Capricasix

Thomas had never seen such a mess!

I mean, he’s no Leonardo DiCaprio 🤷🏽‍♀️😄 (and thank dog for that!) Edited to add that I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’ve read on social media that the HBO podcast revealed that Pedro ad-libbed Joel’s speech in the scene with Tommy. Even more reason why he deserves an Emmy! (I mean, he deserves one just for being incredibly hot, but they don’t seem to have a category for that 😡😄) Serial editing to add - after listening to the relevant part of the podcast, I learned that Craig Mazin wrote most of it but Pedro ad-libbed the line about waking up and feeling like Joel lost something, and all he’s ever done is fail her, again and again 🥺 (I feel like he’s also talking about Sarah and Tess, not just about Ellie)

She’s 14. Teenagers, especially young ones, love to say things that they think are shocking to adults around them. She’s testing her limits like many teenagers do. This does not mean that there’s some kind of inappropriate tension between them.

Oh, OK. I thought it was a variation on a potluck or something like that 😄 Thanks!

Please to explain what is a Potbelly lunch?

I remember a line in the first book, when James and Siegfried met for the first time, that specifically references Siegfried and Tristan’s parents’ love for Wagner. That had to have been pure dramatic licence, considering Siegfried’s name IRL was Donald 😄

My minor quibble was with Maria’s pregnancy, specifically the likelihood of a viable pregnancy at her age. What did the chalkboard memorial say about her son‘s birth year? Was it 1997? I’d have to go back and look. It’s not a big deal, as it’s certainly possible for a woman to have a successful pregnancy in her late forties. Hilary Swank is something like 48 and pregnant with her first child, I believe.

Apropos of nothing, the resistance fighters in the Terminator universe used detector dogs in a similar way as in this episode 🤔

I really don’t think Joel is dead. And I never played the game, so I know very little of the backstory - but I don’t think his story ends so soon. I forgot to add the part that made me laugh out loud - when Joel was teaching Ellie how to target-shoot and he took the gun to show her that it was still working fine, he said something about how to aim it, and she said, “Are you gonna shoot it or get it pregnant?” LOL 🤣

Another great episode. I’ll need to watch it again (and again) to catch anything I missed the first time. I always enjoy seeing Graham Greene in anything. He’s a Canadian acting institution. The only thing puzzling me is, how Maria (Tommy’s wife? I think that was her name) is still young enough to have children. She was an ADA in the Before Times, which would mean that she would have had to have been a practicing lawyer for a few years at least, in addition to undergrad and law school - and the pandemic was 20 years ago - so she has to be *at least* in her mid-40s, and that’s being generous. Yes, I know that it’s possible for a woman to be pregnant at that age. It just made me think 🤷🏽‍♀️😄

I know! I was almost yelling at the TV like “Why are you in there with them? You wanted Gerald to come and now you’re ignoring him? Come on!” So did he definitely leave, or was it unresolved? Because that snog made me think that he might have changed his mind. I found that blue filter, or whatever it was that they used to make it seem like winter, was annoying. It was so unnatural.

Eyesight. I think it’s fairly rare to see a 56yo without some type of corrective lens, and in a world where I don’t imagine there are too many optometrists, poor eyesight might be a significant issue. Although I may be biased, as I’ve needed glasses since the age of nine and my eyes have only gotten worse over the years 😄🤓 I seem to recall reading an article about it a few years ago, but I couldn’t tell you where - it’s lost in the mists of time!

Yes! She sounded almost regretful that it was going to end that way - at least, until the horde erupted out of the ground 😄

Also when Henry was about to give himself up, he said something like “I’ll come out! Just let the kids go”, and she said, “No, sorry 🤷🏽‍♀️” almost as if to say “Too bad, so sad - the kids have to die too”.

It’s easier for British (or Australian, or New Zealander, or Irish) actors to mimic an American accent than it is for Americans to mimic theirs.

Yet another line of dialogue that got me thinking - Henry said to Joel, “I am the bad guy, because I did a bad-guy thing.” The quandary: does doing a bad thing automatically make someone bad? Some people live in a world of absolutes. You do something bad, and that makes you bad. One and done, no second chances, no moral or ethical gray areas. However, I think most people capable of critical thinking understand that life is not black and white, and there are lots of morally gray areas, when we don’t know what we’re capable of until and unless we’re put in a situation where doing nothing could cause actual harm to ourselves or our loved ones. Ellie asked Joel if he’d ever killed innocent people, and he didn’t (or couldn’t) answer her.

Serial posting to add: I’ve been thinking about a couple of things that Kathleen said - “Did you ever consider that he was meant to die?” and “Kids die all the time”. This sounds uncomfortably close to what some said about elderly people during the height of the pandemic, to wit: they’ve lived long lives and maybe it’s their time; well, they were old and going to die anyway, so what’s the problem? This is why I can accept that, yes, people would actually act like the resisters did when they defeated FEDRA.

Completely agree. There’s so much violent rhetoric online, and while it might be easy to handwave that as people just saying sh*t that they would never actually do IRL, we would be naive to assume that everyone would show the same restraint. Humans often do things in a group that they could never imagine doing on their own. Call it a mob mentality, or going along with the crowd; it’s part of the human condition.

Reminds me of a line in The Mandalorian’s second season episode The Believer - Valin Hess says to Mando and Mayfeld, “Everybody thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order.”

For a 56-year-old guy, he’s got great aim 😄

I thought I recognized him from somewhere, but I couldn’t think where, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. Found out that he’s Canadian, born in Toronto, and that he’s also a dancer. That twigged something in my brain, and after a google, I realized that I remembered him as a young teen on a hip-hop dancing show that aired on the public television channel in Ontario in the late 2000s!

Yes, in the “Inside the Episode” feature, Neil Druckmann says that making Sam deaf was such a good idea that he was upset he himself didn’t think of it 😄 I really like the podcast too. I could listen to Troy Baker read Wikipedia (since phone books aren’t a thing any more!) 😄

Yes, yes, exactly! When the resisters were torturing and executing the FEDRA members, I couldn’t help thinking that this is what some people in certain segments of our society say they want to do to doctors, scientists, journalists, politicians because of their imagined complicity, and even conspiracy, in the real-life pandemic (which those parts of society still call a hoax). And when we saw the one resister vehicle that had “We The People” spray-painted on the side, some Canadian viewers might recognize that also as the motto of a certain QAnon-adjacent “Queen of Canada”. Probably just a coincidence, but unsettling nonetheless.

Another fantastic episode. I’m enjoying seeing Joel open up a little bit. While he’s probably never going to wear his heart on his sleeve, it’s good to see that he’s a little more understanding of people’s different motivations, eg. why Henry did what he did for Sam. I was holding my breath while they were walking through the tunnels, just waiting for something to burst through the walls or up out of the floor! And when the armored vehicle fell into the hole that opened up in the ground, and then the Clickers/bloaty dude all came swarming out, that was proper terrifying 😬😬😬 I’m really glad I didn’t watch it last night before I went to bed 😄 I don’t know why, but I didn’t realize that the resisters had only taken over the city such a short time ago. I thought they’d been in control for a long time. Ellie telling Sam that she was scared of ending up alone…her tough-kid veneer was slipping a little. And then Henry and Sam at the end - heartbreaking 😢 I had to laugh at the scene when they were in the conference room - the way Joel was standing with his hands on his hips reminded me of a certain bounty hunter 😄 (I tried to add a screenshot but the file was too big)

Haven’t I heard that military MREs can last even longer than that? 😄