The Last of Us episode 3: The euclidean story of a surly doomsday prepper
Thanks to its association with the award-winning game, “The Last of Us” was burdened with the kind of expectations that almost inevitably lead to disappointment or once the media machinery kicks into overdrive, a backlash. Yet the show has met that challenge, and while the third episode is probably the best of the nine, it has company that at least comes close before the season’s over.
The show subverts a stand alone story into the larger canvas of this zombie-ridden world, and then uses Linda Ronstadt’s haunting song “Long, Long Time” to finish things off.
Feeling almost like an episode of an anthology series – think “Tales of the Last of Us” – the centerpiece revolved around Bill (Nick Offerman), a surly doomsday prepper, who reluctantly takes in the weary traveler Frank (“The White Lotus’” Murray Bartlett, who somehow seems to be everywhere at once these days).
The real emotional wallop came at the end, when Joel (Pedro Pascal), who had known the couple, and his traveling companion Ellie (Bella Ramsey) find Bill’s suicide note, in which he speaks of “saving” Frank and how his love for him changed his morbid, cynical outlook.
I am satisfied. And you were my purpose,” Bill tells Frank, who responds by saying, “I do not support this. … It is incredibly romantic from an objective point of view.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/entertainment/the-last-of-us-episode-3-review/index.html
What happened to Pedro Pascal, Ellie, and Lamar Ramsey, in HBO’s “The Last of Us” episode?
The Kate Bush hit, “Running Up That Hill”, which received an unexpected resurgence thanks to “Stranger Things,” should receive renewed interest due to the strains of Ronstadt’s voice. (HBO, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
“The Last of Us” has two episodes to go in order to deal with Joel’s condition and get back to its ostensible mission to ascertain what makes Ellie special, while its building popularity has fans obsessing over – and occasionally nitpicking – its every wrinkle, down to small details.
After the justifiable hoopla caused by its third episode, HBO’s “The Last of Us” plucked at the heartstrings again in its fifth hour, subtitled “Endure and Survive,” which featured the characters of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) befriending a pair of brothers, one of whom was deaf.
Apocalyptic drama inevitably means that a lot of people die, good as well as bad. Small-scale tragedy can hit harder than a mass-casualty event, especially when it involves an innocent.
Sam the eight-year-old was laughing with the younger one, and he found a few moments to be like kids with him. Sam decorated the places he and his brother, Henry (Lamar Johnson), were forced to hide with childlike drawings. It was a moment of normal, in a world that was so brutal and chaotic.
The flashback made you like these characters and root for them. Sam was killed suddenly, after being turned into something inhuman.
The game on which the series is based is not the same as a TV show. Killing a child in drama is never easy to do because of the unique and frightening way those moments strike the audience.
A touching love story from the zombies of The Walking Dead, aka Euphoria’s Storm Reid, that leaves us feeling like a horrible person
The episode speaks to the fearlessness of the storytelling by producers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, presenting a stark demonstration – if one was still needed at this point – that the stakes in the show’s world are as stark as they come.
In the second season of The Walking Dead, a missing girl comes shuffling out of the barn and becomes a monster after being transformed into a zombie.
Beyond departing from the comics, that sequence felt genuinely shocking at the time, and reinforced that the show’s dramatic ambitions went beyond mere horror. As the website Undeadwalking.com put it, “This scene made many fans realize this wasn’t a typical series. This one was unafraid to push things to the max, make the viewers uncomfortable, and feel the pain of loss with the characters.
Nothing good can last for long, so a zombie intruded on the moment, wounding both of them. The encounter will lead to Ellie’s realization that she’s immune to the zombie plague, while Riley’s dire fate gave way to a return to Joel’s situation, and Ellie finding a needle and thread to close his wound.
The emotional wallop the show has delivered helps explain its popularity and social-media footprint – inspiring even the skeptical to tune in – and why the term “zombie drama,” while accurate, is too reductive. If the third episode resonated because of its romantic underpinnings, the latest one (dropped early on HBO Max, and available in its regular slot on HBO opposite the Super Bowl) ultimately came around to unimaginable loss, and making viewers acutely feel it.
This time, we interrupt the regularly scheduled zombie drama with a touching love story, which is done in the form of an extended flashback during a different phase of life.
The meat of the hour, however, flashed back to Ellie as the bad-attitude recipient of military training, who is dragged by her AWOL friend, Riley (“Euphoria’s” Storm Reid), to an abandoned mall, which turned out to be not quite as abandoned as advertised.
The trip is ostensibly Riley’s way of saying goodbye, as she has decided to join the resistance group the Fireflies. As the hour progresses, it becomes obvious that it is a first date, with Riley exposing her to a host of wonders, including the escalators, arcades and photo booths, before a kiss takes their relationship in a new and more. Along the way, the show even identified the source of Ellie’s book of stupid jokes.
Although “Left Behind” added a bit to the ongoing Joel-Ellie dynamic, with her refusal to abandon him, its exploration of love and loss in this grim world evoked both the third episode, with its Linda Ronstadt-scored detour involving Frank and Bill; and the fifth, to the extent that during a zombie apocalypse, even the good die young.
It ends for everyone at some point, right? Riley accepted her cruel fate. The actors are both 19 years old, which makes them more interesting for their scenes.
The series offered a respite from that, showing how young love can be devastating, but it was overshadowed by how The Last of Us keeps bucking expectations and why so many viewers cant get off this merry-go-round.