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Peace 47

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Everything posted by Peace 47

  1. I am so anxiously awaiting some pushback against the inflexibility of it all. Although I am having fun with this season, I do think it is missing character moment opportunities for Din (or Bo) that I really enjoyed in past seasons. Bo was there when Din removed his helmet for Grogu in the S2 finale, right? She knew why he did it and what the circumstances were for doing it. Would have loved for a quiet moment at the campfire and for her to ask Din the question: you’re redeemed, but you didn’t think removing your helmet was wrong to do in the first place, right? You’d do it again? So what does that make the rule? Din and Bo are risking their lives to save Paz’s kid, and the day they remove their helmets, they will be shunned and possibly even attacked by the Covert, maybe even Paz himself. Something like Bill Burr’s character pointing out in S2 that Din’s rigid rules “start to change when he gets desperate” (to save Grogu) would be nice to revisit. There’s nothing that good yet in the dialogue this season. Maybe the examination of rigidity will only come about when Grogu pushes back forcefully (or Force-fully, haha) against Din on this continued path, or Grogu is somehow endangered by the rules in some way.
  2. Didn’t it seem like he was pretty nervous before the match started? He kept looking back at Din so much that Din had to say “Don’t look at me, look at him,” which I swear my dad said word-for-word when he coached my brother’s 8-year old baseball team. I couldn’t also help but think of South Park’s Randy Marsh yelling “Take the shot!!!!!” to his son’s pee-wee hockey team when all the little preschoolers can do is shuffle along on the ice. Din really should have taken Grogu to the “snack shack” for a treat after the match, a staple of kid baseball when I was a kid.
  3. It’s possible. I initially read it more as Grogu doing the thing that he almost always does, which is express some trepidation about doing something scary to him, and then absolutely crushing it, like using the Force on the silver ball last season in front of Ahsoka, or guiding Bo into the caves in episode 2. I think it’s part of what makes this show family entertainment: the kid overcomes fears to succeed at something. I would love this for both Din and Grogu. I feel like the issue has been hanging out there for awhile, but Bo and Paz are really driving it home in different ways in this episode. There’s definitely a remaining wall there. Din’s pet name for Grogu is “Kid,” but he never ever calls him “my kid” or even “my foundling” (just a “foundling in my care”).
  4. One of the other characters called him by his full name, “Kelleran Beq.” Din’s soccer dad energy at the beginning was very funny. But he knows what his kid can do, you have to give him that. Bo-Katan worrying over Grogu was very cute, too. Since Pedro Pascal couldn’t be on set most of this season due to other filming obligations, did it take him about 3 minutes per episode to do voicework this season? Din has always been laconic, but I feel that he is talking less than ever. The show also isn’t really giving him an arc yet this season when we are halfway through it, which stands out only because Grogu and Bo-Katan have been given ones. Such a cheat to show Bo-Katan de-helmeting but not Din, haha. Did Din say that he was Grogu’s ward? I thought “ward” meant the person under care, not the carer. Maybe Din’s arc will be acknowledgement of fatherhood, and not “only” guardianship. It seemed significant that nearly every other character calls Din Grogu’s dad, or Grogu Din’s son, for at least the past couple of seasons, but he has never said it himself. Probably because no one ever said it to him, poor dude. The Mandalorians have got to move off that beach. It’s been 0 days since last work-related accident. :-(
  5. I found the Ro Laren conversation with Picard quite affecting, mostly because of Forbes’ good acting. It’s kind of a thinker for me that the show is choosing to portray Jean-Luc as somewhat of a personal failure at the end of his life, despite all his professional successes. His former best friend and the mother of his child dipped on him. Ro’s last words in the hallway about her sadness at his holding such a grudge were painful to hear. And I can’t remember Picard S1 and didn’t watch S2, but didn’t Raffi also have personal hard feelings towards Picard? Back in the day, I really responded to the promise of the TNG finale: that Jean-Luc realized how much he loved his “people” and was going to do better personally and hold onto them (he went to the poker game!!), but I do get why things (including the movies) ultimately went differently, and we’re seeing the fallout of all of it now. Now that I kind of follow this theme, I’m responding to the story a little better. If Jean-Luc sucks that much on a personal level in his old age, I get why Beverly left. Jack told Riker that Beverly cannot even talk about any good times on the Enterprise because it makes her too sad! Imagine how badly Jean-Luc must have effed up for that to happen. I can get behind this if they don’t let Jean-Luc off the hook for it all at the end of the day. Captain Shaw is funny, even though he is an ass. “Would you like to face said music stated or uninstated?” And then he “knights” Seven. Hilarious.
