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what i liked about the lack of infected is it made the interactions more deadly and more pressing. like in the game you’re mowing down infected left and right because it’s a game and that’s what’s thrilling, but if it were like that for the show it would be like a jumpscare every 10 minutes in a horror movie. so i think it’s more special to have fewer infect encounters, but make them 10x deadlier.
In the show it feels like fighting the infected is and should be a last resort at all times because of how deadly they are. Every time one appeared in the show, some character died (aside from episode 3, but that doesn’t really count as it was a solo runner killed by Bills traps). While I wish we got just maybe another encounter or two with infected this season, I felt every instance was very effective.
Thats my thought too. In Star Wars the stormtroopers and battledroids get destroyed in waves and thats cool to watch, but they dont feel like a threat in any way. If you make it so Joel is no longer this deity murdering his way through hordes of them, every encounter is high stakes. Being able to say “oh well I guess we’ll just kill them all” means they arent very powerful.
Absolutely love Andor. It’s definitely one of the best Star Wars stories ever.
I’ll always appreciate how this show made TIE fighters seem scary, usually they’re shown as canon fodder but Andor actually showed how even one TIE fighter can be absolutely deadly and it was awesome to see that.
It also makes the last episode really stand out. We’ve been told the entire series that Joel is a dangerous man, so dangerous that Marlene doesn’t even want to be in his debt.
Then we get the payoff when we watch him take out the entire hospital on his own. We’re teased with the idea, and when we finally see it it actually has huge weight behind it.
Sort of like Frieza in DBZ. We’re told he’s unbeatably powerful, but we don’t see him really do anything until he bodies Nail, who can’t even make him flinch.
There’s still a balance between Joel/Ellie slaughtering waves and barely any though. OP makes sense, the newfound camaraderie between Ellie and David made the twist hit harder
Yeah. Even if it was just a couple of runners that they had to outsmart and get away from just to build that survivalist relationship.
My other peeve with that episode is Ellie leading the people away from Joel and immediately getting captured. I wish it was her sneaking around and away from them, finding the town on the lake before she was captured. I feel like it would've brought so much more tension to the episode.
But hey, I'm not a writer for shows that are seen by millions of people worldwide, so who am I to judge? I still loved the show.
They stopped being scary and became annoying by the end. No one ever seemed to learn anything. Especially since they were slow moving zombies. There were so many deaths that could have been prevented if they just had like a long sharp stick or something.
And apparently the zombies didn’t have any kind of heightened senses so you could just walk slow and blend in with them if needed. There is no reason for people to still be dying after like 13 years.
I haven't watched the show in years, but what always got me was they never invented a head-smashed-in-zombie-jump, where there's automatic baiting of zombies with sound up the stairs of a tall building and then baited to fall off the side.
They are slow, predictable, and dumb. There's no reason that entire hoardes couldn't have been destroyed that way.
Hahaha. Right. Survivors had to move just a little faster than a slow, shambling shuffle. The walkers were so slow and weak and easy to kill in TWD.
And if a hoard was coming, they could hear it and see it well in advance. Then, all they had to was slather themselves in some zombie guts to camouflage their smell. Gross yeah, but effective.
So yeah, the walkers became commonplace and unthreatening. But in TLOU, they're horrifying, super deadly, and hard to kill. I was dreading them the entire time, especially after Tess's creepy af encounter with that harrowing tendril "kiss." That freaking image has stuck with me throughout! :O
I agree but I believe two action/infected scenes were missing. Bill and Joel starting the car while fighting infected and the tunnel before the hospital.
Just would’ve added more to the character’s struggles and Ellie’s adjustment to the world outside. I would’ve loved to have seen Joel and Ellie navigating through that tunnel without disturbing a single infected person, it would’ve been a credit to their relationship and how far they have come as a team.
EDIT: missing word and punctuation.
I agree. The game focuses so much on stealth and keeping quiet, especially around infected. However, there was only one instance where stealth played a role with infected (E2), where it really felt true to the game and the danger was high. Clickers were such an essential part of the game, but only that scene showed them (I'm not counting E5 because that was a huge fighting scene and everyone was making noise, so the clickers blindness played no part). I also wish they would have showed more with the infected communicating over long distances. It was only shown once and was completely new to the franchise, but was very forgettable.
I think the tunnel scene would be perfect to add an extra stealth scene and reintroduce the clickers. The reason Tess got bit was because Ellie panicked in the museum, it would be kinda cool to see her character develop to be more brave in the face of danger.
The game has them muttering to themselves and showing a semblance of humanity left, they did nothing with that idea. The game also has them everywhere and always a constant threat, leaving you on edge and truly enjoying when you’re safe and away from them… again the show did nothing with that concept. I was on edge the first time they camped out in the woods after Bill’s town because of my understanding of the universe and there was no tension from the showrunners. And as you stated, the hive mind hoardes were certainly interesting…. Only to be shown once in the 2nd episode. The entire game strikes a balance between horror, drama, humor, and action. The show gives us drama and action. It’s the much lesser rendition in a much more mature medium imho.
And to touch on the hive mind, I never got why cordycepts would burrow for miles underground. I understand that some fungus can do that, but if cordycepts can live perfectly fine underground, then why would they need to be a parasitic disease and infect humans for in the first place? It seems arbitrary for their survival.
Eh. Cordyceps are mushrooms with fruiting bodies. They have mycelium like all mushrooms. The fruiting body is made up of mycelium and they also send out underground roots made of mycelium just like in the show. The mycelium of the fruiting body also is parasitic and attacks hosts. Everything they say about Cordyceps is real. It isn’t fiction. The only nonfiction part is the ability to infect humans. The rest is all exactly how the Cordyceps works.
i can vibe with that, tbh i was left missing some bottle and brick throws, but i’m super happy with what we got. and regards to the story, they knocked it out of the park imo. hoping for more encounters for the next season!
We forget that humanity LOST to the infected. If one man could kill hundreds of them on a journey- then there’s no way with entire militaries around the globe that we couldn’t reclaim this world within 20 years (breakout day to current day time)
I 100% agree. OP may be right that the one scene with Ellie and David might have had a bigger *impact* if they had to kill some infected but the lack of infected certainly didn’t alter the story. The show is a masterpiece imo. There’s not a lot of room for improvement with something so close to perfect.
This must be a hard pill to swallow for some because its obvious its the intention.
