The Last of Us (HBO Spoilers)

[Ran]

1 minute ago, briantw said:

Without spoiling anything, the Fireflies very much have a plan for Ellie.  I’m assuming they’ll reveal what it is in episode two. 

Right, I assume so. The obvious being figuring it out and making a vaccine from it.

But wouldn't Fedra do the same? Or are the Fireflies just paranoid that they prefer to keep humanity in existential danger?

[briantw]

37 minutes ago, Ran said:

Right, I assume so. The obvious being figuring it out and making a vaccine from it.

But wouldn't Fedra do the same? Or are the Fireflies just paranoid that they prefer to keep humanity in existential danger?

I honestly don't recall if the game delves into that or not.  I played it when it came out, which was like a decade ago, so I'm fuzzy on the more minor details.  I mostly remember a handful of big events and the ending, which is the best ending of any game I've played, so that's sort of easy to remember.

[The Anti-Targ]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

Just watched this. Liked the first half, especially the attempt to escape with the truck, and the initial jump into the "present" in quarantined Boston, but felt it dragged a little towards the denoument of the episode.

I don't entirely follow why the story goes the way it goes, though. Going to put this in quotes just so it doesn't show up in the preview...

Oh, yeah, so how much was Children of Men an influence on The Last of Us? Have the devs/writers ever noted it? There seem to be some strong parallels...

To me it's pretty simple, knowledge is power. Why would you give knowledge to your enemy you've been fighting for basically the last 20 years, when that knowledge could be a pathway to you finally getting your vision for how to run the country?

The main thing the Fireflies wanted in the early years is the return of civilian govt and independent judiciary, they don't necessarily have a hugely different policy on how to manage the country, at least not now 20 years down the track, other than perhaps no summary executions for people who leave quarantine areas. Maybe instead execution after a trial has found you guilty of leaving the quarantine area unauthorised.

 

[Mexal]

Fireflies are the resistance. The resistance never trusts the oppressors. Also, having knowledge and a vaccine would give them leverage to gain power and achieve their goals. Seems like a common theme pretty much anywhere when being oppressed. 

[The Anti-Targ]

2 hours ago, briantw said:

I honestly don't recall if the game delves into that or not.  I played it when it came out, which was like a decade ago, so I'm fuzzy on the more minor details.  I mostly remember a handful of big events and the ending, which is the best ending of any game I've played, so that's sort of easy to remember.

One thing the show already seems to have done is flesh out FEDRA and the military govt much more than the game. So nothing in the game itself.

I haven't seen the first episode yet, but I've seen bits since I'm not really concerned about spoilers having played the game a few times. But a change that seems to have occurred is the execution of people for leaving the zone. In the tutorial part of the game you see a lineup of people caught by FEDRA soldiers re-entering Boston, they are scanned and if the scan was clear nothing was done to them, but one NPC scanned as infected and was killed on the spot. Immediate killing was shown in the episode with the kid, but there is nothing in the game comparable to the public hanging of people just for sneaking outside the zone and not quite sneaking back in. It is not shown in the game what happens to the people that scanned clear, but I don't recall seeing any gallows set up in the game version of Boston. So they obviously decided to flesh out that tutorial bit of the game to show what happened to those NPCs that scanned clear, and chose the harshest of consequences.

[Martell Spy]

I don't think it's just how harshly FEDRA handles the quarantine. I think the labor system shown is also a sign of corruption. The jobs to gain food and medicine are few and horrible in nature. 

Also, the Fireflies might be corrupt in their own way. Not sure about this as not enough has been depicted yet. Possibly they are just willing to use extreme measures.

[Kalbear]

For me the reason you don't hand over Ellie to FEDRA is kind of obvious - because you don't give an authoritarian repressive government power over you even more than what they already have. Not only do you not trust them to just kill ellie on the spot (which almost happened!) but you don't trust them to make a cure or give the cure out to everyone. 

[Ran]

4 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

I don't think it's just how harshly FEDRA handles the quarantine. I think the labor system shown is also a sign of corruption. The jobs to gain food and medicine are few and horrible in nature. 

To me that reads more like the desperation involved in trying to keep the population alive in the face of a civilization-destroying pandemic that requires constant vigilance. They don't have the means of doing more than eking out an existence, and there's necessary work to be done. Everything's a mess. Not much evidence so far that FEDRA-types are rolling in wealth or producing luxury goods for themselves and no one else.

44 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

because you don't give an authoritarian repressive government power over you even more than what they already have.

I again wonder what the Firefly alternative is. They talk of "freedom", but what,  they're just going to have people have freedom of movement? That seems to be the big sticking point, and right now we haven't been given what the alternative is that also doesn't destroy Boston. One line about how "They don't do it this way in X, we should change it" would have helped, but the other bastion we hear of -- Atlanta -- sounds like it's exactly the same thing. 

Honestly, I was prepared to assume FEDRA was just evil at the start, when I had expected them to just kill that little girl out of hand. But they brought her in and they treated her kindly. They're not rejecting adding more mouths to feed. Those crippled guys with amputated limbs in wheelchairs? Probably can't work, but they haven't been shoved out into the cold to get infected. FEDRA seems to be trying its best to keep people alive in the face of a constant invasive threat that can wipe everything out in a day, and lack of resources.

I'm sure those of you who have played the game "know" the right and wrong of it, but for this first episode, the Fireflies just seem deluded and paranoid. Evidence of FEDRA actively preventing feasible improvement in conditions or evidence that there is a successful example of an alternative to the present situation would have alleviated that.

[Mexal]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

I'm sure those of you who have played the game "know" the right and wrong of it, but for this first episode, the Fireflies just seem deluded and paranoid. Evidence of FEDRA actively preventing feasible improvement in conditions or evidence that there is a successful example of an alternative to the present situation would have alleviated that.