  6. Regarding how the first game (which is the basis for Season 1), ends:
  7. For sure, I would be out, too. And showers as an extreme rarity? I look like Seinfeld with the low-flow shower head after just 24 hours.
  8. This is such a funny way to phrase it, haha. It also reminds me of Manny from “The Good Place”: "I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem." The show also went to the trouble in episode 2 of showing that the preeminent fungal scientist in Malaysia (and perhaps the world) had zero hope for a cure or treatment and recommended bombing the place into oblivion, so it makes it harder to believe this one doctor with subpar facilities and less resources than that woman can crack the code (and Ellie’s skull 🙁). The thing is, and tell me if I am wrong: it seems like if one is saying that the finale has no emotional resonance without the acceptance that this time (unlike all the other times he protected Ellie), Joel consciously, deliberately damned mankind to save one person, one also is probably of the belief that whether the cure had a 1% chance of success or a 100% chance of success, it was no choice at all for Joel, who would choose Ellie no matter the odds. So the real point is: be uncomfortable with Joel’s automatic prioritization of Ellie when it’s also not what she would have chosen. The argument being that the story itself wants to hold up an uncomfortable mirror to those of us who would choose our own loved one(s) over the certainty of making the world a more livable place. That the point of the story is accepting the moral quandary (not fighting against it) and letting it be discomfiting. But if Joel was always going to pick Ellie in that hospital, and he damned all of humanity in doing so, we can still talk about how much we damn him for it, and I don’t think that makes the story less impactful. I do agree that it was no choice for Joel, but I don’t think it was character development in the finale that got him there. I don’t think that it was ever a choice from the time he dragged Ellie away from Tess at the capitol building. Joel is basically the same person who told Tommy to pass the family by the side of the road in Texas because he didn’t want to risk Sarah’s life; the same person who beat that FEDRA soldier to death because he had a trauma response that made him defend Ellie without thought; the same person who repeatedly defended her on their journey, first for Tess, then for Ellie herself. Therefore, the only thing that changed in his character over the series was the consciousness of his acceptance of her as a loved one in her own right, as he did it subconsciously early on (like putting her seatbelt on her or staying up all night on watch when she expressed concern about people finding them in the woods). So for me the story is actually not about his own moral development or degradation (depending on how you view his final actions), per se, but about the beauty of finding love and connection at the end of the world, not the tragedy of it. (And that’s why his lie at the end poisons all of it.) And as always, the hill (over Jackson) that I will die on is that I just think you have to lessen his moral culpability in the finale by (1) yet another trauma response for him (holding his new daughter in the same way he held Sarah, while being held at gunpoint, again), (2) the duress of the situation (that they were literally seconds from slicing Ellie open) and (3) the moral/ legal justification of “defense of others” when he had a reasonable belief of her imminent death.
  9. I really like the discussion here about it all, although I couldn’t be more anti-Firefly if I tried, lol. I mean, do not get me wrong, I tend to agree that your interpretation is what Druckmann and now Mazin wanted us to think about it all, but “death of the author,” as someone else said here. The Fireflies are objectively shown to suck at everything they do, as many people in this thread keep coming back to again and again, probably because the cognitive dissonance of ignoring what is onscreen is a bridge too far (over the river of death) for some of us. The Fireflies seemingly had to quite recently hastily abandon their Colorado university base, so they couldn’t defend that adequately (although I know some will say that you could just as easily infer that they were done there and moved on). They are recruiting child soldiers (Riley) before the kids even turn 18. They bomb indiscriminately in Boston without making any progress against FEDRA and have to outsource getting Ellie to their own people at the capitol building a couple miles away because losing their leader temporarily to injury shut them down totally. Then they all killed each other at the Capitol. The doctor and/or nurses were questioning the hospital power supply before slicing into Ellie. Marlene, with access to vehicles, manpower and weapons, couldn’t even get across the country without losing more people than Joel and Ellie did on their own. They are a mess! And they want to be my latex salesman? (TM Seinfeld) As for the other point about Ellie’s life not being worth more than just the chance of a cure, I still can’t get there, for all the reasons covered elsewhere in this thread. But setting that aside, and going with the concept that it would help, then with respect to Joel’s actions, they were made under extreme duress with an imminent threat to Ellie’s life. He killed the people who wanted to kill Ellie. He did not kill the only people who did not have the power to kill Ellie (the nurses). I just can’t assign him the blame for dooming humanity out of love for one person when he didn’t have any time to make rational, considered decision, other than his kid would die if he didn’t act immediately. I know the argument is that you give him six months to make a “rational” decision, and he would do the same, but like, I don’t think he would mow down a dozen people if he weren’t cornered into such a duress-filled situation, which is part of what we are supposed to be repelled by. I’ve heard Mazin say a couple of times that this shows the terrible things love makes us do, and I’m over here like … no? What is terrible about doing everything in your power to stop your kid dying in 5 minutes when you are given no discussion, no consideration and the lobbing of threats that she’ll otherwise be raped, murdered or clicker-ed if you don’t let them kill her this right this second? Who responds well to that instantaneous emotional trauma? I also think giving Ellie the right to choose is not right here, either. A bunch of adults whom a little girl respects telling her that she needs to die for humanity isn’t really a choice for her, plus all the depression she was already suffering. It’s interesting to consider what Tess would have done in Joel’s place, or what Tess would have done with Joel had she lived. I think she would have done the same as Joel. She was bonding with Ellie very quickly, and while she did say “set everything right,” she also said to “save who you can save.” If you can’t do both, Tess comes across as someone who would save who she could (Ellie).
