Tag: HBO

The Last of Us Show Changed Ellie In Ways That Make Season Two Worrying

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The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.

Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.

To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.

The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show

Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.

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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.

The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.

What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?

Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku

The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.

Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.

The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku

Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.

After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.

What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?

Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.

HBO Max

Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.

Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.

I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.

For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.

Image: Naughty Dog

The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part II focuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.

In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.

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Kenneth Shepard

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March 14, 2023
The Last Of Us Episode 9 Recap: A Powerful, Haunting Finale

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Screenshot: HBO

Well, friends. We’ve come to the end of the road, at least for now. Episode nine of HBO’s The Last of Us is the season finale, bringing us to the end of the story told in the first game. Even the episode’s title, “Look for the Light,” neatly closes the loop opened by that of the first episode, “When You’re Lost In the Darkness.” Deeply faithful to the game’s provocative, morally ambiguous ending and other famous story beats in its final chapter, the episode nonetheless departs from the source material in a few key ways, starting with its opening. Let’s start with the beginning of the end.

Ashley Johnson as Ellie’s mother Anna

Notably, this is the first entry since episode two that begins with a cold-open prologue rather than the title sequence. After the first two episodes, I actually thought this was something the show might be committed to in the long term, with each episode kicking off with a different, relevant glimpse of life before the pandemic or some other thread that could inform our understanding of what was to come. But no, the device fell away early on, only to make one last return for the season finale, with a flashback that doesn’t exist in the game and that gives us a new perspective on two key characters: Marlene, and Anna, Ellie’s mother.

A few days ago, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the game The Last of Us and one of the showrunners of HBO’s prediction, tweeted this:

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The image here is not a reference to a real thing that exists in our world. Rather, it’s a fictional comic book referenced in Uncharted 4, the final game in Naughty Dog’s other big franchise of the past 15+ years. But it speaks to the idea that Anna, Ellie’s mother, is a character who the writers of the game (and now the show) have thought a lot about, even if, until now, she’s never actually been seen. Players of the game will know that she and Marlene were friends, that Marlene promised Anna she’d look after Ellie, and that Anna was alongside Marlene in the fight for a better world, but this is her first actual appearance in official The Last of Us media, and the actor playing her is none other than Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie in the games.

We see Anna running through a forest, pursued by shrieking infected. As if that weren’t tough enough, she’s pregnant and going into labor. She emerges into a vast clearing dominated by a farmhouse, the Firefly insignia emblazoned on the nearby grain silo.

Racing to the top of the house, Anna barricades the door with a chair and draws a familiar-looking switchblade. Tragically, the determined infected busts through, and though Anna plunges the switchblade into its neck, it’s not before she’s bitten, sealing her fate. Ellie is born, and Anna cuts the umbilical cord. It must be something about the timing of all this that resulted in Ellie’s immunity.

Anna takes a moment to bond with her daughter, as we watch, knowing she has a few hours at best to spend with the child. And the credits roll.

One lie comes before another

Night falls, and three lights cut through the darkness, a possible visual nod to the Firefly slogan. Marlene and two men find Anna still in that room, quietly singing to baby Ellie. The song she’s singing is “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” by A-ha. It’s a song we know Ellie hears later in life, as she has a cassette tape of A-ha’s greatest hits in episode seven, which makes use of the band’s “Take On Me” at one point. (Interestingly, though “Take On Me” was a bigger hit in the U.S., “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” outperformed it in the UK.)

Screenshot: HBO

Marlene immediately sees the bite on Anna’s leg, and here’s where something extraordinary happens: Anna says she cut Ellie’s umbilical cord before she was bitten. Of course it’s perfectly understandable. She did cut it only moments after, and whatever survival instinct she may have once had for herself has likely now transferred onto her daughter. She wants to give her daughter a chance. But as a thematic device, it’s significant because it bookends this final episode with lies. Ellie’s life begins with a lie, and later, it’s changed by one, both from people who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, are very invested in keeping her alive.

Anna, reminding Marlene that they’ve been friends for their whole lives, tells Marlene to kill her and to take care of Ellie, and to give her the switchblade. Marlene protests that she can’t, she can’t do any of those things, she especially can’t kill her friend, but then she musters the strength to do so. She is no stranger to gritting her teeth and doing what must be done in the struggle for a better world. You can tell it eats her up inside, but the world of The Last of Us offers little alternative for one who is truly, deeply committed to making a difference.

Outside Salt Lake City

Now the show leaps into its approximation of the game’s final chapter. In both, Joel is uncharacteristically chatty, his bond with Ellie no longer in doubt after all they’ve been through together and especially after the harrowing events of episode eight. Ellie, by contrast, is preoccupied, remote, distracted perhaps by the magnitude of what their arrival in Salt Lake City could mean. While the Joel of the game talks about what a beautiful day it is, TV Joel excitedly shows Ellie that he found a can of Chef Boyardee, calling back to their campfire meal in episode four when the good chef’s awesomeness was one of the few things they could agree on. Both Joels talk about one day teaching Ellie guitar, and though she says she’d like that, it’s clear that right now, she has other things on her mind.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

One interesting detail from the game that’s omitted from the show is a dream that Ellie tells Joel about, in which she’s on a plane and it’s going down, so she busts into the cabin only to find that there’s no captain. So she takes the controls but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and just as the plane is about to crash, she wakes up. It’s a pretty typical anxiety dream—I actually have nightmares about plane crashes from time to time myself—and it makes sense that Ellie would feel that her life is out of control, but she remarks on the strangeness of having a dream set on a flying plane when she’s never flown on a plane in real life. She never got to experience the pre-cordyceps world, and yet the ghost of it is everywhere around her.

The famous giraffe scene

Joel and Ellie cut through a building on their way to the hospital, and in the show, for what I’m pretty sure is the first and only time, Joel does something he does repeatedly in the game: he boosts Ellie up, here so she can lower a ladder for him. However, the usually attentive Ellie is caught off guard by something and instead ends up just dropping the ladder and running off to look at something. Joel pursues her, perhaps worried at first that she’s in danger, and what follows is one of the game’s most famous moments, faithfully recreated in the show.

Screenshot: HBO

What he finds is Ellie, standing awestruck by the sight of a giraffe, peacefully munching on some leaves growing on the building. In the game, Joel encourages Ellie to pet the giraffe. In the show, he encourages her to grab some leaves and feed it a little bit, and the sight of its long tongue reaching out for that green goodness is pretty great. For Joel, though, the best sight here is the sight of Ellie enjoying this moment. You can tell, particularly in the show thanks to Pedro Pascal’s acting, that Joel is happy to be alive to witness and share in this moment with her. So often, it’s not the thing itself that matters, so much as it is the sharing of it with someone.

Read More: The Last Of Us Show Tries To Change What The Game Tells Us About Joel

Perhaps part of why we’re drawn to apocalypse stories is the way they can help us focus on what really matters. There’s a line in last year’s HBO post-apocalypse prestige drama Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. Mandel) from central character Jeevan who says, “Having just one person, it’s a big deal. Just one other person.” I’m reminded of that in this scene. Like Station Eleven, The Last of Us is deeply concerned with what makes our lives mean something, and in my experience, that’s always tied up in connection with others, in one way or another.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Screenshot: HBO

Moving to another spot which lets them watch the whole giraffe family walk off into the distance, Joel asks Ellie a question he asked her much earlier in the game, or, in the case of the show, way back in episode two, as they stood looking toward the capitol building in Boston. “So, is it everything you hoped for?” Ellie recalls that moment too and says it’s had its ups and downs before repeating something she said back then as well: “You can’t deny that view.” It’s a moment that makes us feel the journey they’ve been on, all the ground they’ve covered, the time that’s passed, and all the ways in which things between them have changed from that moment so much earlier, when all Ellie was to Joel was some human cargo he resented having to deal with. Coming to this moment in the game again as I replayed it for this recap, knowing what was coming, I almost wanted to linger there forever, to let them linger there forever, and spare us all the pain ahead.

Now, he doesn’t want to imagine his life without her again, and so he tells her that she doesn’t have to go through with this. In both the game and the show, her response is the same: “After all we’ve been through, everything that I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing.” She tells him that once this is done, they can go wherever he wants, but “there’s no halfway with this.” In the game, Joel looks up just in time to see the last giraffe disappear into the distance. The moment has passed. Their choice is made.

Joel confronts the past

Next, their journey to the hospital takes them through a triage camp the army set up in the days immediately following the outbreak. In both the game and the show, this is the site for a confrontation of sorts with Joel’s past, though that takes very different forms in each version.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, Joel mentions having been in a similar camp after the outbreak. When Ellie asks if it was after he lost Sarah, he says yes, and she tells him how sorry she is for his loss. Previously, Joel’s forbidden Ellie from mentioning any of his losses, from talking about Tess or his daughter, but this time, he says “That’s okay, Ellie.” A short time later, Ellie gives Joel the same photograph of himself with Sarah that he refused earlier when Tommy offered it to him. Ellie says Maria showed it to her back at the dam and she stole it. Joel, obviously moved, says, “Well, no matter how hard you try, I guess you can’t escape your past. Thank you.”

In the show, however, we return to something first teased back in episode three. At the time, Joel said that the scar on his forehead was from someone shooting at him and missing. Now, he tells Ellie that the wound is what landed him in triage, and also that “I was the guy that shot and missed.” After Sarah’s death, he “couldn’t see the point anymore,” he says, but he flinched when he pulled the trigger. “So time heals all wounds, I guess?” Ellie asks. Joel says “It wasn’t time that did it” and gives her a meaningful look.

Screenshot: HBO

After this emotionally heavy moment, Joel seeks to lighten things up by actually requesting some shitty puns. It’s a great little exchange, with Joel and Ellie disagreeing on the quality of some of the jokes—one she declares “actually good” and he calls “a zero out of ten”—but my favorite bit is when Ellie says “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” Joel at first looks scandalized but when Ellie asks, “Too soon?” Joel says, “No, it’s topical.” Joke time is soon interrupted, though, when some kind of gas grenade gets tossed their way, Ellie is dragged off, and Joel is conked on the head with a rifle.

One last dance with infected before all is said and done

This episode and its differences from the game’s corresponding sequence reveal some interesting differences in how the game and the show approach pacing and combat. In the show, episode eight was the final crucible, the peril and terror of that situation solidifying Joel and Ellie’s bond, and it likely would have been anticlimactic for the two to have another encounter with infected at this point. The dramatic purpose of such encounters has already been fulfilled. There’s really nowhere else for them to go. In the game, however, as a mainstream commercial product released in 2013, it would have been strange for there not to be one final encounter with infected. For many players, such combat is first and foremost what they come to a game like this for. So you do have one final encounter with a whole mess of infected (including multiple bloaters) in the partially flooded tunnels near the hospital. Once they’re all finished off, Joel utters Ellie’s favorite catchphrase, “Endure and survive.”

Look for the light.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog

They’re not out of the woods yet, though. A bit later, Joel gets stuck in a bus that’s rapidly filling with water. Ellie (who can’t swim) attempts to rescue him, but is herself swept away. The current carries Joel toward her and he sees her, framed by light, before pulling her up out of the water and attempting to resuscitate her. This is where the Fireflies find them, and knock Joel unconscious.

Marlene and morality

Joel wakes up in a room with Marlene (Merle Dandridge in both the game and the show), who marvels at the fact that the two of them came all this way and survived, that Joel actually managed to deliver Ellie there, when the same journey cost the lives of so many of her people. “It was (all) her,” Joel says. “She fought like hell to get here.”

Screenshot: HBO

When Joel insists on seeing Ellie, Marlene tells him he can’t. “She’s being prepped for surgery.” When Joel realizes that cordyceps grows in the brain and that the surgery Marlene is describing means Ellie’s death, well, he knows what he has to do.

Notably, in the show, Marlene offers a more detailed explanation of Ellie’s immunity, and how the doctor intends to use that to create a cure. I suspect that this, along with Joel’s line back in episode six suggesting that if Marlene says they can make a cure, they can do it, are meant to deflect the fairly common response to the show’s central moral dilemma, a response I saw as recently as this past weekend on Twitter, that says “They probably wouldn’t have been able to make a cure anyway.”

My issue with this response is that I view it as a reluctance or refusal to engage with The Last of Us on its own terms. I think it’s a copout, a way to more easily justify what Joel does by saying “the stakes weren’t that big anyway” by disregarding the internal logic of the work itself. Sure, if you view The Last of Us in “realistic” terms, you can say that the odds of a vaccine being made weren’t great, but that’s not the moral dilemma we’re being asked to engage with here. The game and the show both work to establish this as a situation in which a vaccine is clearly possible.

The game does this in part through an audio diary you can find in the hospital in which the lead surgeon rattles off a bunch of whatever the medical equivalent of technobabble is, terms and phrases that are meant to sound legitimate within the fiction of the game and establish that the surgeon knows what he’s talking about. He then says, “We’re about to hit a milestone in human history equal to…the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we’re about to come home…All our sacrifices, and the hundreds of men and women who’ve bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.” We are meant to view what Joel does as in opposition to that, as overriding all of that. That’s not to say that we can’t still conclude that Joel is right to do what he does. But we should at least consider it within the moral calculus that the game and the show actually establish.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Ten years ago, I felt that so many players’ reaction to the game’s climax was not just one of agreeing with Joel but one of cheering “Fuck yeah!” while he did what he does, of reveling in his undoing of everything the Fireflies have done, in his murder of Marlene, and I wonder if some of that isn’t just because it’s very easy to feel fully aligned with someone when you’ve spent so long walking in their shoes. But I can imagine a game focused on Marlene, one that follows her for years and years, from establishing the Fireflies, working with and then tragically losing Ellie’s mother Anna, watching over Ellie from afar while trying to undermine FEDRA and seeking a cure or some way to unfuck the world, all the while seeing her fellow passionate believers fight and die alongside her, and then coming to the heartbreaking moment where her own best friend’s daughter is the world’s last best hope. I wonder if, given the chance to experience Marlene’s struggle that way, to see things from her perspective, some people who see the ending of The Last of Us in very simple terms might find their view of it complicated.

And this was Anna’s fight as well. You can find an audio log that’s effectively Marlene speaking to Anna, to the memory of her friend, and in it she says “Here’s a chance to save us…all of us. This is what we were after…what you were after.” I don’t think any of this is at all easy for Marlene. I think she’s just learned by now how to do even the things she finds very, very hard, if she believes it supports the greater good.

None of this is simple. I’m conflicted about it myself, and I do sometimes put one life ahead of many. (It’s just a game, of course, but you’d better believe that at the end of Life Is Strange, I made the choice to save the one person I felt close to and cared about deeply over a town full of others.) And I have no problem with Joel doing what he does. As I’ve said before, I want art and media that depicts human beings doing questionable or complicated or awful things sometimes. I just want people to actually engage with that complexity, rather than acting as if feeling at all conflicted about how all this plays out is silly and that Joel does the only reasonable thing he could have done.

Saving Ellie, dooming the world

Marlene, sensing that Joel is gonna be a problem, tries to have him escorted out of the building. However, he kills his escort, and fights his way through the hospital to save Ellie. In the game, I find this sequence quite challenging. The hospital provides your Firefly enemies with so many opportunities to flank you. The Joel in the TV show seems to have it considerably easier. (And in case anyone is wondering, yes, in the game you do get a new weapon, the assault rifle, here, just like Joel does in the show.) In any case, he kills a whole mess of dudes on his way to Ellie.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Arriving in the operating room, Joel orders the doctor to unhook her. He grabs a scalpel and stands in Joel’s way. Joel kills him, too. Yes, the doctor was about to take her life. By doing this, though, Joel has taken the life of someone who was deeply loved by somebody else. And how many of the people he killed on his way up here will also leave a void in the lives of people after today? God, what a moral mess.

