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Martman posted:I'm saying the show has shown us that the soldiers following orders and fighting for their group does not actually indicate anything except that they believe their group is right. You're saying they're all obviously confident in the cure, I'm saying it just shows that they're good soldiers. I'm not sure where you're getting the good soldiers bit. Joel believes them and he literally kills the men with guns. Tess completely believed they had the capability and made Joel promise to see it though. It's very clearly signaled that Ellie would have likely disagreed with Joel's choice and sacrificed herself, which requires her to also believe the cure is real. This has nothing to do with "following orders". The idea that Joel stops the surgery because the fireflies were being reckless and wasting a chance at a cure goes against everything the show built up to that point about their relationship, and obviates pretty much all of the emotional significance of the ending, with no basis other than they didn't do the magic zombie science convincingly enough. It makes no sense, and "don't trust authority figures" isn't really much of a theme of the show anyways, it's tangential to the actual theme of other people being the real monsters/danger/cause of the downfall of humanity.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:36
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I mean "good soldiers" in the sense of "no matter what their personal feelings, they fall in line." You're saying there's evidence that everyone involved is confident in the cure, I'm saying there is none. Because we've been shown over and over that at the end of the day the soldiers in these groups will follow orders and fight for their group. The danger of military authority and the corruption of that power are absolutely thematic elements that are repeated. From my point of view you're the one making huge elements of the show completely irrelevant if at the end of the day we're supposed to look at the fireflies and say "welp, they must know what they're doing." Murdering a fuckton of people after finding that the mission for a cure may have been doomed (or maybe just drastically set back) by corruption and incompetence still has a lot of emotional weight to me. A lot of it still works perfectly well whether it fails because of the Fireflies or solely because of Joel. Martman fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 02:41
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Jarmak posted:I'm not sure where you're getting the good soldiers bit. Joel believes them and he literally kills the men with guns. Tess completely believed they had the capability and made Joel promise to see it though. It's very clearly signaled that Ellie would have likely disagreed with Joel's choice and sacrificed herself, which requires her to also believe the cure is real. This has nothing to do with "following orders". To the contrary they have a very explicit statement by Ellie that she wants to live and be with Joel, and the Fireflies very pointedly don't ask her or tell her what they're about to do.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:43
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The author is dead and all so maybe take the "haha, isn't it funny these are the exact same discussions that happened years ago and here they are again " is telling you something about the actual message being received from this media.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:44
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I mean we spent the better part of 8 episodes building up to the point where Joel opens up again and accepts Ellie as a surrogate daughter, only to immediately be faced with the choice of sacrificing her to save the world. To think the actual point of the ending is that Joel goes on a rampage because he learned to not trust authority figures baffles me. Even as an ancillary plot point it makes no sense and would only serve to diminish the emotional impact of the choice he's forced to make. It makes way more sense that they were a bit ham-fisted with the zombie cure science and it came across a bit contrived.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:47
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It is baffling to me that you think the fireflies must know what they're doing. If you make him save Ellie for 100% selfish reasons, it removes the depth of the tragedy for me because it is just a pure regression for Joel. I find it interesting that Joel actually has developed a ton as a person but is finally unable to be honest with her because he's still too scared that he's bad, and by telling that lie dooms their relationship even though it could have been ok.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:49
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Jetrauben posted:To the contrary they have a very explicit statement by Ellie that she wants to live and be with Joel, and the Fireflies very pointedly don't ask her or tell her what they're about to do. That context is very different, and the subtext of the ending very clearly tells us otherwise. If that subtext wasn't clear the show runners say as much in the making of segment after the show. Ellie probably would have chosen differently, and Joel knows this, it's the entire point of the tension in the final scene.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:52
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I think engaging with the text is more important than what the authors say they meant.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:52
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"We ran tests in Boston Joel, and we can make this cure. But it didn't work from her blood, we need the densest fungus to make it work." "But the densest fungus is in her brain!!!" "Yeah, it's gonna be a big risk. She might not[or probably won't] make it, but dammit we have a real chance here!" Tah day, with that small dialog change the entire hospital rampage gets a real moral weight. 1) establish credibility in Marlene's risky plan by eliminating the obvious preceding steps 2) establish the stakes and why they exist (and in a more interesting way imo) Those are the two biggest things missing, and their exclusion is the popcorn stuck in most people's teeth about the hospital plot.
