‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Premiere

hello welcome back to the prestige tv podcast feed i'm joyna robinson i'm rob mahoney and we are here to deliver to you the ninth The Last of Us podcast episode on The Ringer podcast feed. Hello.
We're here to talk to you about season two, episode one of The Last of Us. It's titled Future Days and directed by Craig Mazin and written by Craig Mazin.
So we talked about this a little bit on a previous pod, sort of like why we wanted to do this podcast when Mallory and I are also doing a deep dive coverage on House of R. There's button mash episodes about it.
There's Midnight Boys episodes about it. Chris and Andy talked about it.
So what can Rob and Joanna bring to the table after all of that? Rob Mahoney, what do you think? what are we what to the table here. With our late in the week sort of.
Dive into The Last of Us. Pure unbridled enthusiasm.
Verve. Vibes.
Hopefully vibes. I hope that's what our listeners have come to expect from us.
And I hope we can deliver on that front. But honestly.
I don't think it's that much more complicated than. We both love this show.
The show is a massive deal. And so to omit it from the Prestige TV podcast feels like an oversight.
And for me personally, I simply demand a space to have my voice heard on a show that is, and I will say a property that is very important to me as someone who loves, loves, loves these two games. So here's the deal.
Rob has played and loves The Last of Us. Absolutely.
I have watched a cinematic playthrough of the first game, and I'm almost done with my cinematic playthrough of the second game. So we know what happens.
We are not going to spoil what happens outside of a spoiler section at the end of the pod. Definitely not.
Our goal for this podcast, to make it feel like something distinct from the other Last of Us episodes that you'll see on the Ringer feed, other than our, you said Verve, I will add maybe Vim and Vigor. Sure.
We're hoping to have some conversations with people who worked on the show.

So that's sort of interview opportunities

as they may come up

is something we were hoping to explore,

which Mallory and I simply do not have time for

in the two and a half hours.

You don't want to add another half hour to the runtime?

Why not?

I think everyone's good.

So we don't have an interview this week,

but hopefully in episodes going forward,

we will have interviews with folks

who have worked on the show,

checking in sort of later in the week

I don't have an interview this week, but hopefully in episodes going forward, we will have interviews with folks who have worked on the show, checking in sort of later in the week on some of their thoughts is our plan, our hope, our dream. And I'm going to have many questions for them, Joe, because this is just a real experience for me as someone who, as you know, does not read a lot of fiction.
When you and I cover things, I am not usually attuned to the source material. And many moments watching the season premiere of The Last of Us in which I felt conflicted.
I felt anger at adaptive choices. I felt frustration.
I felt confusion. It's not again.
I'm staying the course. I want to be along for the ride.
This is a season that has been sort of reconfigured from the game overall. And I think overall, the creative challenge for the people who made the game now getting a second chance to kind of rewrite and retell a new version of that story with all the benefit of hindsight, it's just a fascinating experience.
But for someone who loved that game, I feel a little jumbled up. I feel a little turned about.
I'm trying to figure out how to feel about it. Oh, I love that.
Okay. Two things before some of the things we want to talk about and then again we will have a spoiler section so rob can just like fully unleash uh his spoilery thoughts but 5.3 million viewers uh tuned in for the premiere which is not nothing it's up 12 from uh its its launch in season one so this is we we're doing well.
Because season one felt like HBO was like, this is a smashola hit for us. So the fact that we're doing even better than season one, HBO has to be feeling good about that.
But how many of those 5.3 million are undead? How do we actually crunch the numbers on that? Can a fungus work the Mac's website?

It's a great question.

The interface is a little funky sometimes.

I have a really important question for you.

This is something I just learned from perusing the subreddit the last couple days.

Yeah.

You know I love a subreddit.

Are you, Rob Mahoney, player of The Last of Us?

Sure.