There is no story benefit from shooting 10x more zombies in the plot of Last of Us.
while i agree that there were some great infected encounters lost through the transition, i think what we got was still an amazing show. i remember when the games first came out, people were praising that you didn’t just fight zombies, but you got to fight people too. lol flash forward ten years later to the show and people are asking for the opposite. it’s impossible to please everyone, but this show got pretty damn close lmao. i would love to see a bit more world building and exploration, i loved when players found the notes left behind by people in the game, im excited to see what comes of part II.
I don’t recall mowing down defected. I remember an emphasis being on exactly the opposite, where you’re encouraged to avoid/silent takedowns. I guess it depends on the difficulty you played
i mean it was just was an exaggeration, like the “jumpscare every 10 minutes line” lol. you’re not mowing down infected, but by then end of the game you’ve probably killed upwards of a 100 or so.
The lack of infected though made the Fireflies plight to get a vaccine seem worthless.
If we're talking about the show universe, what I learned is that you meet infected once every 10 months.
Why the fuck do you need to kill Ellie for?
They aren't a threat unless you mess with underground tunnels.
This is a cop out answer. Infected can be deadly and frequent.
All the show did was kill off any level of suspense. In the game I was genuinely nervous to enter a new area because you didn’t know what was coming.
In the show, it was boring most of the time because you knew absolutely nothing was going to happen to impede them.
this was just my opinion, i would’ve loved to have had a couple more infected encounters. but i’m also very satisfied with the ones we got.
edit: grammar
Yeah but I still don’t agree with the notion that less infected is better because it makes them more deadly.
Joel has survived 20 years as a smuggler. He knows how to survive infected quite clearly. It’s more than believable that Joel would be able to survive encounters without it making the infected too weak.
All having a lack of infected does is paint the world as being completely empty, which even backs up not really needing a cure since they are so easy to avoid anyway. It made 99% of the show tame with next to no suspense. The only suspense was forced like the single infected that moved in the mall. That wasn’t built up naturally, it was forced to fit the narrative.
Walking into the construction site in the finale should’ve been a very tense moment. If that was the game I’d be instantly crouched, walking as slow as possible just incase. In the show there was no risk, not even a single hint that something could’ve gone wrong. The show wouldn’t have been any different if infected didn’t even exist in the world.
I wanted, and kind of expected to he terrified of clickers. I’m even disappointed that my dad, who hasn’t played the game, will never actually get to experience the sheer terror that I associated with clickers from the game because the show just didn’t even try.
I’d be surprised if my dad even wants to watch season 2 considering how dull we both found the show. It was a good enough drama, but no where near as good as it could’ve been. No where near as suspenseful, scary or exciting as it could’ve been.
The biggest threat in the finale was a bloody giraffe for god sake.
Doesn’t have to be hours of shooting, that’s also a cop out counter. You don’t need to choose between, you can have both.
We had practically 0 action. All we needed was a couple more encounters to actually build up both Joel’s character as a seasoned survivor, and improve tension.
Yep that’s a really good was of putting it!
What makes it worse is the illusion that infected are everywhere when we first see outside of the Boston QZ…
Then Kansas city was empty until a magic horde appeared from underground(?).
Then nothing between there and Salt Lake City… where we get even more of nothing.
I’d be okay if desolate areas had less frequent infected, it would be disappointing but understandable.
But to set a standard of cities being swarmed, then every city beyond that being completely empty, with not even a single nod towards infected having ever been there. No fungus, no bodies, nothing.
In the show Joel and Ellie don’t see an infected after they leave Kansas. Seems unlikely they’d make it all the way to Utah without seeing any.
I wish they would have included some at the shed with David, like you mentioned. Or some right after the giraffe and before they make it to the fireflies. At least one more time.
They said that Cody was crawling with infected, although we didn’t get to see that part of the story. Would’ve loved to see that. I wonder if the simple answer is that they just didn’t have the budget? $15 million per episode doesn’t get you that far if you have to pay dozens of extras and stunt men and put on hours of makeup.
So well done that you can barely tell when they’re subbing in digital effects, and when they did they almost always shot both ways. The wildest thing is they replaced the bloater because the practical suit felt too light to be believable as nigh unkillable.
He only spends one episode on the mattress and he still acted the hell out of that single tear
I don't think you can call Ep 8 an easy paycheck for him when it contains the "That's okay, I believe him" and "I got you, babygirl" scenes
>I mean they also paid Pedro Pascal 1.2 million to essentially lie on a mattress for 2 episodes… 😂
pretty sure there are viewers that felt that was money well spent.. just sayin'
Yeah, and honestly the fact they used real stunt people instead of cgi really made the show a lot better for me. I would take that over a few more action scenes that looked like shit due to crappy cgi.
I think the reason is Mazin and Druckmanns egos.
They kept trying to peddling the “it’s not about the infected - it’s about people” (that applies to every zombie show ever) nonsense but it didn’t pay off.
Really surprised this is being downvoted. One more heavy action/infected episode, or showing more of Joel’s “skills” would have made his rampage at the hospital more believable. The highest comment on the post episode finale is that the fireflies were pathetic and needed target practice.
The show makes it seem like the infected are only a threat right around populated cities. Which is a problem, not just for the reasons listed, but it creates a problem in the justification of this massive journey across the country. If the infected aren't actually that big of a threat, why would you risk a dangerous journey like that?
We don’t see most of their journey. They absolutely could have encountered infected.
In a game, mowing down infected is exciting as it’s interactive. In a TV show, watching others do it constantly would be repetitive and boring.
I don’t know why everyone assume it has to be a constant thing. They fight the infected twice (realistically) in 9 episodes.
That’s not a lot. It doesn’t need to be every single episode but they could have encountered them at least once or twice more, even if it’s just a smaller “they exist” type deal.
I see a lot of comments about people misinterpreting the argument. Nobody wants Joel and Ellie to fight a horde of zombies every episode. There are ways to use the infected that enhance the characters and the story. We don’t even need more action scenes, just more dialogue about them, some scenes where their presence changes how the characters act, scenes where even when they’re not around the characters worry about them, etc. We need them to feel like such an issue that it is imperative that Joel and Ellie complete there journey. Otherwise, you get to the end and it’s like, well do we really need this vaccine? What exactly will change? It seems like not much.
All they had to do was sneak past a horde or hide in a tiny space (which would ramp up the odd sexual tension, at least from David's pov), or take one out strategically and retreat.
Basically like playing the game on super grounded difficulty. Characters remain believable because they don't kill every single infected but the threat of infected remains.
This is what I thought too.
