Dev F

I think that's part of the irony of the character, actually: her shtick would've worked like gangbusters right up until the moment she actually accomplished something. When you're being ground under by FEDRA every day, "We'll overthrow these motherfuckers and kill every filthy rat that licked their boots!" sounds pretty darn good. It's only after the resistance has taken power that you start to wonder, "Waitaminnit, maybe someone should make sure we don't starve or get torn apart by fungus zombies instead of chasing after every remaining collaborator."

Oh, Kathleen's revolution canonically takes place ten days before the present-day events of the story. I guess I just assumed that there was probably a period of years between that event and Michael's death—precisely because his death would've shattered the resistance as it was then constituted and it would've taken a long time for Kathleen to whip it back into fighting shape. And the fact that the resistance now seems like such a small band could just be a function of the fact that FEDRA did wipe out most of them after Michael's death. Perry could be one of the few in the inner circle who escaped apprehension, and Kathleen could've survived because FEDRA thought she was just a harmless kindergarten teacher or whatever.

A backstory that spans several years is definitely the impression I got as well. But that may be because I think the weakness of most serial dramas is that not enough time is allowed to pass in the story (it drove me crazy that Game of Thrones was always dating every major event to a "fortnight" after the last major event!), so I always default to assuming large amounts of time have passed over small amounts of time. How do we know that they didn't? If Sam got sick a few years ago, I'm assuming Henry sold out the resistance and FEDRA killed Michael a few years ago as well. I don't think we have reason to assume that any of that happened in the immediate past either. And one assumes that it would've taken time for the resistance to regroup after the death of their charismatic leader. The one backstory question I'm still unsure about, though: Are we meant to think that Henry is deaf because of his leukemia? On the one hand, hearing loss is apparently a fairly common symptom of the disease. On the other, Sam doesn't come across as someone who only recently lost his hearing, and he and Henry are fluent in ASL despite growing up in a postapocalyptic society, which might imply that it's an inherited condition and they have/had other Deaf family members.

There's a much more straightforward explanation. Here's the ratings distribution for the series as a whole: And here's the distribution for this episode: In other words, a bunch of homophobes just review-bombed this episode with 1-star ratings.

The current population of bloaters is probably the first generation that has ever existed, so the cordyceps wouldn't have had time to evolve to ensure that they spread the infection instead of just murdering people. They're currently just a weird evolutionary dead end by which the cordyceps' "stoke aggression" adaptation and their "grow together with the host's body" adaptation have tipped out of balance.

It's also incredibly common for people to draw broad, wrong principles from more specific judgments that are actually quite reasonable. It would be totally defensible for Kathleen to argue that lots of people's kids need cancer drugs, and there's nothing righteous about getting priority over the rest of them by conspiring in the murder of a local freedom fighter. But it doesn't bring any other poor sick kids back to kill Sam now. That's just vengeance, but it feels morally right to Kathleen because she was genuinely wronged, and the fact that someone else benefited from that wrong and there's nothing morally appropriate to do about it is a tough pill to swallow.

The most interesting moment to me was when Ellie, Henry, and Sam are running in a panic away the infected, and suddenly Ellie notices the open car window. She immediately hones in on it and starts reenacting Joel's advice to her when they were under fire in the previous episode: "You see that hole? . . . When I say go, you crawl to that wall, and you squeeze through, and you don't come out until I say, okay? . . . You stay down, you stay low, you stay quiet." Not only that, but Joel notices what she's doing and starts clearing the way for her with his sniper rifle. I thought that was such a great, subtle way to illustrate the strengthening bond between them.

Yeah, I think one of the main themes of the episode is that when people lose everything, they still reach for the closest match for what they used to have. Hence the reference in the title of the episode: “Alone and forsaken by fate and by man / Oh Lord, if you hear me, please hold to my hand.” That's reflected in Joel's storyline most obviously, but also in the scenes with Kathleen: how the FEDRA center still pretended to honor preapocalyptic standards of criminal justice despite running an literal torture center, and how Kathleen is now echoing FEDRA in how she deals with her own prisoners, even though she led a revolution to overthrow them for their brutality! My guess is that something similar is happening with Kathleen's supporters: they're following her because of what she used to mean to them—for overthrowing FEDRA—despite the fact that she's gone a bit mad with power herself since then.

I mean, it's not like a lot of people are seeing undertones as it is. There's always going to be a small subset of people who have an outlier reading of any given story, but the overwhelming majority of responses I've seen seem to be reading it as a quasi-father-daughter relationship as the creators intended.

How's that? I'd argue that laughing together over a juvenile joke about diarrhea is in the category of interactions that's least likely to serve as a prelude to romance.

Me neither, except for maybe the inherent tension in our culture's expectations for masculinity vs. paternal tenderness, as expressed in this song from the show Crazy Ex Girlfriend:

There are two characters holding guns on our heroes in the final scene: the little boy with a red mask painted on his face, who has the gun on Joel, and the grown man in a puffy red coat, whose gun is pointed at Ellie.

