Uncle JUICE

The hot tub was the absolute unquestioned star of this episode. Once I saw it, I didn't want to see anyone else for the rest of the episode. The whole episode should have been dedicated to this simpleton and his bumbling with this insane prop. I want to see him thinking of this idea. THen realizing he can't get an actual hot tub. Then picking out this weird contraption. Then his struggle setting it up, which DEFINITELY started with pitchers of water, then a bucket, then finally a hose, then realizing it would never get warm enough before filming, then having to film in it anyway, and THEN him both trying to empty it (because you know that shit was a disaster), and him trying to return it, AND I want to see him talking to the contractor who has to fix the floor and water damage ceiling in the basement and explaining the whole thing. Tell me that's not a better episode than anything featuring Monique or that tiny Tampa rapper or some nonsense that Chance is somehow now a gambler with such a problem.

Sorry all, but for me, this episode was awful. The opening scene, that chase, was absolutely amazing, like amazing enough that when it was over I instantly began raving to Mrs. Juice about how dope it was, and laughing with a childish joy about it. It was tremendous! The next fifteen minutes were ridiculous. If we are never going back to that lady from Gideon ship, and i suggest we do not, then this is a total waste of time. And the interaction between everyone on coruscant felt just bizarre. They talked like they were in am infomercial for the amnesty program. Even the way they shook hands was weird. And the score kept trying to sound like I should be impressed, but coruscant looks like a fancy airport terminal, nothing g has any weight, everything is neon, it looks terrible. No one was like, "hey, I wonder what that Dr. Pershing is up to" in the star wars universe. And I don't care if they're in a program, Pershing would be reviled as a war criminal. Fucking terrible episode and now i have to be mad at it all the way to next week.

I can't understand and have never understood the appeal of getting so banged up you might pee on yourself, or fuck a co-worker and not remember it. It's disgusting. I was working from home yesterday and just wanted a background show on, so I went back to the first season with Kate, and it's not like this at all. It's jarring to see the difference.

...is a question Joel could have asked Marlene and saved like 68 lives of the people he ends up shooting. :) Well done.

Sorry if I came off this way, it's unintentional and I couldn't agree more (my go to is though I can't make a beef wellington, I can still have an opinion on my beef wellington being poorly done). That said your proposed solution would at least be a start to a draft. I am not a professional writer, I'm a hobbyist though and this show's been really incredibly well written in so many spots that this one kinda sticks out for me. Especially when you weren't pressed for screen time.

I'm confused, were they going to just crack open her skull and take her brains? Also seems weird that they didn't shave her head. Curious, do you think this problem (which I'm on board with) could have been solved with a two minute discussion between Joel and the doctor about what exactly was going to happen, that it was risky (so he'd be talking about less than certain death, maybe even as good as 50 50), that he wasn't sure it was going to work, that she'd recover, because the availability of medical supplies that make all surgeries safer is so scarce. That they have no imaging tech, so they can't be sure where the cordyceps is BESIDES the brain so they have to start there? This way Joel has to make a decision that a XX% chance isn't high enough for him, something like that? I just don't think adjusting the story this way is really difficult, so I don't get why they didn't bother doing it. I don't get why they went straight for the brain thing. It'd be much easier to sell Joel and Ellie on starting with the bites.

I hate myself for being able to confirm that yes, this happened, without even having to look it up. It might be time for my episode of Intervention. I am waiting for the letter from my son that starts out with "Dad, your addiction to Below Deck iterations has negatively affected my life in the following ways..." I DON'T EVEN LIKE THIS SHOW.

It might be time for a discussion about the worst episodes of this show, ever. Because recency bias has this one in the top 5 for me, without even considering it. What a shitshow. And people who drink as much as these people do aren't "cool." They're disgusting. You don't drink like that if you have any sort of healthy outlook on your life. There's just no reason to do it. This show's making the best ever argument for weed: before you can start acting like an asshole on weed, you're asleep. The Ross / Katie thing is a MAJOR PROBLEM for me every time I see it.

Totally forgot he's also a serial killer and not just using bodies of the recently deceased. What a weird character choice, where his being a serial killer barely makes the list of villainous qualities!

