“I'm taking a ride with my best friend” - The Last of Us on HBO (2023)

If it's possible without major spoilage - do we know where this season ends narratively? Will this season for sure take us up to the end of the first game?

Yes.

Game 2 will apparently be split into two seasons, iirc.

Interesting. I imagine they'll be tempted to milk it for more than 3 seasons. Kind of surprised they didn't split the first game into two seasons, feels a bit rushed already. That said, I do like that it isn't open-ended and they're working toward a conclusion of sorts unlike The Walking Dead sprawl. (I gave up on WD after two seasons or so, so what do I know... just seems to have gone on way too long).

I didn’t think that scene left any ambiguity about Kathleen’s survival!

― better than whoever you are (gyac), Tuesday, February 21, 2023 1:11 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hehe, well to me it looked like one of those screen "deaths" that point towards "aha, gotcha, she survived!"

On reflection I think "People loved contractors" might be the best line in the show's entire run so far.

Not just because it's funny -- but because it speaks to the way that when everything's broken you have to / get to create a new world, and part of making up a new future is making up a new past

And this has something to do with parenting, too -- lots of people in the show insist in dialogue that Joel doesn't get to revise or forget his years as a murderer/thief/raider but .... maybe he actually does? Maybe Ellie gets to grow up in a world where Joel was a good guy doing what he had to do and people loved contractors.

xp i mean it would undermine the premise of the whole show (ellie must be protected because she is the only one immune to the cordyceps) if kathleen survived as anything other than a fungus monster

I am not sure we watched the same scene, Kathleen got fairly obviously mauled and the only reason there’s a cut there is cos it’s clearly a fairly gruesome death.

It was pretty late at night when I saw it, so I may have just been being dozy. I was actually hoping for a slower more serendipitous demise considering what a terror she was - too good a character to just knock-off in just one episode, but if that's the way it is that's the way it is

It's another example imo of spending a bit too much time on a character that is totally inconsequential, good actor/character or no. Because I do feel this season has been rushed, or at least has not been spending time on the more important stuff, which makes the more important stuff seem rushed. Not that this matters, everyone on this thread seems to be enjoying it!

Xp I don’t necessarily mind that personally, sometimes a relatively small part like that can pack an extra punch precisely because the screentime is so short.

it was a great episode, but two minor things just pulled me out it a little:

1) they just had two empty horses for Joel and Ellie when they were out on patrol? none of them were doubled up when they got back to down
2) at the campus, Joel just lightly looped the horse's reins over a branch without even attempting a basic know. good thing nothing happened that might have startled the horse!

(obvs tiny nitpicks, I'm really digging this show!)

was annoyed that joel left the horse without his backpack

also, those are in general awfully small backpacks to have backpacked across the US with... guessing REIs/patagonias were the stores that were first looted?

This is why I hate posting from my phone, "got back to TOWN" and "a basic KNOT", obvs.

Probably reading too much into it but was wondering if that that was a videogame type nod as in TLOU, Red Dead Redemption etc, hitching your horse basically entails just throwing the reins over a pole, branch, whatever

I think I read somewhere (and maybe horsey people know) that horses can more or less be trained to stay put if you just throw the reigns on the ground or in a tree, the same way a dog can be trained to heel.

Just found out that one of the creators of The Last of Us rooted the story in his perspective on Israel’s occupation. He grew up as a settler in the West Bank and the story is largely rooted in a settler’s perspective on the futility of “cyclical violence” and I hate it so much.

— James Ray ☭ (@GoodVibePolitik) February 20, 2023

Caught up last night, and it was good, although the best scenes were where it introduced new material (as has been the case for the whole series IMO).

jon wrote:

1) they just had two empty horses for Joel and Ellie when they were out on patrol? none of them were doubled up when they got back to down

Right, that seemed odd, but to me, and this may or may not have been intentional, it symbolizes the level of closeness right before and after Ep 6's emotional peak. Before, they're each alone on separate horses; after, they're sharing a horse and Ellie is clinging to Joel.

at the campus, Joel just lightly looped the horse's reins over a branch without even attempting a basic know. good thing nothing happened that might have startled the horse!

Watched it back and he kind of pushes the reins into the vee of the branch, which might have been deep enough to prevent the horse from getting away.

every time Gabriel Luna shows up I want to scream "look out, he's a Terminator!"

I assumed he did it to keep the horse from wandering off by itself, but also to let it get away if something really bad happened. Surely you'd want the horse to be able to escape if there's proper danger?

