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That would require a different mechanism—not a blood-borne chemical signal, which an infected person wouldn't be able to detect until it had already bitten her, but a pheromonal signal that she gave off into the air. And we can be pretty sure that Ellie doesn't give off cordyceps-influenced pheromones, because the dog in Jackson didn't recognize her as infected.

But it's similar to the other examples in that the issues with it are matters of scientific accuracy external to the story. Within the story—which, again, is already centered around the scientifically preposterous notion of an insect pathogen evolving in a single step to create a race of human fungus zombies with echolocation abilities and interconnected self-propelling mycelia—there's nothing to suggest that the cure is anything but the real deal. Discounting a handwavy sci-fi explanation in a handwavy sci-fi series seems like, say, insisting that all the characters in a horror movie about a haunted house must actually be suffering from delusional paranoia, because science says ghosts don't really exist.

No, that would only get them a sample of normal cordyceps, which they could extract from any infected person they dragged in off the street. The idea is that only Ellie's brain houses the unique cordyceps strain that halted the growth of her regular cordyceps infection. I assume they did take samples and run tests while Joel was unconscious. Per Marlene, they seemed to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of Ellie's immunity; I assume that came from a (very fast) study of Ellie's blood. Or maybe they took samples of Ellie's blood when she was first their prisoner and tested them before Ellie herself arrived? Either way, it's of course not hugely realistic that they'd be able to do that. But we're talking about a sci-fi fungus that turns people into mushroom zombies connected to each other via an underground network of self-propelled mycelia; I'm willing to accept a little more sci-fi hooey on top of that. Because it's clear that the intention is for it not to be hooey within the story. And it's important to the story that the Fireflies not be quacks, because that story, about how Joel killed a bunch of people who were going to murder his surrogate daughter out of misplaced faith in a supposed savior who was wrong and selfish and doomed to fail, would be an exact duplicate of last week's storyline! And it would be a shame if his entire arc for the season ended with a stutter. But this is something that's frustrated me ever since the first game came out. Why would players and now viewers want for Joel's actions to be unambiguously righteous? Isn't it more interesting if they're not? The idea that Joel saved Ellie at the cost of humanity writ large is one of the main things that separates The Last of Us from the typical The time, it's personal! shoot-'em-up.

That's one of the points of the episode though, right? It's actually titled "When We Are in Need ," after the banner in the group's meeting hall that ends "He Shall Provide." They were relying on blind faith—in God, in David—when they should've been working their asses off to provide for themselves and each other, like Ellie and Joel. In fact, the showrunners talk in the podcast about how they deliberately set up a contrast between Silver Lake and Jackson. In Silver Lake, David's people showed up in the warmer months, assumed they'd found a paradise, and didn't do the necessary work to make it livable in the winter. In Jackson, on the other hand, Maria's people all worked together to establish community gardens, restore power and water, and defend their borders, and their settlement has prospered for years. Part of the difference is just bad luck, but part of it is the advantage of being committed to democracy and communal responsibility instead of a single strong leader and blind faith.

That Forbes review's criticisms of the second game were clearly made in good faith—unlike, say, the incessant mouth-foaming drivel on what is known disdainfully in my circles of the internet as "the other subreddit." But the entire Forbes critique springs from a presumption about TLOU1 that I've never agreed with, even before there was a TLOU2 for it to color. So I've never really thought anything in the second game warranted major retooling. I will say this, though: While I've never agreed with the Forbes critic's reading of part 1, and in fact I think it diminishes the game quite significantly, I also understand why some fans read the game that way, and why they disliked part 2 as a result. But I also think it's interesting how much the TV series has worked to preclude that reading by emphasizing certain elements of the story that were less clear in the game. I'm curious whether that'll impact how people end up reading season 1 as a whole and respond to season 2.

I don't think bullets are that mechanically complicated, and the casings are reusable. People all over over the country have probably been making more for twenty years.

I honestly thought that scene was a bit much. I get that they wanted to portray David's "violent heart," but isn't a big reason why he's drawn to Ellie supposed to be that he feels like he has to restrain his true nature among the rest of his flock? Instead of having him publicly lay poor Hannah out, I probably would've played it with simmering malice and the suggestion that Hannah is afraid of what David might do (had done?) to her in a more private setting. But I did really like that "violent heart" confession later, which added an interesting new dimension to the David/Ellie showdown that isn't in the game, and reinforces some of the metaphorical/thematic stuff they've been doing with the cordyceps infection all season. I especially enjoyed the twist that David is only pretending to be a man of God, and that he actually sort of worships the cordyceps. It's one of the first times the show has explored the idea that new ways of life and ways of thinking might emerge from the fungal apocalypse, instead of people just clinging to old desires and values or falling into old patterns of oppression and violence.

We're not meant to realize it until she spits out the pills. The idea, I think, is that she knew he was lying the whole time and was only pretending to trust him.