Are you team Bottle or team Brick? I I'm bottle. It's just flashier.
Okay. You know, they both have their place, but I am a bottle guy first and foremost.
Do you want to explain, A, what that is? And B, how did you then feel to see yourself represented in the premiere when Ellie went for the bottle? It's a very powerful moment for me. You know, I don't get to be represented on screen very often, Joe.
Yeah, as a white guy in America. This is what I'm saying.
But you pick up a bottle and you use it to distract a zombie, and all of a sudden, I'm just feeling, I'm feeling observed in a way that makes me a little uncomfortable, but also very flattered. So within the game, The Last of Us, obviously, you're trying to dodge and manipulate all of these zombies who have various different sensory abilities.
Some can see you. Some can only hear you.
And so to distract some, you might throw a bottle to create some noise. You might throw a brick to create some clattering, to break a window, whatever it may be.
But if I'm given the choice, I'm going to take the bottle every time. All right.
Well, we will come down then as a United Front pro bottle on this on this podcast god i was so worried i was about to ask uh people to write in their thoughts or feelings and i realized we don't have an email yet for this run rob mahoney have you come with any hopefully mushroom based but not necessarily mushroom based emails to suggest to folks to email us i do have some some of course, off the top, you can always email us at prestige TV at Spotify.com. If you don't want to participate in our little game of creating a new email address for every show we cover.
I have a couple, Joe, I'm, I'm conflicted on them for one. This first episode gives us a lot of cute little bits to work with, but we're kind of just getting into the story.
And so you don't want to get ahead of over our skis, so to speak, as far as what we're actually talking about here. CanInfectedDoMath at gmail.com? The question is out there.
It's a great question. Many people are wondering.
To quote Lily Tomlin at gmail.com. Brittany and the Jug Boys at gmail.com.
And we can debate as to who is Brittany and who is a jug boy on this podcast between me, you and Donnie. I'm up for debate.
My personal favorite, though, this is your brain on shrooms at gmail.com. How do you feel about that one? I'm obsessed with this is your brain on shrooms.
Is it available? I did check and it was available. Let's do a little confirmation here uh before we give it out officially i can't believe you did a pre-record check this is the first time we've done that it's incredibly efficient of you you know well we'll see if it actually paid off for us this is your brain on shrooms we are locked in all right so this is your brain on shrooms at gmail.com we're we're landing rob what a talent you have for this um so send us your team bottle or team brick uh thoughts also any other thoughts you have this is something i love about the prestige feed is is interacting with the listeners and hearing from you guys and the the inbox has been a little dry between seasons yeah i don't know we still got a lot of spinal tap takes based off of our coverage of the pit we got a lot of spinal i know a lot more about spinal taps than i ever really cared to but thank you all for for writing we did ask for that information and if at some point during this season of the last of us we need to extract some spinal fluid we're gonna know exactly how to do it.
And we're going to know exactly where they may be going wrong. Do you feel like spinal fluid of an infected would be like mushroom brothy? Would that be what it would be like? I kind of hope so.
See, now we're getting somewhere. Can you eat an infected? What are the ethics of eating an infected? Sorry, as someone who just finished covering a season of yellow jackets i will say you can definitely eat and infected but will it make you infected oh well you you just mentioned ethics you didn't mention well i'm trying to practicalities and ethics i'm trying to figure out whether this is something i should plan my weekend around i feel like you should like okay here's a couple options, we go the full Yellow Jackets route and just like spit roast the whole infected, right? Do love a roasted mushroom.
Another option is we're shaving sort of mushroomy bits off. More of a truffle-y approach.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would be more tempted to do the shaving part, and then I would want to really cook it cook it.
And I feel like once it's really cooked, like I would want to do like the growths things, the shelves. The plates that are kind of coming out.
The shelf plates, nothing tenderly, like no tendrils are crossing my palate. Okay, great.
Glad we decided that. And as you know, I don't know if you know this, but like when it's the last of a season, I get into cooking mushroom recipes.
I got a really good mushroom and leek galette recipe from a listener that I'm going to try out this weekend. You are a foodie.
So if you want to get in on cooking some mushroom recipes, you let us know. I don't want to step on the house of our bits and overall this this is the problem too you know you have your established canonical reference points of cooking all these mushroom recipes with mallory uh we on prestige we're so used to a severance type show in which we're theorizing with and around the people who are listening and so this is a new territory for us where we're gonna have to to find our way, stumble through the darkness that is, you know, this abandoned grocery store of a podcast and figure out how we are going to be communicating with each other.
Okay, let me throw a bottle and hopefully send you in the right direction, which is something that you brought up as something maybe we could talk about today that Mal and I didn't really touch on is this idea of like, maybe more specifically the visuals of the first episode. And I was curious to talk to you as someone who well first of all have you played the re any of the remastered version of the last of us that just came out i've only played the remastered first game so i have not played in part the remaster of the second second game came out so soon after its original release that i like i'm already pretty good in terms of the graph the graphical fidelity of the of Us Part 2.
I don't know that I needed a huge update, but I'm glad it exists. This episode is brought to you by Prime.
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Download the Bleacher Report app today. So inside of this episode, I'm curious for you, a game player, if something that Mel and I got slightly wrong is that the dancing that's in the first episode does exist in the game, but exists as a flashback.
So we hadn't gotten there yet. We have now, but we hadn't gotten there yet when we talked about it.
And my understanding is that the way that this dance scene with Ellie and Dina plays out in the show is almost shot for shot, basically as the game. So what does seeing something like that, you were talking about sort of like grumbling about fidelity to the text and something like that, when you see something that is so meticulously and Craig Mazin talked about this on the official podcast, how hard they worked to get everything the same inside of that sequence as it is in the game.
What does that do for you as a viewer and as a game player? It's honestly a pretty emotional experience for that scene in particular. That dance scene is one that I love.
And I think it's placement in the game, as you're saying, a little different because it is a flashback and you're you're kind of jumping through time somewhat but it's so beautiful and i think it captures something that's so important about the last of us right which is getting these shreds of actual humanity within this post-apocalyptic world getting this this actual human connection and i always get a little nervous when you have a source text like this or i think it also applies to graphic novels and comic books too and you're like trying to recreate a splash page like a very specific visual it usually turns out coming pretty hollow ultimately like you have the emotional connection to whatever the source material is you see it on screen and it's like i get what you're but I don't really, it doesn't resonate with me in any meaningful way.

What makes The Last of Us work as well as it does is that with these big moments, like

this dance scene, like, you know, the, the climactic kind of like lie at the end of season

one, like these, these huge emotional moments of the show and of the game that it's pulling

from, it doesn't feel like cosplay.