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Mar 14, 2023 02:56
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Martman posted:It is baffling to me that you think the fireflies must know what they're doing. I think that's part of it but not the only angle. He may feel that by telling her, he'd be putting the weight of the doom of the entire human race on her shoulders. Like it's her fault for living that everyone else has to die. Sure it wouldn't be 100% rational for her to think that, since she didn't choose for Joel to save her, and it might not have worked anyway. But it's a lot of emotional maturity to expect from a heavily traumatized 14 year old kid who already blames herself for bad things happening to people around her.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:04
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Skyl3lazer posted:"But the densest fungus is in her brain!!!" this was my favorite line in the game and its absolutely insane they left it out
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Mar 14, 2023 03:12
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Skyl3lazer posted:"We ran tests in Boston Joel, and we can make this cure. But it didn't work from her blood, we need the densest fungus to make it work." Yeah but if we know the science is sound, or even that it has a strong chance, it comes at the cost of flattening the dilemma of whether he should sacrifice one child to save the entire human race. In your scenario, Joel's choice was just wrong and selfish, if sympathetic. IMO, whether their plan would have worked needs to be just as unclear to us as it was to Joel. That's what makes it a tough choice. The popcorn stuck in peoples' teeth is that this show doesn't leave you with an easy answer and that's uncomfortable. We want the Fireflies to either be explicitly incompetent or explicitly competent but that's not what the show gave us. It's totally possible that the doc was either skilled or a desperate quack. And that's why we're still talking about the ending, instead of just saying "aw how sad".
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Mar 14, 2023 03:17
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I disagree in that even if it's unclear, that still makes it an easy answer to me. The situation he's put in means that he 100% cannot trust them, because they would never go about things this way if they were reasonable. The main contention for me after is that I think that still leads to a fulfilling ending, whereas other people say my reading is invalid.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:19
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Joel was willing to basically sacrifice his brother who had a child on the way to the cause so I think it’s safe to assume he thought the plan had a good amount of merit.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:23
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XboxPants posted:We want the Fireflies to either be explicitly incompetent or explicitly competent but that's not what the show gave us. Throughout the entire show (including flashbacks) the organization has been portrayed as phenomenal buffoons.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:28
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fullroundaction posted:Joel was willing to basically sacrifice his brother who had a child on the way to the cause so I think it’s safe to assume he thought the plan had a good amount of merit. I think he believed in it enough but he got into it originally because he wanted something to trade to find his brother, and then because Tess asked him too and he loved her and it was her dying wish, and then even asking his brother to do it (because he believed he couldn't safely) was before his flip into a more conscious guardianship of "I do actually care and want to protect her like she is asking me to protect her". Edit: which is to say, I'm arguing in favor of the ending being bad because it's not thoroughly earned, but I don't think that's because he didn't believe in the cure as a concept/possibility, he went on a long journey to get there, but he fuckin yeeted back on it when it put her at risk. G-Spot Run fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 03:34
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Martman posted:I disagree in that even if it's unclear, that still makes it an easy answer to me. The situation he's put in means that he 100% cannot trust them, because they would never go about things this way if they were reasonable. Personally, I think your reading is valid. It's just uninteresting to me. When you say: Martman posted:Murdering a fuckton of people after finding that the mission for a cure may have been doomed (or maybe just drastically set back) by corruption and incompetence still has a lot of emotional weight to me. A lot of it still works perfectly well whether it fails because of the Fireflies or solely because of Joel. That's just not what I was in the show for. Even if I didn't know there was a second season/game, I still would have never expected this to be the kind of show where Joel delivers Ellie to the doctors and they make a cure and save humanity and get rid of the zombies and tie up a happy ending with a nice bow. Those were never the stakes to me, or the emotional core of the show. Instead, it was always about Joel, Ellie, and their growth both personally and regarding each other. Finding that the mission for a cure is doomed has pretty much zero weight to me because I never expected them to fix zombieism to begin with. I have no problem if you view the Fireflies as 2-dimensional buffoons; everyone gets to decide how to view them. But that's why I prefer this ending. You get to look at them as completely flawed, other people can idealize them, and I get to imagine that Joel had a chance to try to regain what he lost, but rejected that in favor of moving on with what he had.
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Mar 14, 2023 03:46
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Don't spoiler this if it's not something that is ever addressed. But Marlene is apparently convinced by Ellie's way she obtained immunity, and they got a hospital together and got a surgeon and all that. Since the Fireflies don't object at all to murdering people, like bombing Fedra guards, or just throwing flashbangs at little girls with their dads and knocking their skulls in, then planning to carve that little girl's brain up within hours of her showing up, why didn't they just like get some pregnant women together and get them bitten as they were giving birth? Or didn't they try that?
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Mar 14, 2023 03:51
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I know it's an incredibly fast acting fantasy zombie thing but getting bit in the fraction of a minute before you panic-labour a child (good job, adrenaline) and cut the cord to the placenta which is a bit of a go-between on the mother's blood supply already anyway and also needing to lie that actually you cut the cord before getting bit speaks to some very unreliable and medically questionable but mostly just really particular timing.
