S01.E02: Infected

[Whimsy]

Quote

Joel, Tess, and Ellie traverse through an abandoned and flooded Boston hotel on their way to drop Ellie off with a group of Fireflies

 

Original airdate 1/22/23

[AimingforYoko]

I kinda figured Tess wasn't in it for the long haul, considering I hadn't seen Anna Torv in any of the trailers, but at least she went out like a badass.

[magdalene]

This show is not good for my blood pressure.  I am not surprised to be losing Tess, but it was sooner than I had thought.  It's a bummer because I found her very compelling.

[Valny]

RIP Tess.  That fungus “kiss” was nasty!  Did anyone notice the three of them were all dry after coming out of the water filled hotel? Or was it supposed to be hours after?  I would have taken my shoes off first, at least I could keep them dry. Then again, who knows what’s on the bottom of that floor!

[magdalene]

With all the nasty in this show that kiss was the nastiest. I gagged.

[peridot]

I wonder if they will do flashbacks to 2003 throughout the rest of the season?  I really enjoyed this flashback too.  At first, I thought the soldier (cop?) was there to arrest her for something.  Of course, HBO had to work in nudity somehow!  It's interesting that the fungus moved around even after the host is dead.  Her recommendation was so sad.

I didn't blame Tess and Joel holding her at gunpoint the next morning.  I don't get why Ellie is so nonchalant about being infected.  I'm surprised that Joel didn't put a bullet in her head once she started faking seizures.  During their walk, I'm surprised the trio didn't walk around in front of the car rather than going over it.

I flinched when Ellie was messing around and rang the bell.  I was expecting for something to come out of the water.

I wonder what's the criteria for the infected to hear.  The ceiling crashed down behind the trio as they walked into the room, but nothing came rushing out.

It's sad what happened to Tess.  I wondered if something happened to her because I thought I saw her hand tremble when they were on the roof, but I didn't expect it to be true.  That kiss was really disgusting.  Do the infected sense if someone is already infected?  I thought he would bite Tess.

[paigow]

Joel should have grabbed some grenades... but I never played the game so maybe those are not supposed to be used in regular play mode...

[AnimeMania]

That frog was a very talented musician.

🐸🎶Hello my baby, hello my honey
Hello my ragtime, gaaaal🎵

Edited January 23, 2023 by AnimeMania

[CrazyDog]

The beginning scenes with the professor were chilling. This show does grim and bleak well.

It sucks to see badass Tess go so soon. She and Joel had such a great survivor dynamic. And she and Ellie were interesting and connecting.

The set designs are truly impressive. Them having to walk around trying to avoid the tendrils and hive mind really adds to the tension throughout the whole episode. 

Ellie is such a great mix of innocent kid and smartass tough, growing up alone in this terrible world. Seeing the outside world and what was done to it, and also having a moment of kid-like fun inside the hotel. She's a great character. Though I also cringed when she rang the bell in the hotel. I'm glad the show avoided the obviousness of something coming from the water.

I guess the military schools and QZs aren't teaching the intricacies of the infected outside the walls.

Nature can still (ducks, birds, frogs) apparently co-exist with the infected too? 

It's interesting with some of the characters having experienced the before times, while this world is all Ellie knows.

Edited January 23, 2023 by CrazyDog

[thuganomics85]

Say what you will about Pedro Pascal being typecast as reluctant babysitters, but at least there are massive variations to his characters because Mando certainly wouldn't have ever considered shooting Grogu!

With Pedro and Bella Ramsey as the only names in the credits (plus my knowledge of the game in general), it wasn't a massive surprise that Tess wasn't going to make it all the way through this, but it's still hits hard that she's already become a casualty. Clearly everyone but Joel and Ellie are going to be fair game here.  Anna Torv made the most of her screen time at least and was able to show that Tess is/was someone harden by this world but once she saw that there was a shred of hope with Ellie and a cure, she made damn sure to do everything in her power to keep that hope alive.  I do wonder if we'll see any kind of flashbacks of her: perhaps how she and Joel actually met?  And I imagine this will be another loss that will stick with Joel going forward.

