Agreed on all points. It matters less if the movies win, and more if the blockbusters are frontrunners/in legitimate contention. Neither Avatar nor Top Gun were in contention. When popular movies are frontrunners and have drawn big audiences, more people tend to tune in to see if the big names win (although I would…

Same here, more with regards to McDonagh than Butler. But yeah, I could have seen wins for either, but I’m not terribly up in arms that they didn’t. 

1. Avatar and Top Gun never had a chance to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and if you are a pop culture writer who legitimately thought they did, you need to do some serious consideration of how you approach your field. There was no glimmer of hope ever.

I can only speak to the show since I have no experience in the game. So with that in mind, I’ll approach your question:

To me, the clear insanity of the Fireflies’ plan was reason enough for Joel to take Ellie, if only to get them to pump the brakes on “the plan” to flesh it out a bit more. Humanity has been dealing with cordyceps for 20 years. Why does Ellie need to go into surgery minutes or hours after they find her? Why can’t they…

I’m not terribly surprised at this outcome. Between Everything Everywhere All at Once and the four movies mentioned for getting shut out—Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, TAR, and The Fablemans—only two strike me as the kind of films that will still be in conversations for “best of” lists in 10 or 20 years. Those…

Nah, they’re just trying to make sure that people have to pay for two months of Netflix in order to watch one season of a show. 

And they refuse to see/understand how canceling shows all the time leads viewers to be more wary of getting into a show, only to have it be scrapped. So viewers take a wait and see approach, Netflix interprets that as apathy, and cancels it. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The number of ways that Netflix shoots…

I’m also convinced that Netflix has the worst predictive algorithms of any streaming service. When I’m on Netflix, they only ever suggest shows to me that either 1. I have no interest in or 2. that are already in my queue. I can’t remember the last time Netflix showed me a preview and it made me pause, add the show to…

I think that argument had a lot more weight 10 years ago, when Netflix was the only game in town and had a pretty extensive catalog of non-original material. But as other studios/channels have launched their own streamers and reclaimed their catalog, Netflix’s collection of non-original content has become, to put it…

It’s interesting, because I look at what you wrote about how none of this shaped Joel’s decision and I think what you cite actually makes a pretty good case that it does shape his decision, even if it’s not his primary motivation.

I think this is the really daunting thing about doing adaptation work. You’ve got a built-in audience of fans of the original, but you’ve still got to adapt the work to suit the new format. That risks alienating those fans if they disagree with those adaptive choices. You hope that the fans will give you the grace to…

I think that’s fair. FWIW, I didn’t think the series was perfect, either. But I found it immensely entertaining. But I had to stop reading reviews that focused on changes between the game and the series because that sort of criticism never felt productive to me. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that. 

Right?! It’s not like we don’t have three years worth of recent fucking history to draw on here to enlighten us about how humanity would act. I actually thought that was one of unspoken but really resonant parts of the episode. 

I could only be so concise because your original post laid out the terms and stakes so well!

Now that the season’s done, I can really say that I’m glad that I had no prior knowledge of the game. It seems like knowing the game really well tainted a lot of people’s viewing experience. There were quite frankly a tiring number of pieces analyzing large and small changes from the game. It’s hard for a lot of…

Nah, humanity was fucked well before Joel made his choice. I would hazard that’s why he made his choice. Curing cordyceps doesn’t fix what’s wrong with humanity, and that’s the bigger plague at this point. 

This is well put and my exact take on it as well (I even used Trolley problem in another post before I saw yours). To me, looking at the series this way justifies the balance of human horrors vs. zombie horrors that some viewers have been complaining about. They say there aren’t enough zombies, but it seems clear to…

Oh god, that letter from Bill is a really good point. I hadn’t thought of that. 

This. Ellie didn’t consent, even if she did tell Joel she wanted to see it through earlier. Without full knowledge of what that means (ie: her death), she cannot make an informed choice or give consent. And like you, I wasn’t nearly confident enough in Marlene’s theory of the “cure” to sacrifice a child for it. (Plus,…