New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: We’re back again! FLASH-back, that is!
This one isn’t as big a departure from the action as the Bill episode was a few weeks back, but it does mean that last week’s cliffhanger goes mostly unresolved. Ellie does take a crack at patching Joel up, though it seems to me that sticking a decades-old unsanitized needle into an open wound is just as likely to kill him as save him…
Kyle: If the flashback here seems a bit out of place it’s probably because this storyline was originally part of the game’s « Left Behind » DLC, which was written and released well after the first game came out. I’m not totally against putting it here in the show’s narrative—it’s important background that should go somewhere—but it does step on one of the more dramatic moments in the game (though maybe that’s still coming in the future?)
Given how we first met Ellie as a prisoner in the show, I definitely appreciate giving a little more time to showing what she was like trying to grow up as a normal kid under FEDRA’s version of society.
HBO
Andrew: Yeah, I don’t have a problem with the episode, and people watching this in the future when the whole season is available to binge straight through probably won’t be as bothered by the delayed cliffhanger.
This does flirt with a thing that I can find frustrating in fiction, though—this impulse to show/explain every single little thing about a character instead of letting things be implied or a little mysterious. I’m not overly bothered by it here, but if TLoU stretches into a second or third season I could see them leaning on flashback-as-filler in a way that could be less interesting.
Did you ever wonder, viewers, about how Ellie got her knife? How Bill got his truck?! Tune in next week!
Kyle: As long as they don’t go full 50-years-of-Star-Wars-filler on it, I think it’ll be OK…
Andrew: Anyway, those things aside, this episode lets us spend a big chunk of time with Ellie sans Joel for the first time, which I appreciate. It’s a flashback to a few days? Weeks? Months? Before the start of the series, when Ellie is a just a Teen With A Bad Attitude in FEDRA high school instead of a Possible Savior of Humankind.
Kyle: In the game I believe it’s set a few weeks before Ellie meets Joel, so let’s go with that.
I was glad to see a well-acted version of Riley here, acting as a foil to push and pull Ellie in interesting directions. Even if I didn’t know what was going to happen, though, I think it’d be pretty hard to get too attached to her. The pattern of « meet a new character; See them connect with the characters we love; Oops they’re dead within an episode or two » is already getting a bit played out. It’s possible to go to that well too often…
HBO
Andrew: Two’s company, three’s a crowd in The Last of Us universe, and if you spend any time with Ellie and Joel you’d better have an exit strategy figured out. I appreciate the commitment to keeping the focus narrow but what if more characters, like Tommy, were simply allowed to depart and keep having their own lives instead of dying horribly? I guess we’ll never know.
Kyle: I guess it feels a little different in the game because these characters tend to linger with you a little longer—even if that time is often artificially lengthened by shootouts and whatnot. So the pattern is still there in the game, but it doesn’t seem so predictably timed to end-of-episode breaks.
Andrew: Let’s give some props to the set designers, though, who seem thrilled to work on something that isn’t another run-down residential area. The design of the dilapidated, abandoned mall—the episode’s big setpiece—has tons of fun details. I didn’t go frame-by-frame to check and make sure that all the real stores mentioned/depicted were portrayed exactly as they would have been in September 2003, but the presence of an abandoned mall with all of its anchor stores intact is very true to the early ’00s.
Other « society crumbled in September 2003! » things I liked: of course there would be a pop-up Halloween store in this mall, and Ellie is listening to a cut from 2002’s Riot Act, the final in-universe Pearl Jam album. (Unless Eddie Vedder survived the apocalypse; of all the alternative rock stalwarts, he’s the one I’d bet on, honestly.)
