smart she is. She certainly would have tagged landmarks or whatever else to make sure she didn’t lose her way.
Also, I didn’t get the impression she was in the deep woods, more like scattered houses with wooded tracts in between. The deer died right by a house.
Yup. And it’s weird that the town was having trouble finding game close by…without many humans around, I would think that the wildlife populations would boom.
I was wondering about that too.
I think maybe “the cult” explains it. Especially with David’s, um, predilections.
But there was consistent snowfall being shown during the episode, it’s plausible to think that her tracks got covered.
delicately etched? compared to the game everything here was rendered in glaring neon for the show.
Ellie is infected.Not just with the Cordyceps fungus, but with Rage. There’s an anger within her that is just waiting to be unleashed. It’s clear that they definitely building Ellie’s arc from the Last of Us Part II into the TV series than there was in the original game.I thought this was a fantastic hour of TV, I thought that this version of David was a lot scarier than the one in the video game. The Christian pastor act hiding his sociopathy was chilling. Troy Baker was great as this as well, I think Pedro is great and I know they needed to cast a bigger star but I would have loved to see the version of this series where Troy got to reprise his Joel performance in live action. He’s a genuinely great actor.
Troy Baker got to scowl a couple times and then die.I mean, he did good at that, but that was basically it.
All of Ellie’s rage we see in this episode is there in the corresponding parts of the game.
—It’ll be a crying shame if this show gets overlooked at the Emmys, this episode should be Bella Ramsey’s submittal
—Speaking of which, the horse and stunt woman deserve an Emmy
—That was another tense episode without any infected in sight—Can Elle infect someone with a bite?
If you watch tv shows and your take away is “that deserved an EMMY” vs “that did not deserve an Emmy!” you’re a weirdo.
Oh, pipe down.- Saying that “saying that you believe an actor’s work deserves to be recognized by her industry” is ‘weird’ makes YOU the weirdo, weirdo.- It’s “takeaway”, one word.- JohnW had FOUR valid takeaways, including a question, so your criticism was quite unbalanced in the first place (as if your own comment was adding any value to the discussion itself).
Nah, there always has to be at least one dick in these comments.
Shut the fuck up dickweed.
This seems needlessly antagonistic
That last point is actually something to consider. The infamous Mary “Typhoid Mary” Mallon wasn’t symptomatic for typhoid fever but she could (and did) pass it on to dozens of other people in the early 20th century.
Not only that, but she knew she was capable of passing it on and still continued to work as a cook, therefore spreading typhoid to even more people. She also assumed fake identities and moved cooking jobs frequently to avoid detection because everywhere she worked there were outbreaks. She was eventually forcibly quarantined for the last twenty years of her life.
Can Elle infect someone with a bite?No.
[citation needed]
I’m fairly confident the horse crash was CG.
Um. Remember “Luck”? Ain’t no way they crashed that horse.
“Um. Remember “Luck”? Ain’t no way they crashed that horse.”
Yeah, you understand that’s more of an argument FOR cgi than it is an argument AGAINST cgi, right?
In the after show recap they showed a mechanical horse on a dolly being used for Ellie’s crash.
The behind the scenes featurette this episode showed that it was actually a practical effect. Though I’m sure there’s a decent chance that it was cleaned up with a little CGI.
It was with some practical effects. Watch after the episode, they show the mechanism to throw her from the horse.
The featurette at the end of the episode showed the stunt. It actually was really uncomfortable to watch and seemed crazy dangerous. They had a “stuffed” horse on rails and pulled it forward until it hit a catch that flipped it over. I think they put CG over the horse, but the fall was a stunt person!
Having now watched the bts, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say if they used ANY of that it was for the close-up side angle shot of the fall, but it was more than likely just used as a lighting reference for the CG lads and lasses. There’s no way that stiff-legged model horse looked anything but hilarious in a wide shot, and it didn’t look like the fake animal was rigged to collapse. The clip in the bts showed it in motion but conveniently cut out before we saw the stuntwoman being thrown or not.
My uneducated guess is that the horse had CG comped over it in the wide shot, but Bella hitting the snow in the wide shot was the stunt actress. Why dangerously flip a woman over for a closeup?
Did you actually see the fake horse flip? I may have watched the wrong video.
Nope, it was a horse model with the stunt women on it. The whole thing was on rails. They showed the stunt on HBO Max after the final credits. They have cast members talk and show filming of scenes after the credits. You get about 5 minutes of cool details.
Yeah I thought that too. I know they used to use horses who were trained to fall, but I think there were still too many injuries that it has become unnecessary with the technology available today.
In the post-episode discussion they show it, it’s a fake mechanical horse on rails that launches the stunt woman. The horse you see is CG’d over the fake one but she goes a flyin
They showed the fake horse and stunt actress in the behind the scenes afterwards!
So early on Elle kicked the sensor as infected but then the dog didn’t detect the infection so maybe her magical blood or whatever has cleared the infection and she just has the scar now? I was bothered by that as well… if she pops positive she should have infected him. The lines should have started to spread on his hand and so on. Then I was like, “whatever, this episode rules” and moved on but still…
it’s “ELLIE” you guys
My bad.
I was so glad they showed the dummy horse on the track in the “behind the scenes” stuff. Even tho my brain knew they didn’t really shoot a horse, I had to keep saying it. Before it happened, I knew that’s how they’d catch Ellie. Bella better win every award she’s nominated for. A coworker told me this episode shows how cruel Joel & Ellie can be. My personal opinion is, when I’ve been thru what they’ve been thru, you better by God believe I will do exactly the same thing to save a loved one or myself.
Indeed. Can Ellie infect someone with her bite?
We don’t know – the show (and game) never clarifies that. But she knows she can use that fear of her biting someone can infect someone else to give her an opportunity to escape.
I’m thinking that was a CG horse with human stunt person taken from green screen. But well done no matter what!
Discount Simon Pegg really did a good job. Super creepy. And while I don’t think Joel and Ellie spent near enough time together this season, its still moving to see monents like her lying with him, and their embrace after her trauma. This chapter was truncated for sure, (there is a whole part where Ellie and David fight infected side by side, and it builds trust before the reveal) but overall I think they captured it really well. Couple takeaways: 1. Troy Baker totally could have still played Joel. Bit of a string bean, but nothing packing a few pounds wouldn’t fix.2. It’s no wonder they got rid of the spores and masks. They knew there just wouldn’t be a lot of infected in this series.
Clearly this show needed at least one more episode. Probably between eps 3 & 4, to fill in the journey and increase the emotional bond between Joel and Ellie. And this one could have been a full hour, to really slow burn the reveal of David as the worst. And there should be slightly more zombie presence. They’re not an ever present threat and it’s kind of surprising that society ever fell. Maybe a few more flashbacks to the collapse? At least one scary fungal encounter per ep? It’s a very good show, but these things are keeping it from greatness.
“And there should be slightly more zombie presence. They’re not an ever present threat and it’s kind of surprising that society ever fell.” As I rambled about above, this is how I feel. And I think it is a big problem in an otherwise excellent show.
Meh, if they had one scary fungal encounter per ep, people would start complaining about how contrived that is. They just can’t please everyone. Besides, they showed us the army of infected outside Boston and under KC. I really don’t need to see infected every ep to remind me they’re a threat.
It belies the very nature of the show to me. The zombie hoards are so horrific that folks have to live in quarantined, heavily fortified cities – except when they don’t. And the trek Joel wanted to take to find his brother was a huge, fraught undertaking. Turns out it wasn’t.
My takeaway is that it’s indicative of FEDRA’s mismanagement. They’re keeping everyone walled in in the remains of the most densely populated places in the US. The worst place to be. They’re running out of food, but it appears people aren’t even allowed to leave of their own volition. The smart thing to do would be to start trickling people out to resettle more remote places. Especially since the city is getting worse.
I’m actually more disappointed that they didn’t do more with the underground fungal network. That was a brilliant addition and a way to show how the cordyceps was always at people’s heels. Maybe we’ll see it in action in the finale, but I doubt it. I hope they build on it in season 2. I also want to see more of how the rest of the world is doing next season.
I agree that one episode more might have been to its benefit, particularly after reading what chimicanga said about there being a part of the game where Ellie and David fight infected together. I think you could have taken this eighth episode and split it into two, the first establishes David’s gang and lets Joel heal a bit more (so his leap from bed bound to killing people isn’t so miraculous), and ends with Ellie being captured or maybe a bit after that, when David is trying to win her over. The second episode could pick up from there, and focus on Ellie getting drawn in, perhaps through fighting along side him, but then discovering the truth and extricating herself (along with Joel’s efforts to save her). I think there was more to do in this episode than what the viewers got. I still enjoyed it, but it was one of the first times the series has felt rushed to me. It felt like a video game sequence: pick up where the previous action leaves off, meet obstacle, understand obstacle, defeat obstacle, and flee. I think that since it had that feeling, the end seemed like a fait accompli to me, so the stakes never seemed particularly high.
he’s been working in NY theatre for years, including memorizing all of “The Great Gatsby” for an experimental theater production, but sure, go with “discount Simon Pegg.”
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“The most terrifying monster yet”Hey man. That’s very transphobic!
We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone.
No, we’ve all see The Walking Dead.
Was it supposed to be a plot twist that David is a “bad guy” lol? I think the twist is that they failed at making him unsympathetic. If the village is actually starving, and some people have died… yeah you might turn to cannibalism.
“they failed at making him unsympathetic.” That’s not how the TLOU works. Everyone has a good reason in TLOU, even if their methods are depraved.
I would have much preferred if David was on the up and up as making him a bad guy is such the obvious trope that it’s not a surprise at all. I actually felt bad for the people Joel killed who seemed to not be deserving their fates but the “twist” takes out all the moral ambiguity. I guess that’s part of the point but it feels like a cop out
But also, Joel was fully justified in killing those dudes. Like doesn’t this Silver Lake place expect that if they try to kill people, the people will try to kill them back?
The show did a good job at showing how hopeless and their lives were so I felt sorry for them. I got suckered for a bit there, thinking that there’d actually be a nice town full of nice people in a zombie-esque show.
They already did that a few episodes ago.
I am not condoning violence against helpless people, and neither in the game or the show is Joel someone who could be described as a good person. But the Silver Lake folks did try to kill both him and Ellie at the University, and then kidnapped Ellie and were going door to door to try to murder Joel while he was injured and sleeping.So-I get they are hungry and suffering, but you can kind of see why Joel wasn’t feeling particularly merciful. He did not go after them until they went after him and his surrogate daughter twice.
And mercy aside, Joel knows for certain that letting them live necessarily means they will come hunting for him at some point. He’s got to eliminate that threat in order to preserve survival.
Good point-he is preserving both his survival and Ellie’s. This section of the game, a large part of which this episode of the show cut out, is meant to establish the lengths Joel will go to to protect Ellie. In the game that covered his whole rampage through town. Here, it is condensed to the interrogation scene. It was a good scene, well acted, but I still think the game was more effective in showing this necessary character beat for Joel.
The actor’s performance was so good he almost had me believin.’
I’m betting that the large plate of food that he was eating WAS venison.
But we see David passing over other available meat (the horses, the buck Ellie brought down) in favor of eating humans. It’s not pure necessity; David is making a choice.
Both the horse and the buck were acquired after they’d started eating their dead.
