The Last Of Us

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Season 3 of the Mandalorian starts next week.

[DaveIsHere]

Is anyone watching the series "The Last of Us" on HBO?

I just watched episode 3 and I thought it was brilliant. Best episode I think I've ever seen. I almost don't want to watch the remaining episodes because I know they can't equal episode 3.

Critics are hailing episode three as a masterpiece and one of the best episodes ever:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/the-l ... r-AA16TNbu

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment ... r-AA171tOm

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... -EVER.html

https://www.dailyemerald.com/arts-cultu ... bd4f5.html

Jesus, he just b s

[honorentheos]

Is anyone watching the series "The Last of Us" on HBO?

I just watched episode 3 and I thought it was brilliant. Best episode I think I've ever seen. I almost don't want to watch the remaining episodes because I know they can't equal episode 3.

Critics are hailing episode three as a masterpiece and one of the best episodes ever:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/the-l ... r-AA16TNbu

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment ... r-AA171tOm

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... -EVER.html

https://www.dailyemerald.com/arts-cultu ... bd4f5.html

Jesus, he just b s

I don't know if I'd say Jesus is BS, but maybe.

[honorentheos]

Is anyone watching the series "The Last of Us" on HBO?

I just watched episode 3 and I thought it was brilliant. Best episode I think I've ever seen. I almost don't want to watch the remaining episodes because I know they can't equal episode 3.

Critics are hailing episode three as a masterpiece and one of the best episodes ever:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/the-l ... r-AA16TNbu

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment ... r-AA171tOm

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... -EVER.html

https://www.dailyemerald.com/arts-cultu ... bd4f5.html

Now that the thread has popped back up I am curious what others thought of the conclusion of the series? It seems critics turned on it at the end, especially given the finale basically followed the video game. I don't think it finished as strong as it started per se, but I appreciated the ending holding to the ideas it started with.

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Frankly,.I thought it was going to be hard for the show to create the emotional investment Joel had for Ellie when the player develops this investment and attachment to her wellbeing and getting her to Salt Lake through hours of first person game play that I wasn't sure could be pulled off in the show. I think that proved correct. Ending the penultimate episode on Silver Lake with Ellie killing David who is attempting to rape her was...I think it worked against the final episode, actually. Had David's death been more about survival only, or left ambiguous as in the game, her hacking him up violently without the context of rape would possibly have given her dramatic melancholy shift at the start of the last episode more weight as she asserted the survival to reach the fireflies had to be worth everything they had gone through. It made it less recognizable that her killing multiple people followed by hacking David relentlessly weighed on her. The emotional hacking of David who attempted to rape her made him so different from the majority of people they kill on their way to find the cure, it seemed much more justified of a reaction in the show. In the game he isn't obviously a pedophile but shifts from possibly an ok person she may be able to trust to a cannibal cult leader who turns on her quickly. So her struggle with having hacked him up seemed too much of a change in her character in the show while it seemed like a logical reaction in the game. This lack of taking time to explore what had changed for her made her being disenfranchised from having a say in possibly sacrificing herself for the cure even more of a rejection of her agency. I have to imagine pedo-David, something possible but not necessarily so in the game, is done to make the justice of Ellie killing him absolute for viewers who may not have been ready to have her kill someone so violently without their being so indisputably different from the other who did bad things to survive. But it also makes the ethics of Joel's choice to kill the doctors and save her more ambiguous. Not telling her is still what it is...wrong but also something he can believe is for her benefit. He ends the series as he does the game, a man convinced of his own badness in an irredeemable world with only Ellie worthy of "redemption". But it leaves Ellie less of a character than she started. The traumas so core to who she becomes seemed to work against her character development in the show, having to kill her best friend in the mall juxtaposed with fending off a brutal child-molesting tyrant cannibal isn't as harsh as hacking David up in the game is meant to seem. He was evil, but she was seeing herself having stared into the abyss. In the show, David is too far removed from who Joel is to reinforce the moral introspection she goes through before Joel has to save her from the fireflies or let her die in the chance they can use her brain to manufacture a cure. The last episode only being 45 minutes or so was an odd choices in my opinion. I really think they could have spent more time on giving us a better feel for who Ellie had become after the journey west in order for the emotion of Joel choosing her over humanity to land. Oh well. It does leave Arcane as the undisputed best video game-based show.

