‘The Last of Us’ is a story about zombies
“The Last of Us” revisited: A touching love story of a bad-attitude college student and an abandoned mall (likely)
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.
With two episodes left, “The Last of Us” will be able to deal with his condition and get back to what it is meant to be: figuring out what makesEllie special. While its buildingPopularity has fans obsessed with small details, while its mission has them trying to figure out what
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. Yet as the hour unfolds, it pretty clearly becomes what amounts to a first date, with Riley exposing the wide-eyed Ellie to a host of wonders – escalators, arcade games, photo booths, a merry-go-round – before a spontaneous kiss that takes their relationship in a new and more romantic direction. Along the way, the show even identified the source of Ellie’s book of stupid jokes.
A zombie intruded on their moment together, wounding both of them, as they were having their moment in the film ” The Last of Us”. When the encounter occurs, Riley has a dire fate that leads to a return to Joel, and Ellie discovers she is immune to zombie plague.
Although “Left Behind” caused a bit of a stir, its exploration of both love and loss in this dark world evoked the third and fifth episodes, and Linda Ronstadt-scored detour involving Frank and Bill.
It ends this way for everyone, right? Riley accepted her cruel fate. (As a footnote both actors are actually 19 even though they’re playing younger, which likely made their scenes together more impactful.)
The series gave a respite from that while showing how young love can affect a person, and how “The Last of Us” keeps bucking expectations.
The Last of Us has a reputation as one of the best video game stories ever told. David Barr Kirtley, host of the Geek’s Guide to theGalaxy think that reputation is well deserved. He says that this is a must-watch show. Someone had to write it sooner or later because it seemed like a story that was so good. It’s almost like it exists in the ether and was just waiting for somebody to instantiate it.”
Chapman says that the show is shot-for-shot remake of the game in many episodes. “The script is almost exactly the same, you just don’t get the gameplay.”
The Last of Us: A Conversation with Erin Lindsey in e+e- annihilation Episode 539 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
In The Last of Us,zombie-like zombies crawl through a post- apocalypse America. Horror author Theresa DeLucci says the show’s likable, well-drawn characters set it apart from other zombie stories. “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 might make some friends, you might fall in love, you might 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. Lindsey thinks that episode was the best of the show. She says that she would love to see more scriptwriters and networks take a chance on putting out episodes like that that are more about heart and more about people.
Listen to the complete interview with Zach Chapman, Theresa DeLucci, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 539 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2023/03/geeks-guide-the-last-of-us/
The New York Times: A Game of Thrones Perspective on Real-Time Times and the Existence of the Quark–Zombian Continuum
I’m a super-fan. I’ve been playing this game since the beta in 2013. Right before it came out I went to PAX Prime and got to go see an early preview of the game, and I still have my T-shirt and my poster. My husband is taller than me, and has a good beard, so we did cosplays as the same character. I wrote about it and played it over and over again. 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. When they picked this up, they knew what they had.
I think the [show’s] time frame is implausible bordering on ridiculous. Everybody eats this flour within the same 48-hour period, and everything starts to go to shit. 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. … You see by Episode 2 that these vestigial institutions still exist. In whatever mangled, fascist form, we sort of recognize life in the QZ. There is authority established, there is still water in some places, and a plentiful supply of bullets. And that to me is incompatible with the timeline that they put forward. Even the most prepared military and federal disaster authority in the world can not set up with a single snap of a finger.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2023/03/geeks-guide-the-last-of-us/
Mortal Kombat II, and what happened to her best friend and first crush? A little peek at the game and how she died after playing the game
Usually, when you are trying to take out monsters, you will do 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 pick a brick from the corner of the building and hit them with it. And there were no examples of Pedro Pascal doing that in the show, that made him seem crafty. … There was none of the brutal “smash someone multiple times in the face with a brick” or “stab them with a shiv.” I think it dropped the ball a little bit, because that does not happen in the show.
She is completely excited when she sees the machine for the first time. It is Mortal Kombat II. This is wonderful. There’s a character that 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. And it just seemed odd to me that she didn’t have a more negative reaction when she saw the Mortal Kombat II game, given what associations you’d think it must have had for her—and fairly fresh ones. I didn’t think she was as cheerful as she was in some episodes when we found out what happened to her.