Thinking strategically, David might have both kept up front in the butcher hut so that anyone coming in would see them and think “ok, cool, we still have meat” instead of questioning what was in their stew. And it could also be their actual reserves when they ran out of unalived people. 🙂
In the game David tells Ellie that he’s sorry for shooting her horse but it will provide lots of meat for his group.And in the episode he does bring back the deer for the group to eat, but that’s just one deer. I’m no hunter, but I wouldn’t think one deer would provide enough meat for that entire group, and if it did, probably just for one meal.(any hunters who have gotten meat from a deer, let me know how much meat you can get from it)
I’ve watched a lot of playthroughs of the game, and when you meet David most players don’t trust him because (a) most people you’ve met up to this point have either tried to kill you immediately, and (b) you don’t know if Joel is alive or dead and it feels like the game is trying to replace Joel with David here.But then you have to fight some Infected with David, and you each save each other multiple times. So by the time you defeat all the Infected (including a Bloater!) most players feel a bit better about David. And when he gives the “everything happens for a reason” speech it hits that much harder, because you realize that this guy you’ve started to trust is not to be trusted at all.
I was caught by David’s line when he was saying that Ellie was violent and he said, something to the effect, “ I too was violent before I found God.”I think he was a psychopath before the outbreak and channeled that energy into becoming a charismatic Christian.Also, does penicillin have a 20 year shelf life?
I’m an atheist myself and am naturally suspicious of the motives of any self-declared “man of God”, but really, for the past twenty or thirty years, it would be more of a twist for a preacher in a movie or TV show to actually be a good guy given that the default is that they are a crook and/or a pedophile.
I frankly wished they had had David be antagonistic only because he saw Joel and Ellie as threats and was pushed to his limit by Ellie being violent. Revealing that he’s a moustache-twirling pedophile reduced it to the level of “good guy kills bad guy.” Imagine how much more powerful it would have been if when Ellie is screaming and stabbing him to death, he’s just someone who thinks he’s defending his flock.
Exactly. Like in stories of the Western expansion of the US. We used to see it as a story of brave pioneers often getting attacked by violent Indians, and now we tend to see it as a story of greedy colonizers stealing Native land, but the reality is both views were both true at the same time because both the pioneers and Natives were trying to fend for their own families.
A nuanced and intelligent take on AVclub? Get the fuck outta here
both the pioneers and Natives were trying to fend for their own families.It gets easier if you call them “invaders” instead of “pioneers”
That sounds like a new AMC show.“Man of the Cloth” coming this season. Bryan Cranston is outwardly a famous, slimy cable TV preacher religious sensation. But worlds collide when it turns out that he leads a double life as a good father and husband, and all of the money he raises goes towards building small homes for the homeless, feeding the poor, helping LGBQ kids in need, and combatting infectious diseases in far away countries.
helping LGBQ kids in needWhat do you have against T?!
I think the “twist” was that he knew who Ellie was from the moment they crossed paths.
David on “Evil” is a the only man of God I trust. Because he knows his failings, and keeps trying, and he doesn’t push his religious beliefs on anyone. And he didn’t judge Kristen for killing LeRoux.
Art mimics life
I did a quick poll of all the women I know who watch The Last of Us (I am also a woman) after reading this line in the review. Not a single one of us got “gentle” and “fatherly” from David from the get-go. Creepy and manipulative, yes. Sinister but trying to hide it, yes. But not sincerely gentle or fatherly. Sometimes I forget how male-dominated reviews of shows are, particularly for sci-fi and apocalyptic type stuff. I don’t think any woman would watch the opening of that episode and think David was anything but a dangerous man hiding behind a veneer of religiosity. Anyway, David set up alarm bells for all of us, as I’m sure he did for a lot of men because, duh, “man of god leading a creepy congregation has a dark secret” is a huge trope. Vulture’s review of the episode also notes that David “seems like the real deal” for the first half of the episode, which astounds me. Maybe I’ve just read and watched too much apocalyptic fiction, because the second you see a preacher in a dystopia or post-apocalypse, you should automatically be wary. Any faith that has survived the last 20 years of cordyceps is bound to be twisted in some way.
This is why the action sequence with David and Ellie fighting clickers together that was in the game but cut from the show was so important. During that fight, Ellie and David had to work together and trust each other in a life or death struggle. By the time it was over, there was real doubt about whether David was a villain or not. So then the turn is a real twist for the player.Here, I agree with you. David was well acted on the show, but he was a straight up mustache twirling villain from the start, and the impact of this section of the story was really blunted. The Last of Us show runners have done a good job at cutting out some of the more “gamey” sections to keep the drama moving forward. This one should have been kept. The episode was more shallow without it.
I haven’t seen Walking Dead and I clocked David as a psycho about 2 minutes into his sermon at the beginning. Anyone who has to proclaim themself a “man of God” and wishes no harm to you, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
I don’t know if this is answered in the games, but that part where Ellie bluffs about having infected David got me wondering: can Ellie actually infect other people without knowing it? For a lot of real life diseases a person can be immune to it and still carry it and transmit it.
As for David being a pedophile, I’m pretty sure Ellie wasn’t his first attempt at it: the way David spoke and acted towards the girl who lost her father give me serious “child-bride” vibes. When he hits her it’s not just for “disrespect”, but also an abusive man showing his “property” their place (notice how he’s much less agressive when his men are ready to disregard his orders by killing Ellie). Maybe his story about being a teacher before the cordyceps infection wasn’t even true, but he was certainly already a pedophile back then (which makes even worse if he was truly a teacher). Mabye even a convicted one, who found in the new order a chance to hide himself and give way to his worst impulses.
…can Ellie actually infect other people without knowing it?This has not been established one way or the other in the show, but the games make it clear she cannot.
I haven’t played the second game yet but the first game never says one way or the other whether Ellie can infect someone by biting them.
Continuity error I haven’t seen mentioned online yet: When Ellie is offered food in her cage, she kicks it across the floor in disgust. A few seconds later it’s back in one piece at the cage where it was originally placed
The sequence in the show still worked for me, but I still sort of wish they’d kept the timing the same of Joel interrupting Ellie from swinging the machete into David’s skull one more time? Plus that lingering shot of the machete just… stuck there, was missed. Something much more literally and figuratively visceral about it. That, and the music keyed up so that you couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other after a moment because you didn’t really need to.
I do like that in the game and in the show, Joel never meets David.
I appreciated the shot of the bodies both because of its continuity with that moment in the game, and that it showed the cannibalism was more than just a temporary, oh god we’re desperate thing. Though I do wonder how many people in the town knew they were snacking on people jerky. Plus the scene of the kid taking a big ol’ spoonful of what was almost certainly her dad. X_X
One thing I was curious about is — where are those bodies coming from? We know how the little girl’s father died, and that he’s likely the “venison” seen being prepared just before the actual venison arrives. There are those two bodies hanging from meathooks. Are they just eating people who die naturally of other causes, and then waiting until spring to bury the carcasses in a closed casket? Or are they selecting victims for slaughter and then telling everyone in the community they died in a hunting accident? I’m curious if the game explained that.
In the game, David’s group are straight-up hunter cannibals, at least the men of the group. Their hunting parties, like the one Joel and Ellie ran into, go out specifically looking for people to kill and eat to supplement their food supply. Hence, why they attacked without warning. In the game, David claims there are women and children in the group but we never see them, and it seems like that’s a lie to try to put Ellie at ease when they first meet. In fact, it seems like the group is only men, and David’s reasoning for wanting to keep Ellie alive is for specifically for disgusting reasons. There is also no religious aspects at all nor, once he captures Ellie, is their any attempt to hide that they are cannibals. When Ellie wakes up in the cage James is butchering a person on the table in front of her.There’s another dynamic in the game as well, in that Joel decimates the entire hunting party at the college before being wounded. Ellie kills bunch of David’s men before she’s caught, and Joel kills a bunch more of David’s men on his way to get to Ellie. By the time David traps Ellie in the restaurant most of his group is wiped out and he’s more concerned with punishing Ellie than being a burning building. In show, those bodies were the people David’s hunting parties had caught fairly recently. They were the “venison” James mentions would only last a week or two in the beginning of the episode. When he tells David a group thought they saw some “deer” recently he meant people. It’s the code they use. That’s point of when David later tells James that it’s not code when he tells him to go retrieve the medicine for Ellie.
That’s a good catch. I missed that that “deer” was actually code for people. And that’s probably why David dragged the deer that Ellie killed into the dining area, he wanted to show any skeptical followers that they actually had venison.
That was my thought as well. David made quite sure everyone saw the deer for a reason.
Ah the “deer” thing confused me, as did David asking about the “venison, elk, rabbits,” but makes sense that they would use code even when alone, such would be the shame of, you know, hunting and eating people. And how James says maybe the guy who saw the “deer” might be the fact that “sometimes people see what they want to see.”
My take was that David insisted that everyone in the know talk in code all the time, no matter the situation, just in case they are overheard.
So, it’s safe to assume that if they had caught Joel and Ellie a couple episodes back, they would have been dinner?
Yup.
Also in the game after finding the hanging bodies, Joel finds a list of pounds of meat acquired by date, showing the staggering amount of people they’ve butchered.
Thanks for summarizing for the non-game players. I liked the show’s version better.
I thought the performances in the show were amazing, but I did feel like some of the changes made certain aspects less credulous. Without most of David’s group being wiped out it made less sense why nobody would notice the burning building or why he was beyond caring about his own well being and dead set on going after Ellie. Other things just felt compressed, like Joel’s insta-recovery, because there are long stretches of gameplay, playing as Ellie, interspersed throughout these encounters that make it feel like more time has passed than the show achieves. Ellie doesn’t get knocked out when her horse is killed and there’s a long portion of gameplay where David’s men pursue her as she makes her way through the resort, killing plenty of people, before David subdues her. By the time we get back to what has been happening with Joel, the leap to him being able to move around since Ellie left him doesn’t seem nearly so instantaneous.
You kill an absurd number of people in the game. In the show between the two of them they kill 5 (including David) and also one guy at the university. I honestly didn’t think to look too hard at the group scenes so this might be way off, but the whole group is maybe 30? They might have killed about half the men, and maybe all of the truly dangerous men in David’s inner circle. Everyone else is oppressed and scared.
“In the game, David claims there are women and children in the group but we never see them, and it seems like that’s a lie to try to put Ellie at ease when they first meet. In fact, it seems like the group is only men”It’s true that in the game we never see women or children in David’s group, but David isn’t lying about them being there. Once Ellie escapes and they’re hunting her, you hear David telling members of his group that she’s infected. He tells some unnamed guy (James is dead by this point) to gather the children (and women?) and take them somewhere safe while they hunt Ellie.
EDIT: Just rewatched this part of the playthrough. David tells one of the Hunters to take the children someplace safe while the rest of them hunt down Ellie. So he doesn’t mention “women”, but it’s safe to assume they are in this group. It’s hard to believe that David’s group consists of adult men and children but no women.In the first game all of the human enemies are men. There are some female Infected but you never fight/kill human women, even as Ellie.
Why wouldn’t they eat the monkeys?
The second they didn’t stop what they were doing and immediately dress that deer…
Very little according to the podcast. Most of the people didn’t know.
I’m surprised anyone thought David was good from the start. It’s a safe bet, in any genre fare, that the person spouting scripture is going to be sinister. It would be more shocking to turn out otherwise.
“Oh, great. Religious zealots,” I said as soon as that scene started. Hell of a performance, but nine times out of ten if religious folks suddenly show up in a story that hasn’t had them, they (or at least their leader) is going to turn out to be a monster.As an atheist, I don’t object on moral grounds, just on obvious cliche trope grounds.
“And this offends you as a Jewish person?” “No, it offends me as a comedian.”
