DJariya

HBO says tonight's episode is 86 minutes.


Also, if you're not familiar with her name. Annie Wersching, who voiced Tess in the game, died of cancer at 45. She was a long-time working actress

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dex14

This episode is supposed to be incredible.

Deftones

Man that is brutal. I wonder if that is why she was wearing a wig in The Rookie and why they did what they did with her character.

Maxflier

And it certainly was.
It was like a movie in itself.

Why So Blu?

Wow, phenomenal episode. Get ready for the backlash, though,,,

maxfisher

That was so goddam good that I don't even care about the kind of dumb explanation for the pandemic braking out. Offerman and Bartlett were fantastic. The writing and direction did an incredible job of playing off the audience’s cynicism and telling a different kind of story than we expected. I loved the use of On the Nature of Daylight in the soundtrack, even though I feel like I recently saw something else that borrowed it. And it was just masterful the way they not only told an incredible story with Bill and Frank, but tied it so perfectly into the main story in regards to plot, motivation and theme. Just a phenomenal hour+ of television.

Draven

Incredible - wasn’t exactly sure what story they were telling and then it just stuck the landing, giving Joel everything he needed to continue the mission. Just wonderful.

Dan

Very sad to hear about this. I loved her on 24.

Fantastic episode tonight, driving home the importance of Joel's mission.

Pretty fucked up that


Quoting from the thread for the last episode:
well, well, well...

Mike86

It was a good episode. The only thing about it is that it felt very detached and like it could have almost been a stand-alone thing. Still a good story and showing the changes over the course of the outbreak and Frank and Bill’s time together.

dsa_shea

Thankfully they went a different direction with how Bill's Town played out than it did in the game. It was definitely a great episode.

Decker

That was an amazing, incredibly emotional episode of TV. I’m kind of a wreck. Expect this one to be honored at the Emmys next Fall. Sorry Peter Gould & Vince Gilligan and Jesse David Armstrong, I think the writing prize was won tonight.

csant

I agree... what an amazing episode and it will win some awards for sure.

Can't wait for more. I'm loving having to wait a week for the next episode. This is the type of show I don't want to rush through. =)

outcastja

I was looking forward to the show recreating the scene when we first met Bill in the game since it was one of my favorite moments in the game....but this was so much better.

Giantrobo

All I have to say is Go Woke, Go Broke.

just kidding. That was a good ep.

DJariya

That was incredible. Offerman and Bartlett were fantastic. Beautiful love story. And the piano scene where they bonded to the Linda Ronstadt song was also well done. The final scene between them as they drank the wine and prepared to die together was also very moving. Not many creative folks would take a chance with a story like this. Kudos to Druckmann and Mazin. They did a good job tying their story to Joel’s as well. Nick Offerman deserves an Emmy for his work here.

nickdawgy

I said the same thing to the wife. Very emotional and my favorite episode of the three so far.

maxfisher

The episode was so good that I hate to complain about part of it, but that explanation is the only thing that fell completely flat for me. Cooking food kills fungi, bacteria, etc. They may leave harmful toxins behind, but they’re not going to be alive and able to spread. if they wanted a foodborne cause, they should’ve picked something people eat raw.

Also, I don’t think there’s any widely consumed food that’s sourced from a single location. Certainly flour isn’t. There’s no way tainted food at one location would cause a simultaneous global outbreak. I don’t think it would detract anything from the story if it the pandemic took a couple weeks to spread around the world, so I’m not sure why they felt the need to stress that it broke out everywhere on the same day.

But again, the episode was so well done that it feels petty to complain.

GoldenJCJ

Agreed with everyone here. This was a great episode. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop - Walking Dead style - where bad things happen just for the sake of bad things happening. I’m glad the writers didn’t take the bait on writing the story like that.

I think Bill’s way of living after the “end of the world” is how many of us would like to think we’d be living too. Even though we’d all probably be the ones on the bus to be slaughtered.

I agree that the description of how the plague broke out doesn’t make a lot of sense but I’m just going to assume Joel didn’t have all the facts. He said something like, “No one really knows how it started…” at the beginning of his explanation. It’s possible that over the last 20 years, misinformation and exaggeration, with mass communication down, has made the actual reason for the plague to be lost to time.

csant

That's the way I took it. Joel didnt really know. I hope in a later episode its explain in more detail.

dex14

I didn't take the explanation as the be all end all explanation.

Dan

Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest Joel was 100% correct with my silly reply. It just shows that the characters, at least some of them, believe that theory 20 years later. But there's enough doubt there that it doesn't have to be right.
However I don't expect them to really dive deep into explaining how it actually happened. IMO, that makes for a different kind of show, and not necessarily what the writers want to focus on.

Decker

As long as we're picking nits, how the heck did they create, manufacture, and distribute those testing guns that give instant infection results after the fall of civilization? We are three years post-pandemic and it still takes me 15 minutes to get a Covid result using a much bigger machine.

dsa_shea

I thought that the testing guns were silly as well. The producers do a great job in the series with making areas look unlived in after years of being abandoned. More in line with how I would think areas would look than they were presented in the game. Sure there are some structures that would age and fall apart quicker than others, but not the majority in a 20 year span of abandonment.

I take the flour explanation as a partial attempt at an explanation to the cause of the pandemic. If the flour was primarily sourced from a certain part of the world, and thousands of people around the world use it to make products with, then you start with those thousands of people being infected from direct contact. Others around become secondarily infected through exposure or bites. However, as we have all dealt with this current pandemic, there would still be parts of the world unaffected for a good amount of time once the outbreak happened. I hope they explore that idea at some point during this series.

davidh777

I hate that I’m so cynical that I wanted Bill to tell Frank to stop playing the piano and just get out of the house.

I didn’t notice the running time or I wouldn’t have tried to start watching at 10:30 to slip it in before bedtime. Of course I couldn’t stop watching.

Deftones

Damn that hits hard. Wonderful episode. I am really enjoying seeing Offerman in these smaller bit parts. He was good in The Resort, too.

I didn't catch this but the final shot is an homage to the title scene of the first game:
https://www.darkhorizons.com/last-of...-3-final-shot/