My guess is that it was more a narrative issue than a production issue. First, slotting the Left Behind story chronologically into the main narrative meant it now had to serve an additional purpose: whereas the DLC only had to explain why Ellie chose to stay with Joel and try to save his life, the episode also had to establish the basic fact that she does save him, something the original game had already taken care of in the main narrative before the DLC came out. This means that the episode couldn't really jump forward to show Ellie scrounging around a mall, because viewers would be distracted wondering whether Joel was still alive, how Ellie stabilized him, etc. But once you're sort of locked into portraying the earliest stage of Ellie saving Joel, it seems most natural to focus on the most emotionally significant part of that stage—when Ellie decides she's going to do whatever it takes to save him. And if you've committed to showing both Ellie deciding to save Joel and the backstory that explains why she saves him, it's logical to have them come to a head at the same time. That way, we're not just seeing flashbacks to the events that motivate Ellie's current actions, we're watching Ellie herself reexperience them and be motivated by them. And that's the emotional climax to both the flashback and the present-day story, so there's really nothing gained by drawing out the present-day story beyond that point. That's especially the case because the show can't replicate the nonnarrative logic that informs the interlocking past/present storylines in the DLC. There, one of the big points of the flashbacks (as the showrunners point out in the episode podcast) is to take the same controls players have been using throughout the original game to murder fungus zombies and outlaws, and use them in a totally new way: to take Ellie through a fun date at the mall. By intercutting the alternate gameplay of Ellie's date with more traditional gameplay of Ellie fighting through waves of bad guys in the present—e.g., in one she and Riley are having a water gun fight, while in the other she's shooting infected in the head—the DLC reinforces the connections between Ellie's experiences with Riley and her determination to save Joel. In the show, on the other hand, the only obvious connection would be that both events take place in a mall, and trying to draw more specific parallels by, say, cutting directly from a water gun fight to a firefight would pretty quickly get labored and heavy handed. It's probably for the best that the writers decided not to go there.

Interestingly, my read is exactly the opposite: I think it's easy for us to underestimate how hard being a gay kid would be in the world of the series, because we've enjoyed twenty years of astonishing progress on gay rights that in their world didn't have a chance to happen. This is a world where the United States fell apart two months before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage. Where the country's last crop of liberal politicians were mostly too scared to say they supported marriage equality, instead equivocating that they believed "marriage is between a man and a woman" but that gay partners should be able to undertake "civil unions"—and even this was seen at the time as a political "liability"! And FEDRA was probably cobbled together from the remains of a military still bound by Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And while it's tempting to think that things would've gotten better when people had much more serious problems to deal with than the existence of gay people, in fact hard times often bring out our worse rather than our better natures. Think of the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany, or how the social progress of the Roaring Twenties got beaten back during the Great Depression. Or, heck, just look at how the COVID outbreak worsened America's dumbest political schisms instead of healing them. Which is a long way of saying, I think Ellie and Riley are probably growing up in a world that's pretty homophobic—maybe not substantially degraded from the situation in 2003, but probably not substantially improved either.

How would they know Riley was immune to infection before she was ever infected? They weren't even convinced Ellie was immune until they kept her tied up for three weeks and she never turned! I actually think the implication may be the opposite: Marlene shot down Riley's request to bring Ellie into the Fireflies because of whatever motivated her to stash Ellie in the FEDRA orphanage for her own safety, whereas Marlene was happy to let Riley join up because she meant nothing in particular to her.

You can see from the tracks in the snow and the stuff lying around the horse inside the house that she actually tied him into one of their sleeping bags and dragged him on the ground behind her.

I think he was an intermediate infected form, between the newly turned and the clickers. There's a lot more fungal growth but they haven't yet gone blind, and they seem somewhat more deliberate than the "run around wildly crashing into things" newly infected. (The other big example of this stage on the show would be the infected that "kisses" Tess in episode 2.)

It's not a huge deviation. I know we're not supposed to spoil the game in the episode threads, so I'll just say that the game intercuts the mall flashbacks with a fairly elaborate gameplay element that ultimately serves the same purpose as "Ellie finds a needle and thread in the room upstairs." That did make me wonder whether the episode might've been enhanced if it, too, had a more elaborate present-day narrative to intercut with the flashback. But without the gameplay element, which provides a non-narrative justification for the intercutting, I'm not sure that would've worked. It's not like there's an obvious way for part 1 of the flashback to lead Ellie to point A in saving Joel, then part 2 leading her to point B, etc.; the point is that her memories of the whole experience come crashing back on her all at once, convincing her to stay and save Joel instead of running back to Tommy.

What Arthur says is that Dragonfish "was supposed to be my big debut as a director" but instead "it all died that day." Charlie asks, "So that's why you walked away from all this?" and Arthur confirms. I thought that was about how he left LAM after that project, not necessarily that he left the project mid-production or that it was canceled even if he did. But they certainly didn't make it clear that the film wasn't canceled either, which they easily could have by, say, having Arthur mention that the tank scene was the only big setpiece they had left to film, or something like that.