You know that’s a kneeler, right?
“Those aren’t buoys”
The only truly good, quality religious zealot character that I can think of on any TV show is the preacher from Deadwood.
Friar Tuck.
One of the most heartbreaking story arcs on TV for me
They talked about that in the podcast. That anytime you have a theocratic regime it’s always going to be bad. And usually the person in charge is not as holy as they claim to be.
Fully agree. My wife instantly said “well, I guess we have a new bad guy” as the scripture started being read.
Yeah, that surprises me, too. Also that anyone was shocked by the cannibalism when Ellie discovers it wasn’t paying attention to the earlier parts of the episode. It was pretty clearly telegraphed, from the “venison, elk,” and “it’s not code” exchanges between David and James, it’s pretty clear that they are talking in code about the food, which is not game. Then the dining hall scene confirms that they’re eating people. I mean, the guy brings a tray of fresh meat into the kitchen, and says venison, and viewers assume it’s from the deer Ellie killed. Then we cut to the dining hall where people are eating that meat, and David drags the intact deer carcass in. So it’s clear that they’re not eating deer…
Maybe I’m just conditioned to expect cannibalism in a post-apocalyptic show, but I just assumed they were eating the dead from the opening scene when David refused a burial for the girl’s dad.
I didn’t get there that fast, but yeah, I assumed most post-apocalyptic stories get around to cannibalism eventually. Once you read The Road or watch the movie, that thought is never really far from your mind when you consume apocalyptic fiction.
Same here. I’ll bet David wishes he had gone ahead and buried that ear, though.
Yeah that was a flag for me. There was no other reason to really include that big of dialogue.
James had already told David earlier that they had enough deer meat to last a few weeks. They are alone when they say this so they wouldn’t need to be talking code.
Well part of the point about code is to be consistent so you don’t slip when there are people around.
True, but in this scene they are alone in a separate room/area with no one around.
I just listened to a podcast discussing this episode and they had a theory that David and James *were* talking in code when they mentioned “deer, elk and rabbit”, because later when David tells James to bring back the penicillin for Ellie and says “This isn’t code” it means that he does talk in code with David.So you’re probably right about them talking in code when discussing the food they have.
well there was room between good and pedo cannibal fuck
Dumb question but what happened to the “flock” because I didn’t see them after the raid. Also Troy Baker is Joel in the game series, maybe worth noting. Great episode, Ellies Winter and the David fight are among the best parts of the game and this was pretty well adapted.
Their leader is dead and their food supply, whether they knew what it was or not, is burning to the ground. Likely they’ll splinter off and go their own ways trying to survive.
I think LTBR meant more along the lines of “the building they have meals in is on fire; where the hell is everyone?”
Given what goes on in the steakhouse, I suspect it’s on the edge of town. And given how everyone was looking at David, I don’t think it was as much of a secret of what was happening there as he believed. I can easily imagine no one was in a rush to help out him and his lieutenant.
Yeah, everyone in the town knows what’s really in the stew, and they just don’t talk about it. They’ll probably have a town council about “Hey maybe we should migrate somewhere warmer, where there’s real food we aren’t pretending is venison?”
They probably moved to Florida. Same amount of cannibalism, but at least the weather’s better.
I’m not sure a Florida without a consistent electrical grid — and thus air conditioning — would be much of a treat for anyone other than cordyceps.
I would think there would be a gator on every corner
The survivors of this group will eventually join a non-cannibalisms group. The first time they are served deer and they taste it they’ll say “This doesn’t taste like the deer I ate in David’s group” and they’ll suddenly realize they were eating people.
In the game the restaurant is not the same building where Ellie is caged. She escapes that building, moves through town, and ends up in an empty restaurant.
LTBR, I like that. Also yes that’s what I meant. There isn’t really a group shot after Ellie gets captured and that confused me.
Also besides Ellie killing their leader, most of the actual hunters were killed by Joel. I don’t think there’s a good chance that the old people, women, and children will survive the winter.
They have a horse and a buck to eat. That’ll get them through the rest of winter.Assuming they can eat that crap after enjoying all of that sweet, sweet human flesh.
Bella Ramsey was fantastic this episode. She and the writers supplanted her usual cavalier snark with lazer-focused rage in defense of herself and Joel. Impressive work. Same for Scott Shepherd as Father Cannibal McGoodtime, the hopeful pedophilic rapist leader. (BTW- also streaming 1923/Yellowstone and the Catholic Church torture porn is palpable over on that show. Glad I broke free of that culty Iron Age shit a long time ago. And that show is way overrated…)The heavy vibe around the church camp was really rendered effectively creepy. Juuuuuust the right amount of foreshadowing to make you feel the dread about dinner time, young girls, and putting the men in menu. Joel’s Lazarus-like recovery was pretty ludicrous though. No notable food or water for days, unconscious, stitched and infected and- boom- Jason Bourne.Her attempt at a distracting horse ride was weirdly conceived. I know she has to get caught to service the plot there, but just knock her off the horse jumping over a plot hole or something.
I liked how they kept the creepy pedophile aspect of David just simmering beneath the surface until it finally comes out at the end before Ellie kills him. It’s the best kind of reveal – the one that reframes everything you’ve seen him do up to that point, from his behavior towards the girl whose father died, to his remarks to Ellie about being violent (what do you suppose the odds are that he was a creep of a teacher even before the collapse happened?). I almost wish we’d gotten a bit more of the group, though. They seemed pretty sympathetic, especially since most of them don’t appear to know about the cannibalism (although that might just be David’s delusion). Troy Baker cameo! And a pretty big one, too, as James. A bunch of the Last of Us game voice actors got parts, ranging from the small (I can’t prove, but I swear the blond lady who opens the gate at Jackson is a dead-ringer for the voice actress for Maria in the game), to Baker and Pierce getting supporting character roles in 1-2 episodes, to Merle Dandridge just straight up playing Marlene again in live-action. Looks like Ellie’s VA (Ashley Johnson) has a part in the flashback next episode. I’m psyched for next episode, and not just because it’s the season finale. It’s in Salt Lake City (my home town), and I’m very eager to see how they dress up some part of Canada to look like it. They had an “I-80 and I-15″ sign.
David was scheming on that Ellie veal. LOL!
Troy Baker cameo! And a pretty big one, too, as James. A bunch of the Last of Us game voice actors got parts, ranging from the small (I can’t prove, but I swear the blond lady who opens the gate at Jackson is a dead-ringer for the voice actress for Maria in the game), to Baker and Pierce getting supporting character roles in 1-2 episodes, to Merle Dandridge just straight up playing Marlene again in live-action. Looks like Ellie’s VA (Ashley Johnson) has a part in the flashback next episode.I highly recommend The Last of Us podcast, hosted by Troy Baker. His guests are always Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman. Even though I’ve never played the game, it’s worth listening to learn more about the show.
I’ve been listening to them!
“I liked how they kept the creepy pedophile aspect of David just simmering beneath the surface until it finally comes out at the end before Ellie kills him.”I guess you missed the part where Ellie was in the cage and he places his hand on hers. That’s where you learn that he’s a pedo in the game and in the episode.
Also worth pondering? How Joel just wanders into a town that seemingly seems empty and rescues Ellie. Who stumbles out of a building on fire that nobody in the town seems to notice.
This show has its share of flaws and the highs are great but it is a pretty uneven season.
In the game this area was covered by a blinding blizzard, so it was easier to justify the “things went unnoticed” stuff.
My recollection (although I haven’t played in a few years so I could be wrong), is that the game dealt with the lack of an army rushing to help David much better. Partly because Joel and Ellie killed so many of his army during that sequence, and partly because there was fog/a big storm that was great for stealth and also meant no one could really see clearly what was going on it town.It was strange to see Joel and Ellie just wander out of a burning building unchallenged. But a lot of this kind of story requires a suspension of belief, and this is one of the less egregious things so………
The whole time during that final scene of their reunion I was screaming inside my head, “OK, but GET OUT OF THERE YOU FOOLS! PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE ON YOUR TAIL!”
the tv/movie trope I hate the most; people cheering or having dramatic conversations about their feelings when their life is still in fucking danger
Mine will always be cars stopping gunfire.
As others have mentioned, in the game Joel and Ellie have already killed most of the adult males in this town. You hear David telling someone to gather the women and children and put them somewhere safe while they hunt down Ellie.In the show most of the adult males were sent to hunt down Joel, who killed them. Back at the town it was probably just David and James and a bunch of women and children.
I just rewatched this part of the game and David tells one of the Hunters to gather the children and put them somewhere safe while the rest of them hunt Ellie. So he doesn’t mention “women” here.But it’s safe to assume there are women in this group. Not likely that you’d have a group in the apocalypse of just adult men and children with no women.
Ellie has a weird credulity problem of riding the line between Annie Oakley, or like the little girl in True Grit, and Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Like are we meant to believe that she could overpower all these adults? Is she Arya Stark after all the assassin training? Or is she a wise cracking Nickelodeon youth who always has the upper hand against the “lame grown ups”? Or is she like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has some aforementioned super powers that we don’t know about? In any case, I’m sure this won’t stop a certain slice of the audience from lionizing her as a pop culture heroine, but it does kinda hurt the verisimilitude of an episode like this.
She’s more like Lyanna Mormont
Pretty sure Lyanna would die on the battle field tho lol.
Lyanna did, in fact, die on the battlefield. Took a giant with her though.
It’s always funny when one commenter shows up a dozen or so times out of … 60-ish (currently) total comments and each one of their comments is bad mouthing the show being reviewed.
We get it mate, you don’t like a TV show. Very edgy of you.
If you don’t like it you don’t have to watch it
What do you mean by “all these adults”? She shoots one guy in episode four and only survives in this one by acting out of desperation and fear.
She didn’t really overpower anyone, though. She took her shot, got the crap kicked out of her, and got lucky a bunch. David left the cleaver right next to her head, and she killed James while they were distracted. She stabbed David and he dispatched her pretty easily, but the cleaver again was within her grasp.
I mean, i guess you could argue that David and James had a post-apocalyptic Harry and Marv thing going on in that last sequence, but I don’t think they really boosted Ellie’s physical fighting prowess much. She was desperate to survive and she did it through grit and luck.
Yeah, my complaint about this episode is that David and James did a pretty good Doctor Evil routine, consistently placing Ellie in situations where she could escape. Oh, we’re going to butcher her, let’s leave a bunch of knives lying around within her arm’s reach. Surely she won’t think to grab the cleaver. Do we really think that David would be so into monologuing that he wouldn’t notice and stop Ellie from going for the cleaver under the table? Some of that seemed like a real stretch to me. The number of times that they stopped attacking her to basically have a conversation with her was almost farcical.
If Ellie doesn’t tell David and James that she’s infected and show them her wound, she is 100% killed there. They are so shocked seeing her wound, knowing that everyone turns within 2 days, that it gives Ellie the chance to grab the knife and kill James and escape.
for some people, it’s just a tv show
Adrenaline is a helluva thing.
Ellie doesn’t “overpower these adults” by physical fighting. She either shoots them, threatens them with the rifle, or stabs them from behind.In the game, when you start playing as Ellie, it takes awhile to realize that you can’t play the way you have been playing as Joel and assume you can fist fight enemies. You quickly realize that a 14-year-old girl will quickly die if you try to melee fight with adult men or Infected.You spend a lot of time as Ellie attacking either with the bow or sneaking up behind people and stabbing them.
the wounded, dying animal is what leads Ellie to David and his lieutenant, James (Troy Baker) You’re seriously going to name check Troy Baker and not mention anywhere in your review that he did the voice and motion capture of Joel in the video games?