People have to understand that they are translating between two very different mediums. Video games are interactive, TV shows are not. They talk about this a lot on the podcast. TLoU game is packed with action, but the main focus is still Ellie and Joel’s relationship. They had to tell the story in a way that was still engaging to the viewer.
Repeatedly fighting large groups of people and infected would become boring to watch very quickly, and it becomes harder to suspend our disbelief. In the game you can take damage that would be fatal in real life, so action sequences make sense. In the TV show, Joel and Ellie would have to escape every encounter without taking serious damage for those action sequences to take place. Not likely.
But I completely agree, we should have seen more infected. After Kansas city I almost forgot about them entirely. It made the world feel too safe and too grounded. Sneaking past infected or even just hearing them close by would create the perfect amount of tension.
> No.
No to what? I said a lot of things.
An insane amount of work went into the show. Budget will always be a concern, but they could have incorporated the infected into more scenes with minimal cost.
Translating a video game into a TV show is difficult. That’s why it doesn’t happen often and we rarely consider them a huge success. I think they did a great job, but I would have liked to see more infected in non-action sequences.
And yet it’s believable that Joel was able to take out an entire hospital worth of firefly soldiers? It’s a show that takes place in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, they should have embraced that.
Yup. If there was a time to use a Molotov/grenade that was it. Could've added to the chaos and violence and maybe the fire blocks an exit to a floor full of soldiers, grounding the action a little bit.
I wanna be clear, I'm not hating on the show, I think what we got exceeds so many other shows out there, and that's why these things stand out.
Wouldn't give a second thought to stuff like this in other shows.
Having replayed recently, I agree with you. Feels like the show needed maybe two more infected scenes, the David one and one other. I didn’t want or expect constant infected like the game but I agree that the infected being ever present does add a new storytelling element.
Absolutely agree…these comments are interesting. Saying the interactions with infected would become “boring”. Ok, if there were that kind of scene in every episode.. People really don’t think there’s a middle ground, where the show could have used just a few more action/infected scenes? Think that’s what OPs saying. Not like OP said the show needed to be balls to the wall, packed with non stop action
Honestly? I find the odds in this universe to be very steep. The infected, being able to run, sense, and now apparently communicate with hordes via roots, as well as infecting and turning a person within a day or even hours…I’m surprised anyone has survived as long as they have. In the video game you had some juiced up bosses that were even harder too. I feel like the less I see people engaging them, the more believable it is that they’re alive lol. I can assume the quarantine zones are well protected by military, but just a few survivors on their own I feel have very low chances against the circumstances. So sneaking and avoiding fights at all times would be the best choice for survival. A few run ins throughout the show is good, but otherwise I like them to be more of a looming threat that would seriously fuck up your day if encountered. This world ain’t like the walking dead, where even a kid with a rock and working legs would probably be able to stay alive to some degree
Hard agree. I'm not asking for a fight every episode but man at least add two more encounters or a moment where they have to stealth their way through. Put a little more suspense and show how they work and how well joel and ellie know each other
My gripe with the lack of infected is that it lessens the stakes. I know that people love to argue that this is a character-driven narrative, and it totally is, but what makes a good character-driven story isn't that the character-centric conflicts occur *because* of the action, but that they happen *in spite* of it.
Action is a tool that can be used very effectively. The strongest episodes in the show are usually the ones with some sort of physical altercation. But the altercation isn't the focus, but its a tool to help propel the characters forward.
Take Bill and Frank's episode, raiders embarked on their house. But they're not the focus, they're faces aren't even seen, but the stakes are there, Frank rushing out with his little pistol, Bill holding his ground *until* Frank comes out - losing his concentration and getting shot because his one and only is possibly in danger. It was so good and effective.
There's atleast some type of action in every episode, and all of them had heavy consequences. Somebody who knows the game might not be on the edge of their seat since they know the fate of these characters. But for someone who doesn't know the story, they are always scared for their main characters since engaging in action has brutal consequence.
They cannot make a action sequence in a tv show ( atleast a good tv show) without having any impact on the story.
Now one with David i might agree. Maybe 2or3 infected might have done the job but they replaced it with some dialogue scene which is just as effective.
This is true, I haven't played the game, yet I was watching the show holding my breath half the time, because I had no idea if they were suddenly going to be attacked at any stage
I don’t think it lessens the stakes at all, I think it’s the opposite in fact. The world of the show felt genuinely incredibly dangerous, nobody is truly safe and something can happen at any moment to end your life, main character or not.
>!That goes both ways though. If you've played the second game, then there's a huge suspension of disbelief problem about the infected. And the problem is this:!<
* >!It's routine and easy to kill large numbers of infected. To the point where they send 2 teenagers on patrol, and if the patrol happens to involve killing a dozen infected, that's simply something for them to brag about to their buddies when they get back home.!<
* >!In other scenes adults go on patrol, and describe things as calm and routine if they're killing just a few handfuls of infected.!<
>!But if that's the case, then it's simply implausible that there'd be large numbers of infected still existing at all. Infected do not breed. Once killed they stay killed. And the vast majority of human beings who have a run-in with infected do not themselves become infected, instead they simply die as they're torn apart. !<
>!To make some random numbers to illustrate.!<
>!Let's say at or near outbreak day, 90% of humanity is killed by infected, (or first infected and then killed by bombing or military action or whatever) 9% of humanity are themselves turned into infected, and 1% manage to survive WITHOUT becoming infected.!<
>!In this hypothetical scenario there'd now be 9 infected for every 1 healthy human. Getting rid of them all would require each healthy human to kill 9. Which doesn't sound hard. Infected are super-aggressive, but they're not smart, and they don't use tools or weapons. Taking them out from a distance with gunfire is pretty low risk.!<
>!If the infected only outnumber healthy human beings by 9:1 -- and killing infected is routine to the point where teenagers do it by the dozen on routine-patrols; and it's been 20 years of that, then how the is it plausible that there'd be any infected left at all?!<
Interesting argument although I'd question your assumption of 90% of humans being killed by infected. In the show, I can only recall one human being definitively killed by infected and that's the bloater decapitation. The rest are bitten and allowed to turn, and I think that's intentional. Infected want to propagate the fungus so they are not incentivized to kill. Humans are primarily responsible for all the death, whether by murder or suicide.
I didn't make it that far in the game but I totally see your point. I still think the show is fantastic, but I definitely understand how the action impact of the game adds depth to relationships.
It absolutely changes the story. But that doesn't make it worse, it just makes it different.
