The Last of Us - Episode 3 Review

foreign [Music] The Last of Us episode 3 is here and this is by far the one that has felt as if the show is really announcing itself as something different from the video game here we catch up with Joel and Ellie after Tess's Grand sacrifice and we find out that Ellie has a lot of questions she doesn't really know everything about how all of this started she has ideas and maybe some rumors she's heard and Joel is confused because she went to school and she's like well school isn't like the way it used to be and this is one of my favorite things about the dynamic between these two characters is that there are a lot of things that Ellie just doesn't understand or has never experienced because she was born after all this started there's a scene in this episode where she's like what are you complaining about man you went up in the sky you got to go on planes and it was the same in episode 2 where she walked into the hotel that was submerged with water and she knew what it was and she understood the terminology and Joel was like how do you know what one of these even are and I'm sure that I'm going to have a conversation with my kids one day and sound incredibly old when I tell them that the internet wasn't always around and sometimes I went to the library and used the Dewey Decimal System to look things up and I had to read books and get things off the shelves to find information and I couldn't just have it all at my fingertips if there was an argument amongst my friends about who was in a show or a movie or some historical piece of information we were positive was correct the only way we could confirm that is if we had the DVD the Blu-ray or encyclopedia and nowadays you can just Google that [ __ ] and win the argument in an instant so I love seeing that applied to these characters in this world but as Joel tells Ellie more and more about the history of how this infection all started you can see them Bond just a little bit more when she thanks him for enlightening her and he's like sure yeah yeah sure that barrier between the two of them is just slightly getting chipped away at episode to episode and when they come across a building that Joel has been storing weapons and supplies in we get a moment with Ellie where she finds this little room underground and an infected person who's trapped underneath a bunch of rocks and we watch as Ellie takes this opportunity to not just kill this thing but kind of play around with it she gives it a little cut across the forehead and kind of watches to see what happens and I can imagine this is going to be very interesting for first time viewers wondering what this suggests about Ellie's impulses or what she's done in the past or what she could do in the future but the real heart and soul this episode is in the backstory of Bill and Frank played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett in the game you meet Bill and Nick Offerman in the show looks about like Bill you understand that Bill had a partner at one time Frank but you don't really know much about it you don't really see Frank it suggested that Frank is an around anymore and you don't really know why this story has taken the backstory that is hinted at in the game and decided to make the large majority of this episode be about that backstory and if the central goal of that sequence in the game was for Joel and Ellie to learn a few things and get some supplies that is what still happens to these characters but like any good adaptation it takes that Central goal and amplifies everything that comes before it with even more emotion because here we get to see Bill as the last holdout left in his town he's able to avoid everyone who brings people to the qz and is even able to avoid all the infected he's looting Home Depots and just driving around and fixing up his house and making traps outside and you get to see how serious he is about survival but when Frank falls into one of his traps the two of them share a meal together and eventually a relationship this episode takes us through this relationship in great detail and it's one of the saddest episodes of Television I think think I've ever seen it's truly heartbreaking but what's beautiful about the writing and these two performers is that they're able to make it feel hopeful when Joel and Ellie have found the supplies they need and we understand that these two have now passed away and they read that gut-wrenching letter and then drive away listening to Linda Ronstadt when the director Peter [ __ ] is pulling back through that window the choice to not show those two dead bodies in the bed I think is a very wise one because we saw them at their happiest and we saw them make a very difficult choice at the end of their lives to speed things up a bit and to only have that image and memory of them happy and just letting that be the last we see of them really affected me very deeply I thought that it was acted very well I've never seen Nick Offerman do something like this before Marie Bartlett was amazing of course Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are continuing to do great jobs as these characters there's some really haunting imagery like a crashed demolished playing on a Hillside and a bunch of skeletons and a really terrible story about how the government didn't really care and didn't necessarily do their due diligence to find out whether or not someone was infected or not before they were executed back in the day unpeeling those layers of the backstory not just for Joel and Ellie but for other characters like Bill and Frank who've experienced this on such a wide scale really makes the show feel Global makes it feel International with episode 2 having an opening in Indonesia you really get a sense of how everyone has been affected by this thing once again another great episode but the first one I think that truly defied expectations this one has pieces of the game but it really does its own thing and I think they did a brilliant job guys thank you so much as always for watching look forward to next week I'm very excited to see episode four you guys are the best and if you like this you can click right here and get stuck minized [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: Chris Stuckmann

Views: 514,611

Keywords: The Last of Us, Reviews, Video Game, Playstation, PS3, PS4, PS5, TV Show, Episode, Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna, Joel, Ellie, Scene, Clip, Trailer, Teaser, Review, Chris Stuckmann, The Last of Us: Part II, Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, Infected, HBO, Long Long Time, Episode 3, Episode Three, Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett, Bill, Frank

Id: EzTUfgZ9OQM

Length: 6min 4sec (364 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023