It doesn't feel like you're just kind of set dressing to make it look like the game, even though you are doing that. And I think the reason it doesn't feel that way is because you've done all the emotional work to make those moments pay off.
But so I see that scene and I am, I'm like pulled in. Like I see the dangling out, slightly out of focus lights and I am just like locked into this moment and I am pulled back to the experience of playing the game and kind of what it felt like unpacking this narrative in that way.
But did that scene work for you on an emotional level, though? Like, did you feel attached to Dina in particular, who we just met within the world of the show? Yeah. And I think that I think of all the things that has worked for people out of this first episode of season two, Isabella Merced as Dina has been sort of like this runaway smashola hit for people.
And she has been for a while a like, who is that kind of actor where she'll pop up in a lot of things. It's like, there's just something about her energy that really pops.
Her energy is really good. And I kind of want to get back to, I don't know, something that we talked about a bit in recent coverage of shows, this idea of like Dina is, Isabel Merced is amazing.
And also Dina is a much easier to like warm to character than a Joel or an Ellie who have gone through so much, are going through so much, are defined in a lot of ways by their trauma and stuff like that. We don't know inside of the show yet, Dina's whole story.
Why is her outlook so sunny? Why is she such a, you know, suck up the marrow, the bone of life sort of person? I don't know why I said it like that. Well, we ran out of fungus.
We had to eat something. So, like, I think uh i loved her everyone loved her and and she's quite easy to love but that's part of the point of i think of the character and i think what worked for me not knowing that this was a shot for shot remake of this section of the game what worked for me it's it's just beautifully beautifully lit uh the music is incredible and really evocative.
I love a moment like this inside of a show. I immediately flashed in Dawson's Creek, but I'm sure there are more actual prestige high tone versions of this, but just sort of like a dance shared between two characters when there's like tension and there's a really good song that goes with it.
And then you wind up having that association with that song for I love a bluegrass number

personally.

And so I just I think it worked really well.

And I think thinking about it a few days later, I mean, Mallory and I recorded our

ep early.

So like a week and a half ago.

But thinking about it a few days later from premiere, listening to Craig Mazin talk about

this idea of like community and how important this idea of community of Jackson was for them to establish. So we're at this dance.
We're inside of this functioning community. What we get that's in addition to the game is the idea of government in Jackson.
How does government work in Jackson? What's the infrastructure in Jackson? Well, they need an infrastructure package. That's for sure.
The pipes are simply at a level of disrepair that is not acceptable. It's tough.
It's so upsetting. But that shot we get of Ellie all alone, Ellie surrounded by life and celebration and joy and just her all alone at the bar watching it until Dina pulls, tries to pull her into, you know, an ordinary, extraordinary life experience.
And what that says about Ellie as someone who we watched in season one work so hard to become a unit of two. And then the fraction of the fissure that we get inside of that here in in season two yeah where that leaves ellie in relation to everyone else how does how does that contrast between community and ellie all alone or joel alone on the porch uh work for you i mean it works really well i think this is one of those things where in terms of the visuals of the last of us this is this is a show and the game is based on with a lot of negative space a lot of like sprawling countrysides and forests that are vacant a lot of you know cities that have been overrun and overgrown and you're used to this idea that if there's a lot of stuff happening in the scene like visually speaking if there's a lot of clutter it's usually a very dangerous area right it's like it is it is a store that has been like ransacked and is now overrun with infected or whatever.
It's a lot of clutter around is a bad thing. And so to see somewhere like Jackson that is approaching actual civilization with a sort of bustling life is so disorienting in the world of The Last of Us.
But I think it's kind of hitting at why everything for Joel and Ellie is turning on its head. Like these are two people who learned how to live out in the wilderness by themselves, codependent, basically strictly on each other.
And now Ellie is trying to be a person independent of Joel. And Joel, for a bunch of different reasons, is like holding on way, way too tight in a way that is overbearing, that is limiting to Ellie, even independent of the extraordinary circumstances that they've been to.
Like, for a teenage girl, this is not something that many teenage girls would want.

Right. I think it's really interesting.
And I think it's so interesting to show Joel in his fatherly role, both with his nephew and with Dina, calling Dina kiddo, stuff like that, which is like a word he's only ever used for Ellie. like that Joel is many things,

but one of those things is he's a good dad. Like he is a good dad.
Well, debatable. No, I think he is a good dad.
I think what he did at the end of season one is on a different level than just dadding. I'm just sort of keeping that that's not a normal dad dilemma i mean as far as i know you uh this is your brain on shrooms at gmail.com if you and dad have ever had to come to this crossroads it's obviously in the dad bucket in terms of like what we wouldn't do for your kids right right right but like in terms of like ordinary day in day out if we're living in ordinary peacetime circumstances yeah for joel we're capable of good dadding and and we saw that with his kiddo uh in season one episode one i'm curious in terms of the visual one last thing i want to hit on the visuals i love that point you made about sort of when we see activity it's usually scary um there's also this other aspect of gameplay versus watching a show.
And this is a lot of what the co-creators, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, talk about when they talk about adaptation, is it's such a different prospect playing a game and being that character versus watching a story being told to you. And something that I remember

Chris Ryan talking a lot about when we were on our respective shows covering adolescence is this idea of how do you engender empathy through visual storytelling? And adolescence, if you didn't listen to that, Potter, watch that show, a show that was told in these long one shots, but like how the act of moving your camera through space can engender point of view or give you point of view for one character or another. And so in inside of this section of the game, you know, we'll talk about Abby a lot more in the in the spoiler section.
But like, you know, this is a character you can play at the beginning of The Last of

Not You Can, You about um abby a lot more in uh in the spoiler section but like you know this is a character you can play at the beginning of the last of not you can you are playing yes you don't know her and you're playing her and that automatically puts you in this sort of relational space to that character so did you have any thoughts about that as a game player or how the visuals in this episode helped get us in the POV of any specific characters?

Yeah, I think it's the hardest thing to replicate.

You know, as far as like video game adaptations go, there's a reason why for the longest time they just did not work.

And some of that had to do with the kinds of games they were adapting.

And even some of those challenges still exist.