A demo of how their work killed an actress and permanently shut down a movie? I don't see how that would be an attractive calling card. Whereas if the story is that they soldiered on in the aftermath of tragedy and produced a successful film, I can see how that would've allowed them to stay afloat. Max was digitizing the BTS footage from Dragonfish for the anniversary, though, so presumably it was always supposed to play some part. And if the movie was only known as a disastrous project that killed a woman and nearly destroyed the company, I'm not sure why he would've bothered. I guess the main thing is that I don't recall the episode giving any specific indication that the movie wasn't completed. Or did I miss some important reference to that?

I think Laura was being honest when she told Arthur she didn't mean to kill anyone. She thought Lily was just pushing the button and ruining the take because she was jittery and unprofessional, and that if she couldn't trigger the light, she'd get through the scene and they could move on. I think I assumed that they did finish Dragonfish, with most people assuming that Lily was to blame for her own death because she didn't push the button, but Arthur blaming himself for pushing her too hard and walking away once the movie was done. I guess I can't figure out how else the company would've kept going at all, if they sunk all their money into a film that had to be scrapped because it killed a woman. And they certainly wouldn't be commemorating it at their big gala forty years later, right?

It's also kind of a motte-and-bailey argument, because it makes this into a question about social values that most of us are probably ill equipped to debate—certainly not without taking the thread wildly off topic!—but the argument was originally something much more specific than that. It wasn't just that a foster relationship between a teen girl and an unrelated single man was inherently risky, it was that the the characters themselves were engaging in behavior with disturbing romantic undertones. And that's an argument we as fans are very well equipped to dispute, because we all have eyes and ears and we've noticed nothing of the sort. Let's not get drawn into attacking the motte here when the bailey is so completely vulnerable. It's a simple question: Do we think that the scene of Joel and Ellie resting in separate sleeping bags five feet apart, not even looking toward each other, and laughing over a joke about diarrhea, betrays some creepy sexual tension? How about a scene where they're wearing big puffy jackets and peering through binoculars and a rifle sight at a distant shooting target, one of them makes a "That's what she said" joke, and the other gives her a disapproving look? If the answer to that question is "Of course not, that's preposterous," nothing more need be said.

It looks like there's a telltale pattern of fungal fibers that spreads out from the bite under the skin. Since Ellie's infection doesn't seem to be spreading anymore, it's possible she could dig out the fibers or something, but it seems like that would be a complicated, painful, and possibly damaging procedure.

The showrunners point out in the podcast for this episode that Mercy, the dog in the first episode, did seem to sense that there was something wrong with the old lady when she was first infected. Edited to add: Wait, no, looking back at the podcast I don't see where they say that, but I definitely saw someone bring it up somewhere.

As I mentioned in the earlier episode thread where this reading came up, I don't think it's necessary to engage in this level of argument with an outlier reading that has not even occurred to the vast majority of viewers. It feels like, I dunno, expending a lot of effort to try to disprove a reading of Cheers that claims Sam Malone is actually a serial murderer. The sufficient response is just "What are you talking about? This is not a thing."

I still caught absolutely no glimpse of anything like that. Ellie was making a joke about the fact that Joel's language toward their shooting target sounded sexual, she wasn't suggesting there's anything sexual between them, any more than I saw something sexual between Michael Scott and Jim on The Office when Michael joked, "That's what she said."

No, the flashback is definitely different. The "Bourgeois Pig Shit List" changes from photos of Nixon and his cronies to photos of a bunch of high school kids, and the activists change from arranging flowers to putting shrapnel into pressure cookers. The biggest change is that the actor playing Gabriel is different once Charlie finds out what he looks like. (She even mentions when the ladies point him out on Charlie's album cover T-shirt, "Not what I was expecting.") Originally he's played by an actor credited as "Hot Gabriel" and in the later flashback he's played by "Real Gabriel." In fact, rewatching it now, I think they even went to the trouble of having the album cover feature Hot Gabriel the first time it appears inside the flashback, since Charlie obviously doesn't know how to picture Real Gabriel at that point.

That's interesting, because my assumption was exactly the opposite: that Davis and his mom were meant to be Filipino or part Filipino, so Charlie was making a knowing reference to his specific heritage rather than just assuming that all Asians are Manny Pacquiao. (It was mostly his mom who read as Filipino to me, which makes sense, since the actress is half Filipina, while the actor playing her son is apparently Anglo-Korean.) False flashbacks are actually a major plot point in "Time of the Monkey," when Charlie imagines a wrong, more innocuous version of the retirement home ladies' criminal past, seeing them preparing flower arrangements to protest Nixon and his cronies instead of bombs to blow up high schoolers.