[Xenophon]

Really good thoughts, honor, and I find myself agreeing with a lot of them.

I'm roughly 10 years out from my playthrough but another element I thought was missing through the whole journey was the allusion that the Fireflies are not the "good guys" and they also clearly don't really know what they are doing. I seem to recall quite a few allusions to the fact that the Firefly docs had made attempts at cures before that had gone horribly wrong and their "ends justify the means" methodology ended up with a ton of folks really hurt and very little positive to show for it. Joel's harsher reaction is at least more understandable given that context, even if he is still too extreme in his response.

Which actually takes me to the other part of the last episode that irked me a bit. I feel far too many folks, that I've talked to anyway, missed the fact that EVERYONE (outside of Ellie) jumps to far too extreme a position. Your first response to finding an immune person is to perform a procedure that kills them with no guarantee for success? You know Joel is deeply bonded to Ellie and instead of letting her convey her wishes to him you try to perform a hard break in their relationship that you know Joel isn't going to accept at face value? You just decide to kill basically anything and everything between you and Ellie, including a mostly unarmed doctor, and then lie about the entire situation to the only person you think still worth saving? All ridiculous extremes. It should have highlighted the downfalls of our own hubris, the need for clarity and level-headed reason especially when the stakes are at their highest, how important open and honest communication is with our loved ones... instead most of the reactions I've gotten were "Yehaww! He got his daughter back". Yes a father's love was a critical motif in the game but I think it missed the mark both in making that bond on the screen and also highlighting that it is often irrational and comes at a heavy price.

You're likely correct that it is just an aspect of the show not being able to truly capture the connection to the characters that you get from effectively making the journey yourself as a player but it left a lot to be desired for me. To your Arcane point, I think it helps that the lore and story of League isn't really an intricate part of the gameplay. It allows you to easily divorce the storytelling elements from the gameplay elements in a way that a narrative, story-based game just can't have. You don't feel bound to Jinx when you play her on the rift other than liking their skillset and it fitting into the comp, but you are bound to Ellie/Joel as you experience their struggles as them. Make no mistake, I thought it was a decent series and I'll likely still want to see season 2 but it fell short for me in capturing the emotion that I experienced from the game.

[honorentheos]

Hi Xeno,

Great points. I realized I probably brought some background thinking to the show about the Fireflies from the game that may not have been as concretely demonstrated. When Joel and Tess talk about them early on and they describe Tommy leaving them, then we meet Marleen after the failed trade for the junk car battery I basically accepted them as desperate, amateur rebels.

Your comment about the reactions across the board being extreme is a great observation, too. Most discussion I've heard focused on if Joel was wrong or right to kill everyone to rescue Ellie. It was discussed extensively at the work D&D session that followed it airing, for example. I didn't express an opinion about that as I tended to be more interested in the narrative "why" for Joel's actions, the Fireflies motives, Marleen specifically who apparently dehumanized Ellie completely despite her being her friend's daughter she promised to take care of before having to shoot her. It's why I wish they'd spent more time giving us insight into Ellie's mindset between Silver Lake and Salt Lake City.

That said I also thought it was decent, and the ending better than critics seem to paint it out to be. It's oddly the same ending Game of Thrones took fire (and in that case very deservedly so), so maybe HBO needs to avoid antihero endings for their modern fan base. Though they absolutely need to spend more time on character development before showing main characters experiencing major personality swings.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

You just decide to kill basically anything and everything between you and Ellie, including a mostly unarmed doctor, and then lie about the entire situation to the only person you think still worth saving? All ridiculous extremes. It should have highlighted the downfalls of our own hubris, the need for clarity and level-headed reason especially when the stakes are at their highest, how important open and honest communication is with our loved ones... instead most of the reactions I've gotten were "Yehaww! He got his daughter back". Yes a father's love was a critical motif in the game but I think it missed the mark both in making that bond on the screen and also highlighting that it is often irrational and comes at a heavy price.

Agreed.