The Clickers have arrived!  Yep, they are still as creepy and as scary as I remembered.  The prosthetics were excellent as I hoped, the actors did great work with the body movements, and I'm glad they pretty much just kept the same sounds that they had from the game.  I'm both looking forward to and dreading the next time we see one of those fuckers...

Glad to get some of the glimpses of Joel and Ellie's rapport and interactions.  Pedro and Bella seem to have good chemistry so far.

As much as I'm enjoying the main story, I'm liking the cold openings flashing back to the beginning of the pandemic and the hopelessness of it all.  The way the doctor bluntly but emotionally said the only option was to bomb the city and everyone in it was chilling.

Don't want to dive too much into next week's previews, but I so can't wait to see this show's version of the characters (and the actors playing them!)

[magdalene]

10 minutes ago, thuganomics85 said:

Clearly everyone but Joel and Ellie are going to be fair game here. 

Call me pessimistic but the only survivor character seems to be Ellie with her immunity. I don't think Joel is safe at all.  I had my heart broken with Pedro Pascal characters before, GOT comes to mind.

[DigitalCount]

And even Ellie isn't invulnerable, like they pointed out. She's special, yes, but that doesn't mean she can't get eviscerated.

Me, partway through the episode: man, Tess is a boss! I wonder why I never see people talking about her online? Maybe she's an original cha--oh. Welp.

Seriously, that final scene had me shaking. I think I was whispering "you can do it, fight it" when she was trying to light the lighter before she succumbed to the infection. It was a heroic exit though.

[Anela]

I love Pedro Pascal, but I think Tess was the best character so far. I wasn't expecting her to be gone so soon. Her quick thinking and actions were great, but her panic and being almost frozen, were also just so real. 

[DigitalCount]

Two other things:

1) the fungal scientist at the beginning did so much with a short scene. When she revealed that it was way too late for them and the only way out was bombs, I was shattered. I assume they didn't take her advice initially because no one ever listens to the scientist at first, though we do find out later that they used this tactic in Boston.

2) the scene where Joel is reloading his gun and the perspective tightens on his face was one of the most tense things I've watched in recent memory. I was thinking "that thing is going to be right next to him by the time he gets a fresh reload" and whew lad, there it was. Really appreciated the delicate movements as he was trying to make no sound putting the spent casings in his pocket while keeping the flashlight on his shoulder.

[Haleth]

8 hours ago, peridot said:

I was expecting for something to come out of the water.

YES!  I was on the edge of the seat waiting for someone's ankles to get yanked.

4 hours ago, Anela said:

I love Pedro Pascal, but I think Tess was the best character so far.

YES!  Anna was really overshadowing Pedro.  Such a compelling character!  I'm sorry they won't to continuing as a trio; the three of them played well off each other.

3 hours ago, DigitalCount said:

Really appreciated the delicate movements as he was trying to make no sound putting the spent casings in his pocket while keeping the flashlight on his shoulder.

YES!  As with something lurking in the water I was waiting for Joel to drop one of the shells.  That whole scene was so tense!

I'm not sure I should be watching this right before bed.  It's so creepy. <shudders>

Edited January 23, 2023 by Haleth

[Hana Chan]

This show continues to ratchet up the terror and the angst in a way that is not gratuitous and the focus is on the characters. We have Tess, who clearly loves her damaged partner but knew that he could only give so much of himself. There is Ellie, who makes a big show of how tough she wants to be, but is still in reality of sheltered child who has been thrown into a situation far outside her understanding and capabilities. And Joel, who is so emotionally broken that he shut himself off from everyone and isn't capable of seeing life beyond survival from one day to the next. The idea that there might be a cure for the world is so outside his ability to accept, yet he's the one tasked with trying to make the impossible happen.

The cold openings that give us some insight on how the outbreak started and I was fascinated by the biologist who had such a deep understanding of the cordyceps family and how quickly she recognized that they were in a hopeless situation (and the only possible solution was to bomb the city and incinerate every living being in it). This fits with the science of this fungus where there is zero chance of survival or cure once the appropriate host has been infected. And with the other living creatures surviving in the wild (ducks and frogs), we get the practical science that the fungus is attuned to specific hosts (i.e. humans) so other animals survive quite nicely in a post-cordyceps world. For now.

