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Last of Us (HBO Spoilers) #2


Ser Scot A Ellison
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Finally caught up with this. 

I liked it. I think it's a good adaptation from what I remember of the game. It's faithful, slavishly so at times, though some parts are a bit unsubtle. I think both leads did a good job. I'm baffled by complaints that they weren't given enough time to develop, to be honest; I think that part of the show was well-done. I think they did a good job with the ending. It plays out better in dramatic form than video game form, I think. It's easy to lose the emotion in the gameplay IMO. 

Would've been nice to have a bit more not-zombies in the second half of the season, although I don't remember them really being that relevant in the second half of the game either, if I'm honest. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/16/2023 at 10:53 PM, sifth said:

To further add just how out of his mind and broken Joel is, we have his final conversation with Ellie, before the credits. He's constantly comparing Ellie to Sarah and saying "I think you two would be friends" and in my mind, I'm thinking "dude, she'd be in her 30's, you know", but naturally in Joel's broken mind his daughter will always be 14.

I thought that was quite good writing. Firstly, because it really hammers home why he'd never be okay with her being killed for a cure. I could only see him not go completely bonkers about that if she told him it was her choice. And secondly as you said, it shows just how messed up his mind is. 

He appears quite sane and reasonable throughout most of the first season. I agree with @Kalnestk Oblast's quote I'll cite below that they perhaps should have depicted Joel's depraved side a bite more prominently, but the fact that he's loco in the coco is probably best evoked by the mental gymnastics he pulls in that scene to merge his memory of Sarah with Ellie. I thought it was tremendously well acted from Pedro's side as well, he really sells the neediness of Joel in that particular scene.

Spoiler

No idea about the game, but I wonder if they'd have to balls to eventually end this with Joel as the antagonist standing between Ellie's wish to provide the world with a cure and his own emotional need to protect his surrogate daughter from death.

 

On 3/16/2023 at 6:50 PM, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Yep. Again, one of the biggest strengths of the story is being able to show us the path for this very messed up guy to make some fairly horrible choices and understand precisely why he's doing it. But that doesn't mean we should agree with those choices. They 100% make sense for Joel, but it's also not awesome.

During the show one of the things I kept saying is how they need to make Joel less sympathetic and more monstrous - or at least show it. In the game he's got a rep and then does horrible things in the game too, repeatedly. It's telegraphed in the brutal way he fights and improvises and the in-your-face violence he does. It's very clear (as you say) how broken he is. I don't know how well they did that in the show, honestly, at least until very late in the show - around ep 8 - and at that point he's going around and torturing a bunch of cannibals, so him being all Jack Bauer is not that unsympathetic. Joel is kind of meant to be absolutely feared by people. He has a horrible rep. He is supposed to be scary to a point. 

Yeah, so far the rep he has is mostly based on telling and not really showing.

I also wondered why he spared the nurses. Looking back on the finale, I thought that was a rather odd choice for his character to make in the grand scheme of things.

Edited by Veltigar
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10 hours ago, Veltigar said:

I also wondered why he spared the nurses. Looking back on the finale, I thought that was a rather odd choice for his character to make in the grand scheme of things.

I think he spared anyone not armed. He wasn't going to kill the doctor until he grabbed the scalpel and came at him. The nurses posed no threat.

 

BTW I forgot to come to this thread a couple weeks ago. There was a fungus outbreak in a northern Michigan lumber mill that sickened 50+ people and shut the mill down. They reopened the mill this week.  My mind went to The Last of Us!

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23 minutes ago, dbunting said:

I think he spared anyone not armed. He wasn't going to kill the doctor until he grabbed the scalpel and came at him. The nurses posed no threat.

He executed the people who put their guns down and surrendered. So...yeah, he just arbitrarily decided that nurses were fine.

That doctor could get proper fucked tho

 

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1 hour ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

That doctor could get proper fucked tho

He grabbed a scalpel and said he wouldn't let Joel take her. Joel shot him immediately after that.