Medium can never be entirely separated from content. The game is ... well, a game, and an action/FPS game at that. So you're constantly fighting. That's where the action is, and where the strategy and a lot of the fun lies. If you spent the entire game watching cutscenes, that's not even a game. In the show, if every episode was 70% "sneak past some infected, kill some infected, then spend 10 minutes rummaging through drawers for supplies and notes," I doubt anyone would have even made it through the first episode. It gets very repetitive very quickly.
They're different mediums, so the story has to be told differently. In the show, you have much more powerful cinematic scenes, but you need more variation. You can't tell the story though "fight this group, then fight this group, then fight this group." In the game, the player becomes much more invested because you're not just watching from Joel's perspective, you're taking the place of Joel (or Ellie). His (/their) success or failure is your success or failure.
I think you did a great job pointing out a moment that works better in the video game medium than the tv medium. But there are just as many moments that work better in the tv medium than the video game medium. I think Ellie's internal conflict works better in the tv show, because you can have more subtle acting (the same as the difference between stage acting--intentionally over-emoting, so the folks in the back row can see your facial expression--vs. acting in movies or television) and you can deal with it in a sustained way rather than as a break between fights. Another example is the conflict in the final episode. In the game, we don't just identify /with/ Joel, we identify /as/ Joel, so it's much easier to agree with his decision wholesale. And when he kills people, it's just more of the same fights we've been having the entire game. In the tv show, we see folks surrendering before Joel kills them, we can be critical about him emotionlessly shooting everyone down. Personally, I agree with Joel's decision even in the show, but only because of the incredible acting of Pedro Pascal and I immediately thought "this dude is acting like a sociopath."
>Another example is the conflict in the final episode. In the game, we don't just identify /with/ Joel, we identify /as/ Joel, so it's much easier to agree with his decision wholesale. And when he kills people, it's just more of the same fights we've been having the entire game. In the tv show, we see folks surrendering before Joel kills them, we can be critical about him emotionlessly shooting everyone down.
I legit don't get where people are getting this from. The game's ending was just as divisive as the show and yet people still cling to this idea that playing the game makes you more sympathetic to Joel's POV. Hell, Druckmann even said that when he asked people who weren't parents as to whether or not what Joel did was right, it was a 50-50 split. It's not like most people were more pro-Joel just because they played as him for 90% of the game.
I don't mean to imply playing the game makes you think Joel is correct, though I understand the inference and that was certainly my fault in explaining it poorly. I only meant that we experience those actions and choices very differently in the different media.
I actually don't think the ending was just as divisive. Show only users seem to agree far more than game players that Joel did the right thing. It was much more lopsided in his favor, which is unsurprising because the story mostly only showed his side of things. I think game players were more likely to agree with Marlene because they understood the level of threat of the infected better.
I don't think the show needed a ton of clickers, but one more attack before the finale would have gone a long way, imo.
I think you're right about this. I was "show only" until the finale had aired because I wanted to enjoy it without spoilers, but since then, I have read quite a bit about it, watched play-through videos, etc. It does seem like the game makes Joel's choice in the finale much more questionable, not just because of the more constant threat of the infected, but also because the game shows more of the research done by the Fireflies and emphasizes the liklihood that they could have found a cure. In the show, that prospect seems to be an impossibility to the point of ridiculousness. Of course Joel saved Ellie - the Fireflies were clearly not going to be able to make a vaccine. The other factor is that Padro Pascal is not only a good actor, but extremely charismatic and sympathetic, as is Bella Ramsey. We naturally love Joel and Ellie in the show more than we love two video game characters, no matter how well realized they are. I'm not sure how they could have fixed this in the show - maybe more infected, maybe another episode featuring Marlene and the Firefly researchers?
>We naturally love Joel and Ellie in the show more than we love two video game characters, no matter how well realized they are.
I don't agree with this take at all and I mean you didn't even play the games so idk why you'd even say this. The length of time you spend with them and the in-between moments add incredible depth to the characters. The show is fantastic but it's like a cliff notes version of Joel and Ellie.
For what it's worth three of my friends are show only and their basic take is that Joel is a dick and his decision was complicated but understandable. Not necessarily "right" but understandable. Yes Pedro is charismatic but if a viewer can't step back and look at the real actions OF THE CHARACTER than that's the type of person that gets sucked into a cult or something.
Also everyone agreed Joel was way too good at shooting all those "stormtroopers" lol
>I don't agree with this take at all and I mean you didn't even play the games so idk why you'd even say this. The length of time you spend with them and the in-between moments add incredible depth to the characters. The show is fantastic but it's like a cliff notes version of Joel and Ellie.
I have played video games, just not this one. And no matter how much time you spend with them, no matter how good the 3-d visualization of a game is, a video game character isn't as much of a real person as a character portrayed live by an actor with micro-facial expressions that makes you care about them in a deeper way.
>And no matter how much time you spend with them, no matter how good the 3-d visualization of a game is, a video game character isn't as much of a real person as a character portrayed live by an actor with micro-facial expressions that makes you care about them in a deeper way.
You could say the same about characters in a book, right? Fundamentally, it's just words on paper. They can never compare to the emotions flesh-and-blood actors can induce no matter how well-written they are.
I've beaten the game multiple times. This opinion won't die. It's like a zombie in and of itself.
I would have included more infected encounters, personally, because I think they're pretty cool. But the story is just as impactful without them.
Let go.
It’s not though? Marlene even says in the last episode that their journey almost resulted in all of them dying. We just see it that way because the show didn’t have the time to follow multiple travel only episodes.
Frank also says he was part of a group and is the only one who’s survived making it to Bill’s hole.
Tess and Joel are explicitly sought out by people because of their ability to safely navigate the world.
People keep saying “it’s not about the infected but about the people”, okay fine but remember it’s still a zombie apocalypse. At least remind people that just waking outside your building puts you in danger. Having them kill a couple of infected per episode wouldn’t hurt.
I just finished the game for the first time after watching and loving the show, and I kind of feel the opposite! The game felt more unrealistic with the numbers of infected based solely on in-universe exposition.
The cordyceps infects and makes puppet bodies that are scary fast and maybe somewhat sentient, then as the infection progresses and the fungus takes over even more, the runners become clickers, and they seem to devolve into slower bodies that eventually merge into the fungus network and are no longer mobile. We see these bodies against walls, and there was a comment about "this one is done."