I was waiting for the legendary "clickers" to make their appearance and they did not disappoint. Incredibly creepy and ugly and a lot harder to kill than the "runners". I know that there are more variants out there and it's going to be fun to see how they are handled. And the way the fugus is a network and connecting everything infected... again, this is how they work in nature but it explains why this kind of "disease" was going to be nearly impossible to stop once the outbreak started.

I was heartbroken to see Tess go and she did like the badass she always was. But her pleading for Joel to find it within himself to fight for something more than just getting by day to day and even daring to dream of a world where the fungus was no longer a threat was her greatest gift to the world. Yeah, the cordyceps kiss was horrifying in every manner possible, but she held out to the very second that she needed to. 

The visuals of a ruined city with nature taking over (amid the fungus-infected mutants roaming about) were beautiful and it really goes to show that in the hands of the right people, a story like this can be a lot more than a Walking Dead retread.

[mledawn]

The opener was a fantastic use of flashback and the actors were so good in their scenes. All the cast has been great, although I do think Bella is the weakest. Her accent slipped this episode but I think she’s doing a good enough job with the role so far. It’s early days after all - and acting across from Pedro and Anna (in particular killing it) is a tough spot.

I am so happy with myself for deciding to watch Mayor of Kingstown on Sunday night and The Last of Us in the daytime, on Monday morning. I cannot handle that level of anxiety back to back.

[Kate47]

They did a little "behind the episode" featurette after where you got to see the prosthetic work for the Clickers and man, it was gorgeous. The coloring of the fungus and the way it melds into the face was both beautiful and repulsive. Score one for practical effects tbh.

As someone who's never played the game but has watched some playthroughs and character deep dives, I'm loving how the show is building the world. It's so intense and fills in the blanks without holding your hand.

[Hana Chan]

10 hours ago, peridot said:

Of course, HBO had to work in nudity somehow! 

Well, to be fair it was an autopsy. 

Speaking of that scene... when the biologist made her incision on the bite site and we saw all that fungus just beneath the surface... my skin was crawling.

[iMonrey]

I'm not sure I'm following this very well. Joel and Tess were tasked with taking Ellie to a group of rebels that were stationed outside the quarantine zone because, why? 

But when they got there, they were all dead. So now Tess says Joel has to take Ellie . . . where?

I didn't get why these zombies had swollen brains coming out of their heads when zombies we saw earlier did not. I take it there are zombie variants?

How long do the zombies live, once they've become zombies? It seems like they would eventually die out naturally once there are no more hosts.

I'm not convinced this show is doing a great job making itself accessible to an audience that isn't familiar with the game. Most of the comments I've read include pre-existing knowledge of the story.

[Racj82]

I'm glad they did remove Tess. I love Torv and I was enjoying the character. It's not that. But, I could see them not having the guts to make that move because it would upset people killing off a female lead. I don't want my stories pulling punches for stuff like that. Tell the story you envisioned. Don't worry about complaints. They will always be there. 

She will be missed though.

I'm enjoying this journey. There is just enough world building, character interaction and action to keep things moving smoothly.

[aghst]

The set design and camera angles really do look like a video game.

Especially when it switches from a wide angle to a tight view often.

I've seen buildings all dilapidated and overgrown with vegetation reclaiming the terrain back in other games before.

I can see it, Joel is reluctant to be responsible for protecting Ellie, even though he killed that soldier to prevent a replay of Sarah being killed by another trigger-happy soldier.

He has no choice, he loses Tess, who implored him to take her, and he can't drop her off as originally planned.

So Tess had to make this big sacrifice.  They must have wanted that kiss so she's struggling to ignite that lighter when there were grenades all over the floor which she flooded with gasoline.

[Racj82]

2 minutes ago, iMonrey said:

I'm not sure I'm following this very well. Joel and Tess were tasked with taking Ellie to a group of rebels that were stationed outside the quarantine zone because, why? 

But when they got there, they were all dead. So now Tess says Joel has to take Ellie . . . where?

I didn't get why these zombies had swollen brains coming out of their heads when zombies we saw earlier did not. I take it there are zombie variants?

How long do the zombies live, once they've become zombies? It seems like they would eventually die out naturally once there are no more hosts.

I'm not convinced this show is doing a great job making itself accessible to an audience that isn't familiar with the game. Most of the comments I've read include pre-existing knowledge of the story.