Joel has one last encounter before he makes his escape, this time with Marlene. In both the show and the game, Marlene asks Joel to consider what Ellie herself would want. The look that plays across his face in both cases shows that he knows what he’s doing isn’t what she’d want.

After years and years of working tirelessly for a shot like this at a better world, after sacrificing so much, Marlene, too, is killed. “You’d just come after her,” Joel says, before pulling the trigger.

Joel’s lie near Jackson

Ellie wakes up in the back of a car, still in her hospital gown. Joel’s driving them to Jackson, and when she asks him what happened, he feeds her a lie about there being dozens of people who share her immunity, and the doctors not being able to make any use of it all, to the point that “they’ve stopped looking for a cure.” Ellie is obviously crushed.

Significantly, in the game’s short final sequence, you play as Ellie as she and Joel walk the last bit of distance toward Jackson. Joel, ready for his life with Ellie to begin in earnest, starts talking about how much he thinks Sarah would have liked him. Ellie is, of course, preoccupied, and eventually she stops Joel, and starts talking about how she lost Riley.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

The point of the story, I think, is that Ellie felt left behind (sorry) by Riley’s death, that she would have rather died if it could have meant a cure than being alive, and that she suspects Joel made a choice of his own accord to save her rather than let that happen. Joel, perhaps sensing where this is going, tries to offer some of his old-fashioned wisdom about how it can be tough to come to grips with surviving but you keep finding things to live for. But she demands a straight answer, asking him to swear that everything he said about the Fireflies is true. “I swear,” he says.

Screenshot: HBO

There’s a long pause. Is she doubting him? Deciding whether she can trust him? Debating telling him that he’s full of shit? Where would any of that leave her now, in this world where everything she thought she was living and fighting for has now evaporated into nothing?

“Okay,” she says.

Final thoughts

Playing through the game again alongside watching the series gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps most of all, I thought about how, just by virtue of being an interactive experience that’s set in perhaps the most lovingly rendered vision of the post-apocalypse ever created, the game The Last of Us is much more about the haunted world than the show is. Naughty Dog clearly approached designing the locations you pass through very thoughtfully. They didn’t just design some assets and then toss them together. Quite the opposite. For every house or apartment you enter, you can tell that Naughty Dog asked themselves questions like: Who lived here? What was their cultural background? What did they do for a living? Did they have any pets? Most of us probably know the sense of emptiness a person can leave behind when they die. Closets filled with clothes they’ll never wear again. A toothbrush in the bathroom. This is a world filled with that emptiness.

On the other hand, I appreciate that the television show found a few opportunities, here and there, to remind us that even in its world, love is possible, and by extension, lives of meaning are possible. The game, with its framing of Bill and Frank’s relationship, with the tragedy of Henry and Sam, leans so relentlessly into loss and tragedy, with little dramatic counterpoint to remind us what love in this world—any kind of love, the love between a man and his adopted daughter, for instance—can even look like. Of course episode three—the Bill and Frank episode—was the most radical instance of the show departing from the game to offer an image of love, but it wasn’t the only one. Marlon and Florence in episode six got so little screen time, but there, too, thanks to the two wonderful actors cast in those roles, we got a sense of a real, lived-in relationship, people being there for each other across decades.

All of this is to say that I appreciate that the creative team behind the HBO show approached this undertaking as an adaptation, not merely a retelling or recreation. Now the wait begins for the show’s next season, when I look forward to finding out how they continue to not just re-tell the exact same story we’ve already experienced, but adapt it for a new medium.

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Carolyn Petit

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March 12, 2023
The Last of Us Show Destroyed Everyone With Two Words: Baby Girl

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Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is full of standout scenes. While episode 8, “When We Are In Need,” is full of tension, drama, and even a bit more action than the show typically gets into, the moment that has viewers in a chokehold right now is one of its quietest: when Pedro Pascal’s Joel calls Bella Ramsey’s Ellie “baby girl.” It’s just one line, but in the overarching story of The Last of Us, it means everything.

Why it matters that Joel called Ellie “baby girl”

In both HBO’s show and Naughty Dog’s game, the relationship Joel and Ellie have fostered throughout their cross-country odyssey doesn’t culminate until winter sets in. At long last they’ve finally moved past their initial grievances about traveling together, and have started to really open up about their pasts and their hopes for the future. While the specifics of when and where differ between the show and game, Joel and Ellie have talked about grief, shared the things they wish they could have done in a world not overtaken by the cordyceps fungus, and openly shown care for each other. They’ve fought and survived together for a long time, but now seem able to drop their guard. Ellie finds the companionship she’s been missing in this desecrated world, and Joel opens himself up to care for someone in a way he hasn’t in 20 years.

He finally acknowledges this with words when he calls Ellie “baby girl,” which was a term of endearment he used for his daughter Sarah before she was killed by the military during the initial cordyceps outbreak, as seen in the first episode. Before this week, The Last of Us made several references big and small that suggested Joel’s initially guarded attitude toward Ellie was deeply rooted in his own grief. Consider his occasional glances at his broken watch, which Sarah gave to him the night she died.

While Joel and Ellie shared some brief moments of connection before, Joel’s already loved and taken care of a young girl once in his life, only to have her ripped away in the most traumatic way possible. The show made this explicit in episode six by having Joel and his brother Tommy discuss how his growing attachment to Ellie made him fearful for her life and his ability to protect her. This was to the point where Joel was ready to leave her in his brother’s care because he feared he would fail Ellie the way he feels he failed Sarah.

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By the time we get to the final scene of this week’s episode eight, Ellie has protected Joel in the same way he protected her. The gap between them has been fully bridged, and Ellie has had to survive the traumatic events of fighting through a group of cannibals and predators without Joel’s help. So when Joel finds her bloody and scared in the winter cold, he holds her and calls her “baby girl.” In a simple nickname, Joel and Ellie’s burgeoning relationship becomes indelible.

The fan reaction to Joel calling Ellie “baby girl”

Meanwhile, fans are having a moment about it.

And who could blame them? Pascal and Ramsey put their entire The Last of Ussy into that scene. They both sold that shit. Now that all The Last of Us newcomers watching are properly invested in Joel and Ellie’s relationship, I’m excited to see how these fans feel about the events of next week’s finale, which I’m sure will be universally accepted and not at all divisive.

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Kenneth Shepard

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March 7, 2023
What to Stream During Women’s History Month

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There’s a scene in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women that goes down in history as one of my favorites in all of cinema.

In it, Saoirse Ronan, who plays the spirited and independent Jo March, gives a monologue about how women are expected to be one dimensional — either opinionated or loved, smart or pretty, dedicated to her career or to her husband.

In her frustration, she says: “Women … they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.”

It’s a powerful scene, carrying a powerful sentiment, but it doesn’t end there. After her triumphant declaration, Jo breaks down, revealing what she’s ashamed to admit to herself: “But I’m so lonely.”

This monumental scene is both emotional and political. Her poignant but vulnerable musings express the central tension of the film: the desire to be seen as a complex, capable individual while society tries to pin you down as the opposite.

What’s so special about that scene — besides Saoirse’s acting masterclass — is that Jo is putting language to something that so many of us can’t name. Although this is super relatable to most women, it’s difficult to accept that despite the advancement of women over the years, so much of this is still true today. Socially, women are taught to view themselves as less deserving and when they assert that they’re worth more, they’re often punished.

In most cases, sexism is so ingrained in society that it takes years to apprehend the unconscious biases that plague our daily life. This sexism gets reinforced by the media because until recently men created the representation of women.

This is why the presence of women in media is so critical. Telling female-driven stories help reshape how women see themselves outside of the strictures of the male gaze.

Directors like Greta Gerwig are more and more common — women telling dynamic, well-rounded stories about the diversity and expansiveness of the female experience.

In Gerwig’s podcast conversation with Barry Jenkins for A24, she discusses the monumental importance of being mentored by female directors. “I’d never met a young woman who said she wanted to be a director … I had fallen in love with film, but it just still felt out of reach. And all of a sudden I was like, Oh, wait, are we allowed to say we want to do this?”

From her undergrad days as a fledgling director to now, Gerwig notes how much has changed for female directors. And how revolutionary it is.

In the podcast, Gerwig continues: “People are like this year of “women in film.” And I’m like, not only do you have Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow, you also have Maggie Betts and Dee Rees and Valerie Faris and me and Patty Jenkins and Angelina Jolie. And those are all very visible films.”

It’s not just the number Gerwig is impressed by, but also the variety. She continues. “There’s thousands more. And that is an extraordinary moment, I think. And those are all such different films from each other. It’s not like, “Here is the kinds of films women make.” It’s like, I can’t think of two films more different from Battle of the Sexes to Mudbound to Wonder Woman.”

Gerwig is right. All these films vary greatly, but they’re equally reflective of a moment where women are rapidly gaining agency.

You can see the difference. There are even memes about how heartthrobs like Timothee Chalamet and Harry Styles seem like Men Written By Women. In a world where famed directors like Tarantino famously and unflinchingly depict violence against women — I won’t even get into the Sam Levinson/The Weeknd drama on set of The Idol — it’s refreshing to enjoy the female gaze, rather than the oft-reductive male gaze.

So bask in the glory of The World By Women. Here are just a few of the best female-directed films that are streaming now:

Lady Bird, Netflix

via A24

Because of my affinity for Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan, it’s no surprise that Lady Bird is first on my list. In the podcast, Jenkins describes its magic saying: “you’re watching this movie … and everybody’s laughing their heads off the first 45 minutes and then you start to hear a few people sniffling in the back and on the side and then you realize, I’m watching a very, very heavy, sad kind of film. And it all coalesces into this very hopeful kind of thing that feels earned.”

Mudbound, Netflix

Every emotion you’ve ever felt is perfectly rendered in the award-winning feature, Mudbound. Director Dee Ross places the audience in the post-war South, watching the splintering of two families — one white, one Black. It’s more than worth all the heavy feelings it evokes.

Till, Amazon Prime

We should all be talking about Chinonye Chukwu. The director behind Till, one of the most heart wrenching films of 2022, was the first Black woman to win the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance fro Clemency in 2019. Till depicts the famous racial tragedy of the lynching of Emmett Till, focusing on the journey of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, as she pursued justice.

The Woman King, Netflix

How to describe The Woman King. Part action film, part social commentary, the film depicts the true narrative of the Agojie, a female fighting unit in the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1820. A slate of incredible actors, including Viola Davis and Lashana Lynch are powerfully directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Kajillionaire, HBO

Run, don’t walk, and see this unforgettable film. Miranda July’s feature is about many things — con artists, California living, a bubble factory, and waiting for The Big One. But mostly, it’s about tenderness. It’s likely the strangest movie you’ll ever see, but it’s one that will stay with you forever.

Do Revenge

via Netflix

Finally, a good high school film! Taking all its cues from the iconic teen dramedies of the 90s, Do Revenge is more than just another YA Netflix movie. For starters, it’s good. Really good. Behind the incredible costume design, Sarah Michelle Geller cameo, and carefully curated cinematography, it’s a story about how we treat women. And how women treat each other. Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, this film will go into the anti-hero hall of fame.

Women Talking, Apple TV

In this revelatory Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Miriam Towes novel, the women of an isolated religious colony reveal a shocking secret about the men in their community. This film mixes the heavy with the lighthearted for an immersive, unique watch.

Promising Young Woman, HBO

One of the buzziest dramas in recent years, Promising Young Women is not another trite take capitalizing on the political moment. It’s a real meditation on pain, morality, revenge, and the worst parts of ourselves and the people around us. This is another heavy watch, but its fast pace and provocative questions will remain in your mind long after.

Clueless, HBO

This nostalgic 90s classic is the perfect example of what happens when women are in the driver’s seat. Based on Jane Austen’s Emma, this whimsical adaptation is as charming as Cher — based on the novel’s titular Emma Woodhouse — is handsome, clever, and rich. There’s a version of this film in which Cher is merely a shallow object built for our ridicule and to serve as comedic relief. However, Cher is complex, redeemable, and the center of a film ultimately about female friendships.

Nomadland, Hulu

Chloe Zhao is one of the industry’s best and brightest. She shot to fame after the success of Nomadland, a startlingly beautiful exploration of the American West. This award-winning feature made history when Zhao won best director. It’s the perfect balance of sweeping landscapes and displays of personal emotion.

She Said

The Me Too movement changed our culture forever. Directed by Maria Schrader, She Said tells the story of the women behind the movement. It follows the journies of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in their New York Times investigation to exposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women.

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LKC

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March 6, 2023
The Last Of Us Episode 8 Recap: Joel And Ellie’s Most Desperate Hour

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Screenshot: HBO

With just one episode to go, we’re nearing the end of Joel and Ellie’s long journey together. This week’s entry, “When We Are in Need,” corresponds with the game’s winter section, though the HBO adaptation isn’t using the same seasonal structure of the game, and here in TV land, it’s been winter for a while.

When I first played The Last of Us ten years ago, in some ways the winter chapter felt to me like overkill, the game leaning hard into desperation and depravity just to be as gritty and bleak as it could, in order to help sell itself as a “mature,” serious game. “Enough, I get it. Humanity is awful and given half a chance, we’ll all do grotesque, morally reprehensible things.” Replaying the game now alongside the show, the purpose of the chapter within the narrative is clearer to me. Of course it’s common for stories to put characters at their most hopeless and desperate points right before the resolution, but the way The Last of Us does it, separating the characters while both are in dire straits, drives home the importance of their bond to each other. It also, importantly, illustrates that while Joel may have started out as Ellie’s protector on this journey, he now needs her at least as much as she needs him. Let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode, and its similarities to the same stretch of the game.

Ellie meets David in the show vs. the game

This chapter has its own villain in the form of David, a preacher and a predator whose flock reside in the resort town of Silver Lake and are suffering through a particularly harsh winter. In terms of dialogue, it’s one of the show’s more faithful episodes. In fact, it’s almost as if writer Craig Mazin’s screenplay for the episode just took this section of the game, cut out most of the combat sequences, and from there, sought to embellish the dialogue and build on what the game reveals to us about David and his congregation. It continues to be interesting to me how, in the game, combat is perhaps prioritized as the most important element, while in adapting the game to a series, it becomes the least important.

Screenshot: HBO

The winter chapter immediately distinguishes itself from the rest of the game by having you play as Ellie for the first time. (Today, playing through the story in order, you’d play the Left Behind DLC before this, but when the game came out in 2013, this was a surprising shift in perspective.) Desperate for food, Ellie hunts a deer she spots in the woods with her bow and arrows. Nicked and bleeding from multiple arrows, the deer runs, ultimately collapsing, but when Ellie finds it, two others, David and James, have seen it too. Just as in the game, David (voiced here by Nolan North, who plays Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games) makes a deal with Ellie: penicillin for some of the deer meat.

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Screenshot: Naughty Dog

What’s unique to the game is that while waiting for James to return with the medicine, you have a multi-stage combat encounter fighting alongside David, involving a few standoffs against multiple waves of infected and a climactic battle with a bloater. Through it all, you might think that David is actually a new friend. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and fighting alongside someone can be an experience that develops trust. Naughty Dog knows how to use combat as a tool for relationship-building, and here, they build up your trust in David a bit just to pull out the rug from under you and remind you that, in this world, the trust between Joel and Ellie is a rare and precious thing.