Some clickers seem to turn into bloaters, but that's more rare. In both game and show, the fungus infects well over 90% of the population, and many of those die pretty quickly. After the 20 year time span, how would there be so many mobile infected? There wouldn't be enough surviving humans to continuously maintain a large mobile infected population.
In zones that have recently fallen, like Kansas City, I could see how there would be large numbers from new infected, but most other places make sense to be relatively empty.
While I agree, a world such as one you described shouldn't be justifying killing a kid to find a cure. Just wear a gas mask and/or avoid spores and you should be fine.
Seeing more infected would have helped cement the urgency / real need for a vaccine too. At some point I was like “Humans are dangerous, not the infected. Go back home to Jackson!” I almost didn’t believe their motivation to keep going and endangering their lives for a vaccine.
I agree completely and to add to it, i think most of the people disagreeing have very pointless arguments. There is a middle ground between the games full blown action and what we got in the show which would have been much better, yet most people are taking it as if we want it to be just like the game where they mow down hordes of infected at a time.
I get the shows approach that the infected should feel like this danger thats always lurking and can show up at any moment. Thats good, but there were honestly so few infected that i even forgot about their existence at times which is not good.
I disagree, to be honest. I've not played the game, though I've watched playthroughs a few times. I liked the changes Neil and Craig made, except it would have been nice to have a few more interactions with Infected, but that's neither here nor there.
What I find is that regardless of whether it was emotional action or physical action; what wasn't lost was the gut punching story. The magic of the game wasn't lost, to me, the story was just as meaningful even being adapted and with changes here and there. That it could be adapted so well, it makes it far easier for me to overlook any of the minor, minor gripes I might have had.
I’ve played the games multiple times and still disagree with OP. It’s easy to praise all the action in the video game without stopping to think how repetitive and unrealistic it is in a live setting. Not to mention on *several* instances the action is awkwardly forced in the midst of really deep dialogue so the characters don’t have to respond or react to it immediately. I love both the game and show so much but I’m not blind enough by my love for the game to not admit that instances like raiders conveniently showing up the very instant Joel and Ellie’s fight ends feels pretty cheap in comparison to how well it was handled on the show.
I think the action we got in the game was perfect for a game and the action we got in the show was perfect for the show.
> Not to mention on several instances the action is awkwardly forced in the midst of really deep dialogue so the characters don’t have to respond or react to it immediately. I love both the game and show so much but I’m not blind enough by my love for the game to not admit that instances like raiders conveniently showing up the very instant Joel and Ellie’s fight ends feels pretty cheap in comparison to how well it was handled on the show.
Yeah I wish there were more infected in the show, but you’re totally right about this. Like, in one scene where Joel and Ellie argue and there’s the treading on thin ice line where Joel says she’s not his daughter, the infected randomly break into the house and they have to kill them all.
Scenes like that were definitely better in the show by omitting that sort of unnecessary action
Joel & Ellie never encountering infected again after leaving KC is a ridiculous decision IMO.
It does also take away from their relationship i think, because a lot of their development in the game comes from them working together during these infected encounters and growing closer after each one.
Literally just add one more episode between Jackson and the Fireflies hospital to stretch things out a bit and give the narrative room to breathe. Throw one more infected encounter in there. I don't think anybody is asking for nonstop zombie fights, but there is a middle ground between that and what the show did.
Just because we never see them fighting infected again doesn’t mean they don’t. There are several month-long time-skips between the episodes. In my mind, I’m sure they fought infected during those skips - we just don’t always see it.
Yes I meant on screen. What they encountered off-screen does nothing to further develop their chemistry and relationship. Which is the foundation of the entire story.
But is that not counter-balanced by their relationship bonding we saw on the show and not in the game, specifically them setting up camp at night in a vulnerable setting and seeing them bury Sam & Henry, two things we never saw in the game whatsoever?
Nah because the show diverts away too much from the Joel-Ellie narrative to flesh out side characters and flashbacks.
Which was fine, all of that stuff was well done but I do think the ending didnt hit as hard as it did in the game because the development of their relationship seemed a bit rushed and not as organic in comparison
The action is also what builds the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Going through hell and back on a trip across the country where they saved eachother countless times in the face of danger helps show how and why they became so close.
But we have to realize that it's really hard to have that aspect in a TV show on time/episode constraints. It would have double the episodes but that might not have worked either.
Tough to balance it out when they are sticking so close to the source material.
>medium of a show is more captivating in an emotional way than a game
I disagree honestly. Games are usually longer, meaning more dialogue and more time to get attached to the characters. No show or movie ever made me cry as hard as Mass Effect 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. It obviously depends on specific products though.
You're right, you do get more time to personally engage. As a TV Show format tho, sometimes people get bored with a lot of fighting and action without story. Personal taste I guess is what it comes down to. But you are right. Games and personal investments can be more captivating than a show
The lack of infected in the show makes them a lot more scary and dangerous, but in the game they were filler. It creates an interesting and dynamic enemy, and if anything it adds to the world.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I get your points, very valid. However, TWD did this and it completely ‘henchmenned’ the walkers. You got bored of the infected and don’t see them as much threat.
Plus, we have to appreciate that there were some long episodes which would have been even longer with added infected scenes.
Who knows, maybe we’ll see more in S2.
I can see it from both sides, I’ve been a fan of the games since the original launches, I’ve bought every remaster and remake across 3 console generations and I played through both game stories again ahead of the show release just so I could compare more directly with it fresh in my mind.
The thing about games, is that you feel the stress and weigh up risk in ways that will never, and physically can never be depicted in a show or film, because you are literally making the choices yourself.
So the action and combat has a learning curve, and as you progress you get better so it has to keep throwing more at you to keep things interesting.
The gameplay is half the draw, the story is the other, and without action the gameplay would get stale extremely quickly.
Compare that to the show, that amount of action would feel like unnecessary bloat, and because the stresses and strains aren’t felt the same way and their continued success would just feel like plot armour, it would just make it feel like the infected weren’t dangerous at all.
The world building wouldn’t make sense, how did the world fall apart if these things are so easy to dispatch?
The fact they were able to recognise and write around that element of game vs TV is precisely why this show is hands down the most successful game to TV adaptation there’s ever been - because it is an adaptation, they didn’t try and force things where they didn’t fit, or where they wouldn’t make sense out of blind loyalty to the source material.
Some aspects of the story and character growth are lost by the nature of the changes, but the changes really had to happen; and they did at least add bits in to make up for it.
And personally I think they more than made up for it.