  10. Isn’t this (basically, with a slight change of setting) what happened in the game, too, though? The Fireflies came upon Joel and Ellie, knocked Joel out, dragged the two of them to the hospital, and separated him from Ellie?
  11. Is it too much to ask that the a show called The Mandalorian be about, you know, one or more Mandalorians? I found everything about Dr. Pershing to be excruciating past the first 60 seconds of it. I do think Bo’s flirtation with faith is interesting, but as I’m still one who wishes that Din would have an epiphany about the ways of his cult and establish a new way to be Mandalorian that doesn’t involve such coldness and rigidity, I’m a little nervous about where this goes. But maybe he and Bo can still set out the happy medium between faithfulness and faithlessness before it’s all over. The one highlight for me was Din and Bo saying “This is the Way” to each other and Grogu then chiming in with some baby talk that was clearly his attempt to say it, too. The way Din looked back and stared was very cute. I thought that the technician creature starting the mind flare with Pershing towards the end sounded remarkably like Jim Gaffigan, but I didn’t see him credited.
  12. I agree with all of this. Where I find myself pushing back against the narrative a bit is the implication that Joel is the villain of the story for everyone he faces off against (Alec the Impaler in episode 6, Marlene and all the dead Fireflies here). Like the story is really wanting me to be shocked and appalled at what love specifically makes Joel do to other people who aren’t family. But every single one of these people were the aggressors against Joel and/or Ellie (including the doctor who brought a knife to a gun fight, as someone noted upthread), and he didn’t kill the two nurses who weren’t. Henry’s choice back in episode 5 to get another man killed to obtain medication for Sam is the more monstrous lapse of ethics, in my opinion. There, I can be shocked and appalled by what Henry did (sacrificing an entirely innocent life with no quarrel or aggression against Henry or his brother), even if I’m similar to Joel and can ultimately understand why he did it.
  13. She told him the truth at first because it never remotely occurred to her that Joel would care that Ellie had to die. She only knows post-apocalypse Joel, who was a hardened smuggler and who hated her for roping Tommy into her cause, but was someone with whom she could do cold, brutal business. When she then saw him getting agitated about Ellie’s whereabouts and condition, she had to change tactics. I think she wanted to show him out instead of kill him right there because she did (as she said) feel indebted to him for getting Ellie there, but she started in with the threats just to get his compliance and make him go. From my vantage point, there are two paths to critique the ending, each equally interesting: how well the creators established the clarity of the scenario that you wrote (save Ellie even though it seemingly forever forecloses a 100% certain cure), and then, what was the right choice in-story for Joel to have made in light of the setup the creators actually established. If the creators aren’t ironclad on the first part, people will bleed those points into their analysis of the second point. It’s probably easier for a moral utilitarian to condemn Joel’s choice if the cure were 100% certain to work, but maybe harder if the odds were less than … pick a number: 50%, 20%, 5%?). Marlene used the word “could” be a cure; the nurses worried about sufficient power so how good were their facilities; infected can still kill you via swarm and dismemberment before you are cured of a bite; people are the real threat in the show, etc., etc. But I get that Joel was not making any of those calculations, and to him, it was irrelevant (although I have to think concussion + extreme duress + ticking bomb to Ellie’s imminent murder = Joel’s only possible decision under the circumstances). I don’t know why a small part of me emotionally recoils from it being phrased in that way or Joel’s choice being phrased as the selfish one. Maybe it is because I think in some ways, it is irrelevant to Joel whether he lives or dies so long as Ellie is safe and protected, so he’s not doing it for himself, he’s doing it for the life he thinks she deserves to live? This tenacious little girl who saved his live multiple times? But I get it, he definitely cannot live without her being alive, so that is selfish.
