“The Last of Us” revisited: A touching love story about a bad-attitude woman and her death in a sad world

We again interrupt your regularly scheduled zombie drama with a touching love story, this time in the form of an extended flashback during a different phase of life.

In order to deal withJoel’s condition and get back to the truth, ” The Last of Us” needs two episodes to be finished. Its popularity has fans fixated on small details, but it also has an overarching mission which it needs to be finished.

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.

Riley is taking the trip in order to say goodbye as she wants to join the Fireflies. As the hour goes on, it becomes obvious that it’s going to be a first date, with Riley exposing Ellie to a host of fun things and a kiss that takes their relationship in a new direction. Along the way, the show even identified the source of Ellie’s book of stupid jokes.

Nothing good can last long, and this being “The Last of Us”, a zombie intrudes on their 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.

Although it added a bit to the ongoing tension betweenJoel andEllie, its exploration of love and loss in this grim world evoked both the third and fifth episodes.

“It ends this way for everyone sooner or later, right?” Riley says, by way of accepting her cruel fate. Even though both actors are 19 and playing younger, their scenes were more impactive because of that.

For a moment, the series gave viewers a break from watching young love and how it can make people feel sad. The series has also shown how “The Last of Us” keeps bucking expectations and why so many viewers can’t stop watching.

The Last of Us is based on a popular video game. Science fiction author Zach Chapman appreciates that the show is a faithful adaptation of one of his favorite games.

“The show is in many episodes a shot-for-shot remake of the game,” Chapman says in Episode 539 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The script is almost exactly the same, you just don’t get the gameplay.”

The Last of Us: A Game with a Twisted Twistor and a Streaked DeLucci, a Revised Chapman, and an Invisible Deadly Ghost

The Last of Us is a zombie-esque game about a post-revolutionary America crawling with zombies. Theresa DeLucci says that the show is a different kind of zombie story. “Here’s a story where things are shitty, but also hopeful and loving and humorous and complicated, and not everybody you meet is going to be an absolute shitheel looking to screw you over,” she says. You could make friends, you could fall in love and find a family. And I think that’s what makes people like this show a lot and come back to it and not feel like it’s a Walking Dead retread.”

One of the show’s strongest episodes, “Long, Long Time,” explores a same-sex relationship as it develops over the course of 20 years. That episode was the best one, according to Lindsey. She says she would love to see more writers take a risk on putting out episodes that are more about heart and people, and less about moving at breakneck speed from one slaughter fest to the next.

You can hear the complete interview with Theresa DeLucci, Theresa Chapman, andZach Chapman if you listen below. Take a look at the highlights from the discussion.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2023/03/geeks-guide-the-last-of-us/

The New York Times: A Game of Thrones Against Particles in the Second World War. I. How the Nazis Got Their Finshears

I’m a super-fan. I’ve been playing this game since the beta in 2013. I went to the early previews of the game at PAX Prime before the game came out, and still have my poster and T-shirt. My husband is taller than me, but he has a good beard. This game has been written about and repeated over and over. I had high expectations. … I went to an early screening at a theater here in New York City that they completely re-dressed to look like the New York QZ with actors and zombies. You could tell they’re doing the Game of Thrones treatment for this. They knew what they had when they picked this up.

I think the [show’s] time frame is implausible bordering on ridiculous. Everybody eats the same amount of flour within 48 hours. You would see some kind of staggered timeline, I think, depending on the origin of this flour and where it gets to supermarket shelves the soonest. … By the middle of the second episode, you can see that these institutions still exist. In whatever mangled, fascist form, we sort of recognize life in the QZ. There is some authority established, there’s still running water in some places, an endless supply of ammunition for some reason. And that to me is incompatible with the timeline that they put forward. The military or federal disaster authority in the world does not start with a snap of a finger, if you have seen crises break out.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2023/03/geeks-guide-the-last-of-us/

The Mortal Kombat II Machine and the Death of a Best-Friend and a Client: A Story with a Small Boy and Two Monsters

You have to strategize how you’re going to go about taking out these monsters, and usually you’re doing it in a quiet way. A lot of the game you’re strategizing, using improvised weapons that you’re picking up and creating, like bricks. You place a brick on the building’s corner and bash one of their heads in. There were no examples where Pedro Pascal did that in the show. There was no brutal attack like hitting someone with a brick, or hitting them with a shiv. That doesn’t happen in the show, and I think, at least for me, it dropped the ball a little bit.

When Ellie first sees the Mortal Kombat II machine, she’s just completely exuberant, and is like, “Oh my god! It’s Mortal Kombat II! This is so awesome. There’s this character and she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!” And we find out later that just a couple of days ago, her best friend and first crush died under horrible circumstances shortly after they had played Mortal Kombat II together for the first time. It was odd to me that she did not have a negative reaction to the game, due to the associations you would think it had for her. She was feisty in some of the early episodes, but I didn’t find that to be good for me once we found out what happened to her.