Like the challenge of adapting Super Mario Brothers into the Super Mario Brothers movie versus The Last of of us like the last of us was written and storyboarded and designed to be cinematic it was begging for if not a movie than a tv series and so you can do that sort of shot for shot reconstruction of a lot of the things that happen and frankly there's just nothing important that happens in the games that is not a shot of someone's face and so how you translate like that to a close-up or like, it's very easily applicable, I think, to the medium. But the thing you can't replicate.
Yeah. Can you explain that a little bit more? There is nothing important that happens in the game that isn't a shot of someone's face.
I think so. There's obviously all of the connective tissue of the gameplay in which you are fighting off zombies, escaping from other people who are trying to abduct you or kill you,

or kind of trying to navigate from place to place.

But The Last of Us is mostly concerned with the emotional beats

between Joel and Ellie, first and foremost,

and then between the other characters that they introduce as the two games go on.

And so there's so many pauses in between

to take a moment with them at a little campsite, right? As they're're navigating through these areas these sorts of conversations that are happening between these two people and i think the show does a good job of sort of capturing that quiet pretty well and if anything i think it does a little bit better overall the series does in capturing the quiet and maybe not as much of capturing the noise of what it's like to play the last of us to the extent that it it needs to do that, I don't know. But it's not a straight one-to-one because you can't replicate the sheer amount of time that you have spent as a game player throwing bottles and shit, trying to kill zombies.
Like you're not gonna put 30 hours of killing zombies on screen for a season of television. It would never make sense to do it.
But you can capture these quiet moments. And the way that you do that is you focus on these performances, on the emotionality of these characters, on how they're kind of pulled and pushed away from each other.
You also find the camera lingering a lot on implements, right? On cleaning a gun, on like getting a knife ready, on pens, on thread. It's like, it's such a tactile show in that way.
And some of that is because people are trying to be quiet as they're creeping around in the world but some of it is i think just sort of filling that space that like natural silence that exists between these people who are just on a long road trip effectively together in the first game or as we get into in the second game doing all sorts of other things uh but you have to you have to fill that space in a way that feels true to those characters and feels true to the stakes of those moments. And so it is a little bit more about the tools that you carry with you.
And from that, you can see, oh, this stopped watch. What does that tell us about Joel? What does it mean about Ellie that she's always grabbing for this knife? You can find these attachments to items in the world as character beats themselves.
And what gets neglected? Like the, we talked about this a lot in season one, this idea of like what you carry, the things you carry when you're on the road like that. And in Jackson, of course, it's a little different.
They plant it and they're accumulating things around them. They're filling these homes.

The cassettes are just piling up. You really got things to plug into that boom box.
But the guitar is languishing on the ground and this important item, which we'll talk about more as the show goes on. But yeah.
Also, something that I love that the showrunners said that hadn't occurred to me inside of this first episode is Joel's role as a builder, like how he builds things. Joel as provider is something we talked about a lot in season one.
But Joel as a physical builder of things, a tinker, a fixer of things. I'll restring your guitar.
I will fix this piece of machinery that has stopped working. I will build these houses.
I will do all of this. And then Ellie, to a certain degree, the showrunners didn't really put it this way, but this is sort of how I'm viewing it, as a destructive force.
And I don't mean that negatively necessarily, like that she is a creature of violence joel also is yes but like that she has this relish in it and she loves taking something apart and pulling it down yeah and um how those things are at odds with each other maybe just as personality types but also maybe time maybe time of life types. If Ellie as a 19-year-old is all about sort of like pulling things apart and pulling things down and Joel, you know, into his later middle decades is about building things up.
I think that's a really interesting way in which we could think about what outside of the big lie at the end of season one to pull these characters apart. What do you think? I mean, they have a vibe of a family that just moved to the suburbs.
And I say that affectionately, where it's like Joel is in nesting like little daddy homemaker mode. He's trying to get closer to Ellie.
He's trying to build back what he had before everything started. Ellie is, I think, bored.
I think seeking out trouble in a lot of the situations like she wants to be on patrol she wants to be shooting zombies like she wants to put herself in harm's way in certain situations in a way that is reckless like i i think what works about the joel and ellie dynamic is that they are both right he is overbearing she is reckless to the point that she's getting bit repeatedly and like again granted she doesn't have the same stakes in that as everyone else does but really putting herself in danger and i think the fact that she is looking for trouble in that way is such an interesting manifestation for this character and it's something that i love seeing on tv too especially for like a young a teenage girl right like this sort of like self-destructive violent kid we've seen many many boys inhabit that role and what makes ellie such a cool character to watch and to monitor is the way that she's navigating distinctly being a girl in these spaces like people are constantly questioning her why are you going into that house when obviously it's okay for tommy and joel to do it but why are you as a teenage girl doing it uh why are why are you safe in these spaces or not safe in these spaces? And she just mostly wants to stab people, to be honest with you. And she's not terribly concerned with everything else.
Maybe most of all, her own personal safety, she doesn't seem too bothered with. I think that's so interesting.
And I'm like, I, once again, please enjoy our coverage of Yellow Jackets over at House of R. But like, we've been talking about this a lot when we talk about teenage girls and violence or teenage girls and and and carnality and that kind of power and i think that's really interesting inside of a an apocalyptic world what societal norms can you actively rebuild yeah um you know and we get we get some aspects of that inside of the dance scene when we have Seth roll up with the homophobia.

And it's just sort of like, really?

In the mushroom apocalypse, do you still have space for homophobia?

Who has the time, frankly?

Seriously.

Go fix the pipes.

There's a lot to do, Seth.

We don't have time for this.

But yeah, like gender roles or like parent versus child roles.