  14. I posted earlier that I think Joel should have told her the truth about what he did, although your point here is the very good reason why he shouldn’t have. At that moment, he has to chose between (1) setting up the dominoes to break her trust and (2) deciding that the truth will only cause her more pain concerning a situation that now can’t be changed. Like all his choices in the episode, it is one with no good answer, so I can’t fault choosing between 2 bad choices, but this is why I think he should have told her. Trust between them has been a theme throughout the season. Ellie calls him “too honest” when he tells her that what they are about to see on the way to Bill and Frank’s (the mass grave) won’t physically hurt her. When she asks about Outbreak Day, he fills her, and she thanks him for his honesty after her school covered up what happened. He asks her if she trusts him when he is trying to formulate a path to get her to safety in KC, and she nods yes. She tells him in Wyoming that he could have told her anything (about the dam, I think?) and she would have believed him (because she trusts him). Maria warns Ellie to be careful about in whom she places her trust. Ellie has suffered unimaginable trauma and is seriously depressed, so I would question her ability to take on the additional burden, but honesty between them has been such a sustaining force in their relationship, and if Joel had told her that Marlene was going to kill her without Ellie’s consent or knowledge, that regardless of what he suspects Ellie would have wanted, Joel couldn’t let that happen to her after how hard she fought to keep him and herself alive when they were just making plans together for when this was all over, that this is his human failing, that he would do anything in his power to protect her, I think Ellie would have been furious, but as it is, the dishonesty will fester.
  15. I know your question is rhetorical and making the point that Marlene should have asked, but just to draw this out, Marlene saw no point of giving Ellie a choice because (1) no matter what Ellie said, they were going to do the surgery in the name of moral utilitarianism, and if the answer is irrelevant (other than possibly assuaging Marlene’s guilt), no point to asking the question and (2) Marlene convinced herself she was performing a mercy by letting this child go to sleep (forever) with no pain and no fear, a mercy no one gets in this world. She probably thought that Ellie had nothing to make peace with, assuming that she had no loved ones. But it was the coward’s way out: not letting Ellie come to terms with her own imminent mortality only to save Marlene from the emotional damage of having to face that she was murdering a child.
  16. I don’t think that I personally could handle S2 for the depictions of the horrific violence to all of the key characters (no matter whose side the characters are on). I’m ultra-sensitive to that stuff. What I do want to see is Ellie’s museum birthday visit. It’s so beautiful and poignant. I can’t imagine being able to see another take on it in a different medium.
  17. Add to that: she was seriously depressed, suffering from survivor’s guilt and definitely had some suicidal ideation going on (i.e., her speech at the end about being ready for her turn to die). Lots of questions about her capacity to give any informed consent as a minor and a traumatized survivor. There’s a lot of moral utilitarianists ready to criticize Joel, but like, how far do you extend that? If I let someone cause my brain death today so that my organs can be used to save, say, 6 other lives, immediately, should it be done? My one death would benefit 6 other people and their families, and say my own circle is tiny. What is the number of people saved that makes it right to kill me, with or without my consent? We don’t even let people make that choice at all, though. Nerd alert: People (like the Screen Crush YT video where he argues Joel was wrong) throw around Spock’s sacrifice in Star Trek where he said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one, but the lesson and whole point of the immediately following movie is that sometimes the needs of the one (Spock’s) actually do outweigh the needs of many. I saw someone post somewhere that there is only one correct answer to: who would you sacrifice to save the world? “Yourself.” Marlene and all her compatriots were morally wrong under that more basic view that throws out the capacity concerns. Joel was put in an impossible situation by the story, and the incompatibility of the choice he had to make had been there all along. Tess said “Save who you can save” but also “Set everything right.” If he saves the one person he can, there is no hope of setting everything right. I saw someone else post that Bill, Joel’s mirror, imparted one lesson to Joel (find one person worth saving and do it) but not the last lesson Bill learned (Bill painfully agreeing to love Frank the way he wanted to be loved, i.e., letting him go when the end of the road was reached). That is, Joel saved Ellie but did not respect that she wouldn’t want him to love her so much that he would keep her from her purpose (save the world). But that type of purpose is incompatible with who Joel is: he goes on for family only; if you sacrifice family, there is no world left to save in a holistic sense (yes, the Jackson community and any others like it, but even Tommy said the infected are not the real problem out there). And in this TV show world where people are worse than the infected, I find myself understanding Joel all the more.
