This is why the action sequence with David and Ellie fighting clickers together that was in the game but cut from the show was so important. During that fight, Ellie and David had to work together and trust each other in a life or death struggle. By the time it was over, there was real doubt about whether David was a…

I did a quick poll of all the women I know who watch The Last of Us (I am also a woman) after reading this line in the review. Not a single one of us got “gentle” and “fatherly” from David from the get-go. Creepy and manipulative, yes. Sinister but trying to hide it, yes. But not sincerely gentle or fatherly.

She didn’t really overpower anyone, though. She took her shot, got the crap kicked out of her, and got lucky a bunch. David left the cleaver right next to her head, and she killed James while they were distracted. She stabbed David and he dispatched her pretty easily, but the cleaver again was within her grasp.

I am not condoning violence against helpless people, and neither in the game or the show is Joel someone who could be described as a good person. But the Silver Lake folks did try to kill both him and Ellie at the University, and then kidnapped Ellie and were going door to door to try to murder Joel while he was…

This is an example of insanity brought on by the internet. 

I think the TV series has been great-a real achievement. And, even though I am going to criticize it, I liked this episode. There was a lot good about it. But it was by far the most disappointing episode for me up to this point. Two big reasons:

Ellie has a weird credulity problem of riding the line between Annie Oakley, or like the little girl in True Grit, and Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Like are we meant to believe that she could overpower all these adults? Is she Arya Stark after all the assassin training? Or is she a wise cracking Nickelodeon youth…

This show has its share of flaws and the highs are great but it is a pretty uneven season.

Also worth pondering? How Joel just wanders into a town that seemingly seems empty and rescues Ellie. Who stumbles out of a building on fire that nobody in the town seems to notice.

“Oh, great. Religious zealots,” I said as soon as that scene started. Hell of a performance, but nine times out of ten if religious folks suddenly show up in a story that hasn’t had them, they (or at least their leader) is going to turn out to be a monster.

I frankly wished they had had David be antagonistic only because he saw Joel and Ellie as threats and was pushed to his limit by Ellie being violent. Revealing that he’s a moustache-twirling pedophile reduced it to the level of “good guy kills bad guy.” Imagine how much more powerful it would have been if when Ellie…

Aren’t they all cannibals? I mean if they take their mythology seriously that wafer is the flesh of a mystic zombie.

I’m an atheist myself and am naturally suspicious of the motives of any self-declared “man of God”, but really, for the past twenty or thirty years, it would be more of a twist for a preacher in a movie or TV show to actually be a good guy given that the default is that they are a crook and/or a pedophile.

That last point is actually something to consider. The infamous Mary “Typhoid Mary” Mallon wasn’t symptomatic for typhoid fever but she could (and did) pass it on to dozens of other people in the early 20th century.

I’m surprised anyone thought David was good from the start. It’s a safe bet, in any genre fare, that the person spouting scripture is going to be sinister. It would be more shocking to turn out otherwise. 

Was it supposed to be a plot twist that David is a “bad guy” lol?  I think the twist is that they failed at making him unsympathetic.  If the village is actually starving, and some people have died... yeah you might turn to cannibalism. 

We think David is being gentle and fatherly with Ellie because he’s a man of god and doesn’t want to harm anyone.

They subverted the usual evil pastor trope somewhat by David basically admitting the preacher thing was just a ruse to maintain control over the sheep who followed him.

Ellie doesn’t need an incredible sense of direction not to get lost. She had footprints in the snow. The same way the group managed to track her down so easily.

Well, the show certainly raised my bloodlust sky high. If I were Ellie, I would have stabbed him a bunch more times. They kept increasing David’s pure evilness. First he’s a violent, narcissistic authoritarian, then a cannibal, then a pedophile. (Real world priests and authority figures are usually two out of three of…