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Mar 14, 2023 04:01
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covidstomper58 posted:Don't spoiler this if it's not something that is ever addressed. But Marlene is apparently convinced by Ellie's way she obtained immunity, and they got a hospital together and got a surgeon and all that. Since the Fireflies don't object at all to murdering people, like bombing Fedra guards, or just throwing flashbangs at little girls with their dads and knocking their skulls in, then planning to carve that little girl's brain up within hours of her showing up, why didn't they just like get some pregnant women together and get them bitten as they were giving birth? Or didn't they try that? In the flashback, didn't Anna lie and say that she cut the umbilical cord before the bite? So then none of the Fireflies, not even Marlene, would know that giving birth during an active infection is the key to natural immunity
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Mar 14, 2023 04:03
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I feel like Marlene could put two and two together once Ellie turned out immune but hey, it was a while ago
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Mar 14, 2023 04:05
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Martman posted:I feel like Marlene could put two and two together once Ellie turned out immune but hey, it was a while ago If there's anyone that we can agree is just bafflingly incompetent, it's Marlene.
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Mar 14, 2023 04:10
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I thought Marlene was implying something when she said she was there for her birth or someshit.
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Mar 14, 2023 04:10
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Yeah I just assumed that Marlene figured out she lied and assumed until 14 years later that the baby just lucked out and didn't get exposed in those few seconds she was still connected by the umbilical. The flashback does give some interesting context too. She saved Ellie as promised, but she gave the baby up to FEDRA to raise. We know that she was the one who recruited Riley, and that Riley had mentioned Ellie to her but Marlene had vetoed the idea of recruiting her or letting Riley stay close to her. There's a lot of potential interpretations: Marlene might have been just trying to keep Ellie from being involved for fear that she'd be hurt or killed, or a more cynical read might be that she simply had no interest in her and considered her duty to her friend done by not killing/abandoning the baby to die. The fact she left her with FEDRA at all is a bit of an eye-opener, she's completely dedicated to bringing them down but also appeared to think they were the safest place for a baby to be raised. We don't have all the information, of course, maybe she gave the baby to other people and Ellie ended up in FEDRA by complete coincidence after the fact. But it's telling to me that the first indication Marlene ever gives to claiming an emotional connection to Ellie only comes when she's trying to convince Joel to let her be vivisected.
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Mar 14, 2023 04:18
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Jerusalem posted:The fact she left her with FEDRA at all is a bit of an eye-opener, she's completely dedicated to bringing them down but also appeared to think they were the safest place for a baby to be raised. Not that this is right or even a good read, but my first thought was that by giving Ellie to FEDRA, she'd be safe, and Marlene would be fulfilling her promise, but if it ever turned out that Ellie did have some remnant of infection and she zomb'd out and started killing people, well, all the better. She gets to keep her promise and keep her group safe.
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Mar 14, 2023 04:28
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Series started strong, but it slowly and steadily deflated into the unsatisfying wet fart that was last night's episode. So the whole "Joel chooses his adoptive daughter over the rest of the world" is supposed to be a gray area/morally ambiguous decision that's supposed to have no right answer, but the way the show has treated the infected and the overall world is like...what would finding a cure fix? The one or two zombies that ocassionally wander outside of the major cities(some of them, like the very first one and the underground of Kansas, the rest were pretty zombiefree)? In what way would a cure fix the military corrupt FEDRA problem? Or the ocassional unarmed 2-3 people raider groups? Well, if anything the show's made me interested in actually playing the game. So maybe this was all just a really brilliant ad stunt.
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Mar 14, 2023 05:01
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Thinking a bit, not sure how a cure would stop 4-5 zombies trying to rip your head off.
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Mar 14, 2023 05:09
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The Fireflies never even considered mass-producing Ellie switchblades.