  18. I could probably argue that a valid point (although I agree it was not “the” point the creators intended) to take from the first game/ first season (up until Joel’s final lie) is the beauty of a relationship based on salvation and hope in an otherwise very ugly world. I get your point about actions having consequences, but I think that is part of what the Forbes article was saying: the doctor’s actions had consequences so he suffered, so Joel must eventually suffer consequences from that, so Abby and Ellie must suffer consequences from Joel’s actions: it’s a depressing cycle that you have to watch loop until Ellie sort of breaks it/ gives it up at the end (unless Abby or someone on her behalf later comes for Ellie), with literally nothing to show for it other than the lesson (not even the guitar she shared with Joel). It is nihilistic, but it is the tragedy that the game creators wanted to tell, so I can’t fault them for implementing their vision. In light of the finale, I thought that the show’s most brilliant point of transformation of source material (and I know that is saying a lot in light of Bill and Frank), was explaining Joel’s scar that they discussed earlier this season. I loved Joel sharing with Ellie that he tried to kill himself and openly admitting that it wasn’t the healing power of time that saved him. I was wondering why Joel in the game and Joel in the show bothered to go on at all after Sarah died, but I wasn’t looking for the show to take that on. I assumed that he went on in a semi-autopilot mode to look out for Tommy. To hear him say that there was a point where he didn’t actually go on, to share that in light of what he sensed Ellie was feeling, and to tell her in that way that he he loved her was absolutely beautiful. He didn’t need to explain the flinch: it might have been for Tommy; it might have been instinct. And Ellie’s response: my heart. I didn’t respond as well to all the extra talk about Sarah at the end. It came off in flashes as Joel using Ellie as a Sarah replacement (Ellie’s unsure facial expression about the comparisons, Joel going on about direct comparisons between them.) The more muted dialogue in the game where Joel just mentions that he used to do something with Sarah that he was now doing with Ellie and noting that he thought they would like each other was perfect the way that it was.
  19. Okay, I’ve thought about it for another couple of hours, and I’ll say the same thing I said last week when Joel was “creatively” encouraging those dudes to give him a geography lesson. Great job, Joel; no notes! Okay, one note: he shouldn’t have lied to Ellie about what he did. To oversimplify Mazin’s point in the little after-episode talking head he had on HBO Max, he was saying that this story is profound in part for showing the horrific things love makes us do, and while they as creators are not judging Joel’s actions, he did seem enamored of the moral issue the story raises. But there’s a reason why self-defense and defense of others is a legal justification for murder: because the (nominally) non-apocalyptic society in which we currently live says that it is unfair to assign culpability when there is no other option to save a life. I mean, ethically, I guess that the situation is like a reverse Trolley Problem (let the trolley barreling towards Ellie kill her, or actively pull the lever to switch the trolley to another track to kill even more unknown people), but there’s at least some basis in the moral judgment of the current U.S. legal system not to condemn the act of protection. If Joel harms no one, he lets himself be marched outside, and either those guards let him go, as Marlene promised, or they kill him, if Marlene was just lying to get him out of the hospital and away from Ellie. And Ellie dies (or Ellie and Joel both die) at the hands of their murders. That is the ethical choice that Joel should have made? The Fireflies are desperate, disorganized, in chaos and clinging to the idea of a cure that the show hasn’t set up as being practical in any sense. And even if the “cure” or “vaccine” would 100% have worked and could have been mass-produced in a society where manufacturing was all but halted, what world are they saving? The one where “people” (as Joel and Ellie refer to them)—cultists, cannibals, authoritarian fiefdoms, raiders, etc.—are the real threat to anyone with a shred of decency?