In the show, by the time Ellie first encounters David (played here by actor Scott Shepherd), we already have our reasons to be suspicious of him. The episode begins with him reading scripture to his flock, in the old steakhouse he’s converted into a church and town hall of sorts, a place where the abundant food of the pre-cordyceps past is sharply contrasted with the desperate circumstances of the present. (It’s an important location in the game as well, one you come to later, and the sign reading WHEN WE ARE IN NEED HE SHALL PROVIDE is a detail straight from the game.) The faces of the congregation’s members are lean and hardened, telling us much at a glance about what a difficult winter they’re having. A grieving daughter asks when her father can be buried and David says that it’s too cold to do so now, they’ll have to wait until spring. And outside after the service, David chides James (played by Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the games) for his “doubt,” giving off the sense of a man who very much wants to maintain control.

Screenshot: HBO

Notably, in the show, Ellie hunts the deer not with a bow and arrows but with the sniper rifle, recalling in our memories the moment toward the end of episode six when Joel tried to teach her how to use it. When she takes a moment to focus with the deer in her sights, we can sense her recalling Joel’s words and trying to draw on what he taught her.

Both the game and the show have Ellie talking tough when she sees David and James near the deer she killed, with her calling James “buddy boy” and saying that if David tries anything, she’ll “put one right between your eyes.” The show, however, foregrounds David’s role as a preacher in their first conversation far more than the game does. In fact, perhaps the only real hint David gives off in the game that he has certain rigid moral standards might come when, after Ellie swears, he absurdly says, in the midst of a life-and-death battle against waves of infected, that she should watch her language. We definitely pick up on the fact that he’s a preacher eventually, but there’s no real character development done around it.

In the show, however, Ellie asks if David’s “hunger club” is some sort of cult, and he turns on the folksy charm, saying “Well, you sorta kinda got me there,” but saying that what he preaches is “pretty standard Bible stuff.” When Ellie wonders how he can still “believe that stuff” after everything that’s happened, he tells her it was actually after the world ended that he started to believe. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says in both the show and the game, and it’s here that whatever sense of trust you might have felt for David while fighting alongside him likely evaporates. His seeming friendliness reveals itself to be a guise for something more threatening, and he tells her that a “crazy man” killed someone in their flock recently at the university. A crazy man who just happens to be traveling with a “little girl.”

Ellie now understands that David is a threat if she didn’t before, but David lets her ride off with the medicine, telling her that there’s room for her in his group, that he can protect her. It’s almost as if he has some gross designs of his own for her.

Dinnertime at the steakhouse

One of the luxuries of HBO’s adaptation has always been that it can leave the perspective of Joel and Ellie behind entirely when it wants to, and here, we get more development of David’s congregation. In the kitchen, members of the flock lament their dwindling food supplies, and when a man brings in some fresh meat, one of them asks, “What is it?” “Venison,” he replies hesitantly, in a way that may have you asking, “Is it though?” Nonetheless, they put it into the evening’s soup.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

David and James haul the deer Ellie killed into the restaurant, but the room still seems quiet. Sensing what the tension is about, David tells them that yes, it’s true, “we found the girl who was with the man who took Alec from us.” Come morning, he says, they’ll track her trail, and “bring that man to justice.” The grieving girl from the opening scene raises her voice, saying they should kill both of them. David walks over and, in a moment that shows us just what kind of congregation leader he is, backhands her across the face. Things get worse still a moment later when he tells her that although she may think she doesn’t have a father anymore, “the truth is, Hannah, you always have a father. And you will show him respect when he’s speaking.” Kenneth is not wrong when he says the show makes David even more disturbing than he already was.

The scene ends with shots of these hungry people eating their dinners, the thought lingering in our minds that it may be Alec they’re eating.

Hungry…for vengeance!

The next morning, David’s men do indeed come a-huntin’. In both the show and the game, Ellie does the only thing she can think to do: try leading the men away from Joel, who she’s injected with penicillin but who is still hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the show, she presses a knife into his hands and tells him to kill anyone who comes into the house, though he doesn’t even look like he has the strength to sit up.

The show gives us another brief exchange between David and James, as David insists that Ellie be brought in alive. James says he doesn’t mean to question David’s “sense of mercy” but the girl would just be another mouth to feed, and that yes, she may die if left alone out here, but perhaps that’s God’s will. David simply gives him a withering look, but it’s abundantly clear that David’s interest in keeping Ellie alive has nothing to do with mercy.

Ellie rides through the neighborhood on her horse—the neighborhood which, in the game, has a small army of David’s men on the streets—and eventually, her horse is shot out from under her. In the show, it’s James who does this, and David has to stop him and some other men from killing Ellie. Carrying her off himself and ordering a few men to haul the horse carcass, he tells the remainder of his men to go door to door hunting Joel. “You’re so hungry for vengeance? Deliver it.”

In the game, however, another extended combat sequence begins, as Ellie must sneak by or kill a number of David’s men. What we get here that we don’t get so much in the show is a lot of deep dissatisfaction among the flock with David’s leadership, with many men expressing doubt in David and suggesting that soon, his role as leader be put to a vote. Despite your best efforts, though, David does eventually capture and subdue Ellie, while his own delusions of grandeur about his own benevolence continue to manifest. “I’m keeping you alive here,” he says, as he jokes the consciousness out of her.

Ellie left Joel behind

In both the show and the game, Joel finally comes back to life, as if awakened by the cosmos just in Ellie’s hour of need. The Police have a song about that called “Synchronicity I,” but I digress. In the show, some poor bearded sap enters the house where Joel is stashed in the basement. Ellie was smart and hid the door to the basement behind an old piece of furniture, but the poor bastard rolls well on his perception check and notices something’s up. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t.

As he comes down the stairs, spotting the bloody mattress Ellie’s had Joel on for days, we know Joel has finally regained awareness, and is hiding down there somewhere. Yes, it turns out Joel has regained the strength not only to move, but to stab and choke the life out of a man. That’s the Joel we know and love!

Meanwhile, Ellie wakes up in a cage—in the game, to the sight of a man butchering a human body right in front of her, though in the show, it’s just David sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. In the show, which continues working to make David more overtly disturbing than he is in the game, he tells her that she’s in a cage because “you’re a dangerous person, you’ve certainly proven that,” and there’s an unmistakable hint of amusement and even admiration to his comment.

Screenshot: HBO

Joel’s back in action

Joel, desperate to find Ellie, tortures two of David’s men to get her whereabouts. It’s a startling juxtaposition with an exchange between Ellie and David in the game. When Ellie calls David an animal, he protests that she and Joel have killed a great many people too. “They didn’t give us a choice, it’s a video game,” she says. (Well, okay, she doesn’t say that second part.) “And you think we have a choice, is that it?” David says. “You kill to survive. So do we. We have to take care of our own, by any means necessary.”

I don’t really subscribe to that logic, but his words do on some level indict Joel, I think. Some may feel that Joel and David are points of contrast, one’s violence rooted in hate and delusion, the other’s in love and necessity. I certainly don’t think Joel and David are the same, but I also don’t think there’s anything innocent or acceptable about what Joel does here. And I’m fine with that. I want characters in my media who sometimes do awful things. What’s always troubled me about the reaction to Joel, though, is just how many people who played the game seem to think that everything he does is totally justified, while recognizing that the actions of others in the world aren’t. It’s as if we don’t want to closely interrogate the actions of the person we play as, the one we most closely identify with.

This may be a conversation for next week’s finale, but it seems clear to me that the game, and the show, at least want us to think about the lengths Joel goes to here, lengths that include brutally murdering one man after he tells Joel what he wanted to know, and then killing the other, too. When the second man declares that he won’t tell Joel anything, both the game and the show give us the chilling and memorable line in which Joel, referring to the man he just killed, says “That’s okay, I believe him.”

Cordyceps showed David the light

The show expands significantly on David’s conversation with Ellie, and makes it much more unsettling. He speaks to her—a 14-year-old girl—as if he sees her as some kind of equal, a kindred spirit, because they both have “a violent heart.” He fought to restrain his violent heart for a long time, he says, before he was shown the light, not by God, but by cordyceps. “What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.” I appreciate the expansion of David’s ideas here, because I think the notion that love and violence can overlap is at the core of The Last of Us, and while David is clearly deranged, the debate over whether Joel’s violence is a manifestation of love rages on.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

David, plainly a man who is used to having people respond to his charisma, makes the mistake of thinking that Ellie might be seduced by him as well, when, in both the game and the show, he puts his hand on the bars of the cage and makes it clearer still that his ideas about her are, to put it mildly, inappropriate. It’s a deeply sad moment to me, the realization that even in this world where society as we know it has collapsed, Ellie, like most women in our world at one time or another, in one way or another, still has to deal with the threat and the supreme bullshit of predatory men. Both versions punish David for his arrogance and delusion, as Ellie, briefly playing along, takes his hand and then snaps something in it before finally telling David her name. Tell the others, she says, that “Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger!”

Here the game begins to employ the effective device of having us switch back and forth between Joel and Ellie at intervals, as Joel heads into town to find her, killing plenty of David’s men along the way while a blizzard gathers strength, raising the sense of drama and letting you pick off your prey in the low visibility. Yes, of course he’s doing it for her sake, to protect her, to help her, but by now, it also feels very much like he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what he would do without her. Of course historically, games once relied too often on putting underdeveloped women in peril and just focusing on the men who had to rescue them, but The Last of Us earns this setup by humanizing them both, by developing their connection, and by presenting their relationship as one of mutual care and benefit. By now, Ellie has taken care of Joel and saved his life about as much as he’s done for her.

The show also now switches back to Joel’s perspective, showing him heading into town and finding Ellie’s stuff, not to mention human bodies strung up on meathooks. Better hurry, Joel.

The trick up Ellie’s sleeve

In both versions, David (with James’ help, in the show) hauls Ellie out of the cage to cut her up into “little pieces,” since she didn’t take him up on his excellent offer. Just as they’re about to start cleaving, however, she announces that she’s infected, prompting David to roll up her sleeve and reveal the wound on her arm. David says it can’t be real, James says it looks pretty fucking real to him, and that’s the last thing he’ll ever say, as Ellie takes advantage of their moment of hesitation to sink a meat cleaver into James’ neck and dash out of the room.

Screenshot: HBO

Here, the game becomes a kind of boss fight, as Ellie must sneak around the restaurant and stealthily attack David while a fire begins to spread. In the show, his ego more evidently implodes as the restaurant, his church, burns down around him. It’s a breakdown on multiple levels, with this deluded, awful, terrifying man shouting “You don’t know how good I am!” In both cases, it’s up to Ellie to protect herself, to defeat this supremely shitty, predatory man, whose intentions to inflict sexual violence on Ellie, implied but still clear in the game, are made much more explicit in the show. And in both cases, it’s immensely cathartic and satisfying to see her finally kill him, and not just kill him but stab him again and again until she herself is a blood-spattered survivor, a horror movie final girl. But part of what gives the final girl trope its awful potency is that the kinds of sexualized violence these women so often fight against can’t be killed by killing just one bad man. It’s a threat we all face, all the time. Ellie survives, of course, but the stare she gives in the wake of it, the way she reacts at first when Joel approaches her, suggests that she’s forever changed by the experience. Ellie is all of us.

It’s okay, baby girl

Joel shows up just after her fight is won, and as subtle a detail as it is, the fact that in the show, just like in the game, he calls her “baby girl” in the wake of the horror she’s just endured is tender and very meaningful. It tells us that there’s no longer any pretense of division or obligation between them, of Joel doing this just as a job, of her just being cargo.

By putting both characters in such desperate circumstances, and then having them finally come back together in the end, this episode and this stretch of the game are the cementing of the connection between Joel and Ellie that the story needs before it heads into its final chapter. That’s next week, when we’ll finally settle the discourse about whether or not Joel’s actions are justified once and for all. See you then.

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Carolyn Petit

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March 5, 2023
HBO Sues Paramount, MTV Over ‘South Park’ Rights | Entrepreneur

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According to Variety, streaming platform HBO Max has argued in a new lawsuit that Paramount Global, via its streaming platform Paramount+, has violated a contract that gave the former exclusive streaming rights to “South Park.”

“Defendants engaged in a simple and obvious artifice of mischaracterizing the content to avoid obligations” of the contract, the suit says.

HBO Max is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in New York. The complaint says that HBO Max gained the exclusive rights to stream new episodes of “South Park” and its old “library” of past episodes after an “extremely competitive” bidding process.

But, in violation of that contract, the suit claims, Paramount+ made a deal with the show’s creators for spinoff movies and other spinoff media with MTV in an “illicit scheme.” The latter streamer also said it paid for a certain number of episodes and did not receive them.

“South Park” airs on Comedy Central (owned by Paramount) and is one of the longest-running TV shows ever, as Bloomberg noted. It follows the adventures of a group of four boys who run around making jokes in the eponymous Colorado small town.

HBO claims it paid “more than half a billion dollars” for the rights to stream it exclusively.

“Exclusivity was so important to Warner/HBO that when SPDS asked Warner/HBO whether it would consider sharing the rights to South Park with CBS All Access or another Paramount streamer, Warner/HBO rejected the proposition as a ‘non-starter,’” the lawsuit said.

SPDS is South Park Digital Studios, a media company that produces “South Park” as well as has done titles like “The Book of Mormon.”

“We believe these claims are without merit and look forward to demonstrating so through the legal process,” Paramount said, per Variety.

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Gabrielle Bienasz

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February 27, 2023
The Last Of Us Episode 7 Recap: Just Like Heaven

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Screenshot: HBO

The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.

Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.

A tale of two malls

First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.

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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.

This hopeless situation

In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.

He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.

She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.

Screenshot: HBO

(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)

Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.

Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.

Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II

Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.

Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspace starring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.

We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.

Read More: The Last Of Us Show Made One Of The Best Game Moments Worse

A rocky reunion with Riley

Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.

What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?

After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”

In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.

After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.

Screenshot: HBO

When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.

Take on me

The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.

As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.

Just like heaven

Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.

But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”

Screenshot: HBO

Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.

Pictures of you

Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.

As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning

The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.

This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.

In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.

Screenshot: HBO

Kiss me, kill me

Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.

In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)

In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.

Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.

Love and truth in the Halloween shop

She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)

Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.

Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”

Screenshot: HBO

Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.

For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.

I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.

They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.

“I’m not letting you go”

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”

Screenshot: HBO

Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.

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Carolyn Petit

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February 26, 2023
The Saturday Six: Heinz searches for a man who survived off ketchup packets while lost at sea, winter is getting warmer — and weirder — and more

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Winter weather getting warmer, less reliable

Winter weather is getting warmer and less reliable in era of climate change

09:02

The weekend is finally here.

During yet another busy news week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t reviewed some food additives in decades, a winter storm caused power outages, trapped drivers in vehicles and disrupted travel nationwide, and Rapper Nipsey Hussle’s convicted killer was sentenced to 60 years to life in prison.

Rapper Nipsey Hussle in 2018.

Prince Williams/Wireimage/Getty Images

Barbara Bosson of “Hill Street Blues” fame died at the age of 83, the creator of HBO’s “Succession” announced it would end with season 4, and Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd talked to “CBS Mornings” about 2023 dating trends.

But that’s not nearly all.

Below is our weekly Saturday Six, a recap of half a dozen news stories — in no particular order — ranging from the heartfelt to the weird to the tragic, and everything in between.