Yes.
…New York theatergoers have long been applauding the magnetic Shepherd in downtown shows. From his years doing avant-garde plays……with (among others) the legendary Wooster Group, Willem Dafoe’s old company. And not just NY theatergoers.
• Fairly slow start, but also intense. Watching Ellie take care of Joel, spoon water into his mouth, leave him food… ugh, it was so heartbreaking. Her sleeping next to him while he moved his head against hers gave me a lump.• I wish she would have asked David why the violent thugs jumped them. Everyone acted like they got gunned down in cold blood, but they were just defending themselves. Also huge lol to the biker thugs being from that town and dressing like that.• That kitchen scene was deliciously crafted. “What’s that?” – *half a beat too long* – “… Venison.” and then David comes walking in with the deer. Perfection. • The absolute graphic sounds of cutlery clinking and stew being eaten right when the audience figures out what’s going on was spectacularly gross. I got the willies.• Joel in adrenaline-crazed stealth mode was a sight to behold. They must have been saving up his brutality for this episode because he straight-up executed quite a number of them. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group.• David’s speech to Ellie went from Palpatine (“Together we can RULE southwestern Colorado!”) to mega-pedo real quick. The dread in her eyes was so well done.• The horse carcass panning up to the frozen buddies was a squiggly moment. Pure horror movie.• Ellie killed Joel! I hope we get Troy in a lot of random roles and he’s just the “that guy” of the series.• As much as the whole thing traumatized her, Ellie was such a badass. From her escape attempts, to her cleaver attack, to her stealth mission around the cafeteria, it was just spot-on and so fun to watch. Her terror when he started to rape her was only out-acted by her fury when she got the upper hand. She did not chop enough. Bella Ramsey is KILLING it.• Fires starting so easily in TV and movies always makes me chuckle. • Joel grabbing her and calling her “baby girl” made me emotional. The buildup to their relationship has been exquisite and every time it pays off I’m just a puddle.I can’t believe there’s only 1 episode left. Is it super-sized? I really hope so, I have no idea how else they’ll close it out. It’s going to be an insanely long wait for season 2.
“I wish she would have asked David why the violent thugs jumped them.” At this point (in the show but especially in the game) Ellie and Joel have met a lot of men that attack them at first sight. They know that in this world, men don’t need a reason to attack other people.“That kitchen scene was deliciously crafted. ‘What’s that?’ – *half a beat too long* – “… Venison.’ and then David comes walking in with the deer. Perfection.” Earlier we saw James tell David that they only had enough deer meat to last the group a few weeks. They were alone when saying this so this was not code – they were talking about actual deer meat. So they did actually have some deer meat left before David brought back Ellie’s deer, but they had decided to supplement this with human meat.“I can’t believe there’s only 1 episode left. Is it super-sized?” From what I’ve heard, the final is only ~40 minutes long, which makes me worried that they’re going to rush through a lot.
I just listened to a podcast discussing this episode and it convinced me that David and James *are* speaking in code when they’re talking about the meat situation (when they say they have deer, elk and rabbit). When they meet Ellie and David tells James “I’m not speaking in code – get the penicillin.”
‘Only Pedro Pascal could make us thirsty with the line, “You focus right here or I’ll pop your fucking kneecap off.” Yes, zaddy, pop it.’what
This is an example of insanity brought on by the internet.
All the media has to do is say, “________is_______” over and over and that statement is then solidified and true.
I wish they’d say, “Rent is too damn high” or “We need universal healthcare” over and over.
“Rent is too damn high” literally became a meme and that still wasn’t enough.
The internet was a mistake
Is there another point of the internet?
No one who’s experienced a lateral pateller dislocation would say that.
No one who’s not trying too fucking hard would ever say that. FTFY
Seriously
Yep, wierd. TIL ‘zaddy’ is actually in the Oxford Dictionary and not just the Urban Dictionary.nouna sexually attractive man, especially an older one who is fashionable or charismatic.“so many people go for Geoffrey—he’s a zaddy”
So….where did the rest of the community go? There’s the main guy and the dudes that were sent out after Joel – where did everyone else go while their dining room burns to the ground?
Only Pedro Pascal could make us thirsty with the line, “You focus right here or I’ll pop your fucking kneecap off.” Yes, zaddy, pop it.Dude, what the hell
“What happened to the buck Ellie shot?”The meal was already cooked before they brought the deer back. But if you noticed, David was eating a plate of venison while the others had Dad Stew.
I think the TV series has been great-a real achievement. And, even though I am going to criticize it, I liked this episode. There was a lot good about it. But it was by far the most disappointing episode for me up to this point. Two big reasons:1.The game simply did this part much better. I know that is not a consideration for those who have not played it, and to some degree the show needs to be judged on how it works as a TV show. But for those who did play this masterpiece in video game form, this is gonna be hard. The game simply had more time to ratchet up the tension and flesh out the situation, and some key scenes were missing from this version. Again: what we got was good. The episode could have really soared with thirty minutes or so added. I really think a lot who played are going to be underwhelmed by this installment-I was.2. There really have not been enough infected in the show. Trust me, I don’t want the Walking Dead, a show I could not even get through the second season of. I am glad that the show has worked to established that humans are such a big threat. But the infected here are not simply a plot device-they are the stakes. The whole reason this journey HAS to work is because Ellie holds the promise of the vaccine. The game does such a fantastic job of driving this home so that there is tension about the outcome of the journey. Here, they establish the relationship between Joel and Ellie well, and the desperation for survival. But we go long stretches forgetting that the infected are even around, and other than Episode 5 there are just a few wandering around when there should be many. Humans are bad here, but the infected don’t feel like much of a threat-and they need to for the journey Joel and Ellie are on to have weight beyond their growing bond. I think this is a big mistake the show is making. It is strange that the early episodes went to such length to establish the Clickers and the fungal network stuff, only for the infected to then be used sparingly except for one episode. This has been a great show, but for the first time I am nervous about the creative team sticking the landing.
Regarding how this episode could have used a little more time: I’m a little surprised we spent two full episodes in KC (I enjoyed those episodes, don’t get me wrong), but only one for what is unquestionably one of the most memorable sequences from the game. Joel’s recovery, Ellie being discovered, captured, figuring out what was going on with the Silver Lake community, etc, one could argue was worth dividing up into multiple episodes. But that said, I think they did a stellar job in what they did end up delivering. It just felt like they kinda rushed through a huge part of the game here.
I agree with you. I also enjoyed the KC episodes, but the one thing I criticized about deviation from the game before today is needing a primary antagonist in those episodes. The part was well acted and her last speech to Henry was a great summary of TLOU themes. But KC/Pitt was plenty terrifying in the game without the need to put a specific face on the antagonist. That time probably would have been better spent here. 50 minutes was not really enough time to cover this portion of the game.
I read a game/show comparison article and I agree, I do think the game handled this part of the story better. But I only partly agree that the show needs more infected. On one hand, yes, the lack of infected do allow you to forget why Joel and Ellie are even travelling together. Watching them bond is great, but there doesn’t seem to much pushing their journey forward and I keep forgetting where they are even headed. On the other hand, fewer confrontations with the infected allow the show to be more believable. In the second episode when Joel, Tess, and Ellie encounter the two clickers we are shown just how much of a real threat the infected are and the trio is lucky to have made it out with only one casualty. If Joel was able to constantly fight off infected in every episode then the stakes would be greatly reduced and the fact that the infected essentially took over the world wouldn’t be so believable. The absence of infected still perpetuates a ton of tension because you know that if one does show up its going to be a big deal.
I think this is fair and well stated (so you get a star!). And I totally get it-looking around at other takes on the game, I think my opinion is in the minority with regard to number of infected. And the reason most often given is better realism (including from my wife and my mom, who have not played the game but love the show). But I agree with this: “ On one hand, yes, the lack of infected do allow you to forget why Joel and Ellie are even travelling together. Watching them bond is great, but there doesn’t seem to much pushing their journey forward and I keep forgetting where they are even headed.” And I think it is important. I don’t want to say more until the ending wraps up-lets just say I think there are a lot of problems with a scenario where people can forget where Joel and Ellie are even headed and why. I look forward to resuming the discussion next week!
Now you’ve really piqued my curiosity. I only played through the first half or so of the game a few years ago (too stressful) so I don’t know where the story is headed at all anymore. I think the series could have used another episode or two (if nothing else just because I enjoy watching it and want more) and I do kind of wish there were more scenes with infected though, even if they occurred in additional flashbacks with other characters to add to their backstories. Also thanks for the star, I love those!
I am very interested to see what you and others who have not finished the game (including everyone else of suitable TLOU viewing age in my family) thinks of the end (assuming it tracks with what we expect from the game). The ending of the game is one of my favorites in media for the last ten years-there is a reason people still talk about it two decades later.One thing we can both wholeheartedly agree on is that the show would have benefitted from more episodes. Partly because like you said, more episodes of a great thing is even more great! But also because there are some things that could have stood to have more screen time in this series. I think the part with Silver Lake is def. one of those.
If Joel was able to constantly fight off infected in every episode then the stakes would be greatly reduced and the fact that the infected essentially took over the world wouldn’t be so believable.I’d have to disagree here on the “believable” aspect, conceding that we’re talking about fungus zombies, so believable is just within the construct of the narrative. The infected took over the world in less than a week because nobody knew what the hell was going on, so it spread like wildfire, decimating a huge portion of the world’s population but people still stabilized into huge QZs (and other communities) even during the initial outbreak. It was too late, but it didn’t take long before people understood how it spreads and how to deal with the infected. Hell, FEDRA developed scanners to detect if you’re infected. In the current world of the show, and game, there are regular trade routes, and smuggler routes, between QZs that people travel. This wouldn’t be possible if Joel, or anyone else, weren’t able with deal with infected. That’s what makes the situation more believable in the game, rather than making the infected so insurmountable that nobody could move anywhere. Smugglers deal with them all the time, which makes Tess’s getting bit early in the game so shocking to Joel. It’s like a workplace accident.
As far as “zombies” are concerned, I think that a Cordyceps fungus is actually relatively realistic as it’s based on something that actually happens today in other species. I agree with your assessment on how the infected could have taken over so quickly and the remining survivors have settled into a somewhat safe lifestyle. But if Joel had to fight even two infected at once hand-to-hand there’s a really high probability that he gets bit. The infected in TLOU are not the lumbering undead whose bodies are decomposing, they’re effectively still humans with normal human strength and speed who also don’t appear to feel pain and have no regard for their own safety. If all they need to do is get their teeth on you briefly it would be tough to get away unscathed if they ever get within reach.
Relatively is doing a lot of work there. There’s a reason Cordyceps species (though really Ophiocordyceps, a different genera, is the inspiration for the game) only infect insects. Insects have a very simple nervous systems and musculature that’s controlled by internal pressure within an exoskeleton. Making the leap to mammals, let alone humans, is as possible as the dead rising up and walking around. In the game Joel kills dozens of infected. Yes, they are like humans, but they’re also a very dumb and predictable humans that react to any stimulus and run straight towards it. Things the people, especially the prepared and experienced smugglers, in the TLOU world have learned to take advantage of. Large numbers could overwhelm, or stupidly blundering into one, sure, but the experienced denizens of the world aren’t that stupid. Now, understandably the show can’t have Joel mowing through the number of infected (or humans) he does in the game, though the game keeps the tension ratcheted up by having it a likely death if you proceed stupidly, because the danger and tension you feel playing is not going to directly equate to a different medium. The show could condense that though, into a scene or two, that shows Joel’s experience with dealing with infected, while still maintaining that the infected are dangerous. Hell, many of the infected encounters in the game are getting through that section then getting the hell out of Dodge before the numbers become overwhelming. The show has also, oddly, has eschewed the entire intelligent crafting use of objects that’s so intrinsic to the games. Obviously, I wouldn’t expect the show to have Joel make a sugar-based nail bombs on the fly, but not a single Molotov cocktail? Fire being the biggest weakness of the infected? It’s the type of simple preparation that show-Joel would have to know to survive this long running routes through infected areas.
