Decker

Giantrobo

Honestly... I know S2 is gonna happen but i'd be ok with this 1 season.

Deftones

Do not read shit about the sequel game. Massive spoilers. Go into it fresh if you haven't or won't play the game.

Deftones

Yay! They did it! And we got giraffes!

I do agree this felt very rushed. There could have been one episode before this one to give us a bit more before the sudden ending. Still fantastic and I am so glad they basically stuck to the general plot of the game.

dsa_shea

This season felt like one of those really delicious meals but with a feeling of starvation just a few hours later. It could have been fleshed out a bit more, in my opinion. The university visit alone should have been 20-30 minutes, and Ellie and David should have fought shoulder to shoulder against some baddies. That is what gave their final confrontation more weight in the game and would have in the show.

TomOpus

‘The Last of Us’ Passes ‘House of the Dragon’ in Full-Season Viewers

GoldenJCJ

Great episode but it was too short. I liked the abrupt, cliffhanger-esque ending but it felt rushed to me.


I seem to remember in one of the first episodes Joel telling Tess that they’ve found “special” people similar to Ellie before and it has never resulted in a cure. There was no guarantee that experimenting on Ellie this time would actually find a cure for humanity. That coupled with Joel’s love for Ellie and his grief over his daughter, it seems like a no-brainer for Joel to do what he did.

Draven

In the simplest terms, Joel was not going to let “the government” take another daughter from him. I loved seeing him tear through the Fireflies and I appreciated that the character didn’t show mercy that would ultimately come back to bite him in the ass.

A fantastic end to a fantastic season!

Side note - I laughed at the ladder part. I told my wife that boosting the smaller character up to get a ladder was a very video game thing

MrX

IGN has been making these for every episode, here's the game/show comparison for the finale. The spoiler alert at the beginning is just for what happens in the episode, it doesn't spoil anything from the next game.

kefrank

For me, one of the things that justifies Joel's actions is that Marlene didn't tell Ellie the truth either. Marlene tells Joel that Ellie isn't scared because she doesn't know the surgery will be fatal. Neither one of them was really giving Ellie a genuine choice. And would you even want to put that choice on a 14 year old? It's a complex ethical dilemma mixed with very strong, subjective emotions. When the episode ended, I wasn't really sure how I felt about it all but as I've reflected on it, I really like that the season ended in such a layered way.

blairwitchfan

When i was watching, i was thinking, wow that's a terrible CGI giraffe and now I just read they used a real giraffe so maybe I need to calibrate my Tv or my eyes

Dan

The reason the giraffe looked weird was because everything around it was CGI. So putting a real animal in front of that just doesn't look right.


Agreed with kefrank above that Marlene was ultimately no better, withholding the truth from Ellie. Not giving her a chance to see Joel, not giving her the option to choose, even if she would have chosen sacrifice... Plus, rewatching it, you can tell even Marlene is skeptical about the doctor's plan. Her body language, hesitations, etc.
Plus, when she tells her militia goons to walk him out, she 100% knew he was going to fight back.
The fireflies are a bit of a clown show in that regard. FEDRA... the Kansas City rebels... The Fireflies... even Joel & Tess... they all kind of suck. Joel's decision was completely selfish, and 'wrong' in many ways. But it's also the only decision he -- the person that he is -- was ever going to make. It's one thing I like about the game in particular...


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Finisher

Yeah, at least make him struggle a little. Outnumbered like 20-1 and just slinked around with plot armor.

Enjoyed the season but this finale was too abrupt and didn't really land as well as it could have imo.

mugwump

I'm gonna be that guy and question how giraffes survive the winter in Salt Lake City. In zoos they move inside for the duration once there's a nip in the air.

GoldenJCJ

I won’t defend that sequence for being realistic or grounded in any way, because it certainly wasn’t but I did appreciate how they filmed it. They gave Joel a very “man possessed” appearance throughout. The sound was muffled like he was in a daze and he was expressionless throughout, like his brain was only firing in some sort of self-protect mode. It almost played like an out-of-body experience for Joel while it was happening.

