TLOU Discussion (spoilers ahead)

[Dickie Dunn]

I would be okay with S2 deviating completely from the second game.

[tifosi77]

I've been reading about the controversy over Joel's decision. To me, it was a simple choice for several reasons. First, and most importantly, it was all theoretical. There's no proof it would have worked. Second, if the Fireflies were so convinced it would work, then why didn't they take some adult pregnant woman, convince her to sacrifice her life for science, let her get bit, then harvest the baby? Why wait for many months on the slim hope Joel can escort Ellie safely across a wildly dangerous country? Seems ridiculous to have no back up plan in place.

"...[C]onvince her to sacrifice her life for science, let her get bit, then harvest the baby"..............Oh dear, no no no

I think you are being way overly clever with this.

It takes 9 months from start-to-finish to produce an newborn infant, that the mother is carrying to term and birthing to simply have both end up dead at the end of the process. Your plan would have them trapping an Infected for the purpose of this exercise, or at least orchestrating a controlled situation in which transmission could happen, and then potentially voluntarily producing as many as two more Infected as a result, for not less speculative reasons. (Transmission from pregnant mother to unborn child is not something I ever recall hearing about in TLOU lore - I don't recall Anna's story ever being a thing before - so I don't know if that sort of thing was ever contemplated by the creative teams, or if it had been what that looked like in the 20 years post-Outbreak Day)

They don't all know the details of Ellie's birth and the nature of her immunity, Marlene is the only one in the story present day who heard Anna say she was bit after Ellie was born (which is clearly a lie), so Marlene is the sole source of truth here. Ellie was 14 when she was bit which that was the first time her immunity presented, and they didn't know anything about the nature of her immunity (the messenger chemicals) until after they got her to SLC. Within a month of being bitten she was on her way across the country; we first meet her in the show chained up to a radiator because all they know is she was bitten but hasn't turned. They don't know until they get her to SLC that she may have carried her immunity since birth, but do they know it wasn't something that was triggered by the hormonal changes onset during puberty? (e.g. if Ellie had been bitten at age 7 would she still have exhibited any immunity) They don't know, so is the sacrificial lamb plan even feasible? For whatever reason the Boston QZ didn't have the facilities in working order to get the medical sciencey aspect of that investigation accomplished, the Baltimore and Pittsburgh QZs (other regional medical hubs in 2003) had fallen and were Mad Max wastelands; the only place they knew (in Boston) to potentially still be up-and-running with the capability to pull something like this off was SLC. And even that was somewhat speculative.

This plan came together in like 20 days. Ellie was the first known human to exhibit any measure of resistance to CBI in 20 years. There is not a backup for "first time in human history this has ever happened".

Re: not filming for almost a year because there are no scripts, that excuse really annoys me. Stranger Things pulls the same stunt. I'm not saying scriptwriting is easy, but especially for existing IP like The Last of Us, there's no reason a rough draft for a 45-60 minute show can't be knocked out in a week tops. I can't understand waiting until an entire season of a hit show that is virtually guaranteed for renewal has aired, then going, "Oh man, it's going to be 18-24 months before we can show you anything new because we haven't even started on the screenplays." GTFO of here with that.

Tone, you're killing me here, buddy. Don't be this guy.

[skullman80]

I would be okay with S2 deviating completely from the second game.

They already said they aren't doing that, and I honestly don't think they should. It was hugely devisive, but there is a good story to be told there.

[tifosi77]

Fun fact: Laura Bailey, who played Abby in TLOU2, has a cameo as one of the masked nurses in the operating room with Ellie. She played several background characters in the first game, so I don't know if she was 'reprising her role' there, but that's a fun little factoid, given............... well, if you know you know.

[AuthorTony]

Tif - I fouled up the spoiler tags and quote tags and don't feel like fixing all of them, sorry. But, to your points.