I’m still hoping we get to see Joel tape a scissors to a baseball bat!
I agree with everything your saying here, but even as someone who has played the game, I don’t think the show is leaving much to be desired. Even though there have been less zombies, I don’t find myself asking where they are. I’d say they effectively replaced the peril of the gameplay with well-directed and well-acted confliceverywhere else.Consequentially, I actually think it’s going to make Joel’s actions in the ending feel that much more earned.
I agree, and I think you’ve gotta look at “Chernobyl” for what Craig whatzisname is going for. Extremely heightened tension with big emotional payoffs.
I also think they have done a good job in the show with well acted, well directed conflict/drama. Episode 3 of this show is one of my favorite episodes of television in years, and it clearly did not rely on the infected to tell a powerful story in a post fungus outbreak world.But your last line is where you and I part company. I think that the looming, suffocating presence of the infected is essential for making the endgame of this tale powerful, and I don’t think the show has done enough to establish them as a consistent threat. I watch the show with a bunch of people who have not played the game, and many of them keep forgetting where Joel and Ellie are even going and why.I don’t want to say more to avoid spoilers for the next episode, but I think it will be an interesting discussion for next week! Hopefully the discussion is-wow what a great episode.
But for those who did play this masterpiece in video game form, this is gonna be hard. The game simply had more time to ratchet up the tension and flesh out the situation, and some key scenes were missing from this version.You mean the 30 seconds spent talking to David, the 10 minute shooting arena, the 15 minutes of shooting it out and backstabbing an army of dudes, then getting captured and the cage scene playing out identical to how it did in the show?You don’t have to oversell the game. It’s half of the drama with an hour or so of murdering dudes. It’s the least-complicated, least-compelling section of the game and kind of just drags the whole story to a halt.The show was a huge improvement.
The game did it better in that it got you to trust David more at the start. When he’s first introduced you immediately distrust him, because it feels like the game is trying to replace Joel with David. Then the Infected attack and you have to work with David to defeat them – you save each other multiple times here. So by the time they’re all killed, most players are starting to like David, or at least trust him. Which is why his “everything happens for a reason” speech hits so much harder then, because suddenly this guy who you initially distrusted but you went through hell with fighting Clickers and Bloater and now kind of trust is revealed to be the leader of the group that wounded Joel. Before the Infected attack Ellie holding the rifle on David, but after the attack and they go back to the fire Ellie isn’t holding the rifle at all – she trust David.In the show Ellie meets David, doesn’t trust him, and then that distrust is immediately confirmed when he reveals that his group wounded Joel.
This. What I was trying to say in my reply, but said better.
Just because there is a gameplay sequence in a game doesn’t mean there isn’t character development in it, or that it should have been cut from the TV show.That “10 minute shooting arena” in the game? That is when David and Ellie get to know each other. They have to work together to overcome the infected. David had every chance to leave her or turn a gun on her, but didn’t. And so it plants a seed of doubt in the player about whether David is actually a villain. It makes the turn actually mean something instead of the straightforward mustache twirler we got in the show. It also makes David’s fascination with Ellie make more sense. Here he is talking about him being able to see that she is a leader and special, and it feels really abrupt. In the game, they had to make it together through a life or death struggle, so you can see better where it is coming from.“15 minutes of backstabbing dudes”. That was one of the main ways the game showed Joel being at a desperate point where he would do anything for Ellie. Him steamrolling through that town, desperate to find her, was a significant character beat. Plus, the storm in the game and Joel and Ellie taking out all the fighters would have made them just wandering out of a burning building at the end and wandering off without pursuit a lot less stupid looking. You are fine to think this was a huge improvement over the game, but the premise that an action sequence can have no character purpose is wrong. In TLOU, the sequences in this part of the game very much did. Lots of folks in this thread and elsewhere conclude that this episode felt rushed. It WAS rushed. Because in this part of the game, the connections between characters were established via action beats. The show took them out and didn’t effectively replace them.
The infected are very nakedly a plot device in the show. They show up whenever it is most opportune for the storyline, in the most dramatic moments, and they are always deadly. There’s no reason to believe people would have made it 20 years with zombies that succeed in infecting at least one person every time a group of people come into contact with zombies.
In terms of your first two lines: My gripe is that the infected were not merely a plot device in the game, and that their looming presence was a big part of what made the resolution of the story work. My main problem with the show is that the infected are being used more as a plot device, and I am worried about how this will impact the final episode. So: we agree? In the game the infected had a presence that permeated the story. In the show they only show up to move the plot. The point of the post you are responding to is my worry that the course of the show in that regard is a mistake. I can’t really say more without spoilers, so I will refrain until next week. In terms of your final line: Show me a good movie about an apocalypse that is realistic about human survival. There are few if any. The liberties a property like the Last Of Us needs to take to tell a story where humans are still around is very low on my list of concerns. I just want a good story.The series has been very good so far. I am worried that not having the infected be a consistent presence on the show is going to negatively impact the final product.
I’m just really grateful Ellie didn’t get saved by Joel, but saved herself. The trauma of someone trying to rape you (and being stopped) is not so dissimilar to the trauma of being raped. When she stabbed/hacked him so many times, that honestly just felt like how it feels to try and get that feeling out of your body. It’s impossible to get rid of, even if you were able to release all that violence and rage and destruction onto the monster. So basically, just – the moment didn’t feel “hammy” or overdone to me.
How can it be “the most terrifying monster yet” if it is wiped out over the course of a few hours by a sick dude and a teenage girl?
Also, “Again, the construction of this episode is fiendishly impressive. We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone.”Literally no one thought this. It’s clear from the outset he is creepy and evil.
“Only Pedro Pascal could make us thirsty with the line, “You focus right here or I’ll pop your fucking kneecap off.” Yes, zaddy, pop it.”Are you 12 years old? This is lame as hell.
Yeah, Joel got back up and fighting way too quickly, though you could say it was the adrenaline that jump started him. I’m more bothered by the way the lodge was on fire but the entire cult except for the guys who went on the hunt were nowhere to be seen.
In fairness to the cult… no one really seemed to like David all that much and were probably like eh whatever we’re fucked anyway so maybe the building housing our cannibal smorgasbord can just burn.
I think adrenaline and fear/stress. Then the element of surprise and his own skills enabled him to overpower the three in town. I don’t buy, however, that he dragged two unconscious men into the basement in that condition though. They should have just had him torture/kill the two in the backyard where he knocked them out.
He didn’t drag them to the basement, only to the living room. 😉
I think most of the men went to hunt for Joel. The only ones left at camp were David, James, and the women and children.Also the restaurant was right next to a river so it’s probably on the edge of town. Would take awhile for the rest of the camp to notice it was on fire – no fire alarms in the fungal apocalypse.
It was funny how that settlement only had two people for story purposes. Everyone else just sat there looking hungry. They never even left that room!“The actor who memorized every word of The Great Gatsby for a verbatim marathon performance of the novel”^^^ this seems like the sort of thing that would impress craig mazin lmao
So who are the cannibals eating? Their own or unfortunate people that wander too close to their settlement? Because it doesn’t seem there are too many of the latter.
Well, that girl’s dad for one.
I figured that one out on my own. “We’ll ‘bury him in the spring’” was so obvious I heard it in Principal Skinner’s Treehouse of Horror voice.
I like the fact that Joel killed that girls dad… then killed the guys who had bellies full of that girl’s dad. It’s like he beat that guy four times!
That was the conversation they had about “venison” when we first met them. It’s code for people the whole time save for the actual venison brought in. The 4 guys in the last episode were looking for more people to eat, and it’s getting harder and harder to find them.
The patrols they send around, like the one that Ellie and Joel ran into, hunt anything that moves, including people.
I just figure there aren’t too many people wandering around Wyoming in the middle of winter. On the other hand, after 20 years of very reduced human presence wildlife should be flourishing. Should have done more hunting before the snow.
It’s Colorado, but I understand the question as the show presents it. In the game, David’s group are a pretty efficient human killers that have a stockpile of human meat to make it through the winter. There is no community of men, women and children, despite what he says to Ellie. They retreated to the lodge, for isolation, before they start the next season of going after people again, supplemented with as much hunting as they can manage.
“There is no community of men, women and children, despite what he says to Ellie.”No, there are women and children in David’s group in the game. After Ellie escapes you hear David tells his other hunters that Ellie is escaped, she killed James, and that she’s infected. He tells one of the hunters to get the women and children and take them somewhere safe while they hunt down Ellie and kill her.You don’t see woman and children in David’s group in the game, but they are there.
I just rewatched this part of the game and David tells one of the Hunters to take the children somewhere safe while the rest of them hunt for Ellie. He doesn’t mention “women”.But it’s safe to assume there are women in this group, we just don’t see them. Not likely there’d be a group of adult men and children in the fungal apocalypse but no women. In the game you never fight human women – only men. There are some female Infected you fight.
David says that he sent his men to a nearby town. So they likely go to nearby towns to hunt for human meat.
My thoughts: Joel went from nearly comatose to John Wick in about 10 minutes, but hey, suspension of disbelief and all. It looked like Ellie was injecting the penicillin into his intestines or gall bladder, I wonder if it would even be effective in that case. That didn’t wake him up but a guy walking on the floor above sure did. The reviews I’ve been reading say Ellie was stabbing David, but I’m pretty sure she had the meat cleaver that he dropped. She was chopping him into little pieces.
Yeah, regarding Ellie’s act of violence: I’m not sure how anyone could perceive that as anything but violent chopping.
She was hackin’ and whackin’ and smackin’!
It should be injected into muscle, and I think she’d have a hard time pushing through all the muscle into his organs, so I rank it: plausible enough?
This was honestly even harder to stomach than the same section of the game. I agree Scott Shepherd and Bella Ramsey were incredible here.
I’m sorry to know the ending has been spoiled for you. As a gamer, one of the things I was most curious about going into this series was how well our community would be able to stay mum on things for new viewers. My point of reference, of course, is the Song of Ice and Fire book readers being thoughtful to TV Game of Thrones fans (at least in my experience). Unsurprisingly, gamers are less courteous. I’d give us an FAnyway, there goes my hopes for the Fallout TV series having its standout episode based on one of my favorite New Vegas sidequests: “Beyond the Beef”
God I couldn’t even pick a favorite NV quest. Beef is pretty good. Bye Bye Love is good too.
Not in my experience. There was so much RED WEDDING *wink wink nudge nudge* it was nauseating. And I’m a book reader. I hope gamers successfully keep Part 2’s big developments under wraps. Like don’t even hint at them.
wow that was a predictable hour of TV. Was there a single moment of that episode that the audience didn’t see coming a mile away?—another episode where everyone’s wearing new clothes (lmao at bella ramsay’s perfect, brand new parka), they’re nicely groomed (the john corbett-looking henchman was kinda dirty at least) there’s no garbage or ruins anywhere. The banner at the start looked fresh from the print shop. Cheap ass production design throughout. —I love the TV writer brain that creates a community of people where only two individuals participate in the story. Everyone else just sat there looking hungry. This is classic genius-level storytelling; have a room full of people who are there strictly for the villain to demonstrate his evilness on them.I truly hate Craig Mazin and have the lowest possible estimation of his talent, but even I found the evil religious guy plot unbelievably hacky and stupid and predictable. Flush this turd of a show ASAP!