Samesies! :) I think it's an interesting opportunity miss, to have to explain how after all this time, this community somehow was able to feed themselves (we're in outbreak year what, 20 at least?), create a safe haven of sorts at this resort, but somehow couldn't figure out how to hunt animals, and store them. It's weird, and would have given the show a chance to explore another avenue you never expect in a zombie show. Instead it was like "this cannibal compound led by a religious zealot with evil intentions and who is also a pedophile and serial child rapist..." Guys, that's called a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat. Dial it back! Someone upthread said it, and it's demonstrably true: basically two weeks after humans stop hanging around in an area, it's teeming with wildlife. There was a small town in Wales, I think, during the initial lockdown phases of Covid, I'm talking like August / September 2020, where because the people were sheltering in place and so few people were out, that these mountain goats basically just took up residence there. THat definitely would have happened in the environment we're talking about here. So either this weirdo was choosing cannibalism, or the resort is populated by people for whom natural selection is COMING.

It took eight episodes, but I couldn't agree more with the bolded here. The formula for this episode to me was (2X Apocalyptic Cliche) +Video Game Plot. For clarity, I've never played the video game, and maybe it's me projecting the knowledge that video games are the source material onto the episode, but it feels like a side mission. Like if you play as Ellie, this is where you start doing so. But I guess that's sort of to its credit. As you mention, the performance particularly by the guy who played the preacher and of course by future Emmy winner Bella Ramsey were fantastic, but the plot was rote for me. I had a little trouble last week when I saw the previews featured a very 'pastoral' character, because I find very few fresh looks at the nature of religion and the religious in post-apocalyptic shows. I mean can't there be ONE genuinely nice religious guy in any of these stories? It was like the show couldn't find enough ways to make this character villainous, when it's a far more complex story if you back off on a couple of these fronts. Does he have to slap the girl? Does he have to be a cannibal leader AND a child molester? How is the character served by being a preacher? Even the part where the one guy has the nerve to proffer a theory on what God's will might be, if you take that out, I don't think you lose anything. What if he's a nice guy preacher, but their circumstances have forced cannibalism on them, and he hates it but can't tell anyone...or if he's not a preacher at all, he's just a guy who's a community leader, maybe like a former mayor. I'm looking forward and expect a big time recovery next week, but anyone who is lauding this episode as great, I just have a disagreement with.

I think they're another name for "currency," of which money is a subset. When I think of money, I think of something I can put in a bank, that I can access as needed. There's no such institution for ration cards, you have to physically have them in order to use them, as we can see when the FEDRA guys are doling them out. While the governmental power dynamic is alive and well, my point was more that organizations such as the Catholic Church, whose central function is amassing and distributing money, would cease to exist in a world where there is no such thing as a bank account. Not catholicism, but the big Catholic Church. They've established that fuel supply is extremely unstable, and I'm not sure what the manufacturing on it in their current timeline is, but I know it's a lot easier to manufacture auto fuel than it is to manufacture helicopter fuel. Not to mention you can't just drive a helicopter the way you drive a car, it takes a specialized skill set. And it's reasonable to assume the military was decimated much the same way society was. That flour infection idea is a really good one, it infiltrates everywhere.

As if I haven't gotten myself into enough trouble here, but I can't resist :). The only currency I've seen is ration tickets. This is essentially a barter system: you're doing work and you're paid in food and medicine. In order for there to be 'money', there has to be a centralized system of banking. No one has a cash register, no one has a bank account, no one is 'saving' or 'depositing' anything. That's why I don't think there's any money. If there's no money, then there's no benefit (using the term strictly from a financial context) to having an organization that amasses money for whatever purpose there was to do so. I'm not saying there wouldn't be religion, I'm saying there wouldn't be Religion, if that makes sense. capital R religion is the entity concerned with amassing wealth, nominally so it can be redistributed to areas of need, or to invest in things like property. Allllllllll of that is totally meaningless in this world. Pretty sure no one has referenced a dollar in seven episodes, and the first money we've seen is the quarters in the arcade. Did I miss it somewhere? Even the battery was going to be "purchased" with ration cards and other goods. On the question about why I believe that about humanity, I'd argue that you're right in RECORDED history, but there are examples of formerly adversarial groups banding together in the face of existential threat. More broadly and more in the context I see here, I think I'm right (duh! :)). In our recorded history, there's never been a truly existential threat like this, BUT, I'd point out that many scienctists believe that homo neandertalis and homo erectus and the denisovans all walked the earth at the same time as humans until about 10,000 years ago. They're all gone and there's no mass extinction event evidence, and only one species of hominid remains, ours. It's reasonable to conclude that we bred and warred our way through those other species over the course of about 200 - 300K years. My conclusion is that the drive that made homo sapiens prevail, differentiated us in some small degree from these competitive species, was our 'in group' versus 'out group' identifiers. It's behavior we see in animals still today: hyenas are happy to fight amongst each other for dominance over their pack, but if a pack of lions happens to show up, suddenly everyone's priorities align: survive. My conclusion is just a scale up of this instinctive behavior. Now, you might have me if you said that people in this world, in 2023, have conquered this 'survive' to a far lesser degree than we have in real 2023, but my argument is that the people who don't know a pre-cordyceps world would have a different instinct than those who pre-date cordyceps and therefore come to the situation with a different instinctual bias.

