I'm playing Devil's Advocate a little, but wasn't the Walking Dead mainly focused on character development? The show moved pretty slowly from what I remember, and wasn't confined to a quick moving plot. I think they were on a farm for nearly an entire season, and then a prison another season. It also juggled something like double digit characters pretty admirably with some getting more attention than others at various times. The Last of Us has two main characters and the rest are very minor characters that are introduced and go away within 1 or 2 episodes. Other than the pair of slower episodes, the plot moves at lightning speed from one thing to the next. I'm no huge Walking Dead fan or anything, but I do remember liking the first couple of seasons before I got bored with it. The way TWD is being dismissed/ignored has me scratching my head. Maybe it's the age-old phenomena of shows overstaying their welcome and ruining the entire perception of the show's early seasons. I had to go back to RT and look at the consensus. It received around 90% score for both critics and audiences up through Season 5. Anyway, I'd actually argue that TWD had MORE of a focus on character development. In my opinion, the Last of Us' domination comes from how great a job it does as world-building. Along with the more superficial (but valid) HBO things like better sets/cinematography/visuals/etc.
TWD characters were also very stupid. I honestly don't remember much character development at all. They all seemed quite static to me. T-Dog was a straight up token black guy.
I honestly don't see how someone would watch that show very long if not for some appreciation of the characters. If not for that, you'd basically be watching the show to slog through long periods of bad character development for a few intense zombie scenes that are few and far between. How many seasons did you torture yourself watching it?
Maybe 4 seasons. I had read the comics before the show became a thing so that kept my interest. But if you read those season threads, I had clear disdain for the show. It turned into more of a comedy to me for seeing what stupid situations the characters will get themselves killed. The costume/makeup production was very good. For TLoU, I've never played the game. The story is new and the world building has been great. Joel and Ellie's relationship has been fun to watch grow. I get why people liked episode 3. It was a good standalone story that paralleled Joel's feelings while showing a little bit of the current society. I did feel like it could've been shortened by 15-20 minutes since those characters are not central to the plot. Episode 7 was a similar backstory for Ellie and showing her emotional/mental maturation as well as her motivations. Her FEDRA school scenes shows that Ellie is pretty wise and has leadership potential as well as her conversations debating Riley joining the Fireflies gives more insight to Ellie's feelings on authority. The romantic stuff could've been trimmed down to save time for more plot advancement. There were enough scenes between Ellie and Riley to see that they had romantic feelings for each other. With the limited number of episodes we get, I'd prefer more plot than redundant romantic scenes.
Seems like a smart marketing tactic when they knew they could count on video game players to watch the show regardless of the content (if only to complain about consistency).
i finally watched last night. this is going to make me sound dumb, but until the very end i thought the episode was a flash-forward where joel was off recuperating and ellie had either decided to return to boston or was captured by FEDRA and was being indoctrinated. it was only when i saw her bit that i realized it was a flashback. it was cool seeing how she was bit and brought into the fireflys, but it was another pretty slow, drawn-out episode. the mall scenes looked incredible though.
This episode was a little underwhelming and disappointing for me, especially after such a strong Henry and Sam story. This was another heartbreaking moment from the first game, and one I was looking forward to, but I don't think they nailed it as much as the game did. Some of that may have been the casting choice of Riley. Storm Reid is so much bigger than Bella Ramsey and so came across a whole lot older than just a few years. Theirs seemed a best friends/sisterly relationship than a best friends/romantic one. Then they cut out most of the present day scenes with Ellie try to find medicine for Joel and the episode loses a sense of urgency as well a connection to why she was trying so hard to save him. I enjoyed it sure. The set design was amazing as always, but the episode didn't quite work for me thematically. Part of me really wishes I was watching this series fresh. I wonder how hard these scenes would hit me.
Interesting. I didn’t play the game but was aware of it. Maybe because I don’t have any preconceptions going in, this is among my favorite shows of all time already. I loved that last episode.
of course it's the white Christians that are the bad guys Spoiler https://img.memegenerator.net/instances/59871157.jpg
I liked the episode a lot. First real look at Joel's history of violence. Some of it was pretty shocking.