The rebels are not trying to make a cure. They are rebels. Ellie was supposed to go to those people on the outside who could get her to the people trying to make a cure. Those were her trusted people now. They are all gone. 

They literally said in this episode that the infected have a varying lifespan. It's not something obviously known because how would they know.

Yes, there are variants.

I did not play the game. None of this was confusing to me. No judgment. All of these answers will be doled out over time. It's a series. I'm just enjoying the ride and learning as I go.

[mledawn]

@iMonreythey're delivering Ellie in exchange for a battery for their truck. Joel's truck now, I guess.
Tess wanted Joel to see the bigger picture of getting Ellie to the scientists trying to make a cure when she died, though.

Edited January 23, 2023 by mledawn

[iMonrey]

Quote

they're delivering Ellie in exchange for a battery for their truck. Joel's truck now, I guess.
Tess wanted Joel to see the bigger picture of getting Ellie to the scientists trying to make a cure when she died, though.

How does Joel know where these scientists are?

[Hana Chan]

It's the details that I pick up on with the second (and third and fourth) viewings. The way the tendrils that Dr. Ratna pulled from the deceased victim's throat tried to reach out to the doctor. The way the infection on Tess's neck was working its way towards her brain. The small glances between characters. The way Dr. Ratna's hands shook when the realization hit her just what they were facing. How Joel avoids touching Ellie now that he knows that she'd been bitten. It's just such a superbly crafted show with really fantastic performances across the board. There is so much thought that goes into all those little details and performance nuances that give a huge amount of depth to the storyline.

[Rickster]

44 minutes ago, aghst said:

The set design and camera angles really do look like a video game.

Especially when it switches from a wide angle to a tight view often.

I've seen buildings all dilapidated and overgrown with vegetation reclaiming the terrain back in other games before.

I can see it, Joel is reluctant to be responsible for protecting Ellie, even though he killed that soldier to prevent a replay of Sarah being killed by another trigger-happy soldier.

He has no choice, he loses Tess, who implored him to take her, and he can't drop her off as originally planned.

So Tess had to make this big sacrifice.  They must have wanted that kiss so she's struggling to ignite that lighter when there were grenades all over the floor which she flooded with gasoline.

I guess the video game aspects are a positive for a lot of viewers, but to me as someone who knows nothing about the game, the whole episode came across very video gamey to me in a negative way. I thought the best part was the prologue in Indonesia.

I couldn’t figure out either why she didn’t grab a grenade inside of using that faulty lighter.

[Capricasix]

13 hours ago, magdalene said:

With all the nasty in this show that kiss was the nastiest. I gagged.

I have to look away from that type of scene…I didn’t even watch the ep last night and I still dreamed about zombies! 🧟‍♀️

[mledawn]

3 hours ago, iMonrey said:

How does Joel know where these scientists are?

He doesn’t specifically. He is to take Ellie to the Fireflies who work with the scientists. This is from the first episode where they speak with Marlene after encountering her and Ellie in the hallway. She explains Ellie’s importance and we learn a bit more about the Fireflies. It’s worth rewatching ep 1 if you missed some of the place setting.

Edited January 23, 2023 by mledawn

[Dev F]

1 hour ago, Racj82 said:

They literally said in this episode that the infected have a varying lifespan. It's not something obviously known because how would they know.

Yes, there are variants.

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.

41 minutes ago, Rickster said:

I couldn’t figure out either why she didn’t grab a grenade inside of using that faulty lighter.

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.

[Chicago Redshirt]

2 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I'm not sure I'm following this very well. Joel and Tess were tasked with taking Ellie to a group of rebels that were stationed outside the quarantine zone because, why? 

But when they got there, they were all dead. So now Tess says Joel has to take Ellie . . . where?

I didn't get why these zombies had swollen brains coming out of their heads when zombies we saw earlier did not. I take it there are zombie variants?

How long do the zombies live, once they've become zombies? It seems like they would eventually die out naturally once there are no more hosts.

I'm not convinced this show is doing a great job making itself accessible to an audience that isn't familiar with the game. Most of the comments I've read include pre-existing knowledge of the story.

I have never played the game and know nothing of it other than "it's an apocalypse game." Almost all the answers to these questions were explicitly in these first two episodes.