Everyone he killed had made an effort to stop him. The nurses didn't. 

Edited by Ran
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4 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

He executed the people who put their guns down and surrendered. So...yeah, he just arbitrarily decided that nurses were fine.

 

Yeah but he was in a no prisoner situation, he couldn't lock them up or just hope that once he left that area that they wouldn't arm themselves and kill him. 

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3 minutes ago, dbunting said:

Yeah but he was in a no prisoner situation, he couldn't lock them up or just hope that once he left that area that they wouldn't arm themselves and kill him. 

Same logic applies to the nurses though. They can go get weapons too.

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10 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Same logic applies to the nurses though. They can go get weapons too.

There is that, but more pertinently, they are witnesses that could ensure that the Fireflies will keep chasing him.

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8 minutes ago, dbunting said:

Someone who isn't armed and showed no inclination to get a weapon isn't the same.  Witness, sure of course, but not a threat.

They're absolutely a threat, and if anything they're the people Joel should be seeking to get the most revenge on; they, after all, were absolutely willing to vivisect Ellie and knew precisely what would happen. The rest of the folks might have been in the dark.

The idea that somehow people who have no weapons around them and were not carrying any are now totally unthreatening even though you have no idea if they would do so if given an opportunity -  when someone who actively puts their weapon down is not is somehow more of a threat despite them showing a willingness to, ya know, not fight...that's an interesting juggling bit of ethics. 

Ultimately it doesn't really matter, it's just another way to try and vaguely make people feel okay with Joel making all the choices for Ellie despite it not being what she wants, lying to her afterwards and potentially dooming the human species. 

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1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

They're absolutely a threat, and if anything they're the people Joel should be seeking to get the most revenge on; they, after all, were absolutely willing to vivisect Ellie and knew precisely what would happen. The rest of the folks might have been in the dark.

The idea that somehow people who have no weapons around them and were not carrying any are now totally unthreatening even though you have no idea if they would do so if given an opportunity -  when someone who actively puts their weapon down is not is somehow more of a threat despite them showing a willingness to, ya know, not fight...that's an interesting juggling bit of ethics. 

Ultimately it doesn't really matter, it's just another way to try and vaguely make people feel okay with Joel making all the choices for Ellie despite it not being what she wants, lying to her afterwards and potentially dooming the human species. 

Not IMO. If anything in that world they need to protect doctors and skilled nurses.  Joel, as we have seen him so far, won't kill just to kill. He knows the fireflies that dropped their weapons would've killed him if they had the chance, that's the difference in my viewing of it. 

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1 minute ago, dbunting said:

Not IMO. If anything in that world they need to protect doctors and skilled nurses.  Joel, as we have seen him so far, won't kill just to kill. He knows the fireflies that dropped their weapons would've killed him if they had the chance, that's the difference in my viewing of it. 

 Yeah, I don't think Joel thinks that far ahead. And he has had zero problems killing any talented people in the past. 

Joel absolutely kills just to kill. Like, literally, the first time we see him kill someone after the fall he is brutally beating a guard to death with his hands. That guard did not need to die after he was disabled, and could have easily been tied up long enough to not alert anyone. They don't bother hiding the body so it's not like the alarm wouldn't have gone up eventually. That's true in the game too - he is absolutely not a 'use the appropriate amount of violence' kind of guy. In the show we see him torture people to get information and then kill them afterwards despite their being tied up and absolutely no threat. He was going to kill the two Native Americans in the cabin if they didn't give him the right answers. He is emphatically not a nice guy. 

Do you really, honestly believe that in the moment where he's running down the halls and killing everyone he sees, including people who are surrendering, that he's going to go 'oh wait, their profession is valuable' and not do that? My take is the reason he didn't kill them was simple: he had Ellie at that moment and they weren't directly in his way, and she was safe. He was somewhat sated at that point. 

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1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

 Yeah, I don't think Joel thinks that far ahead. And he has had zero problems killing any talented people in the past. 