When are you an adult inside of a mushroom apocalypse world? I think that's one area where Ellie is really chafing to, especially in this first episode is this, this idea that yes, she was dependent on Joel to get to, you know, the hospital to meet the fireflies to get across the country. That's not something she was capable of doing herself.
I don't know that she ever really signed up to be his daughter. You know, like she needed his help and his protection and they have a certain kind of connection that is really powerful and and is i think transcends like smuggler and smugly uh smuggler and cargo however you want to define it um but i think there is something about her and joel's relationship that goes beyond whatever she may think about him telling her the truth or not whether she believes the lie that he has told her that's like this is a little more than i was signing up for and and now and now that he is like so much trying to put her like you live in this house with me i am your father like i i'm stopping short of calling you my myself your dad to other people but functionally'm acting like your dad, I think puts her in kind of a tricky spot.

That's so interesting because that wasn't my interpretation of season one in terms of like it felt like she was constantly the seeker.

Yeah, I think that's true.

But I think you're right that there could just become like a line that was crossed where the position, obviously the positions have been sure and it's like now joel wants more of the relationship than ellie wants to give um on this i on this idea of like it's the mushroom apocalypse do we even have time for this set um what do you want to say about this approach this particular approach to apocalyptic storytelling i think and this is where the, again, really, really works and why it's as successful as it was as a game. And I think why the show resonates with so many people.
To me, there's basically two ways to do post-apocalyptic storytelling. Either you are telling a story about survival or you are telling a story about reflection.
And it's very, very, very hard to do both.'s really hard to get into like the emotional aspects of surviving the end of the world without getting really indulgent in those emotions and grind everything to a halt can you give me an example of like the reflective uh approach to apocalyptic storytelling i think we're seeing it right now right like so many aspects of this state this first episode are reckonings for Joel. What have you done, right? Like you have survived, you made it to Jackson.
Like you got from point A to point B in terms of getting Ellie to the hospital and then some. But like Joel is now reckoning with this lie he's told to Ellie.
He's reckoning with killing Eugene and having to deal with Gail in the aftermath of that. He's dealing this group of fireflies led by abby that are now searching for him right there is a lot of like what what did you do to get here and at what cost yeah and i think for understandable reasons a lot of like zombie oriented or pandemic oriented content are a lot more about like can you survive to get to the place get to that island so that you don't have to worry about the zombies anymore.
And that's a really cool and fun story to

tell when it's done right. But to do it without losing track of the humanity of what it costs to

get there, I think is a really difficult balancing act. And it's where a lot of things like, for

example, The Walking Dead, I think struggled with that it could only go 100 miles an hour or zero

miles an hour. And when it was going one, you felt the absence of the other.

I think struggled with that. It could only go a hundred miles an hour or zero miles an hour.
And when it was going one, you felt the absence of the other. I think that, um, yeah, you're right.
That this is like a lot of, uh, chickens coming home to sort of thing. What is the cost of your comfort and your safety, your walls and Jackson? Uh, what is the social contract? And also like when you mentioned that, you know, Mallory and I, when we talk about the show always inevitably wind up talking about station 11 but that is a that is a story the way that they did that television adaptation that is a story where you are in reflection rebuild mode for half of the story and like panic survival mode for one half of the story and so you're sort of interacting between the two and this sort of like how do we rebuild inside of jackson how what what is our future what are the future days to you know steal from the title of the episode for us when the apocalypse is still raging outside of the walls is is really wild to me you know what i mean like i i love the the safety and security and and security and society that they're trying to build here inside of Jackson.
I love that, like, Tommy and Maria's kid is grown up inside of a relatively safe environment. But it's not over outside, out over yonder.
So I think that's really interesting. I think for people like like ellie too it it kind of can't be over like there there's so many characters like we talked about all the you know what joel is a person who has lived through a lot who has done a lot of terrible shit to kind of make it this far ellie has done some of those things for the meat like for survival right she's had to kill people to stay alive she's had to go through this entire ordeal that we saw in season one that would be harrowing for anybody but she's also someone who we see at this stage now that she has been kind of put behind the city walls there is a like ferocity to her that keeps kind of popping out of the corners and you see it like in this first kind of fight fake fight she has with this like bear of a man where she get like goes a little too far i think you see it even more when she and Dina are sweeping the supermarket.
And just in terms of the physical choreography of how Ellie fights, she mounts this clicker and stabs him in the neck conservatively 80 times. Just really going to town on this guy.
Rob, I'm sorry to tell you. First of all, I'm not making it this far in the apocalypse at all.
So it's a moot point anyway. But if I'm ever in a position where I have a stabbing implement and there's a clicker near me, 80 is bare minimum number of times I'm stabbing them in the night.
Well, I'm stabbing them zero times because I'm getting the fuck out of there. Okay, great point.
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I'm curious if you have the same relationship that I do, because like from playing the game, the guttural sound of the clickers, which are, look, our vocal fry kings, like we salute you and the work that you're doing. My body has like a visceral response to hearing it because they are so intimidating for the especially the early parts of the first game i'm just like fucking terrified of these guys for me it's on a sound design front it's the stalkers oh sure their sound is so much more human very moany waley but it's like you can like almost hear the lingering human inside of them in pain you know what i mean that is like so uncomfortable also something something that i that a few people

have pointed out that i thought was so interesting is this idea like this the fact that the the city

council if that's what we're calling it like that no one there has heard of a stalker no one there

knows about the stalkers means that the stalkers have probably killed every single person they've ever encountered and something that craig mazin was pointing out is that the stalker won the encounter with ellie ellie lost oh she big she just happens to be immune but like the stalkers have an 100 success rate yeah with what they've encountered and And that is, I don't know, Rob, very scary.