Marlene (head in the Fireflies, or rebel faction engaging in terrorist tactics against the military oversight forces FEDRA, in Boston) wanted them to go to Fireflies holed up in the state house (ETA: I am dumb and originally conflated Springfield, IL, our state capitol, and the fact that Mass had a Springfield with the notion that it would be the capitol of Mass. Mass's capitol is in fact in Boston, as its statehouse. Carry on, nothing to see here. :) ), where Joel and Tess would drop Ellie off with said Fireflies, get paid with a battery that they could then use to make a vehicle work, and then go in search of Joel's missing brother.

Joel and Tess learned that Ellie is fungus-resistant because not only had she not turned after having gotten bit previously despite signs of the fungus present, she was bitten a second time. Ellie tells them (despite Marlene having told her not to tell) that Ellie is fungus resistant and that the Fireflies in Springfield were going to take her somewhere out west to friendly scientists who could try to extrapolate from her biology a way to immunize/fight back.

Tess tells Joel to take Ellie to two of their smuggler contacts...I'm blanking on their specific names ATM. The idea would be that with their contacts and equipment, they could presumably give Joel direction as to where to get Ellie next. Which is important because if they can science the shiznit out of what makes Ellie resistant, maybe they can finally beat back the Infected and restore something of a normal life.

What was swelling from their heads were seemingly varieties of fungi, rather than brains.

Joel said that infected can have lifespans of just a few months to since the beginning of the outbreak. (How it would be known that a particular Infected was more than X years old seems a stretch because it seems like there would be little wherewithal to study/track one for that long, but never mind).

2 hours ago, iMonrey said:

How does Joel know where these scientists are?

Joel has no idea where the scientists are. But Tess's hope was that by getting to the smuggler friends, they would be able to figure things out.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Hana Chan]

1 hour ago, iMonrey said:

I'm not convinced this show is doing a great job making itself accessible to an audience that isn't familiar with the game. Most of the comments I've read include pre-existing knowledge of the story.

I've never played the game and I avoided looking into it because I didn't want to be spoiled. I'm having no problem following the story and IMO they've managed to give just enough exposition without it becoming clunky. It's never easy to build a show around a famous property and make it accessible to both newcomers and audiences already familiar with the story but TLOU is doing an amazing job. Everyone that I've spoken to who've watched so far (gamers and otherwise) have been praising it so they're doing something right.

And there's a lot of stuff that happens in games that just don't work in a tv show or movie (like side quests). The writers have done a good job of keeping the spirit of the game (again, based on the opinion of gamers that I've spoken with) while not making it just a live action runthrough.

[iMonrey]

Quote

Tess tells Joel to take Ellie to two of their smuggler contacts...I'm blanking on their specific names ATM. The idea would be that with their contacts and equipment, they could presumably give Joel direction as to where to get Ellie next.

That's probably what I missed. But they did get to the state house in this episode, and that's where they found everyone there dead, right? And this is where they were supposed to drop off Ellie with said Fireflies in exchange for their battery?

[wanderingstar]

This show stresses me out. That is all.

[aghst]

46 minutes ago, Dev F said:

 

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.

If the fungus takes over a person's body to that extent, probably feeding off a lot of the human tissue, it would probably disrupt a lot of the systems which keep humans alive.  For instance, if their mouths are full of fungus or worms or whatever, the body is probably not getting much oxygen and the immune system will flood the lungs with fluid, causing inflammation in all kinds of organs, killing the human host, as happens with covid.

TLOU was written before covid and people in general have better ideas about the immune system and how it reacts to pathogens.

It makes for an entertaining story but I think it's mostly science fiction.  It's one thing for the fungus to take over ants but mammals have vastly different biology.  As noted, fungus can't survive the body temperatures of humans.

Now they're saying climate change causes the fungus to adapt and be able to thrive inside human hosts and control them like they can ants.

But epidemiologist have already pointed out, the fungus wouldn't have to wait for big increases in global temperatures in order to evolve and be able to withstand human body temperatures.  There are already tropical regions of the world which are already hot enough for them to thrive.  Certainly Boston is a cold place.  It's going to take a long time for climate change to make Boston a permanent tropical zone.