Joel absolutely kills just to kill. Like, literally, the first time we see him kill someone after the fall he is brutally beating a guard to death with his hands. That guard did not need to die after he was disabled, and could have easily been tied up long enough to not alert anyone. They don't bother hiding the body so it's not like the alarm wouldn't have gone up eventually. That's true in the game too - he is absolutely not a 'use the appropriate amount of violence' kind of guy. In the show we see him torture people to get information and then kill them afterwards despite their being tied up and absolutely no threat. He was going to kill the two Native Americans in the cabin if they didn't give him the right answers. He is emphatically not a nice guy. 

Do you really, honestly believe that in the moment where he's running down the halls and killing everyone he sees, including people who are surrendering, that he's going to go 'oh wait, their profession is valuable' and not do that? My take is the reason he didn't kill them was simple: he had Ellie at that moment and they weren't directly in his way, and she was safe. He was somewhat sated at that point. 

I did say IMO.

The guard needed to die because he would have raised the alarm and Joel and co. would have been caught and killed before getting to the rendezvous spot.

You talk about the torture and then killing, those guys were there to kill him, again I have clearly stated if you try to kill him, you are fair game to kill, never said anything to the contrary.

As to the rampage sequence, again, those people would have killed him if he didn't have the upper hand, I can't understand how anyone thinks other wise, so they are fair game.

He had Ellie but they absolutely were not safe. 

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It's worth noting that he didn't also stop to hunt down Marlene, nor does he scout out the area to make sure there weren't any Fireflies remaining alive to kill. .

He killed anyone and everyone who tried to prevent him getting to Ellie. Surrendering people had shown an intention to stop him, and so they were dead men and women too. Once he had her, he was  done, and would kill anyone who got in his way, but that's it.

I think thinking about in terms of "No witnesses" is clearly outside the scope of his desires. Though to be honest, showing him meticulously searching for survivors and killing them -- nurses including -- and clearly hunting for Marlene as well to kill her -- would have worked well for me to emphasize why Joel has the reputation that he clearly has, because the ruthlessness that would entail would be pretty high but also understandable in the context of his aim to protect Ellie.

As it is, as I understand it, the fact that people know Joel did this thing has important ramifications in The Last of Us 2.

Edited by Ran
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One thing I am curious about in the finale is the visual motif of Joel kicking away the casings of his spent bullets when he tears through all the red shirts. I read that the show lifted a lot of scenes straight from the game, so I'm wondering whether any of the gamers here remember whether that was also a detail in those scenes in the game?

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1 hour ago, Veltigar said:

One thing I am curious about in the finale is the visual motif of Joel kicking away the casings of his spent bullets when he tears through all the red shirts. I read that the show lifted a lot of scenes straight from the game, so I'm wondering whether any of the gamers here remember whether that was also a detail in those scenes in the game?

From clips I've seen of the final act of the game, there's nothing like that montage. You fight all the mooks in realtime and the camera never does any dramatic movement like that to show casings falling on the ground or being kicked by Joel. 

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Reflected on the show a bit as I was watching it with a friend who is new to it, I think this show is really less than the sum of it's parts, which is unfortunate as I think there's a lot of good in it.

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On 5/14/2023 at 8:32 PM, Raja said:

Reflected on the show a bit as I was watching it with a friend who is new to it, I think this show is really less than the sum of it's parts, which is unfortunate as I think there's a lot of good in it.

That's a bit harsh, but I get where you come from. I think the final two episodes where significantly weaker than what came before and I am somewhat worried about this show falling into the standard zombie show tropes, but for now I'm still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt :)

On 5/14/2023 at 8:26 PM, Ran said:

From clips I've seen of the final act of the game, there's nothing like that montage. You fight all the mooks in realtime and the camera never does any dramatic movement like that to show casings falling on the ground or being kicked by Joel. 

Ah, I thought that was a rather nice detail. Good for them for having created that themselves. Thanks for the answer Ran!

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