It's not great.

Well, it's not great, especially when, as Ellie and the counselor are sort of discussing,

all of their preconceived notions about what these infected are capable of

are kind of thrown out the window when you start introducing rational thought

or even the ability to lure someone in or do basic mathematics you know to pass an algebra one test um okay before we get into the spoiler section i want to ask you about abby played by our mutual fave caitlin deaver absolutely um you know abby is such a uh an important presence in in the second game yeah um there has been so much chatter from the game players about Abby and how she's introduced here. Anything you can say in a spoiler-free way about that or do we have to shove all of that behind the spoiler wall? It's tricky just because we've seen so little so far, right? Like just the kind of outset of her journey.
And I think clearly she's an important character in the way that they have framed it here to establishing the emotional and physical cost of everything that joel has done to this point and this is like one group of people that joel ran through at the end of the day uh our guy has killed many many folks out there in the wilderness uh many under more nefarious pretenses you know other people trying to attack him or raiders or whatever but like this was a group of people in the fireflies

that uh if you're going to have like a face for that sort of trauma caitlin deaver has it and i think is a very empathizing force already as far as like helping us understand like this is a a sort of double parallel for joel and ellie right like you can see elements of ellie's story in abby even And so far, you can see elements of Joel's loss of his daughter in Abby's story so far.

And so creating a counterpoint when we are naturally tethered to Joel and Ellie's perspective, as you said, and that, that is an area that transcends the game into the show. It's like, you are naturally going to be understanding of what they have gone through and the decisions that they've made above any other character they're going to be introduced to.
And so how do we transport some of that empathy to somebody else? How do we zoom out and figure out like what, how do these people we love and care about fit into a story about humanity? Somebody else and somebody else whose agenda, as it's stated inside of this episode, is counter our desire. Absolutely.
Our desire is for Joel and Ellie

to live happily ever after in Jackson together,

united father and daughter in a healthy way.

I don't want to presume.

People may want different things.

Some people out there may just want to like

grow a weed farm in the post-apocalypse, you know?

Like everyone wants something a little different.

There are no Eugene though,

so what are you going to do?

That's true.

That green thumb, really something else. Anything else you want to say before we do some spoilers uh one little shout out again this is not spoiler but maybe more of a treat for the game players uh as opposed to the people who are just watching the show but the composer of both the music for the game and the show gustavo centellaia appears as a member of the dance band uh was delighted to see as somebody who like if we're talking about the visual language of the show the last of us is not the last of us without this like sparse gorgeous guitar forward soundtrack uh and so i thrilled to see him pop up and get a little cameo moment one of the one of the jug boys one of the jug or i mean Brittany.
Brittany himself? I love it. Canonically, I cannot dispute that Santo is Brittany.
All right. So we are going to do a little spoiler section, you know, just touching on a few things here or there that happened in the game.
Really encourage people to peace out if they don't want to hear what happens. You know, Mallory and I were very firm about this on House of R, but this is a story that you're really going to want to experience how you want to experience it.

And we would like to protect you in that in all ways possible.

So that's this very lengthy preamble was your excuse to press stop on the pod and leave.

Are you ready?

Did you leave?

You are the Joel to their Ellie.

You know, you're just trying to boost them over various ledges, keep them safe from being bitten here and there i i respect the work that you do joe i do my best um all right spoilers i actually want to start more esoterically okay rather than talk about the massive thing that everyone is trying to talk about that that that not just elephant in the room but like elephant with a bomb shoved up its ass in the room that's about to explode at any moment um i want to talk to you about gail and something that i don't mallory and i did not really get into is gail the therapist who is an addition uh to the show is not in the game yes um but who represents this idea of forgiveness

um in a way that you know the show is careening towards and if you're listening to this and

haven't played the game but you want the spoilers anyway that's fine careening towards

joel's death at the hands of abby and abbyquenchable vengeance and the dissatisfaction she gets in that act because it doesn't heal the hurt inside of her. And Ellie's unrelenting then, seeking vengeance.
Tommy and his vengeance that he goes after. And so Gail is someone who is angry and heartbroken that her husband is dead, but is nonetheless talking to Joel about it and trying to work through it as this sort of counterbalance.
What does that do for the larger story as far as you're concerned? I'm honestly fascinated to find out just because as you said Gale is such a new

function within the story. Like not only having somebody who is actively trying to forgive Joel in her own way, but in the moment very much despises him.
And it is the sort of counterpoint where, as you and Mal talked about, like this is a fascinating spin on the idea of in show therapy, of having someone who's this adversarial, who is like this sharp in her own way and this wounded in her own way. Like this is not the role that these kinds of characters usually play.
And there's nothing like it in the game whatsoever. And so having like, Joel's been working out things for a long time on people's faces, on various infected that he meets out in the world, snapping at Ellie when she does very little to deserve it.
You know, like this is a long history of this stuff. And so getting him in therapy makes sense in a lot of ways.
I think it also just gives Pedro Pascal something to do at this stage in the season where he is feeling so isolated, right? That character is being shut off from the most meaningful connection in his life. And he trying to figure out he thinks he's trying to figure out why he mostly knows why i suspect uh but i love that we get that from from pedro specifically and it's all the more funny that he's also on mando where they like put him in a helmet and never show his face in any capacity whatsoever i assume so he doesn't have to show up on location for work but who's to say uh just like you can't i don't know of another space in this show where you would get the moment of him sort of wrestling walking all the way up to the edge of like do i need to say this thing that i'm scared of out loud yeah and then pulling back in such a guarded way uh that's that's those are the kinds of moments from joel that i think are really powerful and are hard to replicate with other characters because he doesn't trust anybody other than Tommy.
I guess Tommy is the one exception to that rule. Right.
Inside of the game, we have him have a conversation with Tommy where he tells him what happens. But I don't know.
I'm just really interested to see what Gail can – I don't know how active she will be in the show going forward. Yeah.
I don't know how active Jackson is going to be in the show going forward. All of that.
But yeah, as this sort of like, it can, you don't have to like, not feel your feelings in order to try to find, make peace with someone. You can feel all of that rage anger resentment fear all of those things and not let it consume you necessarily hopefully that's gail's future okay um well as far as that like how much are we going to see of gail and of jackson in the show what is your sense of the pacing of this big reveal like we are we areening toward Joel's death.
We have seven episodes this season. Again, we're in full spoilers now.
There is a significant portion of the game after Joel's death, but before the kind of story changeover to more of Abby's perspective full time. And so it's like, I'm going back and forth on when I think they're going to drop that particular bomb.