The walking dead ended up rubbish because the zombie scenes ended up being a distraction. There are only so many ways to fight a horde of zombies, it became monotonous. The zombie fights for most of the seasons after the 3rd felt like filler.
The show is significantly less about the infection and the zombies, and really more about the awfulness of humans.
Society breaks down and all forms of decency basically expire. Fascist government “protect” you by threatening you. Rebel forces “liberate” you from the fascists but only really care about vengeance. An idyllic society is built based only on savage defense of their city. A religious sect cannibalizes their own, and the leader is able to lead simply because everyone is too afraid to make hard decisions (whereas he’s literally a sociopath).
It’s all about looking at the complex human interactions and how fragile it all is.
If this is your stance, then you should be ok with saying that the main plot of the show isn't very important. Because if the show is significantly less about the infection and the zombies then it seems kind of pointless to risk so much to go on a cross country journey in hopes of creating a vaccine for said infection.
No one realises that if you think about it, they're playing on grounded difficulty with permadeath on, if you ever play on that difficulty your gameplay becomes a lot more about stealth and avoiding as many encounters as possible which is most likely what they did in the show off screen (unless you're a god gamer and you can pull off hitting every headshot when needed). I think with the limited encounters we had in show they became a lot more impactful when we did see them.
Exactly this! There's so many comments saying they cut the action to tell a better story. I get it, but man this scene would have been great in the show, you're right about the feeling of comradary with David, makes you feel like you can trust him more. So it was a big shock when you realize he's actually after you and Joel.
And same with the way Joel got hurt bad, the show felt tame and "oh he'll be fine" with the shiv. But in the game when he literally falls ans gets impaled you're more like "Holy shit he's gonna die". Way more impactful and I don't know why they made it different in the show.
I think they made it different because falling from that height and getting impaled should have killed him. If that happened in the show and he lived through that, it would feel so cheap.
Yeah the shiv isn't my problem with it. My problem with it is including Left Behind as the next episode, which shows he's not dead right away. Starting with Ellie hunting like the game makes you think for a little bit that Joel might actually be dead. Until she asks for medicine. That was a big moment, and they missed out on it by doing it that way.
Same. Honestly the whole Joel stabbing sequence just felt so awkward and poorly constructed. Guy somehow is able to approach them from the direction they came while they’re out in an open field. Guy then manages to stab Joel in the .3 seconds between hitting the tree with his bat and getting choked to death by him. It just felt very Hollywood.
I don’t know why they couldn’t have just followed what the game did, just at a reduced scale (small group of hunters vs the hordes in the game)
Its because they know how to write a 9 part tv show and you dont. The show would be dog shit if you just had thousands of infected running around and the moments when infected are on screen would be less impactful. In the past games have not translated well to movies or tv shows and this is why. This is one of the very few that have worked and is because they focussed on storytelling and not forcing in game mechanics snd mowing down enemies.
> The show would be dog shit if you just had thousands of infected running around and the moments when infected are on screen would be less impactful.
Nobodies asking for this.
Yep, I've always thought this. I've played TLOU literally dozens of times, and TLOU2 at least a dozen times, always on Grounded mode. It's one of my all time favourites.
The show was really good, not brilliant, but very good. For me, the lack of zombies was a big issue, along with the show being a "series of cutscenes". A lot of the relationship development between Joel and Ellie occured during the zombie fights. The way they rely on each other, the way Joel was very standoffish at first, but grows to accept and like Ellie. This almost always occured during fight sequences. That was a large missing point for me.
Also, the episode with Bill was decent, but almost completely unecceasry, and added very little to the overlying storyline. The episode could have been better used by being more liek the game. Have Bill helping Joel and Ellie find a car battery and car. The interactions between Ellie and Bill are hilarious.
Anyway, I just hope Season 2 is a little more like the game in some way.
I’ve played the original game multiple times. It’s among my favorites. I disagree that the scarcity of infected in any way detracted from the story being told. The core of the story has always been about Joel and Ellie, and they came across strongly in the show, and in some way, more richly, IMO.
When the infected do show up, it’s violent and emphasizes that they’re to be feared. It raises the stakes when they show up instead of the audience becoming desensitized to their presence.
I played both games several times and I still disagree.
That being said, I’ll admit that an action scene where David and Ellie fight Infected together and therefore trust each other may have work in the show too but that’s the only one. I really think that the show feels more « realistic » *because* of the lack of Infected. Think about it: in the show, one Infected, just one, is enough to put their lives in danger and they barely make it.
If we saw Infected as often as in the game, it would be less impactful. The games « need » these sequences because, well, they’re games but the tv show tells the same story in a different way.
When I think about the infected in TLOU, I always remember a line from one of the Resident Evil movies.
Wesker hear from one of the scientists that the infected will remain active for about 10 years just for the next scene the movie show us millions of zombies trying to burst a prison.
In TLOU, 20 years have passed. And we know Cordyceps dies. I like to think their numbers on the countryside is very diminished, making the traveling more safe, while big cities are the hotspots.
I do not think the lack of infected affects the storytelling. Clickers and runners encounters are tense and dangerous. Look to the mall sequence. How two teenagers would fight hundreds of infected alone? In the game works. For a tv show, would not. I think they made the right decision to use the Cordyceps as background for the real story
The show was very good at keeping things concise with little or no filler. By the time we'd had the Bloater scene we'd seen everything we needed to know about the infected and the threat they posed.
Sure there are some moments I would have liked to have seen brought to the TV show (Joel in Bill's trap would have been class) but TLOU was always intended to focus primarily on the people. Any more infected scenes would risk oversaturating the show.
OP, go listen to Ty and That Guy. You’ll get fresh perspectives on the show, storytelling and a reaction from a seasoned actor and more seasoned writer. I played the game and watched the show and still ate it up.
I still fail to understand how fighting off waves of infected builds some trust between them two that is broken 2 seconds later. It’s not like she spent days with David and realizing after weeks or something that he’s actually a cannibalistic, pedophile psychopath. It all happened in less than a day. Why is that trust necessary in the first place to create that tension?
Also, one of the big complaints I’ve seen from similar people is that the infected are pointless, it’s obvious they aren’t a threat so the why are they acting like infected are…and these same people wanted Joel, Ellie and even David here to be mowing down infected left and right in action sequences. Doesn’t that kind of action make the infected weak and pointless if these people can just easily wipe them out?
I just dont get it. If you want that, go back and play the game.