I’m probably not explaining along that very well.

GoldenJCJ

I only caught a few glimpses of their surroundings but it looked like the giraffes were roaming around an old baseball stadium. It could be argued that there are big enough corridors and tunnels under the stadium to house a herd of giraffes in cold weather.

maxfisher

Is 'selfish' the right word? I mean, if you put most people in a version of the trolley scenario where it's one person they love vs X number of strangers, the strangers are going to die. I don't know that I'd label such a choice as selfish, unless we want to wade into discussing whether an action can truly not be selfish, as people generally always do what they believe will cause them either the most pleasure or least pain.

Also, it's been a long while since I played the game, but the feeling I had then was that the Fireflies and their doctors were pretty much grasping at straws. As in, they were killing Ellie more in the hopes of learning something than out of a confidence that they could create a treatment. Maybe that's just my memory being faulty, but I felt like the show wanted us to more fully accept that Ellie dying would save humanity, while the game was iffier on whether that was a possibility.

That's a good description and I think they did a great job putting the scene together in a way that conveyed his almost primal state of mind. It just felt off to have it be so easy for him to take everyone out. I think they could've kept that kind of primitive, instinctual reaction, but still had the Fireflies mount a bit of a challenge to him.

kefrank

I get what you're saying and I agree - I think they made an artistic choice to present the sequence in an unrealistic way, particularly in contrast to other action sequences in the prior episodes. They presented it almost as how Joel's subconscious was perceiving it, which was essentially, "No one will come close to stopping me from getting to Ellie right now."

davidh777

And very Naughty Dog especially. I felt compelled to hit the triangle button at that moment.

It looked just like the game. That was great.

Draven

I also figured the Fireflies weren't necessarily ready for a firefight in the hospital that day. They probably didn't even realize what was going on.

Paff

One of the things I liked about the finale is that the answer to immunity is right there, but Ellie's mom lied (she was infected before giving birth and cutting the umbilical cord). Scientists could duplicate the scenario with a pregnant woman, although she'd have to be willing to sacrifice her life to do so. But that's an easier ask of a grown woman than of a 14 year old child.

But we'll never know because of the lie. And I like that moral ambiguity. It's like in the seldom seen George Romero movie The Crazies, where a cure is discovered right as an angry non infected mob descends on the lab and the cure is destroyed.

kefrank

I don't know that the lie mattered that much in the long run aside from the fact that it kept the Fireflies from killing the baby immediately. Marlene seemed skeptical of the lie at the time and based on what she tells Joel in the finale, she certainly knows now that Ellie's mom got infected before the birthing process was complete. It seems like trying to duplicate that scenario would be extremely fraught. They'd have to produce a controlled scenario with one infected biting the mother when labor is almost complete, but not the medical personnel nor the newly born baby. That alone seems nearly impossible given what we saw in the show about the abilities of the infected and their connected nature. They also have no way of knowing exactly how long between the mom being bitten and the umbilical cord being cut leads to immunity vs. the baby just being fatally infected. And even if they managed to reproduce it, in order to harvest the solution they'd have to kill the baby just like they were going to have to kill Ellie. I might be missing something, but the dots aren't connecting for me.

Geofferson

Thought it was a decent finale - although unusually short? Think it clocked in at 45 mins or so.

Overall I thought the season was good - though not great. Benefited from a couple truly outstanding episodes whereas the remainder I felt was just decent television. That said, was definitely good enough to want to return for another season so am looking forward to that.

Giantrobo

All the things you guys are bringing up are addressed in the Official HBO Podcast. You don't have to guess. Stuff like lying to the ones you love, Lies to protect people you love, Lies that you choose to believes even though you know it's a lie, Crazy shit we do for Love, etc...all of it.

DJariya

For those of you who need a physical copy in 4K.

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