I don't think the episode is beyond criticism, but some of this article's arguments strike me as pretty out there: "The show makes a lot of metaphorical hay of the notion that Frank is getting Bill to open up by way of growing strawberries; as soon as the episode depicted them bickering over the patch Frank has gotten by trading for seeds, I let out a groan anticipating the moment where said strawberries would be dramatically shared as a symbol of emotional and actual growth." He's making it sound like this was some belabored setup that stretched out Bill and Frank's argument even though we knew it would end with a dramatic reconciliation. But in fact he's describing a single scene in which the setup and the payoff come mere seconds apart! Really, dude, you groaned in anticipation of something that would've already happened by the time you finished groaning? And that didn't cause you to rethink whether the groan was appropriate? I'm not saying this guy's dislike was disingenuous, but I do think his analysis is muddled enough that it's hard to figure out what his objections actually were. He mostly just seems upset that the episode was "saccharine," which, fine, but why exactly is it bad to counterpoint the main character's darkness instead of echoing it? That's actually why I really appreciated the episode. It's so common to have a "dark mirror" character who illustrates what the main character might become if he doesn't change his ways. (GAME SPOILERS) I think it actually is a "more interesting path," in the reviewer's words, to make Bill a bright mirror of Joel instead, a character who shows him all the things he could have if only he changed his ways. (It's why Ted Chaough was one of my favorite supporting characters on Mad Men, the Man Who Can Fly to Don Draper's Man Who Falls.)

Are we not? That's exactly how I'm reading her behavior; she's not sneaking away to find a gun and stab infected in the face because she's actually as devil-may-care as she claims.

I was also impressed that the writers realized a weirdo prepper in 2003 wouldn't necessarily be an ultra-right-winger in the modern sense. Bill was a conspiracy theorist who thought that George W. Bush did 9/11 to usher in his Nazi regime, so despite his anti-globalist ravings he wouldn't be a one-to-one match for most Don't Tread on Me types today.

Ellie overhears Joel and Tess mention them behind the door in episode 1, and deduces that they are the "B/F" mentioned in Joel's note about the radio code: "So who's Bill and Frank? The radio's a smuggling code, right? Sixties song, they don’t have anything new. Seventies, they got new stuff."

Yeah, Ellie asks Tess about two possible variants she's heard about, "super-infected that explode fungus spores on you," which Tess doesn't seem to have encountered before, and "ones with split-open heads that see in the dark like bats," which Tess doesn't want to talk about. The latter are the clickers they encounter later. Based on Joel's comment about how most infected last a month or two while others have been around for twenty years, it seems like turning into a clicker is what happens if the fungus happens to grow through your brain in the exact right way to avoid killing you. I believe those were frag grenades, not incendiary grenades, so I'm not sure they would've ignited the gas. The idea that grenades explode into a nice big ball of fire is mostly an invention of film and TV, I think.

That's definitely one of the bigger changes, but to me it seemed like a smart one. In a video game, where successfully getting through one location and into the next is essentially its own reward, the MacGuffins that send your character from the first location to the second can be pretty MacGuffin-y without the player batting an eye. But in a dramatic series, when the whole point is to explore what drives the characters from one episode to the next, I'm not sure it would work for Joel's motivation to just be "Get nicer stuff to smuggle."

I think it's mostly part of a visual motif the episode returns to throughout, of light vs. shadow, echoing the Firefly motto that gives the episode its title: "When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light." Specifically, I think, it's one of several images that suggest people mistaking dark for light—Joel looking for reassurance in his guns and smuggling tools, which are squirreled in a dark hidey-hole but surrounded by dusty shafts of light. Which you can also see in: Sara being distracted by the light reflecting off her classmate's bracelet, which is actually flitting around because the classmate is experiencing the early muscle spasms of the infection that will soon blight the world. The little infected boy being drawn to the spotlights of Boston, then fixating on the FEDRA badge in his hands, when FEDRA is about to euthanize him. Joel still wearing the watch his daughter gave him even though it's broken and her memory is a torment. And it all sort of culminates at the end of the episode, when Ellie sees Joel's PTSD-induced murder of the FEDRA guard and takes it as a sign that she can trust him to protect her.