I don't think there truly is a right or wrong of it; it's more a matter of perception. FEDRA thinks it's doing all it can to keep everyone safe and Fireflies think they're being oppressed under the guise of being kept safe. That's not abnormal, nor is it for people to fight back against it without any real idea how to rule. As we know, it's super easy to rail against the big bad guys from one perspective of being oppressed, start a revolution and then super hard to govern when you finally win. Is there a better way? Who knows. Does the Fireflies think they have a better way? Not clear yet.

Game wasn't focused on the macro environment as much as the relationship between Joel and Ellie so for us, I think it's just a lot of speculation.

[karaddin]

22 hours ago, Ran said:

Oh, yeah, so how much was Children of Men an influence on The Last of Us? Have the devs/writers ever noted it? There seem to be some strong parallels...

Daniel Greene said in his reaction to the first episode that he was really put off by the sequence around the truck before eventually realising that he had been expecting it to be done in a single shot, since that's obviously how it works out in the game due to the nature of the medium. Was only on listening to that comment that I realised just how much that sequence in the game was channeling *those* shots in Children of Men.

I think it would have been phenomenal if they'd been able to do it, but I assume the practicalities of making a tv show just didn't allow it to be done.

[Corvinus85]

Well for me the most striking resemblance to Children of Men isn't how it was shot, since one-shot tricks have become the norm recently, but the premise at hand. A man beat up by life who lost a child is tasked with escorting a young woman who may be humanity's best hope. The why humanity is in danger is changed, but that's about it.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Daniel Greene said in his reaction to the first episode that he was really put off by the sequence around the truck before eventually realising that he had been expecting it to be done in a single shot, since that's obviously how it works out in the game due to the nature of the medium. Was only on listening to that comment that I realised just how much that sequence in the game was channeling *those* shots in Children of Men.

I think it would have been phenomenal if they'd been able to do it, but I assume the practicalities of making a tv show just didn't allow it to be done.

I think you could probably tally up all the scenes from apocalyptic / zombie movies that were in that first episode, I got so many flashbacks.

• Running away from a residential area while zombies rush out of their homes, that feels a bit Synder DotD (though pretty sure I've seen it numerous times in Fear of the Walking Dead or Dead Summer)
   
• Driving through small town while people run away from thing.. that exact scene was very close to A Quiet Place II, or World War Z (larger scale). I guess yeah it was shot similarly to Children of Men too.
   
• Huge queues of cars desperate to get out of town reminded me of War of the Worlds or 2012.

There are probably loads I've missed as well

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

Well for me the most striking resemblance to Children of Men isn't how it was shot, since one-shot tricks have become the norm recently, but the premise at hand. A man beat up by life who lost a child is tasked with escorting a young woman who may be humanity's best hope. The why humanity is in danger is changed, but that's about it.

Yeah, that was the thing that leapt out at me.

Didn't think about the truck escape sequence, but yeah, if they'd done it as a oner (it's actually not a true oner in Children of Men, there's some hidden cuts) it'd have drawn a lot of attention to itself. Wouldn't suprise me if it was discussed and someone said, "Wait, do we really want to invite even more comparisons to Children of Men?

[Kalbear]

51 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, that was the thing that leapt out at me.

Didn't think about the truck escape sequence, but yeah, if they'd done it as a oner (it's actually not a true oner in Children of Men, there's some hidden cuts) it'd have drawn a lot of attention to itself. Wouldn't suprise me if it was discussed and someone said, "Wait, do we really want to invite even more comparisons to Children of Men?

At the time they did, because it was in a video game and doing cool homages to awesome other media is great. The actual sequence is very, VERY close to what is in the video game. Which makes it an amusing problem - previously the goal was to make comparisons to CoM as a tribute, and now it looks like a ripoff. 

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

At the time they did, because it was in a video game and doing cool homages to awesome other media is great. The actual sequence is very, VERY close to what is in the video game. Which makes it an amusing problem - previously the goal was to make comparisons to CoM as a tribute, and now it looks like a ripoff. 

Oh, for sure, and I mean, video game is a very different medium from a movie. TV from film is less of a leap. It's also a lot more time -- CoM was 2006, LoU was 2013, so 15 years after CoM feels like an odd time to get something rife with homages to it. Sensible not to do a oner in that case.

 

[Relic]

The past that seemed to me most out of a videogame was the car crash in the mouth of the alley way that separated Joel from his brother. The burning car was a total videogame trope/wall.  

[JGP]

1 hour ago, Relic said:

The past that seemed to me most out of a videogame was the car crash in the mouth of the alley way that separated Joel from his brother. The burning car was a total videogame trope/wall.  

Watching that part, I immediately recalled the check point in Obi-Wan and laughed. 

[Corvinus85]

So did the cities get bombed in an effort to stop the fungi spread? Not nuked, but just carped bombed or something. I don't see how some of those buildings could look as rough as they are by just neglect. I suppose there were a few bad weather events in the 20 year period.

[JGP]

3 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

So did the cities get bombed in an effort to stop the fungi spread? Not nuked, but just carped bombed or something. I don't see how some of those buildings could look as rough as they are by just neglect. I suppose there were a few bad weather events in the 20 year period.

Truth.

Even twenty years of no maintenance then whatever weather as you say, still wouldn't account for those visuals. Had to be conflict, I reckon.

Tempted to get into the game but don't want to ruin the show.  

[Calibandar]

Very exciting show this. The first 20 minutes were excellent, great build up of suspension.

I do wish they would have shown a lot more of the outbreak itself, the start of it. That was fascinating but so short, and the section in 2023 was....well still interesting but nowhere near as good as the start.

Fascinated to see where this goes in the next episode, will be watching that asap, will they be able to get vehicles and head for the Tower in Wyoming.