Just watched Episode 2 of
The Last of Us Season 2, and good God that was the most unintentionally funny shit I've seen in a long, long time. We start off fucking terribly with Abby talking to another version of herself in her dream, warning her to not go into the operating room. What!? She's even leaning against the wall all nonchalant, like a fucking anime character or something. It's so fucking stupid. So points for the game for not doing any of that embarrassing shit.
Than we have the zombie horde, which in the show now is a Lord of the Rings level orc threat of thousands of zombies storming the Jackson compound. First of all, I'm sorry, but how the fuck did this many zombies and corpses just accumulate in one spot without patrols from Jackson finding out? They didn't book it from another state, they were in between where Abby was stationed and Jackson. So how the fuck was this overlooked before winter set in? Did they crawl underneath the snow? Then we get the attack on Jackson that tries so hard to be Epic Fantasy Action, with anti-siege devices, and explosions, and Tommy yelling inspirational battle cries.
But like... yeah, let's roll a whole bunch of drums of gasoline over the wall made of wood, where they're still fairly close to the wall made of wood, and let's then light them on fire, and have the zombies light themselves up running through it toward our wall made of wood.
Also, where'd Jackson get all this fire power? Like seriously, did they just stumble upon a military base once or something? Everyone just had an M-16 in that horde scene.
In the game the horde is maybe a little over a hundred strong, numbers that after Joel, Tommy, and Abby's fight with them, and then later a good 4 or 5 molotovs from Abby's crew, are taken care of. But for the sake of shallow epicness the show makes this whole thing stupid. More points for the game.
And then we get
the scene with Abby and Joel. *sigh* At first I thought maybe they were going to do something interesting, with Dina being with Joel instead of Tommy, but that was short lived, because Dina just gets anesthetized which apparently works instantaneously. Here was me thinking they were giving Dina some of that shared desire for revenge, after witnessing Joel getting tortured to death, and getting some more agency, but fuck me right? The scene also takes place in the most flat broad fucking daylight. I mean, why light an extremely important and traumatic scene appropriately? The game already did that so I guess the show didn't really feel the need to do it again.
Kaitlyn Dever and Pedro Pascal are both kinda shit in their performances. I'll be extra petty and say that both their pained exertion noises sounded weak. For Joel, it was like the sound team asked 'Hey Pedro, could you give us a generic yell? Okay, perfect!' Joel recognizes Abby's crew as being military, which Lord knows what that observation was based on. Abby won't shut the fuck up. I guess the writers thought that this being an important scene it needed a long drawn out monologe.
Then we get the funniest shit, where the camera slowly pans to a bag of golfclubs.... and I... I just fucking can't. Was this meant to be ominous, was it for "the gamers", because it just comes across as a fucking punchline.
Then Ellie shows up and we get sorta how the game did it except worse. Surprise surprise. In the game Ellie screeches bloody murder and there's a deafing pulse after Joel gets the coup de grace, with the whole thing building up till Ellie gets knocked out and we fade to black. Is it anything special, no, but it does it's job very well. In the show however Ellie says she's going to kill Abby after Abby killed Joel. Okay cool, thanks for making sure I got that HBO.
I'll say one nice thing. The scene where Ellie crawls to Joel's lifeless body to hold him, they used the same track from the first game when she's lying next to him after giving him that antibiotic shot and telling him he's going to make it. That was a very nice touch.
I thought the first episode of Season 2 was lame, but this is just amateuristic at this point. Here's a game with a story, characters, and themes I hate, and I can't help but look at it like a shining beaking in comparison to this adaptation.