I'm not saying my harvesting a baby plan was great either, I'm just pointing out that Joel's choice seems far less gray to me when they're planning to sacrifice a 14 year old girl on what is basically a flier. Especially when they gave Ellie no choice in the matter. I was rooting for him to kill all of those mofos.

Edit: As someone who never played the game, I was also unaware how much time passed from Ellie being bit to their decision to smuggle her west. I assumed it was a couple years.

Re: the delay between seasons, I think it's a legit gripe. I'm not saying to have season 2 shot and in the can before season 1 even airs, but the notion that they haven't even started on scripts... It seems not only lazy, but a bad creative choice in a show when you're dealing with young actors. This is less of an issue in TLOU because Bella probably isn't going to change/grow that much, but it has really hurt Stranger Things and forced them to changed the original vision of the show.

Writing a full season on spec might be risky, but if you're trying to run a hit show, I feel like the risk is worthwhile. All imho of course.

[tifosi77]

TLOU2 is a much more recent thing, so I'm gonna go ahead and spoiler substantive discussion about that story ITT.

From my perspective the most common reason I've heard people say as to why don't like TLOU2 is because they say "Joel deserved better". Never mind nearly all of the rest of the story, Joel's demise is 'divisive'. Bullshit. He got what was coming to him, he was a bad man. What you mean is you deserved better. You spent 15 hours playing as Joel in the first game, activating those choices and decisions - how many times did you triangle+square your way through some humans - including not being able to complete the game without murdering the surgeon (*ahem*) in that operating room. You, the player, feel like you deserved better, because every villain is the hero of their own story. That's why I thought it was brilliant to have you play as Abby for much of the game. Why the consequences of violence are deeply personal in that game in a way that they simply weren't first time out; you play as Abby for a while, and get to be friends with her friends and play with her dog....... and then you switch back to Ellie and murder them all, including the dog.

My main criticism of TLOU2 is that the central tenant of a game is that it must be something you want to play. They talk about it a lot in "Grounded", the documentary about the making of the first game. (Available in its entirety on YT, worth a watch) As such, I've played through TLOU maybe four times in ten years. I'll probably never replay TLOU2, because it is such a bleak and dismal experience. They lost sight of that central aim, imo, but it is true to the world and the characters they set up.

Tl;dr Don't change the sequel story one bit.

[Dickie Dunn]

Re: the delay between seasons, I think it's a legit gripe. I'm not saying to have season 2 shot and in the can before season 1 even airs, but the notion that they haven't even started on scripts... It seems not only lazy, but a bad creative choice in a show when you're dealing with young actors. This is less of an issue in TLOU because Bella probably isn't going to change/grow that much, but it has really hurt Stranger Things and forced them to changed the original vision of the show.

Writing a full season on spec might be risky, but if you're trying to run a hit show, I feel like the risk is worthwhile. All imho of course.

This has become a major gripe of mine. I don't know if it's because of the budgetary commitments for a lot of these shows, but it's ridiculous. At least old school network programming had a release schedule that they stuck to. S4 of Stranger Things took like a decade to release with an aging, young cast and you don't ever start writing S5 until months after S4 is released? S2 of HOTD is at least a year and a half away from now. Even less expensive and less CGI heavy stuff like Severance is looking at two years between seasons. **** off.

[tifosi77]

They aren't making a new season of Falcon Crest, lads. A season of one of these prestige shows is effectively like making 3-4 feature films simultaneously.

[tifosi77]

To your points, Tony:

- They mention in the show that Ellie was bitten three weeks prior to when we meet her. It's mentioned in her intro scene w Marlene, when Ellie reveals her infection to Joel and Tess, and again when Tess is bit and she shows how quickly the infection is spreading in her after just an hour post-chomp.

- TLOU2 takes place something like 4+ years after the first game. So Ellie, while still young, is technically an adult. Basically, she's as old as Bella Ramsey is today.