“1) Could Joel bounce back so fast and take down three healthy, youngish adversaries?”Not sure about the first part, but as far as his adversaries… They were probably all starving and weak from their meager rations of people meat.Now that I think about it, it’s kinda funny that Joel killed three guys who probably ate the last guy he killed. What a weird food pyramid!
Only if Ellie presses UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START.
When Ellie saw the machete that David had dropped in the restaurant I was yelling “PRESS TRIANGLE!”
Does Ellie have a compass or incredible sense of direction, because hunting in the woods without leaving markers is a good way to get lost.The bodies found by Joel seems to indicate to me that David’s contention that game was hard to find this winter was just more bullshite and that game in this area was both easy to find and plentiful. Ellie finds both a rabbit and a deer within walking distance of their hideout.The cannibalism wasn’t due to necessity but more for control of the group.
They’re all just really sucky hunters. Or they’re all this guy
https://www.theonion.com/in-retrospect-i-guess-we-might-have-resorted-to-cannib-1819583474
One rabbit and one deer wouldn’t sustain David’s group for very long. There is wildlife in the woods but not a lot, and not enough to feed their entire group continuously.
I strongly suspect that when David said “game” he didn’t mean “game” in the sense that we non-cannibals would.
I watched a YT clip where multiple interviewers were talking to Pedro Pascal about “daddy/zaddy” status, and holy shit was that awkward. I cannot imagine interviewing some sexy actress and being like, “So! You sure are a piece of ass.”Also awkward: Expressing your lust for your “zaddy” when his character stabs a person in the knee.You people are weird.
This show is trash
Wow, you convinced me with your well thought out comment!
This isn’t “sing along with the great one”
No idea what “sing along with the great one” means, but saying “This show is trash” and then offering nothing else to back up that claim is worthy of mocking.
David’s insight into the cordyceps reminded me of the amazing story The Things, which revisits The Thing from the monster’s POV. What I find fascinating in both cases is the reality that humans and their opponents want the same thing. They want to live and thrive. And if another species gets in their way, they won’t stop to attack it. (LINK: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)The more I find out about cordyceps the more it becomes clear that society could easily reform with networks of sporadic settlements that make it difficult for the infected to spread efficiently. Even without a cure it kind of feels like some smart community planning could solve everything. Truly expected the daughter of the dead man to jump in at the last minute and try to finish off Joel, Ellie or both. Ellie found a rabbit and a buck in like 2 hours. How bad are these dudes at hunting?
I want the post-post-apocalyptic story where the real heroes are the urban designers so badly
I would watch that.
And the contractors!
Everybody loves em
LOL. That scene and moment (and Joel’s repressed pleasure) still gives me the giggles.
I am still trying to understand why game is so scarce for David and Co. Like, it’s not keeping me up at night or anything, but in this hypothetical world 20 years after most of humanity has been eliminated, the animal kingdom should be doing pretty well. With the cordyceps plague, most animals’ natural predator basically vanishes overnight. In a place like the West, you would have tons of deer and bison and sheep. And with very few people around, a group like David’s wouldn’t exactly have tons of competition for game. I get that the story needed there to be scarcity, but it was hard to shake the feeling that no, actually, there would be quite a lot of animals around for hunting.
Hunting isn’t quite that easy, let alone in the Rockies in the winter. There’s already nobody there for the most part so humans being eliminated for 20 years wouldn’t make quite the difference in game that you might imagine. Not to mention, in those 20 years natural predators like wolves would also make a come back. In the lower elevations you’d have more luck, as smaller groups of larger game like deer or elk are only pushed into those higher elevations due to territoriality. There’s also just the math. The rough estimate or how long someone could live off of a 150lb deer is 70 days if eating normally. Only about 45% of the deer is edible. Cut out meals and that can obviously be extended, but it’s still cut in half for every person you add. Say David’s camp is 25 people. Every deer is only worth .36 days of food. You can push that out to starvation rations and still one deer is less than three days of food for a group that size. That’s a lot of hunting to survive. That said, it doesn’t make much more sense that humans would be more available than any other game at the time, but that’s an issue the show created that wasn’t really present in the game. In the game David’s group are roving efficient hunters of people, keep fairly strict inventories of (mainly human) meat, and are well stocked for the winter. It’s happenstance that Ellie and Joel end up running into them, fight them, Joel being wounded, and end up having to hole up in the same extended town (the show says 4 miles, in the game it’s much closer.)In the game there are bands of humans trying to survive basically everywhere you go, though they are and endless horde or people to kill, so it somewhat makes sense that David’s group preys upon these people to feed themselves. The show introduced the idea that David is preacher with a flock of women and children he’s, ostensibly, providing for. There’s none of that in the game. It’s all men, and it makes his creepy overtures to Ellie while she’s in the cage all that much more disturbing in his intent.
My problem with this and other similar apocalypse shows is that after 20 years it’s more likely that people would have settled into farming communities than roving the countryside raiding. Thieving is a risky business; Joel and Ellie killed 5 or 6 of their men in defense. Was that worth whatever they thought they could steal? There would be some brutality, in my opinion, but people would probably be more interested in farming and trading than leading with their guns all the time and raping and murdering. I’m sure eventually it would progress into some feudal society with lords financing protection in return for crops.
I get where you’re coming from, but then also consider that literally anyone can raid. There’s little skill involved and you can get better at it as you go along. If you try to go from being a stockbroker on outbreak day to a farmer, you’re probably going to starve to death. So I think it would be less that people settled into farming communites and more that the few groups that had been able to set up farming communites right away (a la Bill) would be pretty much the only ones still alive 20 years on.
Sure at first people would prey upon each other because of the initial chaos. But eventually people would figure out that it isn’t worth the risk. My cats roam my neighborhood where there are troops of large monkeys. The monkeys could easily rip the cats in two. But they instinctively know they may not survive some bites from the cats that could get infected. No antibiotics, no hospitals, no police to protect you from retaliation, etc. makes raiding very dangerous. Also, after 20 years ammunition would be rare. Isn’t there a shelf life? So then it’s all knives and clubs which makes raiding still more risky.
50 years would be an easy shelf life for ammo as long a sit stays dry. As far as supply there are an estimated 500 million legal firearms and 20 Trillion rounds of ammo.
“My cats roam my neighborhood where there are troops of large monkeys. The monkeys could easily rip the cats in two.”THIS *waves arms* whole thing is very intriguing yet kinda leaves one hanging in all kinds of suspense…
I live in Africa.
Oh cool. My first thought was somewhere in SE Asia, but regardless: with the reams of Youtube video of cats in standoffs/casual detentes with larger assorted wildlife (raccoons, deer, Bald eagles, foxes, bears etc.) now I’m even more intrigued by what your cats get up to in their roaming.My childhood roommate – a barn-cat with notched ears when we adopted him and he decided I was more comfortable than any catbed – could often be seen from 2nd floor windows stalking *somethings* in underbrush across or down the street.
Only ever brought back the occasional mouse or bird, and even then, mostly when we were out at camp, when he became nocturnal, but not at home. (We didn’t often see anything larger in our part of a small city/big town.)If large monkeys won’t mess with your cats, they must be neighbourhood alphas (and they know it)? Or they once picked the right species to mess with, won big, and word got around. (I love dogs too but cats rule, IMHO.)
I live in a walled compound (home invasions are common where I live) with 60 other houses so it really isn’t much different than a suburban American housing tract. You can’t keep monkeys out though. They’re a real pain in the ass because they’re even more destructive and home invasive than squirrels. I have no idea why they don’t mess with cats or dogs and vice versa except my theory that it isn’t worth whatever injuries they might get. My cats tend to stay within the compound (I think) but there are mongeese around. There are also ibis birds aroumd which are twice as big as a cat. They try to stalk them but I doubt they’ve ever caught one. In any case, one of my cats has zero “street” skills. He has no clue how to stalk and he can’t work out how to get over a 3 foot high chain link fence so I’m sure he’s never caught anything. The other one has very good cat skills so I’m sure she actually does kill stuff.
(home invasions are common where I live)Sorry to hear that. One situation where dogs might definitely rule over cats (the latter likely just NOPE-ing outta there as soon as any sh*t went down).
You can’t keep monkeys out though. They’re a real pain in the ass because they’re even more destructive and home invasive than squirrels.Yikes. I can’t imagine the preventative measures or – worst case – restorative costs if those got into the attic. ibis birds aroumd which are twice as big as a cat. They try to stalk themGoogled just to confirm a picture in my head, and man…did NOT know how broad is the range of birds by that name nor how prehistorically intimidating they could look. Cat would have balls – or just stronger instinct than smarts – to go after one of those.Much obliged for the descriptive answer and the lol of the cat who “can’t work out how to get over a 3 foot high chain link fence”. There’s always one of those.
I think we are more or less saying the same thing. My point was generally that 20 years on it would be nothing but farming/hunting communities, not because everyone decided to become farmers, but the relatively small percentage of people that had managed to do it successfully would be the only ones that survived that long.
I spent much of the first episode wondering how in the hell they were feeding the hundreds to thousands of folks in the Boston QZ, where there is basically literally no arable land (I grew up there).
Agreed. The whole raider thing is well worn trope of post-apocalyptic fiction that usually never made much sense. In this case, after 20 years, even if people didn’t want to live in the remaining functional QZs, you’d expect there would be more communities the size of Jackson in the least. Human nature is to congregate. That’s not to say that established communities wouldn’t raid other communities, or that small bands of thieves wouldn’t exist that prey upon trade routes if they were established, but that would be because there’s something worth stealing. Bands of roving raiders couldn’t really survive on picking off a few unlucky travelers here or there the way it’s presented. In fact, that would be more plausible if there many more established communities where they could trade their stolen goods for necessities.
“The show introduced the idea that David is preacher with a flock of women and children he’s, ostensibly, providing for. There’s none of that in the game. It’s all men”No, there are women and children in the game, but we never see them.After Ellie escapes, David tells one of the hunters that she’s infected and they have to kill her. He tells them to gather the women and children and put them somewhere safe while they hunt Ellie.Just because we don’t see women and children in David’s group in the game doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
I stand corrected. I’ve played the game multiple times and somehow didn’t recall that line.
That line happens when you’re in the first building after you kill James and escape David (I think that’s a pet store?). You hear David and some other Hunters outside talking. But if you rush through this building and go outside then this dialogue does not happen.
Ok, I just rewatched that part of the game and in that scene I described David tells one of the Hunters to gather the children and put them somewhere safe while the rest of them hunt Ellie, but he doesn’t mention “women”. So technically in the game we don’t see any women in David’s group and he doesn’t mention them.But it’s fair to assume there are women in David’s group, we just never see them. Not very likely that you’d have a group in the fungal apocalypse that is all adult men and children but no women. Also, in the game you never fight human women – all the human enemies you fight are adult men. There are female Infected you fight. The game didn’t want you to have an adult male beating up and killing human women, even if they were trying to kill you.
Fair, except BELLA FOUND LOTS OF GAME IN LIKE 2 HOURS … I mean, come on! In the reality of the show it makes no sense.