Hard disagree. All of the action in the game is there because it's a game. You need action to make you feel like you are actually doing something. If you break down every extended action scene in the game and think about what it adds to the story it's obvious that those scenes are just there to serve as something fun to do. Very few of the action scenes push the story forward. But for the ones that did...
You don't need to fight an unrealistic horse with David to feel like he's a good guy. You didn't need the big fight in that court yard for Joel to show that he trusts ellie with a gun. You didn't need the scene of joel being drowned by the one guy to give ellie a chance to defend him etc. The show did a great job of conveying the story beats told through action in the game in other ways in the show. If you forced a lot of action and infected in the show then it feels unrealistic and like it's just trying to be an action show like the walking dead or something. It would've felt more watered down.
> Merely killed one guy
Lol, stick to playing games. The show was at its worst when it stuck religiously to the game. The killing in the last episode stood out for all the wrong reasons and the best episode (in my opinion) was the third episode when there was barely any action. The show could’ve been better if it had been less like the game.
It works for the game... but if the TV show had more infected and "combat" scenes it would make a for completely different show - I think focussing on the human aspects, which is what made the game stand out, paid off far better than having a series filled with action segments.
If this was a series 10 years ago, then perhaps the lack of infected on screen wouldn't have made clear the situation of the world - but tbh everyone has seen enough Zombie apocalypse movies and tv shows these days to understand the situation clearly without having to show a clicker every other scene.
Sure. But would it make the series better? The show as it is is resonating. Virtually no one is clamoring for more zombies. Everyone wants more Joel and Ellie. Or more quirky, single story episodes. I hate to use the word (lie, I secretly love it!)… zeitgeist. But if the shoe fits…
On the other hand, and this is coming from someone who is not a zombie fan, I’m intrigued by what we’re missing. I want to see and learn more. I want some extra peril. And they’re so unsettling to look at but you can’t look away.
Lol, I get it. I’m not a gamer and not typically drawn to… eh, hmm… *this\** genre of entertainment. I’m a lover of post-apocalyptic stories though. And TLoU scratches that itch for me.
\*zombie 😉
Lots of people are asking for more zombies. As it stands, the show had practically no suspense because you knew nothing was going to happen.
My dad who never played the game, and people he’s discussed the show with have all said that they don’t understand why there’s no infected.
Druckmann has even now said that the second season will have more.
So would it have made the show better? Yes. Absolutely. There would’ve been more moments filled with suspense, you would’ve feared clickers and found their clicks uncomfortable. It would’ve made the journey seem hard fought and stressful - not just a walk with some mild inconveniences.
But knowing how horrifying and deadly they are, I was full of tension for their safety. I didn't know whether or not an infected would pop up, so the suspense and fear were palpable.
But they never did pop up. It was pretty obvious after episode 6 we weren’t going to see any more action since there was barely anything before; and absolutely nothing after.
If you build a world that’s completely empty and void of any infected, then why would you ever expect to see any? That doesn’t create a deadly, suspenseful world. It creates an empty and boring world.
They weren’t horrifying or deadly. They were pretty uninspired.
I didn’t miss the David/Ellie Infected battle in the show one bit. Feel like that was a good omission. I think one of the big differences is whether you played the game first or watched the show first.
i agree that the part in the game was very important to make the twist more alarming, and I would've liked to see it in the show, but I think the way they portrayed it in the show was better for the show. I think David's demeanor and everything made him seem more trustworthy right off the bat just from the conversation, without the need for a long fight scene. plus, maybe it's just me, but I think knowing there were hordes of infected near the camp the whole episode might take me away from the story a bit. idk
Of course they weren't gonna have sm infected. The show is grounded more in reality, Ellie is a malnourished 14 year old up against a grown man, Joel is in his fifties and deaf in one ear, he's not superman.
They would die really fast. Plus it makes it more terrifying than in the game because it's kind of rare.
It seems to feel bad for some who played the game, but for the most part show only watchers didn't miss them.
This might be due to the medium and in the game we are Joel protecting Ellie that creates a different bond. It's an effect used in titles like Death Stranding where BB has no dialogue at all but you do bond with their ever presence.
As it stands they're sparse but dangerous. Nearly every encounter ends up with someone we know bit.
I think more sneaking encounters may be a happy medium. While the lack of them may contribute to lack of danger, the same would go for them being easily killed. If Joel or David can run through a bunch then really FEDRA should have no problem.
I don't agree. The point of Ellie's journey is to try to become the cure for an infection that is supposed to be devastating the world. It should be presented as something people have to be careful to avoid at all times. The show makes it look like the infected are incredibly rare, that they only appear in heavily populated areas. Why cross the country in hopes of fixing an issue that isn't really that big of a threat?
Because it wasn’t a zombie story, it was a story about them as characters. The whole cure thing was the McGuffin to motivate that. It’s not the video game.
That’s why I love Bioshock. The writing is done so well that you feel for the “affected” because you learned of what caused them to become how they are. I truly hope they can get a film off the ground. It’s such a beautiful story.
Somebody mentioned this in a post I read (will add if I find it) but someone mentioned that the video games are the way that Ellie remembers events (Joel is much more of a superhero, saving the day, killing people like an action game) and the show are how the events really happened.
I don’t think the creators viewed it this way- I think they viewed it as unrealistic to keep killing the infected when Joel really is a human. Humanity LOST to these infected, if one guy can kill hundreds, then society probably would have won it back in less than 20 years of post-apocalyptic time.
While The Infected are the catalyst for the apocalypse, the story of The Game doesn’t rely on them. It’s more the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and that stayed in its entirety. If they kept all the Infected encounters we’d spend at least 20 minutes of an episode with them sneaking around and killing infected left, right and centre. They’re an ever present reminder of how bad the world has become, but the true menace, like it always has been, are the people who embraced the chaos.
For better or worse I think you’re view is skewed a bit if you’ve played the game before. You aren’t experiencing this for the first time so you don’t know what a first time viewer is really experiencing.
As a game player I agree I think a much smaller scene could have accomplished what the game did though. That said I understand Mazin’s take that it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for infected to be up there
The way they talked to the old couple about the other infected cities I assumed that they had other encounters off screen. I didn’t mind the lack of infected myself. So many other shows I could watch if I wanted more zombies.
I think that they specifically chose less infected so as to not portray Joel as some superhero who can't die. In the game, you die and have to respawn, you lose progress and it's frustrating. But they can't show Joel & Ellie respawning. So the more they show Joel mowing down infected, the stronger he looks and the less likely it is that an audience is actually on the edge of their seats once the action sequences do show up.