[AuthorTony]

To your points, Tony:

- They mention in the show that Ellie was bitten three weeks prior to when we meet her. It's mentioned in her intro scene w Marlene, when Ellie reveals her infection to Joel and Tess, and again when Tess is bit and she shows how quickly the infection is spreading in her after just an hour post-chomp.

Doh - I totally missed that. I wasn't quite as invested in the first two eps as much as I was the rest of the season.

[AuthorTony]

They aren't making a new season of Falcon Crest, lads. A season of one of these prestige shows is effectively like making 3-4 feature films simultaneously.

I still don't see why the writers can't be doing their writer thing while the present season is filming/airing. I mean, it's just writing. Any schmuck can do it.

[tifosi77]

"The writers" are Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. That's it. Those are the only two credited writers on the show. I am sure they did some development of a TLOU2 story treatment while they were working on Se 1, but the meat of actual writing isn't going to happen unless/until the second season is greenlit and budgeted because no one's getting paid before that. (Outside of a few dollars here and there for, say, one episode as a proof-of-concept)

[AuthorTony]

Pfft. Give a monkey a keyboard and he could write season 2 in a week.

[tifosi77]

Anyone can just write a season..........

[DigitalGypsy66]

Pfft. Give a monkey a keyboard and he could write season 2 in a week.

ChatGPT could do it.

[shoeshine boy]

Re: the delay between seasons, I think it's a legit gripe. I'm not saying to have season 2 shot and in the can before season 1 even airs, but the notion that they haven't even started on scripts... It seems not only lazy, but a bad creative choice in a show when you're dealing with young actors. This is less of an issue in TLOU because Bella probably isn't going to change/grow that much, but it has really hurt Stranger Things and forced them to changed the original vision of the show.

Writing a full season on spec might be risky, but if you're trying to run a hit show, I feel like the risk is worthwhile. All imho of course.

I'm with you on this. so many of these shows are super short seasons, TLOU was 9 eps. was there more they could've included? I never played the game so I don't know. so you have just over 2 months of episodes and now it'll be probably 16-24 months before we get anything new.
maybe my attention span is lacking but by then, I've completely forgotten what happened and sometimes, forgotten that a show existed at all.

[AuthorTony]

Anyone can just write a season..........

If George Costanza write a sitcom, I could write season 2 of TLOU.

[tifosi77]

Do you want it great? Or do you want it fast? Because those are competing principles that rarely appear together.

TLOU was greenlit by HBO around Thanksgiving 2020; it was just over two years from greenlight to first episode. Because this is much more akin to feature film production than "TV" they are probably only shooting maybe 4-5 pages of script per day, likely much less than that. (That's maybe 25% of the pace of a regular TV show) They filmed for over 200 days on location (actual production working days, aside from COVID quarantines) to make around 10 hours of story.

[tifosi77]

‘The Last of Us’ Passes ‘House of the Dragon’ in Full-Season Viewers

The first-season finale of The Last of Us brought in the show’s biggest audience to date.

Sunday’s finale averaged 8.2 million viewers across all platforms for HBO, up slightly from the previous week’s 8.1 million and an opening-night high for the nine-episode season. According to HBO, The Last of Us’ first six episodes are averaging 30.4 million viewers since the Jan. 15 premiere, with the debut episode closing in on 40 million viewers.

This, against a live broadcast of the Oscars which had it's best ratings performance since the Before Times.

[DigitalGypsy66]

TLOU 2 will comprise multiple TV seasons, fwiw.

Also, Druckman hasn't confirmed that Naughty Dog has TLOU 3 in the pipeline either. Could be a late-series GOT situation going on.

[tifosi77]

They 100% definitely should not do a third TLOU game.

[skullman80]

They 100% definitely should not do a third TLOU game.

This times 100000.

[nocera]

Okay but hear me out: The Last of Us: Year One.

[tifosi77]

The Next Of Us doesn't quite hold the same weight, does it

[nocera]

Okay then spin-offs. Fear the Last of Us.