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Mar 14, 2023 05:21
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the most unbelievable detail in this show is the fireflies' stupid logo being perfectly stencilled every time it appears
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Mar 14, 2023 06:45
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An economical but middling last episode to an economical but middling season. Pedro and Bella's acting was fantastic, and a lot of the world building was good, but the narrative was uneven and problematic in a lot of ways already explored in this thread. As a non-game player, I found that the video game elements hindered the climaxes and action sequences (case in point, the hospital fight in this episode), but the lengthy dramatic portions in between sold me on the show. Thinking back on the whole thing now, episode three really stands out as an odd inclusion; it's my favorite episode, but it really doesn't gel with the brisk storytelling or straightforward narrative of the rest of the season. All in all, I'd give it a 7/10. Having read some spoilers for the second game, I remain cautiously optimistic, but I really hope that the show runners depart more from the source material. Most of the time I've found that the weakest parts of the show were taken straight from the game. G-Spot Run posted:I know it's an incredibly fast acting fantasy zombie thing but getting bit in the fraction of a minute before you panic-labour a child (good job, adrenaline) and cut the cord to the placenta which is a bit of a go-between on the mother's blood supply already anyway and also needing to lie that actually you cut the cord before getting bit speaks to some very unreliable and medically questionable but mostly just really particular timing. I tried to stop critiquing these kinds of details back around episode 5 because it just took me out of the show but this one got me. When they showed her cutting the umbilical cord and then her bite I thought, "are they implying that Ellie was infected from birth? Nah, that would make zero sense since it takes minutes for the fungus to spread and would be really contrived." lol
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Mar 14, 2023 08:24
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GoutPatrol posted:Thinking a bit, not sure how a cure would stop 4-5 zombies trying to rip your head off. I suppose the idea is that there are only 4-5 zombies and they don't get any more.
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Mar 14, 2023 09:25
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GoutPatrol posted:Thinking a bit, not sure how a cure would stop 4-5 zombies trying to rip your head off. It stops literally every encounter having a high probability of being a death sentence even if you kill them and survive. Other than Bill's ep, every single time they popped up, people were getting infected. That kid in the pilot, Tess, Sam, Riley, Anna, they all survived their encounters but were still hosed regardless.
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Mar 14, 2023 11:19
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The more I think about this episode the more I think it would have been massively improved by having them stay with the Fireflies for a few days or a week before the rampage. Show the medical team doing tests on Ellie. Have a couple of scenes of interaction between Joel and Marlene to establish A) that the Fireflies put some actual thought into what they would do with Ellie but are ultimately uncertain about whether they could be successful, and B) that Joel is skeptical but ultimately trusting. Then have Joel wake up one morning with Ellie gone for more "testing" only to have Marlene tell him that they've decided to take her into surgery. That would have added maybe an extra ten minutes to this episode but it would both have made the whole situation more believable and given the narrative more much-needed breathing room.
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Mar 14, 2023 11:44
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lezard_valeth posted:Series started strong, but it slowly and steadily deflated into the unsatisfying wet fart that was last night's episode. The show actually does a much better job of making the decision morally ambiguous because it includes real moments of serene love and hope. In the first game you never get to see Bill and Frank's relationship, Pittsburgh is just faceless people-hunters, you never go into Jackson, all of the cult people who aren't shooting at you or field stripping a person for dinner are hidden away, etc. For the series they did a lot more work to show the viewer moments of hope and redemption, and put in more people that are the victims of this world rather than just antagonists. In the game it's very much running into terrible people constantly and I came away from it unequivocally, misanthropically on the side of Joel. On the other hand, the game world is absolutely crawling with infected to trip over everywhere, so they're a much more constant threat. Xombie fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 14:50
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exmarx posted:the most unbelievable detail in this show is the fireflies' stupid logo being perfectly stencilled every time it appears Every time I see that stupid logo or here the word or here "FEDRA" I'm just instantly reminded it's from a videogame. It's just all so cheesy. Ellie and Joel are amazing together and I love watching the scenes with them in it. But everything else just pales in comparison to them two (minus episode 3 which was absolutely amazing).
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Mar 14, 2023 16:13
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BonoMan posted:Every time I see that stupid logo or here the word or here "FEDRA" I'm just instantly reminded it's from a videogame. It's just all so cheesy. Yeah tagging their mark on stuff in their own base is a little odd. Maybe the reason the dudes in the hospital were such crap shots is they were the PR division? Very gung ho about branding, less so about practicing their tactics and ability to shoot.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:20
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do y'all think making a stencil is hard or something?
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Mar 14, 2023 16:43
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Khanstant posted:do y'all think making a stencil is hard or something? Its definitely easier than taking cover in a gunfight, that much is clear.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:48
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BonoMan posted:Every time I see that stupid logo or here the word or here "FEDRA" I'm just instantly reminded it's from a videogame. It's just all so cheesy. w/r/t FEDRA, they probably didn't want to paint FEMA as jumping straight to mass murders and fascism in a disaster
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Mar 14, 2023 16:53
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Xombie posted:
This is one big difference I noticed. In the show, it seemed the characters didn’t much fear going into random, abandoned buildings unless there was as some obvious sign infected might be nearby. In the game, you basically hold your breath every time you enter a building because it’s near-guaranteed to have infected and you’re just hoping there are no clickers.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:59
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