#i love pedro but i'm sorry as a huge fan of the game he just isn't joel

[godidontevenknowwhat]

I'm not saying Naughty Dog should hire me as a casting director for their live action adaptions but

I'm not NOT saying that

[oodlyenough]

alright last of us ep 1 thoughts! some spoilers for both games, sorry

i expected this to be good (the game seems like a natural port to tv) and was not disappointed, i quite enjoyed myself. i'd be very curious to see/hear more reaction from viewers who don't already know the story inside out, as that is obviously the target audience (nothing wrong with that) but it's a different perspective to someone coming at it as a fan of the game

pedro pascal as joel is great. this is an easy sell to me in part because i'm somewhat ambivalent to game joel anyway, lol, but i feel a bit more fondness towards tv joel already. uh, more on that later

bella ramsey is good. it will take me longer to warm up to his ellie, because i am more attached to game ellie. this was always going to be the hardest role to cast because finding an actual teenager to carry this role was going to be hard. there are some moments where i feel like i can See the acting, which is distracting -- but there were other moments i quite liked their delivery, so i think i will settle into it as time goes on. the moment where ellie asks about the code and then, later, lies about the 80s song on the radio was the moment where they really clicked for me as ellie, so i'm looking forward to more bits like that.

the stand-out here for me was actually nico parker as sarah. sarah is a sweet but ultimately little beyond a prop in the game; here we got to know more of her, parker's performance was great, and the mounting dread as we follow sarah through the day and see hints of things amiss around her was excellent. it's interesting how much i was on the edge of my seat the entire prologue even though i knew exactly what would happen

marlene i'm so thrilled you manifested out of my playstation to be here you're beautiful. have you and kim explored each other's bodies

huge win for the joel/tess people LOL. i like tess a lot in game, and this is a different variation on the character, i think. they've softened her a bit -- i liked her lying to robert about how it's not an issue and she'll totally just let it slide, and the reveal of course that she didn't mean that lmao... but i hope we get to see her be a bit more ruthless in ep 2, or i'll feel this character lost something from the source. the entire robert subplot in-game is just a gunplay tutorial, and getting it all out of the way to get to business faster is an improvement, narratively, for a tv show.

but they've softened everyone so far, including joel. wanting a battery to go find his brother is a much nobler and sympathetic goal than being ripped off on arms he was trying to smuggle. this has pros and cons. obviously a pro is it's easier to like joel here; a con is what this will mean for the future of the character/season, when joel will be having to do some pretty brutal things, and presumably be pretty cold to ellie for quite some time. i also keep thinking of that moment in part 2 where dina is like, who would want to hurt joel? and ellie is like uh half the people who met him. "we're shitty people joel" is a good and definitive moment in game, one of the kinds of scenes i consider a thesis statement on the characters -- does it still hold up with this tess + joel? if it doesn't, how does the show adjust?

tbc i guess!!

misc other thoughts:

i wonder why we changed the outbreak to 2003... i assume it's so that "20 years later" means the main action is taking place in 2023. but it's not "our" 2023 so that seems almost irrelevant. i suppose they still felt that was more hashtag relatable than setting it in the near future

loved the cold open

the title sequence is cool but unfortunately like every prestige title sequence feels derivative of game of thrones. i think they could've repurposed the game's opener (the snippets of news broadcasts) and had a real banger of an opening. oh well

LOVE that they kept the music/composer

not sure how i felt about the early scenes of ellie w the fireflies. in game, i felt it was fairly clear ellie was doing this by choice. i also felt her wanting to return "home" didn't really jive with what i knew from left behind, where she was moments away from running away with riley + clearly unhappy at school anyway. maybe with riley gone she would want to return to normalcy but... idk

selfishly i hope this takes off because i can't remember the last time i watched a show weekly that other people were watching and talking about. maybe even flesh and blood people at work and stuff. wow.