Climate change is making winter weather warmer and “weirder.” From the story: “What we are experiencing, as whole, in aggregate, is what we expect from climate change,” she says. “That volatility, that unpredictability, that weirdness, if you will, is climate change,” said Heidi Roop, a climatologist at the University of Minnesota. Watch the video above.

After Heinz learned that a man survived almost a month at sea without nothing but ketchup and seasonings, the company is on a hunt to find him and help him purchase a new boat. From the story: “To whoever finds this message, we need your help tracking down an amazing man with an amazing story. You may remember Elvis Francois as the brave sailor who survived on nothing but ketchup and spices while adrift at sea for 24 days. Well, Heinz wants to celebrate his safe return home and help him buy a new boat…but we can’t seem to find him,” the company said.

A year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we looked at the devastation as the war continues. From the story: Neither Russia nor Ukraine has officially released casualty figures, but both countries are believed to have suffered huge losses on the battlefield since Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

A pizza shop in Columbus, Ohio, raised eyebrows in its advertising attempt to find “non-stupid” people. From the story: The family-owned Santino’s Pizzeria has posted a sign reading, “Now Hiring Non-Stupid People.” The job ad has garnered social media buzz for the tiny shop on the city’s southwest side.

We learned about the eight colleges producing the most multimillionaires. From the story: More than one-third of the wealthiest people in the U.S. attended one of just eight elite universities, according to a new study from wealth consultancy Henley & Partners. There are about 9,600 so-called centimillionaires living in the U.S., or people whose net worth is greater than $100 million, the report noted. About 35% of them attended one of eight U.S. universities.

Finally, we found out that the estimated animal death toll from the Ohio train derailment is about 43,700. From the story: Last week, officials said they believed that the Ohio train derailment had killed 3,500 aquatic animals. On Thursday, they provided a new estimate, pushing the total to more than 43,700 animals within a 5-mile area.

See you next week. Until then, follow CBS News on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

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February 25, 2023
Warner Bros. Discovery making new

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Warner Bros Discovery will revisit Middle-earth after penning a deal with New Line Cinema to produce “multiple” film adaptations of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav said Thursday in an earnings call.

This latest Middle-earth cinematic universe expansion forms part of a larger strategy to lean into a catalog of tried-and-true movie franchises that executives hope will boost the company’s streaming numbers.

“For all the scope and detail lovingly packed into the two trilogies, the vast, complex and dazzling universe dreamed up by J.R.R. Tolkien remains largely unexplored on film,” Warner Bros. Pictures Group Co-Chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy said in a statement following the announcement.

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001). Warner Bros. Discovery executives hope the newly announced Tolkien movies can replicate the commercial success of the franchise’s original films and draw in new subscribers to its streaming platforms.

IMDB/2001 New Line Productions

Mining Middle-earth

The original three “Lord of the Rings” films, along with three sequels based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” enjoyed massive critical and commercial success, scooping up 17 Academy Awards and earning nearly $6 billion at the box office worldwide, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. Executives hope the newly announced movies can replicate the commercial success of the franchise’s original films and draw in new subscribers to its streaming platforms.

In the fourth-quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery streaming services like HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+ added 1.1 million subscribers, bringing the company’s total worldwide subscribers to 96.1 million. But those numbers weren’t enough to offset the company’s large cash infusions into various high-cost production projects.

Zaslav has spent his tenure at Warner Bros. Discovery rejuvenating the company’s movie operations to unlock new audiences across the company’s various streaming channels. Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery moved to expand its DC Comics catalog, green-lighting production of five television series and five films based on the superhero comics in a bid to rival Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel-based content.

“We are very fortunate to have a huge share of the most beloved and globally recognized storytelling IP in the world, including ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Superman,’ ‘Batman,’ ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and we intend to take full advantage of these one-of-a-kind franchises across our various platforms,” Zaslav said during the earnings call.

Details about how many Tolkien films Warner Brothers Studio will produce and who will direct them have yet to be announced.

Warner Bros. Discovery posted a quarterly loss of $2.1 billion, or 86 cents a share, far higher than Wall Street estimates of a 35-cents-a-share loss. The company’s profit for the period was $38 million.

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February 24, 2023
HBO’s “Succession” will end with season 4, creator says

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The acclaimed Emmy-winning HBO drama “Succession” is coming to an end. The show’s creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong told The New Yorker that the show’s fourth season would be its last, explaining that he wanted viewers to have a heads up before the season premiere that the series would be concluding.

“I feel a responsibility to the viewership, and I personally wouldn’t like the feeling of, ‘Oh, that’s it, guys. That was the end,’” Armstrong told the magazine in an interview published Thursday.

Another reason? It’s not reasonable for the cast and crew, in their interviews, to have to conceal that the show is ending, Armstrong said.

Alan Ruck, Brian Cox, Ann Sarnoff, Jesse Armstrong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong, Casey Bloys and Peter Friedman attend HBO’s “Succession” Season 3 premiere at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Oct. 12, 2021.

Lexie Moreland/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images

“It’s pretty definitively the end, so then it just might be uncomfortable having to sort of dissemble like a politician for ages about it,” Armstrong said.

Prior to writing the fourth season, Armstrong said he and the writers weighed the pros and cons of keeping the show going, or ending it. And while his preference was to go with the latter, Armstrong said he never completely closed the door on continuing the show until much later into season four’s development.

“I like operating the writing room by coming in with a sort of proposition, and then being genuinely open to alternative ways of going,” he explained. “And the decision to end solidified through the writing and even when we started filming: I said to the cast, ‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think this is it.’”

Armstrong added that it was hard to completely close the door to future seasons because he wanted “to stop being sad about stopping doing something which I really, really enjoyed.” And while he eventually decided to end the show, he still feels “deeply conflicted.”

“It’s been a difficult decision, because the collaborations—with the cast, with my fellow-writers, with Nick Britell and Mark Mylod and the other directors— they’ve just been so good,” Armstrong said. “I have the circus-has-left-town feeling that everyone gets who works on a production that’s good, and this one particularly so.”

“Succession” tells the story of the Roy family, owners of a mega media conglomerate, all fighting for control of the company as the patriarch, played by Brian Cox, faces health issues.

The new season will premiere March 26. “Succession” has so far received a staggering 48 Emmy nominations, with 13 wins.

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Simrin Singh

Simrin Singh is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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February 23, 2023
‘Succession’ Will End With Upcoming Season 4, Says Creator

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Following hints that his series was approaching a conclusion, Succession creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong confirmed on Thursday that his HBO hit will end with its upcoming fourth season. “It’s pretty definitively the end,” the five-time Emmy winner told The New Yorker. “We could have said it at the end of the season…but, also, the countervailing thought is that we don’t hide the ball very much on the show. I feel a responsibility to the viewership.”

Succession, which examines the murky power dynamics between a powerful aging media mogul and the adult children angling to carry on his legacy, has developed into one of HBO’s most successful series since its bow on the network in 2018. Armstrong has gone undefeated in the drama writing Emmy category, taking that trophy for each of the first three seasons, while the show itself has won the top outstanding drama series prize for its last two seasons. HBO reported that the season three finale delivered a series-high audience of 1.7 million among same-day viewers, and that average episodic viewership was up more than 50% over season two.

“I’ve never thought this could go on forever. The end has always been kind of present in my mind. From Season 2, I’ve been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?” Armstrong told The New Yorker of his decision to end the show. “We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference.” Of whether he could change his mind and continue the show, Armstrong added, “this succession story that we were telling is complete…but the feeling that there could be something else in an allied world, or allied characters, or some of the same characters—that’s also strong in me.”

The third season built to siblings Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) overcoming longstanding rivalries by banding together to try and oust their father, Logan (Brian Cox), only for the plan to be spoiled by Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew MacFadyen). The finale ends with Logan once again on top. “Logan is continually expressing his desire for this sort of imperial or monarchical—I’m trying to avoid the word ‘succession,’ but—succession,” Armstrong said of the patriarch’s mindset going into season 4. “And at the same time, as a human being, he desperately wants to win. That includes winning over these people he sees before him, to whom he wants to give power and influence. He wants them to be able to inherit it. He’s a good vessel for that paradox.”

The fourth season will begin on a birthday party for Logan, just as the series premiere did. The plot for where this final stretch of episodes might go remains firmly under wraps otherwise, though Armstrong did tell The New Yorker there may be some potential to stay in this world beyond whatever conclusion he reaches. “Maybe there’s another part of this world we could come back to, if there was an appetite?” he said. “Maybe there’s something else that could be done, that harnessed what’s been good about the way we’ve worked on this.” For those already in mourning, we can only hope.

Succession’s fourth and final season premieres March 26 on HBO.

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David Canfield

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February 23, 2023
The Last Of Us Episode 6 Recap: Ellie The Goodbye Girl

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Screenshot: HBO

Last week’s episode of The Last of Us was perhaps the show at its most bleak and devastating. Thankfully, episode six, entitled “Kin,” offers us a bit of a tonal reprieve, with enough scenes of hope and possibility for life in the post-cordyceps world to remind us that it is still possible to carve out lives worth living. That’s not to say that it lacks for emotional impact, however. On the contrary, it contains the scene that arguably serves as the crux for the emotional journey that Joel and Ellie go on together, and it represents the show at its most faithful to the game that inspired it, recreating the scene beat for beat and almost word for word. It’s a good thing, too, as it’s one of those moments that works so well in the game that it’s best left alone. However, the episode also departs from the game in a number of key ways, making it a particularly interesting one to compare and contrast with Naughty Dog’s original version of the tale.

Marlon and Florence

The episode begins by briefly making us re-witness the horrible tragedy that ended episode five. From there, it’s THREE MONTHS LATER, and a landscape covered in snow. Interestingly, the events of this episode correspond to the game’s fall chapter, but the show transplants them to winter. A man is bringing white rabbits he’s killed back to a cabin, perhaps a nod to the scene that opens the game’s winter section, in which a white rabbit emerges from a mound of snow only to be pierced by one of Ellie’s arrows.

At first, I wondered if this might be Joel, thinking maybe he and Ellie had found a place to wait out the harshness of winter. But no, it’s someone else, a man named Marlon, and as he enters the cabin, we see his face: it’s the great actor Graham Greene. Perhaps best known for his performance in Dances with Wolves, Greene is one of those actors who I always felt deserved a more robust and prominent career. Sadly his role here is small, but he makes the most of his screen time.

Screenshot: HBO

Waiting for him in the cabin is a woman named Florence (played by the also-fantastic Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure), who tries to tell Marlon something with her eyes. (Neither Marlon nor Florence’s names are spoken in the show, but HBO has revealed them in casting announcements.) As he sets down his bow and takes off his coat, Joel makes his presence known, stepping out with a gun and telling the man to get rid of his. But what makes this scene a pleasure is the way that neither of the cabin’s residents seem all that shaken by Joel’s presence. It’s just one more thing for the two of them to bicker over.

It’s almost comedic, how unaffected they are by Joel’s efforts to be a fairly intimidating interrogator. When Joel says he’s looking for his brother, Marlon immediately says “Well, I ain’t seen him.” When Joel asks him to point out where they are on a map, he says “If you’ve got a map, why are you lost?” When Ellie, hiding out above, asks if she can come down, Joel says no but she does it anyway, prompting Florence to look at Marlon and laugh. Yep, Joel doesn’t exactly have great control of the situation, but these are decent people.

My favorite moment in this scene comes when Joel tells Marlon that he’s found a great place to hide. Marlon says he’s been there since before Joel was born, that he came there to “get the hell away from everybody,” to which Florence volunteers that she didn’t want to, and Marlon sighs and waves his hand dismissively at her. You get a sense of the understanding these two have of each other, having shared a lifetime together. They have great “old married couple” vibes, and after the bleakness of last week’s episode, it’s a welcome reminder that there are still people, here and there, living lives of love and meaning.

They leave Joel and Ellie with a sense of foreboding, however, painting a picture of nearby towns swarming with infected, and when asked for advice on the best way west, Marlon says “go east.” In particular, he warns Joel and Ellie not to go past a nearby river. “We never seen who’s out there, but we seen the bodies they leave behind,” Florence says. “If your brother’s west of the river, he’s gone.”

A more vulnerable Joel

As Joel and Ellie leave the cabin, something alarming happens: Joel has some kind of episode, perhaps a panic attack, that finds him leaning against a post and clutching his chest. Ellie seems concerned about him but in the moment, she may be more worried about herself. “Just a reminder that if you’re dead, I’m fucked,” she says. In the game, Joel doesn’t seem susceptible to issues like this, generally seeming far more physically capable than most people in their mid-50s and only ever appearing physically distressed when he’s seriously injured (more on that later).

Screenshot: HBO

This moment works to make Joel seem more human and vulnerable to viewers, and to set up a crisis of self-confidence that he tells his brother about later. It also reminds us of just how much Ellie is relying on him to remain alive and capable, as it crystallizes just how much is at stake for Ellie later when Joel does find himself in real peril. For now, though, Joel soon brushes it off, attributing the fleeting issue to “the cold air all of a sudden,” and Ellie urges them onward in their quest to find Tommy and the Fireflies. “All we have to do is cross the River of Death,” she says.

Ellie the dream astronaut

The corresponding section of the game is just bursting with natural beauty, as Joel and Ellie make their way through a rainy autumn landscape, following a rolling river. I missed that a bit in the more spare but still striking winter landscapes we see Joel and Ellie traverse here, soon passing above what Ellie says is the River of Death Marlon warned them about. They set up camp, where Joel wraps duct tape around his boots, a moment that made me imagine a game mechanic in which you had to do this every so often or Joel would start taking damage from walking around in shoes that were falling apart. It’s not exactly something that happens in the game, but it is one of the show’s rare images of Joel using scrounged supplies as a resource.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

Ellie’s standing on a nearby rock gazing at the northern lights, leading Joel to say one of the most dad-like things he’s said to Ellie thus far: “Come down from there, you’re gonna break your neck.” And after they share a swig from Joel’s flask (I love Ellie’s little “cheers” gesture before she drinks), she poses a thought experiment: what are we gonna do if the cure works? He pushes back on “we” so fine, she asks what he would like to do. He says maybe get a ranch somewhere—some land, some sheep.

Ellie’s stated desire is one she also voices in the game, and it explains her fascination with the starry sky: if things were different, she would have wanted to be an astronaut. The show’s writers add a nice bit of specificity to it, though, as she names a bunch of famous astronauts she read about in school before asking Joel if he knows who her favorite is. “Sally Ride,” he guesses correctly. “Sally fuckin’ Ride,” she replies. “Best astronaut name ever.” Absolutely.

Remembering Sam

Here’s another contrast between the game and the show that highlights their different approaches to Joel, and by extension, the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Dreaming of a better world in which her blood has made cordyceps a thing of the past, her thoughts turn to Sam, who she couldn’t save. “I tried, with Sam,” she tells Joel, saying that she rubbed some of her blood into Sam’s bite, hoping it would save him. Joel gives space to her feelings and, wanting to say something supportive, tells Ellie that if Marlene says the Fireflies can make a cure, they can do it.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, Ellie also brings up Sam, but Joel reacts very differently. You can stumble on a grave marked with a teddy bear, which prompts Ellie to mention that she forgot to leave a toy robot she’d picked up earlier on Sam’s grave. Joel shuts her down. Ellie protests that she wants to talk about it, which is the most understandable thing in the world. Joel forbids it, saying “Things happen and we move on.” Ellie relents, saying “You’re right, I’m sorry,” even though he’s not right at all. It’s just how Joel has coped with the suffering he’s endured, by not thinking or talking about it at all.