 

 

[Chicago Redshirt]

54 minutes ago, iMonrey said:

That's probably what I missed. But they did get to the state house in this episode, and that's where they found everyone there dead, right? And this is where they were supposed to drop off Ellie with said Fireflies in exchange for their battery?

Correct. They crossed the no-man's land part of Boston and got to the state house, which is where they found the dead Fireflies and guessed that some of them had gotten infected, and the healthy and infected Fireflies killed other.

They didn't find a map or radio or anything that would directly explain what to do next with Ellie in an initial quick search, and they knew a metric ton of Infected were en route so didn't have time to do a more thorough one.

Infected!Tess decided to blow up as many Infected as she could real good and cover Joel and Ellie's escape.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Chicago Redshirt

[Swartz]

I love Anna Torv!  I so missed seeing her play a bad ass. The best!

[Whimsy]

Like a lot of you, I’ve never played the game. I also assumed, based on the advertising for this show, that Tess wasn’t going to be around long since she wasn’t in any marketing, but I was still sad to see her go. 
 

I don’t mean to be all Pearl-clutchy, but the swearing is starting to get on my nerves. I get it, the game probably has a ton of swearing, but it just doesn’t sound natural to me. Almost every single sentence that’s said has a swear of some kind. I just wish that they wouldn’t try to shoe-horn swearing in because it’s the Schlick of the video game- the edgy, swearing child. 
 

Other than that, I’m enjoying the show. This episode really was tense, as im sure the rest of the season will be. 

[mcree]

One of the last things Tess says is to take Ellie to “Bill and Frank”, now that the Fireflies they were to meet are dead. The game has several small hints you can find before this point that describe them, but I don’t recall a similar line/detail in the show. Of course, Joel knows who they are, and in the game he explains right after this point in the story where they are going and why, to Ellie and therefore the player. And maybe to the viewer at the beginning of the next episode.

[Dev F]

47 minutes ago, mcree said:

One of the last things Tess says is to take Ellie to “Bill and Frank”, now that the Fireflies they were to meet are dead. The game has several small hints you can find before this point that describe them, but I don’t recall a similar line/detail in the show.

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."

[overtherainbow]

I don't think I'm going to be watching this show in the evening time again. Going to bed with visions of cordyceps zombie swarms and wiggly spores. The most terrifying scene for me was when they were watching the swarm from afar and later when you could hear them getting closer to the door. Ugh! I'm definitely hooked though. I never played the game (am aware of it though) so I don't have a lot of the same issues other people have with the show.

[Danny Franks]

So we're going to get more of the 'before' stuff, setting up the outbreak. That's cool. I enjoyed the opening scenes in Indonesia, with the scientist being so immediately panicked by the revelation that cordyceps can infect humans.

And I really liked Tess and Joel arguing over Ellie's fate. Tess has some shred of optimism that Joel just does not, and just a bit more humanity than Joel, with the way she started connecting a little with Ellie, started being protective of her. That didn't last long, though.

You can see Joel's determination to keep his distance - emotionally and even physically, from a teenage girl. Probably the first teenage girl he's had any real interactions with since Sarah died.

I like all the performances in the show, but still don't see Pedro and Bella as Joel and Ellie. The game versions are too indelibly marked on my brain. Bella has flashes where I hear and see Ellie, particularly when she yells at someone.

The visuals of the show continue to be incredible. Decayed, abandoned Boston looked great, and I've always loved the juxtaposition of the greys of the old world and the vivid, vibrant greens of nature reclaiming it. Seeing Faneuil Hall was pretty cool, and seeing it overrun by fungus zombies? Kind of similar to when I was last there, to be honest.

The veiled panic and terror that Joel and Tess felt when they saw the Clicker victim was palpable. Just like playing the game, those things are fucking scary. That sound they make... 

But wait... you kill one Infected and the rest can feel it? That's not good.

[Raachel2008]

8 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I'm not convinced this show is doing a great job making itself accessible to an audience that isn't familiar with the game. Most of the comments I've read include pre-existing knowledge of the story.

My SO has zero patience for the zombies/monsters genre and had never heard about The Last of Us before the series and he is captivated by the show, to the point that he sits on the couch to watch it instead of laying around and alternating between what is on screen and his cellphone. He is not Einstein, but far far far from being stupid, and is getting the story just fine.