What you’re saying would make sense if Ellie didn’t happen upon a rabbit and felled a buck in what, her first couple hours in the forest.
I mean, it was pretty obvious, at least to me, that they were all holed up in one town. In a cult. So, probably not a lot of hunting/gathering going on. I dunno.
With the cordyceps plague, most animals’ natural predator basically vanishes overnight. In a place like the West, you would have tons of deer and bison and sheep.I don’t know about after 20 years or so, but damn, find your way toward some of those factory farms where there are thousands of cows or pigs, who by this point continued to breed and cause all sorts of environmental havoc, but would be good eating.
They’re called factory farms for a reason. The animals are confined and dependent on humans to feed them. They’d all have starved to death not long after the facilities were abandoned. There are a lot of huge farms that are closer to free-ranging though, and fences would certainly fail fairly quickly. Most cow breeds wouldn’t last long in the face of natural predation but a few would and feral hogs would be fucking everywhere after 20 years. That natural predation would come from wolf and cougar populations that would boom with the lack of human interference.
Exactly. It’s Colorado, there hasn’t been any development in 20 plus years, hunting for sport is long over, there should be plenty of deer, elk etc. Hell the town Tommy lived in was raising cattle, weren’t they?
What are the infected living off of? They have to be eating something— the fungus, a parasite itself, isn’t feeding them.
In the “Passage” books after a time lapse of a century, those infected with a vampire virus (and given super strength etc.) are shown preying on animals since human prey has gotten scarce, even on mountain lions and grizzly bears, and it’s noted that this causing extinctions and general ecological collapse.
I imagine hunting is still pretty difficult if you have absolutely no knowledge of how to do it? Especially when it’s a life or death situation and you don’t have the time or resources to try and study various techniques.
BUT BELLA FOUND GAME IN NO TIME. In the reality set up by the show it’s mind-boggling.
Why didn’t they eat all the monkeys?
I am still trying to understand why game is so scarce for David and Co. Like, it’s not keeping me up at night or anything, but in this hypothetical world 20 years after most of humanity has been eliminated, the animal kingdom should be doing pretty well. Speaking to deer, the population has exploded in the last hundred years thanks to man, specifically the wide swaths of crops available for eatin’ and loungin’. You can go down a wormhole on Google, but a quick search reveals that there are roughly 100X as many deer today than there were 100 years ago. So it kind of tracks that without crops for food and shelter (they make little deer nests in cornfields, that I know from growing up on a farm), their numbers would dwindle quickly. Rabbits I have no idea. Starving deer probably ate them.
You had me until the part about deer eating rabbit lol
It’s either lazy writing or Pastor Pedo and company were just looking for reasons to eat human flesh.
The more I find out about cordyceps the more it becomes clear that society could easily reform with networks of sporadic settlements that make it difficult for the infected to spread efficiently. Even without a cure it kind of feels like some smart community planning could solve everything.That’s a fair conclusion given what the show has presented. In the game infected are far, far more prevalent. Even isolated, successful communities like Jackson send out constant patrols to monitor/kill them to keep them from getting a foothold anywhere near Jackson. The show has, somewhat oddly, neutered their threat by… mostly not including them, and removing spores as a form of transmission.
I always felt like The Thing “wanted” to land in a city center or at least an area dense with fauna, so it could quickly become a kaiju and overtake the planet. Like that’s what typically happens with its species, and the movie events just have it stuck in pre-kaiju stage because there’s only a few sweaty dudes around
Sure, smart urban planning could have potentially stopped its spread, but you saw what happened with the beginning of Covid: people flipped the fuck out, and started fighting each other for TP. Humans will backstab each other if it means their own survival, so the idealistic thinkers might have something to worry about when their food supply starts to dwindle.
“Ellie found a rabbit and a buck in like 2 hours. How bad are these dudes at hunting?”
Yeah, my first thought when they mentioned game being scarce was “wait, humanity has been mostly gone for two decades. The woods should be absolutely TEEMING with deer, rabbits, etc.” We had 18 months with people just mostly inside their homes, and wildlife was fucking everywhere.
How bad are these dudes at hunting?The show didn’t make it clear, but after reading the comments and rewatching the episode, once they resorted to cannibalism they developed a preference for people parts. The men stopped hunting game and only hunted humans, who are scarcer in the forest.
There’s nothing in the game about David’s group “developing a preference for people”. David tells Ellie that they do it to survive, as there is not enough food or wildlife for his group to survive on.In the game David and James are in the forest when Ellie meets them because they’re hunting, just like she is. David tries to trade with Ellie for her to give them that deer she killed.
Have you posted that short story link in a comments section before?
(Many thanks if so.)
Someone did awhile back and I read and forwarded it to at least two others.
Loved it; it was fascinating.
(Especially having watched too-many-times-to-count Carpenter’s and the prequel of a decade ago, which brilliantly built on the foundation of, fed into and complemented the original, even if it could never top it.)That’s a first-year study/essay on primal archetypal myths right there, with that through-line from “Who Goes There’ to multiple very effective films, adaptations/inspirations to “The Things”…And yeah; the men look like incompetent boobs when Ellie, new to the area, finds two animals and gets one before they apparently even see anything.
Other commenters surmise David’s pleasure in subjugation and dominance may have lead him to enjoy the transgressive nature of cannibalism (fair point) so he’s not as concerned about hunting other sources of meat, but still…
Giving this another shot as today a few other response comments I posted have magically not been greyed out:
if you’re the person who posted the same The Things link awhile ago, much obliged.
I’ve watched too-many-times-to-count Carpenter’s The Thing and the prequel of a decade ago, which brilliantly built on the foundation of, fed into and complemented the original, even if it could never top it.
So I read and forwarded that short story to a couple others as it was a fascinating read, and thought it a fantastic complement to the throughline from “Who Goes There?” to multiple film adaptations. And yeah; the men look like incompetent boobs when Ellie, new to the area, finds two animals and gets one before they apparently even see anything.
Other commenters surmise David’s pleasure in subjugation and dominance may have lead him to enjoy the transgressive nature of cannibalism (fair point) so he’s not as concerned about hunting other sources of meat, but still…
I was thinking along the same lines. They’re resorting to cannibalism despite living beside a forest where another unseasoned hunter found a big rabbit and shot a buck within hours. The game population has been virtually unhunted by man for 20 years now – forests would be teeming with edible animals.It’s either shaky writing or a thirst for eating people.
Uncommented on in this episode: Penicillin is just another fungus that Ellie is injecting into Joel’s body.
Good fungus and bad fungus.
There are good fungi on both sides.
“Very fine fungi … on both sides.”
you’re asking a bit much from the writing to make that connection
I suppose it’s too much to hope for this to actually be a fancy schmancy show, as opposed to just using the technical trappings of one.
Why did the people of Silver Lake resort to cannibalism when they could have been surviving on just sweet nutritious snow, like Ellie’s horse? The poor thing was probably lucky it got shot before its slow death by starvation, or Ellie trying to turn the remaining emaciated pieces of it into jerky. But if people in movies actually had to carry around the amount of feed they would need for their horses, they wouldn’t get far at all.
Uh, you do realize she was giving the horse water via the snow, right? Not feeding it. A horse will live through a winter in Colorado self grazing which, granted, they didn’t show Ellie letting the horse do. But if people in movies actually had to carry around the amount of feed they would need for their horses, they wouldn’t get far at all.What? That’s not how ranging with horses works. Horses were the premier form of transportation and warfare for thousands of years precisely because of their self sufficiency. Nobody was carrying around feed.
Horses that are working absolutely do need feed, especially in wintertime when forage is going to be slow. Armies throughout history have issued horse rations. And I doubt Ellie’s was finding much grazing in the garage.
I will forever applaud that this show (I haven’t gamed it) let ELLIE have the David kill instead of having Joel like bust in a the 11th hour and save her ass. Awesome.“I found god after the apocalypse, which is either the best time or the worst time to find him”. This isn’t just a “line” as the reviewer says… David being a manipulative, intelligent, POS… it was the BEST time for him to find God. Just as he was probably drawn to being a teacher because it put him a position of power and authority, “finding God” allowed him to get into the ultimate position of power and authority.
In the game Ellie also kills David without any help from Joel.Both in the game and in the show, Joel never meets David.
Good on the game too then:-). Just from a television point of view I was SO relieved they didn’t do the miraculous, Joel saves Ellie thing.
Agreed. I love that in the game Joel is on a mission to save Ellie, and while he does kill a lot of Hunters, Ellie has also killed a bunch of Hunters and David. She’s already won by the time he shows up.Joel: “Ellie – I’ve come to save you!”
Ellie: “Well, thanks, but I’ve already killed most of the Hunters and the big boss here.” (shows body with machete sticking out of the face)
Joel: “Oh. Well … I definitely would have killed that guy for you if I hadn’t spent so much time looking for materials and opening a shiv door.”
I called the “they eat people” shtick pretty early (when he said “we’ll burry your father in the summer” I had a pretty good hunch), but got the pedo thing waaay too late
To be fair, the “pedo thing” isn’t introduced (in the game and the show) until the conversation when Ellie is in the cage.
this was a bit more subtle than what they did in the walking dead but still pretty cliché supervillain with a benevolant facade trope.
We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone.Going to be honest here, I never once believed his outward persona. That might be due to my own upbringing and experiences dealing with “people of faith” or “men of god”, but, rarely are their intentions without ulterior motives. It’s quite literally the reason why I’m atheist. I’m glad he met his end the way he did, though, I wanted to see more of it instead of keeping it offscreen.
I can be slow, but it must have been the guy’s performance…somehow the “grooming” part didn’t occur to me until right about when it was revealed, great work, yeesh yuck!
and his lieutenant, James (Troy Baker),It sure says a lot about the quality of modern A.V. Club that this writer doesn’t have a clue this episode features Joel’s original voice actor in a substantial cameo.Pathetic.
Pretty sure in this case they just trusted whomever else was in the know to get that, because why else mention the bit part actor’s name?
This particular episode made me cry for all the opposite reasons that ep.3 did. With that one, it was all the warmth and humanity moving me profoundly. With this episode, Several times I nearly broke down because of the sheer horror of it, and at least once utterly repulsed.Joel backsliding into such act of violence, and the scenes juxtaposition with the similar one with thr couple last week really hit me. Joel genuinely seemed terrifying and it was heartbreaking to see a “hero” be so brutal. Thay was one of the big tearing-up scenes for me.Ellie and David’s whole interaction when she’s chained was truly repulsive. I’ve seen plenty of scenes like it, but none have ever made my skin crawl and cause me to to verbally gross out like that. Another teary moment.Ellie’s showdown with David, similar to Joel’s was heartbreaking, though also at least a little cathartic, but still cause me to cry.I’ve seen plenty of horror films and TV, etc. over the years, but The Last of Us is one of the few to consistently affect me. This episode is up there (for me) with the gut-punch ending of Night of the Living Dead, parts of Eraserhead (a film that disturbs in ways that feel almost abstract), and the ending to Don’t Look Now.Just terrific.