I think both dynamics work well for their respective mediums. In the game, we’re left aching for Joel’s facade to crack a bit, for him to finally start showing a little genuine compassion and tenderness to Ellie. In the show, Joel’s hardly warm, but he’s at least less quick to force her to deny her own feelings, which pulls us into their relationship in a different way: we’re starting to see the possibility for connection between them, which makes it that much more painful later in the episode when Joel does shun Ellie.

Welcome to Jackson

Joel and Ellie press on, at one point overlooking a dam, the show’s way of acknowledging the dam that plays prominently in this stretch of the game. Ellie says “Dam!” to which Joel responds that she’s no Will Livingston, the writer of her trusty book of puns.

Soon they walk past another river, at which point Ellie has an alarming thought: what if this is the River of Death? And sure enough, no sooner does she voice this thought than they find themselves surrounded by riders on horseback, holding them at gunpoint. There’s a harrowing moment in which a dog sniffs them both for signs of infection, and we don’t know if Ellie’s immunity also neutralizes any such signs or if the pup is about to sink his teeth into her neck, but the moment passes as the dog happily licks her face and she laughs. After Joel says that he’s looking for his brother, a woman asks Joel his name. It seems the name Joel means something to her, as they all promptly ride on horseback into the town of Jackson.

Screenshot: HBO

This is a significant departure from the game, in which the existence of Jackson is mentioned, but Joel and Ellie don’t actually enter the town. As players, we don’t get a good look at it until Part II. But here, we get to see the settlement now, a place where many families live a fairly normal life in the post-cordyceps world. It’s quite a sight, six episodes in, to see a street busy with foot traffic in a place where children frolic and people are working cooperatively. Among the people laboring on the street is Tommy, Joel’s brother, and the two share a heartfelt reunion. When Tommy asks what the fuck Joel is doing here, he says “I came here to save you,” before laughing at the absurdity of Tommy needing saving.

“We’re communists”

Joel and Ellie wolf down a meal while Tommy and the woman, whose name we learn is Maria, look on. At one moment, another girl furtively looks at Ellie, until Ellie loudly says “What?!” and scares her off. I imagine this was just a random Jackson resident, but I couldn’t help but think of Dina, a character who, in the second game, comes to play an important role in Ellie’s life. When Joel asks for a moment alone with family, Tommy tells him that Maria is family. The extremely unenthusiastic “congrats” that Joel eventually offers up is one of the funnier moments in the series.

Tommy and Maria give them a tour that covers the exposition bases, explaining how the town got started, how they stay safe from infected, and how it functions day in and day out. “Everything you see in our town—greenhouses, livestock—all shared. Collective ownership,” Tommy says. “So, uh, communism,” Joel says. “It ain’t like that,” Tommy refutes, but Maria corrects him. “It is that. Literally. This is a commune. We’re communists.” I appreciate the matter-of-factness of Maria’s statement, and the depiction of communism as a system that, when applied properly, can be beneficial to all. That’s not something you see in media very often.

Joel and Tommy, reunited

In both the show and the game, Joel and Tommy find themselves with some time to privately catch up as Maria and Ellie also spend a bit of time together. In both cases, tensions between the brothers run high, but there are some key differences as well.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In the game, Joel’s stated hope is that Tommy will take Ellie off his hands and deliver her to his former Firefly buddies. Joel’s loss of Sarah is front and center in the scene, as Tommy says he went back down to Texas some time ago and found a photo of Joel and Sarah, which he offers to Joel. “I’m good,” Joel says, refusing the photo. The two get heated when Joel suggests Tommy owes him this favor for the things he did to keep them alive after the pandemic started, and Tommy replies that the horrendous things they did weren’t worth it, that all he has from that time is nightmares. Their argument is interrupted by an attack of marauders before anything can be settled.

Screenshot: HBO

In the show, rather than saying he wants Tommy to take Ellie off his hands, Joel says he wants Tommy to accompany him in delivering Ellie to the Fireflies. He lies to Tommy on multiple counts, both telling him that Tess is fine and that Ellie is the daughter of a high-ranking Firefly who he’s trying to reunite with her family. Here, too, Joel tries to use the violence he committed years ago as leverage. Tommy’s more forgiving here than his video game counterpart, but still remains ashamed of what they did. And as in the game, the memory of Sarah is close at hand, but not because of a photograph. Rather, Tommy tells Joel that he can’t go with him to the Firefly base in Colorado because he’s going to be a father. When Tommy says “I feel like I’d be a good dad,” Joel, obviously deep in his own feelings about Sarah, responds with a cold “I guess we’ll find out.” Tommy doesn’t take it well, and says that just because life stopped for Joel, that’s no reason it has to stop for him.

As he heads out into the cold, Joel once again clutches his chest and leans against a pole for support. He sees a woman nearby who, from behind, bears a striking resemblance to Sarah, but of course it’s not her.

Ellie learns about Sarah

In the game, we don’t witness the time Ellie and Maria spend together while Joel and Tommy are talking, but we do later find out that Maria tells Ellie about Sarah. In the show, we see how this discovery takes place.

After taking a shower and emerging to find that Maria has left her new clothes and a menstrual cup (which she finds both gross and amusing), Ellie heads across the street in search of her. She enters Maria and Tommy’s house and sees names and dates written on a chalkboard marking the lives of two people who died young: someone named Kevin, who died at the age of three shortly after Outbreak Day, and someone named Sarah, who died on Outbreak Day at 14.

Screenshot: HBO

Maria insists on giving Ellie’s hair a trim, and tells her that she’s always liked cutting hair. “Maybe it was a mom thing,” she says, before mentioning “the little memorial Tommy made” in the living room. “I’m sorry about your kids,” Ellie says, and Maria says only Kevin was hers, Sarah was Joel’s daughter. The heavy silence that follows tells Maria that Ellie didn’t know that before.

“I guess that explains him a little,” Ellie says. Maria, with a sense of cool practicality and likely a wariness of Joel based on the stories Tommy’s told her, expresses concern about Ellie being with him, but the teen remains typically testy. “Tommy [killed people] too, are you worried about him?” she asks. Maria says that Tommy was following Joel, “the way you are now,” seemingly seeing Joel as a bad influence, someone who pulls people into his orbit and leaves harm in his wake. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she warns Ellie. “The only people who can betray us are the ones we trust.” Ellie clearly resents the advice and Maria’s distrust of Joel, perhaps because she senses there’s good reason for it and doesn’t want to admit it to herself.

The Goodbye Girl

In the town hall, Ellie joins the other youngsters at a screening of the 1977 film The Goodbye Girl. (Jackson likely has a pretty limited selection of film reels on hand.) However, despite the novelty of seeing an actual movie projected on an actual screen, Ellie remains distracted, paying more attention to Tommy and Maria talking nearby than to the wit of Neil Simon’s screenplay.

The show’s writers clearly didn’t pick The Goodbye Girl at random. The plot involves an actor, played by Richard Dreyfuss, forming a connection with a dancer and her ten-year-old daughter. The woman has a history of being abandoned by the men in her life (hence the title), and fears that the actor will do the same. Ellie herself has a history of being left as we’ll soon learn, and her fears of being abandoned by Joel are at a peak in this episode.

Screenshot: HBO

Meanwhile, Joel is alone in a workshop, struggling to repair his boots and getting immensely frustrated. Tommy comes in with a peace offering of new boots and an apology for his earlier behavior, saying “I know you’re happy for me, it’s just…it’s complicated for you.” Joel asks Tommy for more details on whether the trip to the University of Eastern Colorado where the Firefly base is located is survivable, and finally offers him the truth: Ellie is immune.

As he tells the story of his journey with Ellie thus far, he appears much more vulnerable than the Joel of the game ever does. No action hero, he admits to being far less capable of recognizing and reacting to threats than he used to be, and to sometimes being paralyzed by fear. “I’m not who I was. I’m weak,” he says, describing those moments where “the fear comes up out of nowhere and my heart feels like it’s stopped.” He’s haunted by dreams he can’t remember but that leave him with the feeling that he’s lost something.

The Joel of the game also tries to pass Ellie off onto Tommy because he’s afraid of the pain of emotional involvement, of potentially losing someone again, but he’s much more guarded about it. This Joel is more overtly shaken, riddled with self-doubt and a crippling fear of failure. He seems to honestly believe, when he says “I have to leave her,” that it would be for Ellie’s own good, that he’s incapable of being the person she needs him to be. He presents it to Tommy as a chance to make up for the awful things they both did, “to bring your kid into a better world.” I think it’s definitely a more emotionally persuasive appeal than the one Joel makes in the game, where Tommy just seems to change his mind and decide that taking Ellie on to Colorado is something he has to do.

When Tommy returns to the town hall after speaking with Joel, the look he gives Maria tells her everything, and the look she gives in response tells us everything about how she feels: That bastard Joel has done it again.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

And now we come to the scene that may be the emotional heart of both the game and the show, a crucial turning point in the central relationship. In the game, Ellie senses that Joel is abandoning her, steals a horse, and rides off to a nearby ranch. Joel and Tommy pursue her, and within the faded normalcy of the old house, she and Joel have an argument that reflects the crisis point in their relationship.

There’s no ranch here in the show, but the house in Jackson they’re staying at offers a similar backdrop of pre-pandemic life, and the conversation between them starts the same way, with Ellie reading an old diary and saying, “Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys? Movies? Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt?”

Screenshot: HBO

“If you’re gonna ditch me, ditch me,” she says, telling him that she overheard some of his conversation with Tommy in the workshop. And soon, after asking him what he’s so afraid of, she says “I’m not her, you know,” another line straight from the game and in some ways the emotional excavation of past anguish that both the game and the show have been building up to all along. It’s a scene on which so much hinges in the development of their relationship, and so it’s little surprise that it’s recreated so faithfully here.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

In both cases, Ellie tells Joel that she’s sorry about his daughter but that she has lost people too, and in both cases, he says “You have no idea what loss is,” a pretty awful (and incorrect) thing for him to say. And in both, she tells him that everyone she’s ever cared about has either died or left her, “everyone—fucking except for you. So don’t tell me that I would be safer with someone else because the truth is that I would just be more scared.” Joel’s painful response: “You’re right, you’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad.” Both Joels say that soon, they’re going their separate ways. Ellie’s a goodbye girl, all right.

Ellie the human cargo

The next morning, Tommy comes to collect Ellie, who sits with no display of emotion, her things packed, waiting to be carried along on her journey. It made me recall Joel’s comment to her in an earlier episode, “You’re cargo.” The feeling I got here is that this is now how Ellie feels about herself: she’s a thing that needs to be taken to a place for the good of humanity, but as a person there is nobody to whom she means anything, nobody who cares about her for her sake, only for what she might mean for humanity.

Screenshot: Naughty Dog

But when they get to the stables, Joel is saddling up one of the horses. He says he got there 30 minutes ago with the intention of stealing the horse and being on his way, but now, he’s decided Ellie deserves a choice. “I still think you’d be better off with Tommy,” he starts to say before Ellie cuts him off, shoves her stuff into his arms and says “Let’s go.” In the game, Joel just decides he’s continuing on with Ellie. He says to Tommy that his wife kinda scares him and he doesn’t want her coming after him, but it’s obvious that that’s just something he’s saying, and that he’s decided that he belongs by Ellie’s side, for a little longer, at least.

Joel and Tommy share a hug, and as in the game, Tommy tells them that there’s a place in Jackson for them.

To the University of Eastern Colorado

An amusing interlude finds Joel trying to give Ellie a lesson in using a sniper rifle. All her shots miss and she’s convinced the gun doesn’t aim right. As he talks about proper technique, she asks him if he’s trying to shoot the target or get it pregnant. Of course, he hits the target dead on, to which she says “You dick!” as he shrugs and smiles.

Joel also talks a bit about being a contractor. “The Contractor,” Ellie says in a deep voice, as if she’s imagining some kind of construction-oriented superhero. “That’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, we were cool. Everybody loved contractors,” he says. And then, mirroring a conversation from the game, we hear Joel explaining some of the basic rules of football to Ellie.

Screenshot: HBO

As they explore the campus of the fictional University of Eastern Colorado, Joel volunteers that, more than running a sheep ranch, he wanted to be a singer, but of course he refuses Ellie’s request that he sing something. (He admits this in the game as well, and without going into specifics, I will say that it becomes more than just a throwaway detail later in the series.) In another moment straight from the game, a group of monkeys scurry away from them as they approach and Ellie confirms that it’s her “first time seeing a monkey.” Soon, though, the stillness of the campus starts to feel ominous, and it’s clear things aren’t quite right.

After finding a map indicating that the Fireflies packed up and headed for Salt Lake City, they see a group of men prowling the campus and attempt to make their escape. But before they can safely leave, a man attacks Joel with a baseball bat which breaks as he strikes a tree. Joel breaks the man’s neck, but in the struggle, the sharp wooden hilt of the bat gets stuck in his abdomen. In the game, Joel is severely injured when he and an attacker go toppling over a railing and he gets impaled on a bit of rebar, leading to a sequence in which Ellie must be Joel’s protector for a time, killing attackers as he limps weakly toward the horse. Even in his injured state, he’s still Joel, though. She says that if she gets him out of this, he really owes her a song and he responds with a dry “You wish.”

Soon they’re safely free of their attackers, but Joel falls off his horse and into the snow, and for the moment at least, Ellie’s worst fear is realized, a fear she admitted to Sam at the end of the previous episode. Just as the two seem to have come to some understanding about their importance to each other, he leaves her. “I can’t fucking do this without you,” she says. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going or what the fuck I’m gonna do. Joel, please.” But she is alone, as a moody cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” plays, the song that ended the show’s first episode. That choice, the moody cover callback, struck me as a bit cliche, the show going through the motions of doing what we expect prestige TV to do, but given that much of this episode rang emotionally true, I guess I’ll allow it.

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Carolyn Petit

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February 19, 2023
‘The Last of Us’ Stabs Out With its Biggest Cliffhanger Yet

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The good news about this week’s The Last of Us: we meet several happy characters, and for once, none of them die! The bad news? It just might be the last of Joel.

Whether he’s still alive or not, Joel’s current outlook is grim, based on the ending of “Kin,” written by Last of Us creator Craig Mazin and directed by Jasmila Žbanić. Featuring a laundry list of scenes ripped straight from Neil Druckmann’s video game of the same name, The Last of Us episode six puts Joel and Ellie closer to their end goals than ever before while also clarifying what actually matters to both of these people — just in time to stick a knife in that hard-earned lesson’s gut.

The action picks up three months after “Endure and Survive.” While Joel and Ellie have put time and space between themselves and Kansas City, the deaths of Henry and Sam (Lamar Johnson and Keivonn Montreal Woodard) still live rent-free in their heads. Meanwhile, their easy shorthand and relaxed attitudes make clear that tthese unlikely companions are growing closer, whether they like it or not.

Joel and Ellie’s mission to reunite with Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), takes them deep into the mountains of Wyoming. They hold a happily married couple at gunpoint, essentially hijacking them for directions. The trouble rolls off the couple’s backs like rain, making light of Joel and Ellie’s desperate situation. When it becomes clear that no one in this foursome wishes harm on any other, the couple offers up a helpful tip: don’t go west, or else court death. Just one problem: Tommy’s out west. So, west they go.

In the night, Joel and Ellie camp out under the stars, staying up late, dreaming about the future. Joel wants to retire and herd sheep. Ellie wants to be the next Sally Ride. In time, they both want rest.