I liked a lot this episode. The flashback was amaaaazing. The actress did such a great job, from the moment she thought she was getting jailed by the not so democratic Indonesian government to realizing the were all going to die, to saying 'bomb the city' and 'I'd like to be with my family'. And of course nobody would really order to bomb a city of millions based on one scientist, thus the end of the world.

The visuals of this series... Gorgeous. Boston was amazing, the shot of the two skycrappers one collapsing over the other wow. A few things I didn't understand though: 1) if they know the clickers (?) can find them by sound, why didn't they tell Ellie to be quiet when they entered the hotel, etc? 2) What exactly was the problem with the body they found in the museum? Was it the violence or the fact it had happened inside the museum so it pointed as one or more clickers being there? 3) The ligther had almost no gas or Tess hand was already trembling so hard she couldn't do it?

Anna Torv was amazing. I love how Ellie is awed by that world outside the walls she knew her entire life. 

The bee hive mentality, wooooha. That's just mindblowing.

The Last of Us really is a series that each episode needs a rewatch because as a viewer we gain so much the second time around.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Raachel2008

[Sakura12]

I figured Tess was a goner, Anna Torv was back in Boston for a bit. She went out like a badass minus being tongued by an infected. I haven't played the game an am following to story.

Joel and Tess were tasked with getting Ellie out of QZ to some other firefly's to bring west to the doctors trying to find a cure. The firefly's were all dead, so now Joel has to find the doctors, by going to other people they know on the outside. It looks to happen pretty quick after the bite so the fact that Ellie was bit twice and is fine should be enough to convince Joel that she's immune and the doctors may have something to work with. 

I like seeing the before times in openings, since I like that we skipped ahead 20 years. Although it is sad that Elle being 14 means she was born in this and has never seen the before times. 

[meira.hand]

According to IMDb, Anna Torv is part of the first 5 episodes, so maybe we will see more flashbacks with her.

[mledawn]

5 hours ago, Danny Franks said:

I like all the performances in the show, but still don't see Pedro and Bella as Joel and Ellie. The game versions are too indelibly marked on my brain. Bella has flashes where I hear and see Ellie, particularly when she yells at someone.

I agree with you but I think also we haven’t had enough exposure to them yet. Now that the journey of Joel and Ellie has begun, I hope Pedro and Bella become more Joel and Ellie to me.

3 hours ago, Raachel2008 said:

The visuals of this series... Gorgeous. Boston was amazing, the shot of the two skycrappers one collapsing over the other wow. A few things I didn't understand though: 1) if they know the clickers (?) can find them by sound, why didn't they tell Ellie to be quiet when they entered the hotel, etc? 2) What exactly was the problem with the body they found in the museum? Was it the violence or the fact it had happened inside the museum so it pointed as one or more clickers being there? 3) The ligther had almost no gas or Tess hand was already trembling so hard she couldn't do it?

The cinematography is amazing.

My takes on your questions/points but with the acknowledgement that I’m just spitballing… 1) I was freaking out that Tess and Joel weren’t being more insistent (or clear) with Ellie about the importance of being quiet. To Ellie’s credit, she picked up on it quickly. 2) The body being in the museum meant there was a live fungus nearby which is different than the dried one Joel kicked at outside. 3) I think both

[MrWhyt]

35 minutes ago, Raachel2008 said:

2) What exactly was the problem with the body they found in the museum? Was it the violence or the fact it had happened inside the museum so it pointed as one or more clickers being there?

it was a fresh kill, so infected were definitely in the area recently

[paigow]

Joel should have thrown the empty cartridges across the room...

[skotnikov]

There were things on HBO that were way more shocking/disturbing than this "kiss", but the HBO desperately needs people to watch this, so they will hype it to death (no pun intended). 

Episode 2 is also a disappointment, although the mushroom-people are beautifully done. Is "Hannibal" an inspiration for TLoU art directors? 

[cardigirl]

Have to say, I'm not sure I can watch all of this, as I was pretty "icked out" by the infected ones. Gah!  I'll have to cover me eyes! 
Opening was cool and terrifying! Too real! 

Loved the ruined scenes of Boston. I live here, and those scenes made the show more real.