My guess is the story's headed somewhat in this direction, but my take is that such influence might bloom in the earliest of days, the first year or two, but I think the "why is this happening" question would erode it very quickly, within five years, until such time as religion was either entirely different (inasmuch as what those institutions get all worked up about in this regard) or gone entirely. Organized religion is in many cases and places a money-driven enterprise, and there isn't any more money to have. As to the concentration concern, it's a valid one, but I don't think such distinctoins would mean a lot in a world where your neighbors are fombies and virulently infectious. I guess I think everyone's main priority would immediately, conscious or not, switch to "SURVIVE ABOVE ALL ELSE." I happen to believe the reason humans draw these boxes to put each other in are a direct result of us mastering the resource management on the planet, taking 'survival' largely out of concern, and that means that as social creatures we want to create "us" and "them" by as a result. Gay vs. straight, conservative vs. liberal, white vs. POC, I think as soon as there's a REAL "them," something that's not human that threatens humanity, all that other stuff is just bullshit. As has been pointed out to me, that's probably naive, but it's a TV show, I want it to be that way :). I also don't want this show to start taking pot shots at the religious under the guise of cults. That's low hanging fruit and I don't think it's fair. I'm sure relgiion has mutated in this world, I just think the influence would be about 98% less potent.

Yes, I'm straight and didn't have to deal with the stress and trauma of coming out, of hiding, and as I said, I guess I kind of read into the Ellie and Riley situation from an uninformed and naive perspective. I have to say I specifically watched it looking for some sort of "extra" discomfort between 14 year olds about to share their first kiss, and again just couldn't find it. Teenagers that age are awkward on a good day, and I guess I just wanted to see a slice of the world the way I wish it were, but I also think that ten years after the fall of civilization, which would essentially be the failure of all institutional structures that make an LGBTQ+ lifestyle as stressful as it must be in some places today, given how important food, shelter, safety and connection would be to all remaining humans, I just can't imagine someone in those circumstances really being like "I can't share with you because you're gay." I absolutely can understand after having it explained that it won't read that way to a gay person, at all. My bad. Also the reason I didn't feel the same way about Bill and Frank is because both men would have necessarily grown up in THIS world with this world's prejudices, and their encounter was earlier in the downfall of mankind. They would have both had a lot more baggage.

Perhaps I was clumsy in my phrasing, wouldn't be the first time, but I probably owe you an apology if I came off as minimizing sexual orientation in general or, more to the point, minimizing the importance of representation of same here. That was not at all my intent, and perhaps owes to me being somewhat naive on the subject: I guess I HOPE that it's completely insignificant in Ellie and Riley's fictional world, who they fall in love with. I don't understand TODAY, in this world, why anyone cares who someone else loves, and I guess I really REALLY wouldn't understand it in their world, five or ten years after the fall of civilization. To your point, of course it's important that these relationships are represented in our art, my point was in their world, I don't even think people would even think about it because of the priorities they'd have to have to survive. All that said, on second watch, I couldn't find a different read on it, their nerves struck me as standard teenagers pre-first kiss. So please accept my apology if it sounded like I was minimizing anyone's experience, it was not my intent at all. I only quoted this small part but your post about the timing of gay marriage laws would have never occurred to me, as someone who is outside of those directly affected by it. This one is definitely caused by a blind spot, but again I didn't intend it to sound as, well, uninformed as it apparently did. I apologize for that as well. I can't promise to do better but I'll try :).

I don't think this is a maybe, nor do I think it can be: they made a real point about it in that first episode, which you'd only do if you were going to explain it later. Otherwise it's much, much easier to make Ellie a random orphan without that connection to anyone at all, just serendipity that she happens to be immune. If you're not going to explain Marlene at all, then all you're doing is leaving yourself a bunch of open threads for people to think "why" about. THey add nothing to the story that way, which is why I'm absolutely positive we're going to learn all about that.

