Where a kid can be a kid: Recapping episode 7 of HBO’s The Last of Us
Let's go to the mall —Kyle and Andrew make sure no insight gets "Left Behind" in this DLC-inspired episode.Even the apocalypse can't stop the standard teen wall full of posters...Enlarge / Even the apocalypse can't stop the standard teen wall full of posters...New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.Andrew: We're back again! FLASH-back, that is!
This one isn't as big a departure from the action as the Bill episode was a few weeks back, but it does mean that last week's cliffhanger goes mostly unresolved. Ellie does take a crack at patching Joel up, though it seems to me that sticking a decades-old unsanitized needle into an open wound is just as likely to kill him as save him...Kyle: If the flashback here seems a bit out of place it's probably because this storyline was originally part of the game's "Left Behind" DLC, which was written and released well after the first game came out. I'm not totally against putting it here in the show's narrative—it's important background that should go somewhere—but it does step on one of the more dramatic moments in the game (though maybe that's still coming in the future?)
Given how we first met Ellie as a prisoner in the show, I definitely appreciate giving a little more time to showing what she was like trying to grow up as a normal kid under FEDRA's version of society.
Bored teens look the same, even under FEDRA control. Enlarge / Bored teens look the same, even under FEDRA control.Andrew: Yeah, I don't have a problem with the episode, and people watching this in the future when the whole season is available to binge straight through probably won't be as bothered by the delayed cliffhanger.
This does flirt with a thing that I can find frustrating in fiction, though—this impulse to show/explain every single little thing about a character instead of letting things be implied or a little mysterious. I'm not overly bothered by it here, but if TLoU stretches into a second or third season I could see them leaning on flashback-as-filler in a way that could be less interesting.
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