The Last of Us (HBO) TV Show • Page 155

I hate being like THE GAME IS SO MUCH BETTER GUYS I SWEAR but yea.

 

It seems like their attempts at making her more sympathetic mostly just led to confusing people who haven’t played the game. The inconsistency between her revenge mixed with stuff like wanting to save the seraphite kid.

 

I saw someone sum it up nicely - in the game, Dina goes with Ellie because she *could* die. In the show, Dina goes with Ellie because she *would* die.

 

yeah that quote above is pretty damning. It’s such a significant change to the character and honestly it makes her less sympathetic to me. The show seems designed to open the viewer to the idea that Abby could be good/right and Ellie bad/wrong right from the jump of this season and I think that was a huge misstep.

 

Without spoiling anything for non-game players, this was 100% the most logical point for the finale. I think the finale could have a lot more impact if they had kept the audience guessing as to who Abby was and the origins of her group to this episode. I have seen a lot takes online about how they should have changed the story’s structure to fit, swapping between Ellie and Abby, and I just cannot envision a version where that would have been effective. Maybe I will elaborate more on this in the game thread.

In two years, whenever S3 comes out and all episodes are available to stream, people who are catching up on the show will have a completely different experience. It just sucks that this is a reality of big budget TV now.

As for Ellie’s character change, there is a very big reason (again, trying to avoid spoilers), but if they remove this scene from the show I think it makes their characterization of her very believable IMO, that she would be in over her head.

 

I think the show allows the audience to see that both Abby and Ellie are wrong in their lust for revenge. I don’t think they’ve shown either to be good at this point. They did try to paint Ellie more sympathetically, but I’m not sure it worked.

 

Making Ellie seem less capable detracts from just how far gone she is. Not to mention, in the game, Tommy's the one who left first. Their bloodlust consumes them and they leave behind a trail of bodies throughout Seattle. Even if you as the player decided not to kill anyone in encounters, you'd have still killed more of Abby's crew by this point

 

But like, which is more believable to a TV audience:
- 19 year old Rambo Ellie, who has lived in a gated community for 5 years and only killed infected
- 19 year old out-of-her-depth Ellie, who is brash and naive, and maybe doesn’t think things all the way through.

They establish in the show that Dina has been in her own since she was 8 years old. Ellie, in this version, has never been on her own for a meaningful stretch of time. I think the changes they made make a lot of sense in this regard.

 

That's the only thing I dislike about the flashback episode, the fact that in this version Ellie doesn't go all the way to Salt Lake and back on her own looking for answers. That would've shown how capable she was in the game.

The plot changes in the show make sense in the context of the show, that doesn't mean they're always gonna line up thematically

 

I want to watch again before actually writing what I thought but I liked it for the most part.

Over the last few days though it's been becoming apparent that there was a call to make the show/Ellie less violent. They've photoshopped the season's poster for the physical release to not have Ellie holding the rifle. There was a whole scene apparently where Ellie is shooting a rifle at WLF soldiers that was not used but it was in the trailer. And now I just saw the Mel/Owen scene had Ellie attacking them with a knife rather than shooting Owen in defense and accidentally shooting Mel.

I wonder whose decision it was between Craig or if it was from the higher ups at HBO.

After the episode aired, ViewerAnon had said the aquarium scene that aired was a reshoot but they weren't sure why. This clip from a behind the scenes video proves that.

 

I think I also had seen that Bella had done some pretty intense ballistics training that went nowhere

 

yeah and some pretty cool looking fight choreo that was never used. they always just ran away from wolves/seraphites