‘The Last of Us’ episode 3 review shows a very good show with a stellar cast and an hour that lives up to the hype

The Last of Us episode (3/n): A romantic anthology about a surly doomsday prepper

The award-winning game, “The Last of Us,” put the game under a lot of expectations that resulted in disappointment or a backlash. The third episode is probably the best of the nine, but the show has at least come close to meeting that challenge, and it won’t be the last.

Folding a stand-alone story into the larger canvas of this dystopian, zombie-ravaged world, the show unearths a tale of love and tenderness amid the chaos and violence, while making inordinately good use of Linda Ronstadt’s haunting ballad “Long, Long Time” just to punctuate things.

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’” It seems like Murray Bartlett is everywhere these days.

At the end, when Bill left a suicide note that he spoke about saving Frank and how he changed his outlook, the real emotional wallop came at the start, when Joel found Bill’s suicide note and talked about saving Frank.

I am happy. And you were my purpose,” Bill tells Frank, who responds by saying, “I do not support this. … It is romantic on an objective point of view.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/entertainment/the-last-of-us-episode-3-review/index.html

The Killing of an 8-Year-old in Apocalyptic Drama: “Endure and Survive”

The strains of Linda Ronstadt’s voice should spark renewed interest in the 1970 hit by her, “Running up That Hill”, which got an unexpected rebirth thanks to “Stranger Things.” Conversely, the Kate Bush hit from 1985 that got an unexpected resurgence due to “Stranger Things” should Hbo is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The story will go on even after the announcement that Hbo renewed it for a second season. Either on its own or in that broader context, a series-defining episode like this one is worth savoring for now, and maybe, for a long, long time.

The fifth season of the show, titled “Endure and Survive”, aired on February 10 on the cable network, but will premiere on February 12 on the network.

A lot of people die in Apocalyptic drama. Yet as is so often true when watching the news, a small-scale tragedy can hit harder than a mass-casualty event, especially when it involves an innocent.

The eight-year-old Sam found a few moments to act like a kid with his younger sibling, after laughing with them. Sam and Henry were forced to hide in decorated places, where they drew on their drawings. It was a sweet moment of normalcy in a chaotic world.

The flashback made you like these characters and root for them. They killed Sam after turning him into an inhuman being.

A brief reminder that tv shows and games aren’t the same animal is required before anyone mentions the game on which the series is based. Simply put, killing a child in drama is always dicey, because those moments strike the audience in a unique and unsettling way.

“The Last of Us”: Making Sense of the Show’s Scenario in the Era of a Breaking Theorem

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 young girl who had vanished from the barn suddenly became a monster when she walked out.

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 wasn’t afraid to push things to the max and make the viewers uncomfortable and feel the pain of loss along with the characters.”

“The Last of Us” has demonstrated even more impressive range thus far, in the process establishing a strong showcase for guest stars, including Melanie Lynskey in these latest hours. Yet as Mazin noted in the video that followed the episode, those subplots also inform and impact the relationship between Joel and Ellie, which was evident in their unspoken exchange at the end.

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 stuck because of how romantic it was, the latest one came around to unimaginable loss and made viewers really feel it.