“Get some sleep,” Joel tells Ellie. “Dream of sheep ranches on the moon.”

Morning comes, and Ellie lets Joel sleep in. He’s mad about it but cools down when Ellie talks him through the uneventful night shift. It’s akin to Joel’s daughter making a big deal out of his birthday some 20 years earlier, whether he wanted a big birthday or not. But Ellie isn’t Sarah, as he’s all too painfully aware.

Wandering through the wilderness, Joel and Ellie stumble upon civilization almost by accident, as they encounter a group of survivors who just so happen to know Tommy. One of them is married to him: Marie, played by HBO veteran Rutina Wesley. The erstwhile Tara Thornton is a long way from Bon Temps, but still right at home in the close-knit community of Jackson, Wyoming.

Jackson is a beacon of light in the middle of the Mushroom Kingdom, which has tons of people, working electricity, operational movie theaters, and countless other creature comforts. Most importantly, it has Tommy. Joel’s reunion with his brother is an emotional one, as the typically steely soldier’s voice catches in his throat, the word “Tommy!” barely escaping. For the first time in months — years, even — Joel has a semblance of his old life again.

But it ends up being a complicated day for our heroes. For Ellie, it’s a chance to see what the world looked like before it ended. She gets a warm meal, among the best she’s ever had. She gets a haircut, a few of them, in fact. She goes to the movies and catches an Oscar-winning performance from Richard Dreyfuss. Most importantly, she learns about Sarah, Joel’s daughter, who looms large over the whole day.

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Josh Wigler

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February 19, 2023
The Last Of Us Episode 5 Recap: The Saga Of Henry And Sam

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Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

Episode five of HBO’s The Last of Us marks the midpoint of our nine-episode journey. That’s right, we’re halfway there, and Ellie and Joel are definitely living on a prayer. Look, I’m sorry for the bad Bon Jovi reference but man, this episode is The Last of Us at its most relentlessly bleak. I needed to do something to lighten the mood for myself, and unlike Ellie, I don’t have a book of awful jokes handy. At least this episode also features what I consider the most effective subtle nod to the game in the entire season. We’ll get to that in a bit.

At the end of episode four, Joel and Ellie were being held at gunpoint by two characters who players of the game likely immediately recognized as Henry and Sam. (If you need to catch up, you can find my recap of that episode here.) As episode five begins, we flash back a little while to meet these new characters and learn about what’s driven them into such desperate circumstances.

The Fall of Kansas City FEDRA

At first glance, this episode’s beginning seems like one of pure jubilation. Chants of “freedom!” are heard rising from a crowd that’s celebrating in the streets. But almost immediately, we’re shown the grim side of this happy occasion, with FEDRA officers being executed at point-blank or publicly hoisted into the air by the neck as they twitch with their final struggles for life. An armored vehicle the people have reclaimed roams the streets blasting the message, “Collaborators, surrender now and you will receive a fair trial.” Hmm, yes, somehow I don’t believe you. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re dragging a body behind you that’s stuffed with so many blades it looks like a pincushion, I’m not sure.

As the armored vehicle passes, we see Henry and Sam lurking in the shadows. Henry (Lamar Johnson, The Hate U Give) uses ASL to communicate with his brother, cluing us in to a significant change from the game: Here, Sam is deaf. (Sam is wonderfully played here by young actor Keivonn Woodard, who is also deaf.) In this brief exchange, you can already sense Henry trying to put on a brave face for his much younger brother. The two sneak away unseen by the patrolling resistance which, as we learned in last week’s episode, is hell-bent on finding them.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

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In fact, even as the celebration rages on, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), the resistance’s leader, is working, interrogating a group of “collaborators”—civilians who worked with FEDRA before it fell—about Henry’s whereabouts. Lynskey remains chilling in the role, coating her comments in a tone that, on the surface, sounds reasonable and kind, but is so transparently cold and ruthless underneath. “Lucky for you, I’m not FEDRA,” she tells them, saying that if they cooperate, they’ll be put on trial, be found guilty of course, and then have to do some time, “easy.” She’s got her commando assistant Perry (Jeffrey Pierce, who voices Joel’s brother Tommy in the games) by her side, his silent presence lending her words an added threat of danger. Finally someone cracks and tells her that Henry and Sam are with Edelstein, the doctor we saw Kathleen interrogate in last week’s episode.

A moment later, she orders her men to go door-to-door until her prey is found. When Perry shows some hesitation and advises against this plan, we see that she can turn her condescending ruthlessness on him, too. “He’s not my seventh priority, Perry,” she says. “Is that what he is to you?” I’m starting to feel like the way she prioritizes finding Henry above all other concerns may backfire on her in some way. Remember last week, when Perry showed her the ominous, quivering sinkhole in the building, and rather than dealing with it in any real way, she told him to just seal the building off and remain focused on finding Henry? Yeah, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Perry asks if they’re really putting the arrested collaborators on trial. Of course they’re not. “When you’re done, burn the bodies. It’s faster,” she says, the way you might ask someone to pick up some milk from the grocery store on the way home.

Henry and Sam stay with Edelstein

Henry and Sam meet up with Edelstein, who takes them into the same cramped attic space we saw Kathleen investigate in last week’s episode. Here, it’s not yet covered with Sam’s drawings, as Henry and the doctor discuss their very limited food supply and total lack of ammunition for their guns. Everything that transpires here has an undercurrent of dread for us, since we already know that Edelstein soon gets captured and executed by Kathleen.

Sam, who can’t hear what they’re saying, sits in the corner, drawing on his little magnetic sketch pad. Edelstein seems like a kind and thoughtful man, showing genuine concern for Sam’s well-being. “He’s scared because you’re scared,” he advises Henry.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

Henry goes to comfort his little brother, who has drawn a masked superhero on his pad. “Super Sam,” Henry signs. Sam is understandably afraid, and Henry tries to reassure him that they’re safe here. “There is one problem, though,” he says. “This place? Is ugly.” He then breaks out the big bag of art supplies that Sam uses to decorate the space. It’s an endearing moment, with Henry creating for his younger brother an alternate reality in which the only real problem facing them is the drabness of their surroundings, and not the army hunting them right outside.

The birth of Super Sam

We skip ahead ten days, to find the attic filled with images of Super Sam blasting evil FEDRA officers and flying protectively over the city. But now, a real problem is bearing down on them: they’re almost out of food, and Sam is hungry. Edelstein’s been gone a whole day, and their hopes rest on him returning with some. We already know he’s not coming back. And yet right out the window, Henry can see resistance officers scouring the city, making leaving a dangerous proposition. They’re in a tight spot.

Finally, Henry has to face the fact that Edelstein isn’t returning. He tells Sam that he’s studied the patterns of the resistance patrols and can guide them to safety. When Sam asks if they killed Edelstein, Henry is honest and says they probably did. Sam clings to Henry for a long time after that. He’s a child growing up in a world in which nothing is ever safe or assured. He must be terrified.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

As he holds his brother and looks at the art decorating the walls, Henry has a flash of inspiration. He tells Sam to close his eyes, and paints a red mask on his face, just like the one Sam’s alter ego sports in all the drawings. Seeing it reflected in his brother’s knife, Sam nods with satisfaction. He’s ready to face the world.

They don’t get far, though. Just as they’re about to leave the building, a gunfight breaks out outside. It’s Joel and Ellie’s unceremonious arrival in Kansas City, and Henry observes as Joel kills the hunters attacking him. We see the wheels in his head turning. “New plan,” he tells his brother.

Meeting Joel and Ellie

Now we come back to the moment that concluded episode four, when the paths of these two duos intersect. Henry’s obviously been keeping an eye on Joel since earlier in the day, and he’s tracked him and Ellie to the apartment building where they’ve crashed for the night.

Joel isn’t exactly thrilled about waking up to the reality of being held at gunpoint, but soon they agree to a tentative truce, and Henry introduces himself as “the most wanted man in Kansas City.”

Over a quiet meal, Ellie asks Sam how old he is, and with Henry acting as an interpreter between them, he responds that he’s eight. (In the game, Sam is closer to Ellie’s age of 14, but him being younger here makes me even more sympathetic to how overwhelming and terrifying his experience of the world must be.) Joel, being Joel, says dryly that they successfully ate together and didn’t kill each other, so they should call it a win and move on. But Henry has a card up his sleeve. “I’m betting that y’all came up here to get a view of the city and plan a way out,” he says. “And when the sun’s up, I’ll show you one.”

“Welcome to Killa City”

The next morning, Henry provides Joel (and us) with some additional context for what went down in Kansas City. Looking out at the city, Joel is struck by the lack of FEDRA, especially since he’d always heard that KC FEDRA ruled with an iron fist. Henry confirms the rumors. “Raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years,” he says. So if Henry wasn’t part of this monstrous FEDRA, Joel wonders, what, then, was he? When Henry replies that he was something even worse, “a collaborator,” Joel protests and says he doesn’t work with rats. Henry insists that today, he doesn’t have much choice, “‘cause I live here and you don’t.” They need each other, Henry argues. Only he knows where to go, and only Joel has the capacity for violence to get them out alive.

This is all quite different from the game, in which Henry and Sam weren’t native to Pittsburgh (where the game’s version of this storyline takes place), but had just come there from Hartford, Connecticut in search of supplies. They had no connection to the resistance that had risen up in Pittsburgh, but just happened to be people who could help Joel and Ellie get out of the city. In both stories, though, Sam lets us see new sides of Ellie by giving her a fellow kid to geek out with and play with, and having another duo traveling with them for a while illuminates Joel’s growing attachment to Ellie and his sense of himself as her protector, no longer just out of obligation but increasingly out of genuine care and concern.

As the two talk, the sound of kids laughing can be heard nearby. Ellie is showing Sam her tattered book of jokes, and a genuine smile stretches across Henry’s face. “Haven’t heard that in a long time,” he says, mirroring a moment from the game in which Ellie and Sam playfully eat blueberries together and Henry says it’s been a long time since he saw Sam crack a smile.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I find these moments of fleeting happiness among the most devastating in both the game and the show, because I know how things end for Henry and Sam. Their fate is so awful, so bleak, that it makes me think back to Ellie’s question to Joel in episode four: “If you don’t think there’s hope for the world, why bother going on?” I’m once again glad that the TV series at least offered us the reprieve of Bill and Frank, giving us one vision of lives lived well and with meaning, to temper how relentlessly hopeless it all gets for a while.

Henry’s plan

Henry sketches a map of the area showing how Kathleen’s forces have the area on lock. Still, there is a way out, he insists. Sam sits nearby sketching, but Henry doesn’t want him left out of the conversation. “How do we get across?” he signs at his brother. Sam writes intently on his pad for a moment, then holds it up. “TUNNELS.” It’s a great plan, but there’s a huge catch. Kansas City may seem strangely lacking in Infected, but there’s a reason for that. “FEDRA drove them underground 15 years ago,” Henry says. He insists, though, that FEDRA cleaned out the tunnels three years ago. Just what that means or how exactly they did that remains ominously unspoken, almost as if the show’s writers want to plant a seed in our minds about it. Nah, I’m sure it won’t come up again. Henry admits that the plan is “dicey-as-fuck,” but it’s also the only plan they’ve got.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

As they head down into the tunnels, Joel tells Ellie to get her gun out, and it looks like Ellie has to suppress a smile as he’s finally fully shifted from relentlessly denying her a gun to asking her to be ready to use one. However, the tunnels do indeed appear empty, vastly, surprisingly empty, stretching hollowly before them as far as the eye can see. Joel stays on guard but nothing is stirring in these subterranean passageways, and at last they come to a place that looks quite different, where the walls are decorated with the kinds of colorful drawings you might see at a preschool. Passing through a door, they find an abandoned place where people—adults and children—clearly once lived. Amidst all the details—the toys, the posted signs laying out rules, all the other signs of life—one thing stands out: a child’s drawing of two smiling men in body armor, with rifles, labeled “our protectors,” Danny and Ish. And here’s where we come to the episode’s great little nod to the game.

Who is Ish?

First, a little background. In the game, Joel and Ellie’s journey with Henry and Sam briefly takes them along a beach where you can enter a battered old boat and find a note. (Considering that this is near Pittsburgh, that probably makes about as much sense as the beginning of episode two being set “10 miles west of Boston.”) The note is signed by someone named Ish (perhaps a reference to Moby Dick’s sea-faring narrator Ishmael) and details how, after spending some time at sea to hide from the outbreak, he eventually found himself running low on supplies and his boat in disrepair, and returned to shore to take his chances with humanity again.

Ish’s boat on the beach near Pittsburgh, which, yeah, probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku

From there, you head into nearby sewers, where you can find a small area where Ish lived alone for some time after coming ashore. A note of his you can find there mentions that he met some people who had kids with them and who did not want to shoot him on sight. “Shocking I know,” he comments. The encounter puts the idea in his head that maybe it’s better for him to try trusting other people than it is to continue living alone. “What’s the point of surviving if you don’t have someone to laugh at your corny jokes?” his note reads, a question that cuts to the heart of The Last of Us’ themes. “Tomorrow, I’m going in search of them.”

Soon, you come to a place that’s very much like the one the party finds in the TV series, where Ish lived with other adults and children. In fact, the very same drawing of Ish and another adult named Danny that we see in the show is seen here in the game. Unfortunately, environmental clues also tell us that at some point, infected did get into the settlement, and the results were tragic, with another adult named Kyle and a few children getting trapped in a room by infected, and Kyle killing the children himself to spare them an even worse fate. Another note that you can find in the suburbs upon leaving the sewers reveals that he and a woman named Susan got out, but it’s excruciating to read. “She lost her children,” it says, “and I have no clue what to say to her.”

It concludes with Ish writing that every part of his being wants to give up, but he just can’t. “I’ve seen that we’re still capable of good. We can make it. I have to stay strong… for her.” What happened to him after that remains unknown.

Very often, I feel that Easter eggs are kind of exclusionary. They wink and nod to those people who are in the know, letting those viewers perhaps feel smug about picking up on cool details that fly over the rest of the audience’s heads. This drawing on the wall, though, works either way, I think. If you haven’t played the game, it offers some insight into what life was like here in this underground settlement at one time, and if you do know it from the game, it opens up a whole other narrative to you. A tragedy nested within a tragedy. Right about now, The Last of Us just feels like tragedies all the way down.

Savage Starlight

Sam finds a copy of a Savage Starlight comic, which in the game serves as a collectible Joel can find throughout and give to Ellie. Ellie is immediately stoked at Sam’s find, and the two of them bond over their shared enthusiasm for the series, trading details about which issues they each have. One particularly sweet moment sees Ellie quoting the hero’s catchphrase of “Endure and survive” and Sam teaching it to her in ASL. God, I want these kids to make it. (Around this same stretch of the game, Ellie will occasionally say “Endure and survive” after Joel has finished taking out a group of enemies and it seems like the two are safe for the time being.)

Ellie and Sam play soccer in the game in a moment referenced in the show.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku

Other moments here are direct nods to the game, like one when Ellie and Sam play soccer using a makeshift goal painted on the wall. However, a conversation between Joel and Henry that sheds further light on his connection to Kathleen is totally new. Joel apologizes for having called Henry a rat before, saying that if Henry did what he did for Sam’s sake, he understands. Henry finally tells Joel exactly what it is he did do, and why. He paints a picture of a great man, one who “was never afraid, never selfish, and he was always forgiving.” He’s clearly talking about Kathleen’s brother, who he wanted to follow, and would have followed, if only.