  20. The scenes with Joel and Ellie in this episode leading up to the final hospital vignette were truly beautiful. That relationship is the part of the story that really captured my imagination, and the conversations that took place—Joel trying to help Ellie via canned pasta and board games, their connecting over the pun book and the giraffes, their getting into a frank discussion about Joel’s suicide attempt (which as an aside, felt like the absolute missing piece of Joel’s character as to why he went on after Sarah died and was the perfect grace note to his character), etc. Those moved me deeply in that they presented the possibility of finding love and connection again in this absolute wasteland of the apocalypse. And there is some part of me that wishes that was the story being told. But of course, this story is not an uplifting one: it is an utter tragedy, and so then we have the hospital vignette and the aftermath, where Joel sacrifices (whether he fully realizes it or not) nearly everything good he has salvaged from finding Ellie (connection, trust, openness) except her very life. But what parent can willingly sacrifice their child for a vague platitude that her death might help the world? Marlene was willing to sacrifice Ellie, but as much as she cared for Anna, she was no parent to Ellie. (The actress who played Marlene in the game and the show is wonderful: love her.) I do think in showing Joel as a mass shooter in a TV medium, it hits in a way that doesn’t hit when playing a video game (where you take out hundreds or thousands of people coming at you). I think the show runners do want you (general you) to be repulsed by Joel for purposes of setting up the moral quandary of the story. These weren’t good, innocent people, though, that Joel was taking out: every single one of them had a gun trained on him (even Marlene, who was setting hers down but it was not out of reach), except for the doctor, who had the metaphorical gun to Ellie’s head instead of Joel’s. So I’m not sure (still have to think on it further) that the moral quandary is as deep as the creators think that it is.
  21. I think it’s possible our dude may not be able to swim at all. Bo had to save him from drowning in S2, too. (He instinctively dove into the water to save Grogu from that sea creature and got into trouble immediately.) But maybe the armor is just too heavy without a jet pack to get any kind of buoyancy, regardless of swimming ability. I’m hoping that back in the day, they had some kind of platform in the waters to keep Mandalorians who were taking their vows from plunging to their deaths like Din almost did. Seems like poor planning to have your baptismal ceremonies at a place where the depth goes from 2 ft. to 2,000 ft., but what do I know?
  22. I found it hilarious that Bo marched right out to the landing pad where Din’s ship was, fully intending to tell him to f’ off and leave her alone, but when she sees the kid alone, she doesn’t hesitate for a second to go save his cult-brainwashed ass. Love the frenemy energy of it all. I wonder if she did that for Din, for Grogu, for her creed, for the Dark Saber or all of the above. I wanted Din to have to take off his helmet to do the living waters ceremony, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. I also want Din to question whether the rituals of his cult actually are necessary, because they come at a very high cost. He said he needed a spelunking droid but settled, went in very unprepared, and nearly got himself, his kid, Bo and the droid killed several times over, all because he’s desperate for redemption with a covert that doesn’t seem to care about him all that much. I liked Bo talking to Grogu. It was nice that while Din is teaching Grogu how to be Mandalorian, Bo was also respecting Grogu’s Jedi heritage and talking to him about that.
  23. I feel like kind of a psycho, but I didn’t feel sorry for either of these guys, even a little bit. They were there to murder Joel. Map guy still wasn’t giving Joel answers at first, saying he didn’t know anything about a girl, and Joel’s time was running out to find Ellie alive. So of course he needed to go more extreme. And Joel had to kill those guys because he couldn’t risk them escaping and coming after him. Once again, Great job, Joel: no notes. It was so poignant about how protective Ellie was of Joel in this episode. Trying to take care of him in miserable conditions; having “medicine” practically tumble out of her mouth as soon as David offered something to trade (like she couldn’t say it fast enough); drawing David’s group away from the house and making herself a literal target in the hopes that she could draw their attention away from Joel. And that’s not even getting into the horrific trauma she suffered from David. The way she left that last little bit of food on Joel’s blanket when he couldn’t even swallow water was so sad. That poor kid.
  24. Given how slavishly faithful this adaptation is to the emotional beats of the first game, and given Druckman’s personal involvement in this project, I don’t see them making any major changes to the events of TLOU2. There is one very compelling negative review of the second game from Forbes back in 2020 that I just read the other week and that I think makes a good case for its serious story flaws, but overall, the critics liked it, so I think that probably reinforces Druckman’s view that he was correct in his approach, and Maizin really seems to vibe with Druckman’s style.
  25. Regarding the end of episode 8, one thing that I liked about the game cut scene is that after Joel pulls Ellie off David and he hugs her, the last bit of their exchange is overtaken by music so that the characters get a bit of privacy in that vulnerable moment to say something we don’t get to hear. A tiny bit of me wished it had also been in the HBO show, but I was overall once again amazed at the faithfulness of the adaptation to a pivotal game scene.
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