But I get the sense from this early going that they might be trying to stretch it out a little bit more.

So how how how late can you do you think they can get away with doing it?

I think they could get away with it.

It would feel rushed, but you could potentially move it to like the very end of episode four, I think, is about as late as you can push it um there's a lot to do after the after that fact uh but i i think that's about as far as it could go you're saying joel surviving joel's joel's death i think would the furthest i think it could go would be the end of episode four yeah i mean certainly everyone on

the show and everyone at hbo wants pedro pascal to be active as long as possible but there are

and this feeds nicely into the next thing i want to ask you about because there are flashbacks

galore yes he will be back yeah and one moment we get in this episode that again since mallory

and i had not finished our um you know homework didn't realize the significance of is the

Thank you. in this episode that again since Mallory and I had not finished our you know homework didn't realize the significance of is the porch sequence that happens at the end of this episode so at the end of episode one season two episode one we see Joel on the porch with a guitar and Ellie walking up and seemingly like sort of walking past him and that's all we see in the game towards the end it is revealed that she comes out and talks to him and has this moment of maybe we can figure out a path forward through this uh which is not something you as a game player know until the very end so is this something like when you saw this moment were you worried that they were gonna like give you the full scene right here inside of this episode? And if not, or whatever, do you want that to be like the last scene of the show? Like where, where do you want that to show up? I mean, it's, I'm glad that they held it.
You kind of have to, right? I think it's very important for this stage of the story that you're holding some of that back because you want the audience feeling that pull of i need joel and ellie to have a conversation and that you can do enough to manipulate the timeline and in particular to show these like absences of time that you later are coming back to fill in uh as for where i'm open-minded about that to be honest with you i think's a, like they clearly have taken this season as an opportunity to move a lot of things around

from the original place in the game.

And I think there's plenty of good reason to do it.

I think some of it inevitably

will be more successful than others.

I have a lot of faith based on season one,

not just because they move stuff around,

but because the things that they introduced

and expanded,

I found so rewarding in terms of the world building of The Last of Us. And so I'm excited to see kind of what they do along those lines.
That said, the way Abby is introduced, it makes me a little nervous. Okay.
All right. So let's get to it.
Is this the thing? Did it make you nervous? Did it make you cranky? The thing that she says that seems to have pissed most of the people who are mad about it, not everyone's mad about it, but the people who are mad about it, seem to really think that her, specifically her saying, killing him slowly. because in their interpretation of the game her decision to draw out his death

and torment him is something that is not necessarily pre-planned and something that reveals a lot about her in that moment and reveals about something about her to her compatriots in that moment. So what are your thoughts on that? I think that's fair game to move around just because you can have some of the same benefit even introducing that idea early, right? Like her compatriots are learning this about her now, even though they wouldn't learn it about her later.
And they seem uncomfortable. As one should be under the circumstances.
Yeah. I think my bugaboo is less about that element.
Like that line specifically doesn't bother me so much.

Just the idea of laying her intentions out so clearly when we're first meeting the character. And this is where like this conversation is just inextricable from the reaction to Abby in real time and the reaction to Joel's death in real time.
how you respond to that moment in the game

and your experience of seeing this character

you've spent so much time with

and you've invested in

die in such a brutal way

in principle how you respond to that moment in the game and your experience of seeing this character you spent so much time with and you've invested in die in such a brutal way imprints on you as a gamer and now a viewer and so like for me not like to clarify for people who haven't played the game who are just like full speed ahead on spoilers anyway power to you abby is introduced as someone who is like looking for someone in jackson we don't know who jackson is a huge place it could be conceivably anybody, but she and her group are like on a mission to find someone. You don't really know why.
And so this idea that you're introduced so early to the idea that it is Joel, she's looking for who she is, what her background is, what her intentions are to me saps. One of the like really powerful jarring moments of the game, which when abby and joel inevitably bump into each other and so you you take some of the like some of the electricity out of that moment when you already know what you're doing and so i like there's two reasons you're doing that one some of the audience backlash against abby's character and the disapproval of her role in the story and killing Joel and the way all that went down.

There's many things to unpack in that.

But creating a more,

like forming a more empathetic bond

with that character from jump,

I think is an attempt to stem some of that.

Yeah.

And you're trading some of the mystery

that I found really impactful and really valuable.