“But Sam, he got sick. Leukemia.” And wouldn’t you know it, FEDRA had control of the very limited supply of the only drug that could treat him. So he made a deal, and gave FEDRA what they wanted. He’s still wracked with guilt about it, but the world presented him with an impossible choice that he never should have had to make in the first place. Rather than offer any words of comfort or understanding, though, Joel just says “We’ve waited long enough.” It’s time to move on.

Kathleen and Michael

We find Kathleen standing in her childhood bedroom, in a clearly abandoned house. And as she tells Perry about her brother—who we learn here was named Michael—and how he’d always comfort her during thunderstorms when they were kids, all I could think was, “Oh my god, shut up.” She’s the type of person who’s so convinced that her pain and suffering matter so much more than everyone else’s, that hunting down Henry is good and righteous because he took her brother from her, even though he only did it because it was the only way to save his own brother. Of course her pain and grief are real, but the extremes she’s going to in her pursuit of Henry make me lose all sympathy for her. She’s an egomaniac.

In fact, even her own brother’s wishes don’t matter to her, much as she might pretend to be honoring his life or his memory in this act. “He was so beautiful,” she says about Michael. “I’m not. I never was.” She knows Michael would want her to forgive Henry. He outright told her that when FEDRA had him locked up right before they killed him. But her pain is just too important to her for her to do that. And Perry is happy to validate her worst impulses. “Your brother was a great man. We all loved him,” he says. “But he didn’t change anything. You did. We’re with you.” Thanks, Perry. Big help. I’m sure that won’t encourage Kathleen to do something even more selfish and reckless than all the things she’s already done.

Sniper on the street

Joel and the gang emerge outside of Kathleen’s territory in a suburban neighborhood that seems safe at first glance, and the mood is relatively light as Ellie begins does her best Joel impression and encourages Henry and Sam to come with them to Wyoming. (In the game, Henry and Sam are already planning to track down the Fireflies, but here, they just want to get out of Kansas City for starters.) The calm is broken, however, when a sniper bullet strikes the ground near them and they dash behind a wrecked car for cover, plunging us into a sequence that owes a lot to the game.

The Pittsburgh suburbs section leading up to the sniper encounter is perhaps the game at its most ruinously beautiful.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku

Sniper bullets continue to rain down on them, and just as in the game, Joel opts to sneak around and try to come at the sniper from behind. In the game, though, what you find in the sniper’s perch is a young man with a knife, prompting a grisly button-mashing sequence in which you ultimately turn the blade on the man and stab him with it repeatedly. Here, Joel finds an older man, one of Kathleen’s faithful, who refuses Joel’s plea to just drop the gun, instead cementing his own death by turning the gun on Joel. Just then, Kathleen’s voice crackles over a radio. “Hold them where they are,” she says. “We’re almost there.”

“It ends the way it ends”

In the game, the one repurposed Humvee the Pittsburgh resistance claimed from FEDRA soon arrives, but here, Kathleen’s forces are much more well-equipped, and a number of vehicles are soon barreling down on Ellie, Henry, and Sam. Just as in the game, Joel provides cover with the sniper rifle, and here he takes out the driver of the truck leading the charge, sending it careening into a nearby house where it promptly explodes.

Read More: HBO’s The Last Of Us Just Nailed One Of The Game’s Best Moments

Still, Kathleen’s forces close in. Perry sends men after Joel, and Kathleen begins to address Henry, revealing that her hypocrisy and self-importance know no bounds. “I know why you did what you did,” she says, “but did you ever stop to think that maybe [Sam] was supposed to die?” When Henry protests that Sam is just a kid, she replies that kids die “all the time.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that by her moral calculus, Sam’s life should have been totally disregarded, while Michael’s life should have been prioritized above all. In one truly staggering moment of cognitive dissonance, she says “You think the whole world revolves around him?” as if she isn’t acting like the whole world revolves around her quest for vengeance.

Finally, Henry emerges. “It ends the way it ends,” Kathleen says as she raises her gun to kill him. This calls for a deus ex machina, baby!

Something wicked this way bloats

Just then, the truck nearby teeters and falls as the earth beneath it yawns open, and an absolute tidal wave of speedy infected rise up out of it, a kind of cosmic retribution for Kathleen’s hubris. (A mob of infected also bear down on the group during this sequence in the game, but it’s nothing like this.) Huh, I guess FEDRA didn’t really deal with the infected problem after all, they just tried to brush it aside. Showrunner Craig Mazin knows a thing or two about writing stories where institutions do that, I guess, having worked on Chernobyl as well.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

Suddenly Kathleen’s considerable show of force feels quite impotent, as the assault rifles have little effect in stemming the tide of death. Joel does the best he can to cover his allies amidst the chaos, but Ellie gets separated from Henry and Sam and climbs into an old SUV. Just then, a guttural growl unlike any sound we’ve heard an infected make thus far is heard, and a very different beast emerges from the sinkhole, a formidable, fungus-encrusted chonker of an infected called a bloater, a boss-type enemy from the game. Kathleen’s forces don’t have any of the molotov cocktails or nail bombs I usually use to take these bad boys down, so I think they’re pretty much fucked.

Read More: What Was That Giant Infected In Episode 5 Of The Last Of Us?

Perry peppers the thing with bullets but they clearly have little effect aside from making it mad. As it bears down on him, he urges Kathleen to get to cover, then turns to face his fate, which is having his head ripped clean off in a death consistent with one of the game’s most horrifying death animations.

Meanwhile, Ellie has a guest in her little SUV sanctuary: a creepy infected who was also a teenage girl before getting turned. Ellie heads out onto the street where she sees Henry and Sam pinned down by infected under a nearby car. With Joel’s help and a few stabs of her trusty switchblade—her signature weapon in the game—she gets them out and they make a run for it. Kathleen stops them yet again, but her success is short-lived, as a young infected—who I think but I’m not certain is the same one that chased Ellie out of the vehicle a moment before—leaps on her and absolutely shreds her to bits. It ends the way it ends.

As Joel leads them away from the chaos, we see the mob of infected, including the bloater, lurching its way back toward Kansas City. Nice going, Kathleen. Great job.

“I’m scared of ending up alone”

Joel and the gang have found shelter in an old motel for the night. In the game, there’s a nice moment here where Henry presses Joel for details about the time Joel and his brother Tommy rode Harley-Davidsons on a cross-country trip. That detail’s been omitted from the show, but the general arc of how things play out here is pretty similar.

“You think they’ll be okay?” Henry asks about the kids as they read Savage Starlight together in the next room, and Joel, in his own taciturn way, offers a kind of comfort to Henry, as a fellow protector of a young charge. It’s easier when you’re a kid, he says. “You don’t have anybody else relying on you. That’s the hard part.” Then comes a bit of playful meta-dialogue as Joel says, “What’s that comic book say? ‘Endure and survive’?” “Endure and survive,” Henry says. Then, after a moment: “That shit’s redundant.” “Yeah, it’s not great,” Joel agrees.

And now, as Ellie jokingly predicted earlier, Joel does indeed invite Henry and Sam to join them on the trip to Wyoming. It’s another one of those seemingly pleasant, hopeful moments that I find all the more painful because we’ll never get to see what might have come to pass if only the world they lived in were a little less dangerous and cruel. “Yeah, I think it’d be nice for Sam to have a friend,” Henry says. “New day, new start.” Okay, writers. Now you’re deliberately twisting the knife, jeeze.

Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku

Though Henry urges Sam to get some sleep, he and Ellie stay up for a bit, Ellie doing different voices as she reads Savage Starlight aloud. But Sam is preoccupied. “Are you ever scared?” he writes on his pad, a question he effectively asks her aloud in the game. (“How is it that you’re never scared?”) Just like in the game, Ellie first jokes that she’s afraid of scorpions, before admitting that what really scares her is the possibility of ending up alone.

In the game, when Ellie asks Sam what he’s scared of, he brings up infected. “What if the people are still inside?” he asks, and it’s the first time that the game directly engages with a terrifying idea that the show brings up early on: whether the person an infected once was remains somehow present and aware, even as they lose all control over their body. The game’s Ellie dismisses the idea, saying “that person is not in there anymore.” Her counterpart in the show, however, seems a bit more troubled by the idea.

The game’s Sam keeps his bite a secret, but in the show, after asking Ellie, “If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?” he lifts the leg of his jeans to show her the nasty wound. Ellie here does something strange and sweet and hopeless: she cuts her own hand to draw blood and press it into the bite, telling Sam, “My blood is medicine.” If only it were that simple.

What happens the next morning is so awful, I don’t even want to bring myself to write it. If you’re reading this recap, you probably know, and if you don’t, I think you can guess.

Screenshot: HBO

As they bury the bodies near the motel, Ellie sets Sam’s sketchpad atop his grave. On it, she’s written the words “I’m sorry.” She’s withdrawn and just wants to leave. You have to wonder if she isn’t starting to give up on the world herself. Meanwhile, as he looks at the message she’s written, Joel seems, if anything, more committed to Ellie than ever. Something in his face suggests that he wants to spare her an existence made up of this kind of relentless suffering. He collects his gear, picks up the sniper rifle (new weapon unlocked!), and they head west.

As I said above, I find this week’s episode excruciating, so miserable in its outcome that in retrospect, even the few bright spots make it more agonizing. I don’t know about you but good lord, after all this, I sure hope these two catch a bit of a break soon.

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Carolyn Petit

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February 11, 2023
HBO’s The Last Of Us Show Just Nailed One Of The Game’s Best Moments

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Image: HBO / Kotaku

It seems I was too quick to judge HBO’s The Last of Us. While the first four episodes certainly kept my attention as well-written and delightfully-shot prestige television, I had been a little let down as the adaptive process of turning the game into a show has, so far, left out the recreation of specific, memorable action sequences from the game. Well, with “Endure and Survive,” the fifth episode of the first (but not the last) season of The Last of Us, the show has revealed that it’s more than capable of adapting the action of the video game, and in some cases, just might be doing a better job with it.

Adapted from the hit PlayStation 3 title of the same name, The Last of Us’ gripping, character-driven plot exists alongside tense, deadly, moment-by-moment combat encounters. The player, as Joel, must overcome both hostile humans and infected with a combination of stealth, firearms, and crudely improvised weapons. For its first four episodes, HBO’s adaptation has, mostly, prioritized the story elements, choosing in some cases not to recreate memorable action sequences or feature unique, crafted props of the kind we’ve seen in the game. It makes sense for television to focus on the actors and the story, but until now I’ve found the show to be missing that key action ingredient I’ve loved so well, not just from seeing the game, but from playing it.

Read More: The Last of Us Show Might Be Better If It Worked More Like The Game

There’s a reason The Last of Us appears on our list of the best action games you can play this year. With a slower cadence than what you find in something like Naughty Dog’s other recent series, Uncharted, and an emphasis on survival, The Last of Us as a game injects tight, intense, action sequences throughout the narrative, reminding you that, however much things might feel under your control during the narrative downtime, you’re never actually safe in its deadly world.. The action sequences are when the rug has been pulled out from under you and you must deal with a situation in the here and the now. Mess up, and someone’s dying.

Our action game list highlighted the sequel, Part II, as being a bit more flexible, with more options for how you approach and respond to various situations. But the sequel follows what the first game already did so well: Moments where, forgive the cliche, all hell breaks loose and you must respond. Immediately. It’s stress-inducing action for sure, but damn, is it a thrill.

Read More: 16 Of The Best Action Games You Can Play In 2023

While I would’ve certainly traded the first game’s “upside-down” shootout sequence in the “Bill’s Town” level for the beautiful story of Bill and Frank we got in episode three of the show, I was beginning to worry that HBO’s TV adaptation would continue to leave out other, more explosive sequences rather than attempt to translate the immediacy of the game’s action to the screen. But here we are with episode five’s suburban sniper sequence. This gripping scene not only translates the game’s action particularly well, but does so with a narrative revision that makes the carnage even more intense.

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Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku

Read More: The Last of Us Fans Are Creating Amazing Bill And Frank Fan Art

Just like in the game, Joel and Ellie have teamed up with Henry and Sam. But this time, Henry and Sam’s situation is a bit more urgent. Kathleen, the leader of a revolutionary force, obsessively wants to see Henry die for his role in her brother’s death. Like the game, Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam must travel down an abandoned suburban street, moving from car to car to avoid getting shot by a sniper overlooking the area.

The TV show does depart a touch from this scenario as it exists in the game. To start, Joel isn’t faced with additional hostile forces on his approach to the sniper’s nest. And it becomes clear once Joel deals with the sniper that this individual belongs to the revolutionaries in Kansas City (the game’s parallel version of these events takes place in Pittsburgh and doesn’t feature Kathleen or any of the revolutionaries introduced in episode four). This is one of the improvements the show makes over the original game, something its sequel also worked harder to achieve: lending faces, complicated motivations, and identities to the antagonists.

Read More: The Last of Us Episode 4 Recap: A Return To The Familiar

But we need to talk about the sound design in the sniper sequence first. Though the show has caught my ear before (a particularly unnerving-yet-satisfying ambient music swell as Joel, Ellie, and Tess ascend the stairs in episode two’s museum is one such example), I am unhealthily obsessed with the gunshots in this scene. The exacting and penetrating strike of the sniper rifle’s shot is chased by a split second of silence that could swallow the universe, followed up with a timeless whisper of air and sensually percussive hits on the bodies and windows of cars. Satisfying bangs funneled into powerful clangs, sharp shatters of glass…heavy metal bands will spend their entire careers trying to deliver something so sonically beautiful and destructive at the same time. This is bliss.

The sounds are loveable as special effects and creations on their own, but the effect really drew me in with an intimacy of the kind I’ve felt in video games—and in particular, the one this show is based on. The scene that mirrors this one in the video game is one example, but the latter half of The Last of Us Part II also has a similar sniper scenario. Cover-to-cover movement with the threat of violence pressing you back is successfully brought to life on screen. But we’re not done yet.

Screenshot: HBO

Like in the game, Joel eventually gets to the top of the sniper’s nest, eliminates the shooter and must then get behind the scope as hostile human forces march forward. In the show, the personality-less mob of foes is replaced by new-character Kathleen on her quest for revenge, with her forces in tow. Joel must make several needle-threading shots, one of which is recreated from the game: Hitting the driver of a hostile vehicle, with the camera going behind the scope of the rifle itself. And yes, like the game, that car crashes into a house…a house which has a surprise in store.

Read More: Who Are Kathleen and Perry In HBO’s The Last of Us?

The TV show’s vehicle veers off and crashes to the right side. It crashes on the left in the game; this mirror image of recreated scenes seems to be a common element of the show. Joel and Sarah are flipped in their position on the couch in the opening episode; Joel’s “I am sure you will figure that out” line of dialogue to Ellie asking what the hell she’s supposed to do while he naps in the first episode sees the couch he lays on flipped to the other side of the room.

And while a cluster of infected does ultimately flood the street in the game as well, it’s quite different in the show. Here, the emergence of a horde of infected from underground serves as the payoff to some wonderful foreshadowing in the previous episode and earlier scenes in this one, where we learn that FEDRA had previously chased all the infected underground as a way to “fix” the problem. It’s clear that this is something that will resurface to cause a problem. And in this scene, once you see that truck fall into the house…you know what’s coming, and that the hubris that led Kathleen to go to such extremes will soon claim its price.