What a fantastic point, one I'd not considered until reading this. Where does this pay off, this decision? Unfortunately, it pays off TWO THREE EPISODES AGO if you ask me. This bit gives heft to two scenes that seem to be throwaways before this context. When Ellie kills the trapped infected in Cumberland Farms, now, we can imagine her first experience up close with infected as a framing device. We don't know for sure (yet?) what happened with Riley, but we know she's infected when the episode ends. Ellie's cold curiosity here, when she slices open the skin and sees the fungus, sees no reaction, she's likely thinking very much about her last moments with Riley, in such close contact with her. If she's spirited away prior to Riley's full infection, she might be wondering what exactly happened to her friend, what exactly the fungus did with her, which leads us to the next and more important pay off. In Hold My Hand, she asks Joel if he'd ever killed an infected, and crucially, if it bothered him, if he thought there were still "people" inside the infected. What could this tell us about Riley's end, and Ellie's reaction to it? How she dealt with it, how she was taught to deal with it in FEDRA school (certainly would have been part of a curriculum, no one is doing fucking calculus anymore :)). Did she leave Riley and regret it, that's why she won't leave Joel? Or did she stay and convince herself that Joel was, like Riley, worth an effort? It's like this weird non-linear storytelling, and I don't know or even think it's really important to tell us. I just know I like the structure, it actually mirrors something I'm working on. I agree with the second half, but I take one tiny issue with the first half here. I'm of the opinion that in the environment that people Ellie's age are growing up in, sexual orientation is such a non-issue that they don't even consider it. In other words, they react strictly to attraction without the context of gender / preference, and that's because I think that humans have this deep genetic need for connection to each other, especially in times of trauma. I think based on the population being so thinned (I wish they'd tell us what % of people are left), and on the priorities that would necessarily shift almost entirely to individual survival over the course of years and years (remember we're 20 years after the show's opening; reasonable to assume that 5 or 7 years passed where it was literally the only thing you can think about). I really don't think, and maybe this is me being naive, that anyone would even think about gay or straight or white or black in these circumstances because social evolution would essentially eliminate those people first (because their support and survival networks would necessarily be smaller than those who didn't think this way). NORTH JERSEY IN THE HOUSE. And it got similar reactions at our house, where I said Benneton was in the other wing down by the Hahne's.

This was a terrible episode. I wish I had more insightful things to say, but really, that's about it. Featured way too much bathroom information for me. This guy's having a massive wank, that's how he opens a meeting with his staff? This girl loves taking a shit, I mean come on now, is that something anyone wants to know? Same girl picked her ass and her finger stinks now...wtf. So instead what I'll tell you is I looked up the Classic Mrs. Universe pageant and found that (a) it's still somehow happening in 2023, women are paraded around and evaluated then declared winners by a bunch of men, and (b), my favorite part, it's held in Bulgaria. The winner is the "most honorable married woman." The winner was definitely on board, but the rest of these people look like randos to me. Even the dude. None of them have any real familiarity with each other. It's jarring.

I guess that would mean amateur productions are his specialty, because this show is far from pro! Zing.

I think it was Stuttering John Melendez circa 1994.

I hate the lawyer meetings that are clearly not at a lawyer's office. Pretty sure the 3d time appearance lady and her weird boyfriend took their meeting in my grandmother's dining room. What legitimate lawyer has a glass top desk with no drawers? Also, I'm not letting a guy that looks like that defend me in court. Clearly not a lawyer, fairly certain his clothes were borrowed, unkempt pony tail, I mean geez. What a disaster.

Perhaps ironically, the FEDRA commander basically described what happened in the power vacuum in KC. I wonder if we'll get some sort of look at FEDRA that shows us why so many people felt like they should be overthrown. As far as this episode goes, I'm with whoever said they're all for characterization. I didn't and don't need another version of The Walking Dead, one of the shittiest shows to ever make it out of season 2. Stuff like this is what makes this show feel different. Plus Bella Ramsey is frigging destroying her role. No chance they thought she'd be as good as she's been, and I thought while the actress playing Riley was fine, you can see the qualitative difference between them when they're on screen together. Riley felt closer to a Nickelodeon actor to me. She's just not quite "there" yet.

Among the number of good points in your post, this one sticks out to me. I agree that this isn't a bottle episode; the Bill and Frank stuff goes on for around 35 minutes. Everything else is Joel and Ellie. The remains in the pit, the stop at Cumberland farms, there's plenty of "current day" plot happening, it's just that the Bill and Frank story is so effectively told that it SEEMS like a lot more. I didn't think at all about what you describe though, and it's so true about how 'normal' their lives are, but when viewed through the prism of their world, it's a devastating look at what humanity loses. Glad you picked it up, I'm like you, no zombie shows (fuck off, Walking Dead), no video game exposure, I watched it because I like Pedro Pascal and Sunday nights have been slow since HotD ended.