And I think to me,

the mystery of not knowing what Abby is up to and then suddenly having to realize it all at once and it culminating in such like like irrevocable violence serves the like the themes of the last of us part two in this season in the future seasons of the show so well you're trading that off for like the tension of we know what she's after and so now when they do bump into each other you have that sort of building suspense in a way that's going to be new i just don't know if that's what i want and now now i'm left thinking like are you just doing this all the time every time you watch an adaptation of a novel are you just sitting here festering in your seat like i'm festering it's it's been complicated it's not festering i mean it's it's curiosity of like you know neil and craig have explained it, uh, the best they can without getting into the spoilers because they're not like giving interviews about spoilers yet. Right.
So they've explained it a bit. They'll explain it more when we know more.
Inevitably. Um, and there are things about it.
I like, obviously I did not have your visceral sort of experience, um, playing the game in that way, but like, there are things about it I like, and there are things about it that I understand why it sort of feels like it, it will just depend on how they execute it. You're anticipating how can they possibly do the thing to me here that they did to me in the game, or do the thing to people watching for the first time that they did to me in the game if they've rearranged the pieces this way?

And we're just going to have to see what other decisions they've made in order to try to affect that.

I'm just always curious because I used to get mad and sometimes I still get mad.

But mostly because Craig and Neil are such consummate storytellers. I'm like, what were you achieving here that you felt like you didn't achieve in this other way that you did it? And again, they've explained it a little bit, but I'm eager to learn more.
And it just feeds the thing that I love, what we do on this show on House of R, of r etc which is just like let's pull apart the gears of a story and see how it works and how it fits back together um i'm interested in the thing that i'm very curious about in the upcoming episodes just based on trailer footage is what seems to be a like a full-scale attack on jackson yeah of the infected i mean we get that we get you know there's there's the horde that abby is running from that's its own thing but like how many make a horde oh it's a great question um i think you need like 30 30 for what were you thinking i don't know. So we get, again, canonical confirmation from Tommy.

Six is not enough to be a horde.

No.

That's just six guys.

Maybe 20.

Maybe 20 is enough for a horde.

Like a baker's dozen isn't a horde?

What does a baker's dozen have infected?

A posse?

That's just a group.

It's just a group.

It's just a group hang?

It's a herd.

It's like a herd.

Okay.

A horde is like. Oh, you're right.
You know what I mean? Like, dear God. Yes.
I think if you had 13 infected, you could pick them off and have mushroom galettes for dinner. But I think if you've got 20 or 30- Yeah.
That's, if not a horde, a murmuration. You know, we're really getting somewhere.
This is your brand on shrimps at gmail.com if you have any nomenclature you would like to share with us uh tommy's really the full scale attack on jackson which is has been indicated in the trailer is really interesting to me yeah and um tommy is really interesting to me tommy being a dad and like the idea of like tommy who inside of the game is so consumed by vengeance yes that he loses maria but like tommy as a dad who's gonna lose his kid in theory because um you know which is certainly not something that joel would want at all um is is additionally again that's an adaptive change that is additionally interesting feels very pointed especially as you and mal highlighted the fact that tommy in the game is the most understanding of joel's ultimate decision with ellie and the lie that he told like like putting himself in shoes, understands it in a way that no other character gets the opportunity to do. And so changing his circumstances to make that almost impossible feels like a very direct and deliberate choice.
I think else you want to say here in the spoiler section, just that for all of the hand wringing I have done about Abby. And again, like I'm- Genuinely minimal, minimal hand-wringing.
But I am coming from the perspective of someone who adores that game. And I love Abby as a character in her story.
And so the idea that we are, what almost feels like if you change it too much, if you soften it too much, soften the blow of who Abby is and the reveal of what she's up to, are you pulling the punch, right? Like, are you doing exactly what Ellie does not want to happen for us as an audience? I worry about that, but I do have incredible faith in overall the production team of this show and the writing team of this show. I also have incredible belief, as we've alluded to, in Caitlin Deaver to sort of change this version of the story.
And there are many ways in which she is not a physical representation of the abbey in the game but is an emotional standing in a totally different way and i think capable of of a range of performance and a different kind of rage that is going to be really fascinating to watch once she really gets uncorked uh like our girl knows how to play pain like she just does like i don't i don't love that for her in terms of the role she gets thrust into and god knows she can be an amazing comedic actress too uh but seeing this version of abby is going to be one of the the great curiosities and joys for me of the season even though i have my apprehensions about the way she was introduced all right so we'll all cry together and then we'll go watch book smart as the palate cleanser and we'll go about our day uh

rahmahony joanna robinson this has been an episode of the prestige tv podcast it sure has did we make a case for our own existence who's to say we'll be back uh we we have plans to talk about your friends and neighbors the john ham apple show um i know we're also at least gonna like at least brush up against

Poker Face. We must.

A show that started. For old time's sake if nothing else started our our uh podcasting partnership in many ways so um there's a lot going on i hope people stay tuned to the prestige feed thank you to justin sales as always for organizing everything for us to donnie beach him yeah and maybe more importantly, his sidekick, Peter Bread Beecham, who we met today, who's helping edit this podcast, I'm sure.
Not employee of the month, but a good girl nonetheless. I mean, maybe our employee of the month.
Who's to say? Yeah, the photo's not up on the wall yet but that can be fixed um rob you want to hit

them one more time with the emails i absolutely do you can always get us at prestige tv at spotify.com you can also email us specifically your last of us questions concerns uh i don't know what else do we want to solicit from people joe what else are we in the market for that's a great question i mean nomenclature is a big one if

there's any expertise plumbers uh on the pipe situation um i just like love to hear from the

experts uh when we when we do these shows fungus in your pipes not what you want but please do