Screenshot: HBO

Shattering the calm insanity of Kathleen’s myopic quest for vengeance, the fallen truck and the chorus of screams and roars from the mob of infected it unleashes is a powerful release, snapping us out of the daze of trying to follow Kathleen’s justification for cruelty. We’re barely given time to digest the contours of her bloodlust as the infected’s long-buried rage drowns out all, the great equalizer that considers no one safe and needs no justification for its wrath and violence. At the end of this scene, I felt the instinctual urge to put down the controller and take a breath. Except there was no controller.

Episode five’s sniper scenario doesn’t just adapt a key action sequence of the game, it makes it better. The pacing is tighter, more intense. The narrative wrapping pulls you into what’s at stake in a far more satisfying way, and it earns its zombie mob scene. This is the kind of game sequence adaptation I’ve been waiting for in HBO’s show, and it did not disappoint. Until next time, I’m gonna go see if Whole Foods has crow on sale.

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Claire Jackson

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February 10, 2023
‘The Last of Us’ Unleashes Its Most Monstrous Ending Yet

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With its fifth episode, The Last of Us once again gifts us a pair of new, beautifully realized characters, only to remove them from the board in harrowing fashion. Mercifully, these emotional deaths come after the show’s biggest monster sequence yet, thanks to the arrival of the dreaded Bloater—among the most iconic villains from the Last of Us video game on which the Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann show is based. More on that piece of work in a bit. First, let’s rewind the clock to the top of this tragic tale.

Written by Mazin and directed by Jeremy Webb, “Endure and Survive” begins nearly a fortnight before the events of last week’s episode. We see what, up until now, we had only heard about: Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen and her allies taking back their home from the cruel Kansas City chapter of FEDRA. Power abhors a cruelty vacuum, and Kathleen’s here to fill it, presiding over a new group of people more than willing to execute their enemies on the streets with public hangings and shootings aplenty.

“Did it feel good, betraying your neighbors to FEDRA, watching us get thrown in prison, watching us hang, so you can get medicine, alcohol… fucking apples?” Kathleen asks a literally captive audience minutes before ordering their deaths. “Did it make you feel better? Did it make you feel safe? How does it make you feel now?”

As the episode wears on, we learn more about the vengeful tune humming beneath all of Kathleen’s actions: a laser-focused quest to find and kill the aforementioned Henry, a young man who collaborated with FEDRA to get medicine for his sick brother Sam. The cost of that medicine: selling out Kathleen’s brother, Michael, leader of the Kansas City resistance. Pushed on the subject by her second-in-command Perry (played by The Last of Us video game alum Jeffrey Pierce), Kathleen relents that Michael would have advocated for mercy against Henry. But Michael’s not here anymore, is he? And Kathleen doesn’t care about what he would have wanted, only what she wants. Given that she liberated them from FEDRA, the whole of Kansas City is backing her play. That’s the kind of commanding presence even Twitter trolls can’t deny.

In the other corner of this conflict: Henry, the most wanted man in Kansas City, and his younger brother, the eight-year-old superhero named Sam. Many years his senior, Henry wants nothing more than to get his brother safely out of the city. But after nearly two weeks in hiding and no discernible plan of action in sight, Henry and Sam’s options are starting to look rather grim — until Joel and Ellie roll into town, guns blazing.

Identifying the Last of Us leads as possible allies, Henry and Sam follow Joel and Ellie through the city and into the night, making their acquaintance by way of sticking unloaded guns in their faces. Perhaps one can forgive Joel for responding to this introduction with his “asshole voice” as he warily studies Henry and Sam. Ultimately, he hears them out at Ellie’s behest, and in time, they all agree on a plan: escape Kansas City by way of a tunnel system, once loaded with infected, now presumably empty.

The trip leads the four travelers to an abandoned underground community. An hours-long break quickens the bonds within the group, particularly between the youngest members of the party. Sam, who is deaf, immediately clicks with Ellie over a shared love of corny jokes and comic books. Joel and Henry, meanwhile, tacitly connect over a shared instinct to protect their loved ones at all costs. As Henry recounts the tale of betraying the Kansas City resistance to save his brother’s life, he openly wonders whether or not he’s crossed a point of no return.

“I’m a bad guy, because I did a bad guy thing,” says Henry. “You get it, though. You may not be her father, but you were someone’s. I can tell.”

Joel isn’t one to look back at his past. He certainly isn’t about to discuss his dead daughter with a group of strangers, even ones as pleasant as these. On the other side of their rest stop, with Kansas City falling behind them, Ellie makes a pitch: these strangers should join them on their journey to Wyoming. There’s no time to debate it, however, as the group comes under attack — first by a lone sniper, whom Joel sneaks upon and kills, and then by Kathleen’s entire army, with Henry finally in their sights.

The group faces overwhelming odds, even with Joel now standing in sniper position. He shoots a single truck driver, plowing the exploding vehicle into an abandoned house. But soon, everyone’s outnumbered. Left with few options, Henry surrenders, offering to trade his life for his brother’s safety. Kathleen refuses. “I know why you did what you did,” she tells her target, “but did you ever stop to think he was supposed to die?”

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Josh Wigler

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February 10, 2023
What Was That Giant Infected In The Last Of Us Episode 5?

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Image: HBO

If you just finished watching episode five of HBO’s The Last of Us, you might be wondering just what that giant infected was that the show made a big deal about but didn’t actually bother to explain. Well friends, what you saw is colloquially called a bloater by characters like Joel and Ellie, and it’s a focal point of certain enemy encounters in The Last of Us games. But you wouldn’t know that based on what the show’s actually portrayed so far. So let’s talk about why these big baddies are so impactful to game fans.

What is a bloater?

A bloater is considered to be one of the end stages of infection for victims of the cordyceps fungus ravaging the world of The Last of Us. Unlike the more common clickers, people who have reached bloater stage are pretty much entirely encased in the fungus that grows from out of an infected’s head. This happens when the victim’s been infected for years and has somehow managed to “survive” that long. As Joel mentions in episode two, most infected only live around a month or so, but clickers and bloaters have been infected so long that the fungus has desecrated their eyes and they have to use echolocation to navigate. Clickers are more abundant, but if an infected lives long enough to become a bloater, its hulking frame and exploding pus sacks—oh yes, it has exploding pus sacks that it throws at Joel and Ellie—make it far more dangerous.

How do bloaters work in The Last of Us games?

Bloaters appear as mini-bosses at multiple points throughout both The Last of Us and its sequel. Originally, the enemy made its debut in Bill’s fortified town, but because the show took a very different approach to that story in episode three, the bloater didn’t debut until the Kansas City episodes. A bloater is an especially powerful enemy that, if it grabs you, will take you out in one hit. Perry’s death, in which the bloater tears his head from his body, is an homage to a death animation in the games in which a bloater can grab Joel or Ellie and do exactly that. The games do a hard cut to black before showing the extent of the damage, but still show enough to give a sense of just how gruesome the death will be. Shoutout to HBO for shooting that scene from a distance so we didn’t have to see Perry’s execution in excruciating detail.

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Unlike clickers, bloaters aren’t susceptible to a stealth kill with a shiv or Ellie’s switchblade, so you have to take them out the old-fashioned way with bullets and molotov cocktails. Both games have a few bloaters you can stealth past, though, allowing you to avoid fighting them entirely. But if you can’t manage that, you’ll inevitably use up quite a bit of your supplies taking them out.

Read more: The Big Ways The Last Of Us Show Changes The Game’s Lore

Are bloaters an infected’s final form?

In theory, a standard infected will either survive long enough to become a bloater, or they’ll die and the cordyceps fungus will continue to grow out of their bodies and into the environment around them. In episode one, Tess and Joel stumble upon a dead infected which was pretty much grown into the wall in the Boston quarantine zone. However, as The Last of Us Part II illustrates, environmental factors can influence how the cordyceps evolves at different stages of infection.

The Last of Us Part II takes place primarily in Seattle, and while there, Ellie faces a different variation of late-stage infection called shamblers. Similar to bloaters, these infected are covered head to toe in the cordyceps fungus, but rather than slinging fungal explosives at the player, Shamblers spray acid from their bodies and explode when killed. Though the reason for this divergence in infection is never confirmed, the player can find notes around Seattle that theorize it was due to the rain and moisture in the city. This seems reasonable enough, but shamblers also appear in Part II’s late-game Santa Barbara sections. This might just be an example of gameplay getting in the way of worldbuilding, but whatever the case, there are other possible fates for an infected beyond turning into a bloater…though we might not see them in the show until the upcoming second season.

The most advanced form of infection The Last of Us has shown was in an infamous boss fight in Part II with an entity called the Rat King. This was the culmination of multiple infected growing into each other to create one giant, vicious beast in the lower floors of a Seattle hospital, which was the city’s infection ground zero. This phenomenon has only been seen once in the series so far, and occurred in such specific circumstances that it seems incredibly rare in the world of The Last of Us.

While the bloater is a rarity in The Last of Us’ universe, every time they appear in the games it’s an impactful moment. The bloater’s first appearance in HBO’s show was pretty major, but we’ll have to wait and see if anyone actually bothers to explain why it was significant in a future episode.

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Kenneth Shepard

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February 10, 2023
Kit Harington Addresses Rumored ‘Game Of Thrones’ Jon Snow Spin-Off

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While Jon Snow knows nothing, Kit Harington is well aware of the rabid fervor surrounding his own “Game of Thrones” spin-off.

The native Londoner addressed rumors about the prospective series during an appearance Friday on “The Tonight Show.” Harington didn’t officially confirm it was in development but admitted that any more bruises to his ego could change that.

“I don’t know, man… I walk down the street, and I get recognized a little less nowadays, and it kind of hurts my ego, you know?” I’m pretty close to, like, putting on some furs,” Harington told Fallon before adding, “I got a tally in my head of how few photos I get asked for in a day.”

He continued: “And when it gets below a certain number, I think I’ll do a spin-off.”

Fallon then jokingly begged his audience to stop asking Harington for photos in a cheeky attempt to spawn the Snow-laden series. He said, “we would see a ‘Game of Thrones’ spin-off right now with Jon Snow” if the viewers would stop bothering Harington.

Harington ultimately admitted that he “can’t say anything” about his prospective reprisal as Jon Snow. However, news of a sequel series being in early development was first reported in June 2022 by The Hollywood Reporter. Even Maisie Williams, who played his sister, was excited.

“I think it’s really exciting, and I think that Kit is such a phenomenal actor,” Williams told People last year. “Him playing Jon Snow was just like a cultural reset. I think everything he touches is magic, and I’m excited to see what it will be.”

Harington has long suggested that he has been yearning to reprise his role as the King in the North.

The actor told EW during a “Game of Thrones” convention last year that Snow “would’ve felt he got off lightly” after merely being banished to the Wall in the North after killing Daenerys (Emilia Clarke). However, Harington said what happened next was ripe for exploration.

“He’s gotta go back up to the place with all this history and live out his life thinking about how he killed Danny… about Ygritte dying in his arms… about how he hung Olly, and… about all of this trauma,” Harington told the outlet. “And that… that’s interesting.”

Harington added viewers “wanted some kind of little smile that things are OK” at the end but that Snow was definitely “not OK.” He described Snow’s banishment as “the greatest curse” and seemingly hopes — like Fallon’s audience — that it’ll one day be depicted.

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February 4, 2023
The Last Of Us Fans Think The HBO Series Has Cast Its Abby

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Big arms big arms big arms.
Image: Sony / Naughty Dog /Kotaku

We’re only one episode deep into HBO’s live-action adaptation of The Last of Us and fans think they’ve discovered the actor who’ll play Abby.

In a recent tweet, The Last of Us News, a community-run TLoU fan account, uploaded a screenshot of the game creator, Neil Druckmann, following actor Shannon Berry on Instagram. Of course, Druckmann’s following of The Wilds actor could just be his way of pulling a Hideo Kojima by showing interest in actors who star in shows that are similar to his own works.

But give the internet an inch and they’ll take a mile because Twitter has been buzzing about how perfect Berry’s casting would be for Abby, especially when you consider how closely her face resembles the former Firefly and surprise co-star of The Last of Us Part II. It probably also doesn’t help that Berry’s followed Druckmann back on Insta, but that’s show business baby!

“Hey, she’s 22. Bella Ramsey is 19. Their age difference is spot on for Ellie and Abby,” one Twitter user wrote.

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“God, I hope it happens. She’s the perfect Abby,” wrote another.

“Whoever gets the role I really hope they don’t get the abuse Laura Bailey did!! Neither Laura or whoever gets the role for the series deserves it!” another observed.

“Becoming a Shannon Berry Abby Anderson truther as we speak,” wrote one Twitter user, who went the extra mile by making a Kpop-style fancam video of the actor after someone’s suggestion that Florence Pugh would be a good Abby.

Should Abby appear in TLoU (prestige TV edition), “Abby Anderson truthers” think the show should save her appearance for the final episode of the season, so as to create a neat throughline between the original game’s ending and its sequel.

Read More: HBO’s The Last Of Us Is A Safe Show That’s Caught Between Big Changes, Expectations

The Worst (And Not-So-Bad) Video Game Movies

Since The Last of Us premiered on the streamer, fans and critics alike have heralded the HBO show as the one that’s finally broken the terrible video game adaptation curse. While I think the show knocked it out of the park with its 80-minute pilot episode, I can’t help but notice the pop culture zeitgeist’s tendency to haphazardly regurgitate that accolade whenever a new video game adaptation that isn’t dog water comes out.

The ‘95 Mortal Kombat movie (which is good, don’t @ me), Paramount Pictures’ Sonic films, and Netflix’s Castlevania, League of Legends, and Cyberpunk 2077 shows have all rightfully received the same praise for their overall quality and respect for source material. But much like how Disney keeps having new “first LGBTQ characters,” gamers always tout the latest video game adaptation hotness as finally having “broken the curse” despite us having gone through this whole song and dance like five times over the past two years or so. I suppose recency bias is a bitch.

Regardless, we’ll have to wait and see whether the internet’s admittedly parasocial stalking of Druckmann’s Insta follows results in Berry’s casting as Abby. But right now let’s just appreciate how yoked out Abby is.

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Isaiah Colbert

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January 20, 2023
‘The White Lotus’ Cast Takes Over Fashion Week

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When the season two finale of “The White Lotus” came out and subsequently shattered hearts, minds and several fictional relationships, audiences around the world were not only left with a number of questions of where the characters will go next, but also a hole in our Sunday evenings. We missed seeing their problematic but lovable faces weekly.

Well, Men’s Fashion Week heard the world’s prayers and came to answer them. As the Fall 2023 season has gone on in Milan and Paris, it’s been near impossible to scan a celebrity front row and not see someone from “The White Lotus.”

Albie, Cameron and Ethan (a.k.a. Adam DiMarco, Theo James and Will Sharpe) returned to Italy for the Prada, Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani shows, respectively, while Sicilian icons Lucia and Valentino (Simona Tabasco and Sabrina Impacciatore) stunned at J.W. Anderson’s latest debut. Tabasco then kept the fun going in Paris at Ami’s Fall 2023 event.

Take a look at who we’ve spotted so far.

Simona Tabasco at Ami Paris Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

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Adam DiMarco at Prada Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Prada

Simona Tabasco at J.W. Anderson Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

Theo James at Giorgio Armani Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Courtesy of Giorgio Armani

Sabrina Impacciatore at J.W. Anderson Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

Will Sharpe at Emporio Armani Menswear Fall 2023

Photo: Courtesy of Emporio Armani

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Brooke Frischer

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January 20, 2023

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