Dev F

I don't think we have any reason to believe that Joel was skeptical of the Fireflies' plan. If he were, there'd be no reason for him to insist on the lie that apparently destroyed his and Ellie's relationship, because "I rescued you from the Fireflies because they were psychos who were going to kill you for no good reason" is a perfectly acceptable explanation for his actions. Heck, it's such a good explanation that the fact that he doesn't even reach for that as his LIE as to what happened, instead making up some horseshit about other immune people and raiders, suggests that it didn't even occur to him as a possibility. I mean, the infected have been down there for a quarter century at this point, so there's some reason for the Wolves to believe they'll stay down there. Though obviously a major theme of the episode is the idea that deeply buried demons don't stay buried forever.

No, that was just a random Wolf we've never met before.

I mean, plenty of real-world figures with decades of experience in national security thought it was a great idea to set up an American torture program after 9/11. It's a sadly plausible delusion. But speaking of the torture scene, I haven't seen anyone else point out how ominous it is that the episode goes directly from Ellie playing the guitar for Dina to Isaac talking about how he used to cook to woo women—right before using his beloved cooking pots to burn that poor Seraphite. This parallel is one of the main reason I don't agree with those who argue that Ellie seems too cheerful and well-adjusted for someone on a quest for revenge. The point is that we're seeing her on Day One, at the very beginning of a dark journey—just like we saw the younger version of Isaac who hated that FEDRA mocked their enemies as "voters" and who gave a naive young recruit a chance. But then we jumped forward eleven years and both men had became rigid partisans who mock the Seraphites as "Scars" and see them as "fucking animals" who deserve to die. The implication, I think, is that we're going to see Ellie slide to the other side of that divide in short order.

I'm guessing the lack of #2 is just a pacing thing that's a knock-on effect of the earlier adjustments to the story. (GAME SPOILERS) But given that the story now seems to be headed in the same direction as the game, I assume we'll get #2 in the next episode, with a little more separation from the dramatic developments of this episode.

You say that like it's a reason why they shouldn't have had sex in that moment, but I thought the episode was pretty clear that all of that stuff is the reason why they did.

They specifically say in the season premiere that Deborah is "the first woman at 11:30 on one of the Big Three," so that's definitely still a thing in the Hacks universe. I think the "fourth place" talk means she's behind the other two Big Three networks and also Fox. There's also this shot from season 1, which shows that Deborah's original Late Night pilot was for CBS.

So now we know that Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon are rival talk show hosts in the Hacks universe. If Deborah is the third Big Three host, is that confirmation that Stephen Colbert's Late Show doesn't exist? That would sort of make sense, since Deborah is supposedly taking over the same show she tested for in 1976, which was a fictional version of Late Night airing on CBS. I guess in the show's universe, Late Night is CBS's long-running 11:30 talk show, even though in the real world they didn't really have one until Letterman defected from NBC's real Late Night to start The Late Show in 1993.

I was confused by that at first, but I think the idea is that they had less time than they thought to find a TV and tune in, not that they were already missing the show.

I think it is at 11:30. In the press conference in the season premiere, one of the journalists asks, "How does it feel to be the first woman at 11:30 on one of the Big Three?"

Away, I think. When the scarred guys scatter to escape the Wolves, they ditch their wheelbarrow on the left-hand side of the path as the camera is looking back at the direction they came from. When Ellie and Dina find it later, it's on the left-hand side as the camera faces the direction they're going.

After all the discussion on the subject in the thread for the season 1 finale, I reached the conclusion that this would've probably been the cleanest way to present Joel's final dilemma: that the Fireflies don't intend to kill Ellie, but they're performing a highly dangerous operation under extremely dodgy postapocalyptic conditions, and Joel can tell that they care more about extracting the cure than about guaranteeing Ellie's survival, and he's not going to stand for that. The problem is, if that's the scenario, I think Marlene would've at least tried to assure Joel that they don't need Ellie dead, but instead she just starts talking about how she won't feel any fear or pain, which certainly makes it sound like they expected her to die. Maybe they'll try to retcon it at some point so their intentions were less lethal, but I don't know that it'd totally hang together.

I saw Dina's motivations as being more complex than that: she'd recently gone through a horrifically traumatizing ordeal, and the girl she seemed interested in was stuck in the hospital for three months recuperating from said ordeal while she had to withhold important information from her for her own safety, so I can understand why she would feel particularly alone and vulnerable and reach for the comfort of her sweet, protective, and most of all available ex. As for the ways in which the love triangle differs from the one in the game, I think it's also important to note that (game SPOILERS)

Damien was Deborah's put-upon personal assistant (in one memorable sequence last season, he chases her jet down the runway because he had to stay behind to retrieve Deborah's missing sunglasses), but he took over some of Marcus's duties when he resigned (hence another memorable scene last season in which he breaks down crying at the news, because "I don't want to talk to vendors!"), so he's now appearing in a slightly different context, which might explain the confusion. It's called Late Night, which in the real world is the name of NBC's second-slot late-night show (currently hosted by Seth Meyers), but on Hacks it's apparently the first-slot show on one of the Big Three—which one is unspecified. So it's apparently supposed to be a vague fictional composite.

They actually confirm this explicitly in the episode: Jesse tells Ellie that Jackson is on alert because a patrol discovered a group of live infected who emerged from under a pile of frozen infected corpses: "They're using their own dead like insulation."

Elsewhere in the thread I've quoted the bits of dialogue that were meant to explain this: in the prologue to episode 1, the SLC crew talks about how there's some kind of outfit in Seattle that's willing to take them in while they search for Joel, and in Abby's speech to Joel in episode 2, she explains that she's spent the last five years with this militia group. But considering how many different people I've seen who assumed that the crew was just trailing after Joel for five years, I think the show may have garbled this bit of the backstory. I wonder how much of it has to do with the way they handled the look of the crew—the fact that, with one exception, they all look exactly the same as they did five years ago. It gives the impression that not much has happened to them since we last saw them. I think the vibe would've been quite different if they'd made more of an effort to age them up. There's a little of that with Nora, who goes from a scraggly-haired look in the prologue to a shaved-head look five years later. Why not do more of that? Maybe Owen is a clean-shaven kid in the prologue and has his beard in episode 2. Maybe one of them picked up a facial scar during their time in the militia. Just little cues that they did more than spend half a decade beating their heads against the Joel situation.