Joel backsliding into such act of violence, and the scenes juxtaposition with the similar one with thr couple last week really hit me. Joel genuinely seemed terrifying and it was heartbreaking to see a “hero” be so brutal. Thay was one of the big tearing-up scenes for me.I’m curious, have you played the games or is story new to you? I ask because, as someone who is very familiar with the game, I’ve been having issues with how the show portrays Joel in contrast to game Joel. The show talks about Joel being a pretty bad guy, but in the game Joel’s consistently a pretty callously violent bad guy in the present. Unfortunately, I can’t help that my familiarity with the game interferes a bit with how the show’s portrayal of Joel would be received by a viewer who is seeing this narrative for the first time. It feels like the show is presenting Joel’s worst offences as something in the fairly distant past. This is in contrast to the game where he’s not a straight-up hunter/raider anymore, but is still pretty casually violent. That the show wanted to take a different direction was evident from the beginning with how they changed the events around Robert. The show is similar in that Robert betrays Joel and Tess (though it’s over a battery rather than guns) but it diverges significantly from there. In the game, when Joel and Tess catch up with Robert, Joel tortures him into talking, and when Robert gives them the info they wanted, Tess casually shoots him in the face. The show seemed to not have the confidence that it could still get the viewer on Joel’s (or Tess’s) side if it showed either as callously violent as the game does, and instead presents it more as though their worst transgressions were things in the past. So, in the game, Joel isn’t backsliding into anything. He’s presented as that way from the start.
I think it still works though. Casual violence is basically the core of the gameplay so seeing his casual violence in the cutscenes isn’t jarring. Like the sniper scene, you’ve killed probably hundreds of people by that point, it’d seem ridiculous for Joel to offer mercy to one last mook. And of course he’s going to kill the two guys he interrogates, what’s two more mooks? And yah, better not waste any precious ammo doing it.
I think kind of saving it up for the end works better for the show.
I played some of the game, but not very much. You make valid points, though I feel thay some of the game acknowledging his violence was more to to with the cognitive dissonance if he was portrayed more like the series has him (I’m reminded of how often it just felt weird how casually Lars started to massacre entire enemy bases in the newer TR games, even sometimes forced to because the game takes sneaking away).I can see though, as a player of the games, it would feel different. However, I think if he were that brutal at every opportunity in the TV show, it just wouldn’t be as good, because there’d be less empathy for him. The game, you are him, so the brain can treat it more directly as ‘us or them’. So you may be right about the show not having the confidence, but to me it was probably the right move. It also works well for establishing why they need each other. If he was as violent in the show, I think most people would be hoping Ellie gets away from him, whereas in the show, his violence in the present has come from the desire to protect her, cruel though it may be It’s all subjective though, and these are just my personal views on it :).
How did David put it “tiny little pieces”? Amazing foreshadowing.
Kinda surprised the cult leader or his minions never had a line about wanting to eat the horse after they shot it. Seems like it’s a lotta meat that isn’t people, unless *shudder* they preferred humans.I caught onto the cannibalism theme of this episode disappointingly late. As soon as people started talking about hunger, I thought “oh, this could be the cannibal ep”, that most apocalypses have, IE Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But the way it was shot, with the cult leader getting the deer (that everyone seemed disappointed with him dragging in), THEN showing cooking, made me think they were actually cooking the deer. Perhaps a shot of cooking, THEN dragging the deer carcass in, would have been more affective, as in “wait…if they didn’t have any venison…what was…”Still an amazing, harrowing episode. I hope Bella Ramsay isn’t too fucked up from that batshit insane cleaver swinging at the end of the ep, and hope they have a therapist available on set.
They did drag the horse back for food. David told them to. Joel saw it while looking for Ellie.
Oh word, I thought the blood was Ellie’s for some reason, good catch
In the game, when David is hunting Ellie in the restaurant, if you take long enough before stabbing David, he will tell you “Sorry about your horse, but don’t worry, we won’t let it go to waste.”
“he reassures her the meal is deer meat. Riiiiight.”In the game it’s implied that David is serving Ellie just deer meat – not human – which she does eat. She calls him a liar and he says “On the contrary, I’ve been quite honest with you”, which is true.
“Surprised the cold open wasn’t Riley’s fate, then cutting to Ellie shaking off the horrible memory. Will we ever see it? Do we need to?”We don’t see this in the game/DLC, and we don’t need to. Ellie tells us that she (not “we”) went to Marlene after being bitten and realizing she was not turning. We saw Riley say that the two of them would enjoy all the remaining time together they had left. So we know what happened.
“The Mayo Clinic advises injecting penicillin into ‘muscles, usually in the upper buttock or hip area’—but ain’t nobody got time for that!”In the DLC Ellie says that she knows how to sew up a wound – learned in FEDRA school – but she doesn’t know where/how to inject antibiotics. If you don’t know, it makes sense to inject it on/near the wound.
I loved this episode (as much as one can “love” an episode with a cannibalistic pedophile as the antagonist) but I feel the game did it better.In the game when you meet David, you’re sitting at the fire waiting for James to come back with the medicine. You don’t trust David – it feels too much like the game wants him to be Ellie’s “new Joel”. Then Infected show up and you have to fight them with David. You each save each other multiple times. You have to run to different locations and you eventually fight waves of Infected (including a Bloater!), and you wouldn’t have survived if David wasn’t there.Then you go back to the fire and by this point Ellie trusts David. Before the Infected show up she is holding the rifle on him. But after the Infected she is sitting at the fire without holding the rifle at all.Then David starts his “everything happens for a reason” speech and you/Ellie realizes “oh shit, I was right when I first met this guy, I shouldn’t have trusted him”. It’s a much bigger turn (betrayal?) there.But in the show you meet David, you don’t trust him, Ellie and him sit at the fire, and then he immediately does the “everything happens for a reason” speech, confirming what you/Ellie were already thinking: the guy you didn’t trust confirmed that you shouldn’t trust him.The game did it better by having you initially mistrust David, then start to trust him after you were forced to work together, before you realize that your first instinct was right.
Okay but did you need to comment this 5-7 times over?
Other times I mentioned this were replies to other comment threads. This is a new comment thread. So yes, I did.
The buck Ellie shot was brought in the dining room while they were eating the human meat! Did we watch the same show?
This is the first show in a long time where I cry about it more thinking about the moments the day after than I do when I watch it. Joel’s “baby girl” didn’t reach me till Monday. I miss shows like this.
Again, the construction of this episode is fiendishly impressive. We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone. Really, really? Religious cults with leaders who “marry” child brides is such an overused TV cliche that this is exactly where I assumed the show was going to go, and I’m disappointed that’s where it went.
It would have been far more interesting if David and the cult weren’t in fact pure evil, that it was more ambiguous. I give this episode pretty low marks for its complete lack of originality.
There are no “child brides” in David’s group. He is the leader and a preacher but there is nothing shown that says this entire group has child brides. From what we see they are a group of families working together to survive.Only David a few of the Hunters know that they have started eating human meat. The majority of the people are just regular people trying to survive.The idea that this group is a “cult” and the entire “cult” is pure evil is not true, and your claims that it has a complete lack of originality.
Did ya watch the episode? The whole bit about him being the father to the girl whose father was killed — do you really think his plan was to be a stepfather? Do you really think we’re supposed to be believe that Ellie was the first child/teenager that he (attempted to) rape?
I was not shocked. It was good, for sure, but standard Zombie story fare, done well.It felted rushed though, and would have been better played out over 2 episodes, imo. Either give the show 10 episodes, or if you have to fit it in 9, cut down the first 2 (the 2 I found mostly disappointing) into 1 stronger episode.
“standard Zombie story fare, done well.” sums up how I feel about the show as a whole thus far, (and what I initially thought during the first episode as well).
The show was originally 8 episodes – the original premiere ended with Joel burning the child’s body in Boston, but HBO said “We need to introduced Ellie in the premiere” so they combined episodes 1 & 2 into one episode.But I agree that this easily could have been 2 episode, and should have been. Having Ellie and David fight some Infected after they first meet to bond them (like happens in the game) would have made his reveal even better. This episode was great but rushed – the game did it better.
I bet looking back they would want more episodes. They probably had no idea it would be a huge hit like it is.
As someone who played the game first, I fully expected David to be in at least 2 episodes. There is plenty in the game that would justify this being a 2-part story.
Great episode, but two things: Ellie should have had so much blood spatter on her when Joel finds her, and where are the other people of Silver Lake? The resort’s restaurant and kitchen were gonna burn down but no, no shot of the lodge spewing smoke? The ending of this episode is dedicated to all the women and girls who scream NO! when they’re hounded by perverts and pedophiles.
Blood splatter is weird. Sometimes it splashes in every direction, other times it only goes in one direction.Also, that restaurant is where they eat and have meetings. Other times it would be empty – people would be in their own homes. And in the fungal apocalypse there are no fire alarms. If a building catches fire and you’re inside 3 buildings away, how are you going to know unless someone tells you?
Another mini movie of an episode. Joel is now a stone cold stealth killer extraordinaire. And the final conflict was so good, I blocked my brain from asking “where is David’s flock?” and “is Joel not going to ask what happened to Ellie, or if she thinks she was followed?” Nah. Time to get into the canoe!
I never played the game, but I know enough to know that comes next. How will this end? Will Joel hand Ellie to the Fireflies to be killed in medical experiments? Or will we have a cliffhanger in which Joel realizes that the Fireflies are going to kill Ellie? I think the latter. There has to be a season two, and HBO is being a dick for not telling us that.
“(What happened to the buck Ellie shot?)“
David and his henchman dragged it back with them.“he reassures her the meal is deer meat. Riiiiight.”
Jesus, how did you watch that scene and come to the conclusion that he was lying? He couldn’t have been telling the truth more if he tried.
Also, here’s a hint: DAVID LITERALLY BROUGHT BACK A BUCK MINUTES BEFORE THIS SCENE.It’s deer, stupid.
David Shepherd not wearing a hat the whole time was pissing me offffffff haha
I’m going to be a “persnickety plot watcher” and complain about something— though in no way do I want to detract from Bella Ramsay’s acting in this episode which was indeed top notch.But: burning buildings rapidly fill with thick, choking and blinding smoke. TLoU is not the first show or film to ignore that basic fact of physics, but I simply couldn’t buy that David and Ellie would be doing anything as the fire spread other than desperately, in panic even, trying to escape. Either there shouldn’t have been a fire, or they should have escaped and the attack/fight could have happened outdoors.
I haven’t commented or read the AV Club for many years, and came back for the reviews of this show. I am so glad that these dogshit reviews will mercifully end next week. Like come on. I know your parent company is awful, but a child could provide a more comprehensive analysis than this.
“Instead, the sociopath has begun the process of grooming her.”The one positive of the post-apocalyptic TLOU hellscape? Apparently there’s no drag-queen story hour for grooming large groups of innocent children at one time and that process is back to being done on a more intimate, one-to-one scale.Thanks fungus zombie apocalypse!
Just swinging by to say:
– if, when they went to the nearby town to search for Ellie and Joel,
there were 5 guys (including David), and 3 stayed back to kill Joel…and David carried
Ellie back…then that leaves ONE GUY to drag a full-grown motherfucking
horse corpse (miles?!) back to Silver Springs? Cordyceps apocalypse I
can accept; man dragging half-ton of horse…*no*.
– I *really* wanted David to become infected, and attack/infect his entire town – David LEGIT let the curtain burn and catch the whole place on fire? – what the fuck was the (interior of the) restaurant made of, kerosene? It caught pretty goddamned quickly.Despite all that, I (of course) loved the episode. <3 <3 <3
A bit late to the game, as I am just now binging this show. I didn’t see it mentioned, though I didn’t read ALL the comments for this episode.After Ellie is thrown from the horse, the posse was going to shoot her, but David lets off a warning shot to stop them. Several of them give furtive glances to one another, and to David as they turn to face him.Does anyone else think they were going to kill her so David couldn’t… indulge in his proclivities with her? As a way to put her out of her misery before being caged up? Presumably they know what he’s into.