^ that was my thought also

Yeah, that makes sense too I suppose, I just was prepared for something to happen on that campus and, watching him do that, I couldn't help put picturing the horse getting spooked and leaving them well and truly fucked.

Wow, great episode.

Would love to actually see it if the HBO Max app weren't glitching/freezing. Internet connection speed testing fine but ep continually freezing

Here we go.

Lol @ the "back in 5 minutes" sign

boring ep imo

I think we can all agree it was an episode.

whatevs you two bummertowns

i’m w Josh this was a great episode
lots of feels! and i really enjoyed seeing Ellie so happy, seeing what she lost etc

mr veg and i had a wry lol at ellie listening to pearl jam’s riot act on her walkman. the apocalypse setting prob improves that album’s mood significantly lol

and am i crazy or was the carousel playing some kind of calliope version of the cure’s just like heaven?

Yeah it was

Yes, it’s from one of those indie-music-for-babies albums.

My wife actually thought this was maybe the tensest episode yet. That's what happiness on this show has trained us to expect.

Did only late 80s/early 90s music survive the zombie apocalypse?

Tbf, she was listening on a Walkman, right? So that means cassettes, which means the era of peak cassette, which means '80s and early '90s, right? Anyway, she was listening to early '00s Pearl Jam on her Walkman.

Would have been funny if all they had to listen to was copies of REM's "Monster," though.

This was the first episode I got bored and skipped forward through. Yeah, yeah, they're having fun, romance is blooming...when do they get attacked? Skip, skip, skip...OK, here we go.

lol, doubling down on the "we need *more* zombies!" side of the debate.

That's the thing — I'm not someone who wishes this show was The Walking Dead. I hated that show. It was more like, given the essential nature of this show, where everything always ends tragically, it was inevitable that they were gonna get bit, so I found myself sitting there thinking "when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?"

not to be one of those people – but how long would a cassette reasonably last for? some of the ones i had in the 90s do not sounds very good anymore (yes i went back and listened to them a few years ago).

I dug it, though the post-apocalyptic queer romance angle of it can't help but suffer a bit in comparison to the tremendous Episode 3. But I bought their chemistry and liked seeing them have as close to they could to the best night of their lives. Like Episode 3, the strongest moments to me were in showing the power of small shared joys in this world.

I think there's o ne could make a fair critique of these episodes both falling into the "Bury Your Gays" trope where queerness, especially queer happiness = death. Though everyfuckingbody dies on this show so maybe not as much of a thing here as elsewhere. HBO does lean into this a lot though.

Otherwise, I liked the world-building of Kwong making the case for FEDRA, while acknowledging it's still a pretty miserable existence. Would have liked to see a bit more of that inside FEDRA perspective: the culture of the military school, and the anti-Firefly propaganda that Ellie's been steeped in, etc.

Speaking of 90s music

"we need *more* zombies!"

In your head, in your head

My wife actually thought this was maybe the tensest episode yet. That's what happiness on this show has trained us to expect.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, February 27, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Interesting, I thought it was the least tense because the conclusion was inevitable. Other than wondering when and how the jump scare was going to come, there was nothing to anticipate here.

Mixed feelings on this episode. Because the acting is still top notch and I really felt the dynamic between the two characters. So as a character study it was great.

On the other hand this is kinda turning into Tragic Gilligan's Island, with a special guest star joining the cast in their weekly plight... only in this case the guest star will absolutely get murdered by the end.

Thought the FEDRA vs Fireflies debate bits were boring, neither side is going to be fleshed out enough to be interesting and the conflict seems mostly irrelevant to the core story anyway.

empire vs rebels template

ok then

Feel sorry for anyone who didn’t like this.

But I bought their chemistry and liked seeing them have as close to they could to the best night of their lives. Like Episode 3, the strongest moments to me were in showing the power of small shared joys in this world.

I think there's o ne could make a fair critique of these episodes both falling into the "Bury Your Gays" trope where queerness, especially queer happiness = death. Though everyfuckingbody dies on this show so maybe not as much of a thing here as elsewhere. HBO does lean into this a lot though.

Love the fact they showed one of the best fatalities in Mortal Kombat II but would an arcade in 2003 have had that game and errrr Joust? Maybe? MKII was easily ten years old by then.

I’m almost always into coming of age stories about people who are living much different lives than I’ve lived tbh

I like the idea of this one as a mirror/inversion of ep 3, nicely said