I think it depends on what Nana's health problems actually were. It's implausible for the fungus to restore localized nerve function or what have you, but if it's suppressing a crippling pain response or bypassing degenerated brain functions, that could conceivably serve as a workaround to some forms of disability. As Craig Mazin says in the episode 1 podcast, "We like the idea that it could simply route around whatever had gone wrong in your brain and led to catatonia or Parkinson's or any of these kind of neuromuscular disorders." That's more or less how I read both Nana's actions and those of the runner in town later in the episode: they didn't seem supernaturally strong or tough or fast, they were mostly just heedless, crashing into things, pushing their bodies to their physical limit, and basically just tearing themselves apart to get the fungus into its next victim. I also found it interesting how Neil Druckmann described the process in the same podcast, because of its metaphorical resonances with other elements of the story: "Here's this weird contradiction of, like, it's fixing her, it's fixing what's broken inside of her, but it's taken her mind with it." Yeah, my friend who's a microbiologist pointed out the silliness of the global warming explanation: there have always been warmer places on the globe, so we wouldn't need to wait for the whole world to get hotter to see how organisms respond to increased temperatures. We'd just have to see what happens with them in the tropics. It's funny how many different explanations are bouncing around for the spore omission, and there's probably some truth in all of them. (Another thing the showrunners discuss in the podcast is how the "It's not viruses we need to worry about" discussion in the opening scene was partially designed to emphasize the fact that this is not a show about the kind of pandemic we've been living through for the past few years, so I can see why they wouldn't want to look like they were plugging into the whole masking debate.) But the showrunners have indicated that the main reason for nixing the spores is a logical one. As Mazin put it in an interview, "In the game, there are these where you encounter spores and you need to put a gas mask on. In the world that we're creating, if we put spores in the air, it would be pretty clear that they would spread around everywhere and everybody would have to wear a mask all the time and probably everybody would be completely infected by that point."

Yeah, I thought the casting, too, made the elves seem too ordinary. For instance, it's not like Hugo Weaving fit the stereotype of an effete elven lord, but he had a detached haughtiness that young Elrond here almost totally lacks. But now that I think about it, part of the problem may be that we're seeing elves interacting almost exclusively with other elves, so there are no supposedly lesser races for them to be haughty toward. And the question of how elven imperiousness interacts with itself could be an interesting one, but this first episode, at least, doesn't seem to do much with it. Hee. I don't have any patience for the "How dare there be nonwhite people in Middle Earth!" whining either, but thus far I am a little disappointed with the way the show is incorporating characters of color. It seems to be taking sort of a color-blind approach, seeding random characters of different races here and there, when what I was hoping for is that it would incorporate diversity a bit more meaningfully—that is, use actors of different races to represent different cultural groups within Middle Earth. It's one thing I really appreciated about, for instance, the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica back in the day: how it cast actors of color as interplanetary immigrants from the colony of Tauron on the apparently majority-white colony of Caprica, and used their fictional travails to echo many of the experiences of real-world minority groups.

That is how he helps them fight the Mind Flayer. He's the one who realizes that the Mind Flayer is back in the first place, that he's in control of Billy in the sauna when he's pretending to be remorseful, and so on. He also throws fireworks at the Flesh Golem in the final battle.

No he tells Walt it was for bartending school in the finale as well.

As I said, I'm fairly certain that the presence of "huge back-to-back implausibilities" is not the main difference between this story and the one on Breaking Bad in which Walt poisoned a kid to frame another drug kingpin for framing him (while also being careful to use a poison that would later make it look like the kid poisoned himself accidentally), to convince his former partner, who'd been swayed to the kingpin's side in an elaborate campaign involving the kingpin's fixer, who's also Walt's lawyer's PI, to switch sides again and take out the kingpin—which, after the first attempt to blow him up failed, involved attaching a bomb to the bell on the wheelchair of the other kingpin's nemesis and having him pretend to turn rat to lure the kingpin to his nursing home, and when the bomb went off it blew off exactly half of the kingpin's face to the bone, but he was still able to get up and walk out of the room and fussily adjust his tie one last time before he dropped dead.

I mean, people in the real world don't literally do that—in the same way that no one in the real world literally transforms from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into history's most notorious techno-wizard meth kingpin. But in the same way that people do become debased and corrupted by a festering sense of entitlement like Walter White, they also do sometimes insist on taking responsibility for their actions even though it means accepting a much greater punishment like Jimmy McGill. Is there really a "people just don't do that" threshold that disqualifies a sleazy lawyer choosing to spend eighty-four years in prison, but not a drug kingpin poisoning a little kid to frame another kingpin for trying to frame him so his onetime partner will switch sides and help him blow up the other kingpin? Over-the-top crime-thriller plotting is just the language of these series. The only major difference, it seems to me, is that most of the comparable plot points are about the characters making over-the-top selfish choices rather than over-the-top selfless ones. But the Gilliganverse has never been seemed so cynical or cruel that it allows for hyperbolic gestures of resentment and cruelty but not hyperbolic gestures of decency and love. What's more, this fictional universe hasn't just established a precedent of baroque crime-thriller twists in general, it's laid the groundwork for this twist in particular. In the Breaking Bad episode in which Saul is first introduced, we meet another character named Jimmy who volunteers to get sent to prison over and over, having spent "forty-four of the last fifty years inside" because, as Saul puts it, "he's actually more comfortable inside. The outside world hasn't been too kind to him." And in Saul's last Breaking Bad episode, he tries to convince Walt that he should accept a prison sentence instead of being disappeared, because he has a wife he can't leave high and dry. It seems like the writers have long suggested that this sort of thing both does and maybe should happen in their universe.