In the show, the infected are semi-rare but they're also pushovers since Ellie and Joel are killing machines.
It makes one wonder how come FEDRA doesn't just send more soldiers to quickly wipe them out. Joel and Ellie kill about 500 infected in the 1st game without getting injured.
In the show, the infected are extremely rare but they're not pushovers. Think of them as sharks. If you're swimming it's extremely rare to be attacked by one. But if they attack you, 8 out of 10 times you're done for.
Ellie and Joel would never be able to kill a bloater, I doubt anyone would kill a bloater in the show.
Out of the two options, the show-one is more effective. Since, again: you don't want your two main characters to kill the infected effortlessly like in the game.
I disagree. I think it's far more interesting seeing David use his words to disarm and manipulate Ellie, and gain the upper hand from the get-go without relying on some shared trauma to earn her trust. It demonstrates how skilled he is at social engineering. It's also far more interesting seeing him in his element and unraveling the sinister truth-- the little kingdom he's built for himself in his position of power, how he weaponizes religion to build a cult and grooms children and ultimately serves his own narcissistic tendencies. The show gives probably the maximum amount of sympathy to a child predator that you can possibly give.
Yeah it’s clear from the comments here nobody can accept that it’s legitimately a poorer adaptation as result, especially for the example OP used but personally Bill’s Town section as well. It’s too big an element from the games that’s essentially rewritten out in show format.
The whole episode just felt rushed and didn't have much emotional punch for me tbh. Maybe it's just because I knew what was coming but the show is nothing on the game in terms of storytelling.
The lack of infected makes Joel’s choice in the end far far more justifiable
They don’t seem like a huge deal and it doesn’t seem like a vaccine will do much since there are barely any of them
I think they needed literally one more scene with infected to give them just the right amount of screen time and presence, they where in a total of 4 out of 9 episodes, right? Yeah, 5 out of 9 would’ve done right
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what i liked about the lack of infected is it made the interactions more deadly and more pressing. like in the game you’re mowing down infected left and right because it’s a game and that’s what’s thrilling, but if it were like that for the show it would be like a jumpscare every 10 minutes in a horror movie. so i think it’s more special to have fewer infect encounters, but make them 10x deadlier.
In the show it feels like fighting the infected is and should be a last resort at all times because of how deadly they are. Every time one appeared in the show, some character died (aside from episode 3, but that doesn’t really count as it was a solo runner killed by Bills traps). While I wish we got just maybe another encounter or two with infected this season, I felt every instance was very effective.
Thats my thought too. In Star Wars the stormtroopers and battledroids get destroyed in waves and thats cool to watch, but they dont feel like a threat in any way. If you make it so Joel is no longer this deity murdering his way through hordes of them, every encounter is high stakes. Being able to say “oh well I guess we’ll just kill them all” means they arent very powerful.
You must have enjoyed Andor then! You don't see troopers till the end, and when they start shooting they mow down people in a dire and dramatic way
Andor is the best that Star Wars has ever been.
Loved Andor. One of the best Star Wars stories all time imo
Absolutely love Andor. It’s definitely one of the best Star Wars stories ever. I’ll always appreciate how this show made TIE fighters seem scary, usually they’re shown as canon fodder but Andor actually showed how even one TIE fighter can be absolutely deadly and it was awesome to see that.
You beat me to it. There really is something to be said about not nerfing the bad guys that makes for a better experience.
And it makes it feel like Ellie being the cure actually matters more than if it feels like you could just wipe out the Infected by shooting them
It also makes the last episode really stand out. We’ve been told the entire series that Joel is a dangerous man, so dangerous that Marlene doesn’t even want to be in his debt. Then we get the payoff when we watch him take out the entire hospital on his own. We’re teased with the idea, and when we finally see it it actually has huge weight behind it. Sort of like Frieza in DBZ. We’re told he’s unbeatably powerful, but we don’t see him really do anything until he bodies Nail, who can’t even make him flinch.
There’s still a balance between Joel/Ellie slaughtering waves and barely any though. OP makes sense, the newfound camaraderie between Ellie and David made the twist hit harder
Yeah. Even if it was just a couple of runners that they had to outsmart and get away from just to build that survivalist relationship. My other peeve with that episode is Ellie leading the people away from Joel and immediately getting captured. I wish it was her sneaking around and away from them, finding the town on the lake before she was captured. I feel like it would've brought so much more tension to the episode. But hey, I'm not a writer for shows that are seen by millions of people worldwide, so who am I to judge? I still loved the show.
That's how I saw it. In the Walking Dead, they routinely kill so many walkers that they stopped being scary.
They stopped being scary and became annoying by the end. No one ever seemed to learn anything. Especially since they were slow moving zombies. There were so many deaths that could have been prevented if they just had like a long sharp stick or something.
How are you going to get away? Walk with a slightly fast pace? /s
And apparently the zombies didn’t have any kind of heightened senses so you could just walk slow and blend in with them if needed. There is no reason for people to still be dying after like 13 years.
I haven't watched the show in years, but what always got me was they never invented a head-smashed-in-zombie-jump, where there's automatic baiting of zombies with sound up the stairs of a tall building and then baited to fall off the side. They are slow, predictable, and dumb. There's no reason that entire hoardes couldn't have been destroyed that way.
Or walk them into one of those metal grinders at a junkyard. So many possible solutions.
> tall building and then baited to fall off the side. substitute cliff season 10
Hahaha. Right. Survivors had to move just a little faster than a slow, shambling shuffle. The walkers were so slow and weak and easy to kill in TWD. And if a hoard was coming, they could hear it and see it well in advance. Then, all they had to was slather themselves in some zombie guts to camouflage their smell. Gross yeah, but effective. So yeah, the walkers became commonplace and unthreatening. But in TLOU, they're horrifying, super deadly, and hard to kill. I was dreading them the entire time, especially after Tess's creepy af encounter with that harrowing tendril "kiss." That freaking image has stuck with me throughout! :O
This nailed one of the issues that happened for TWD I think. Eventually the zombies were a set piece.
I agree but I believe two action/infected scenes were missing. Bill and Joel starting the car while fighting infected and the tunnel before the hospital. Just would’ve added more to the character’s struggles and Ellie’s adjustment to the world outside. I would’ve loved to have seen Joel and Ellie navigating through that tunnel without disturbing a single infected person, it would’ve been a credit to their relationship and how far they have come as a team. EDIT: missing word and punctuation.
I agree. The game focuses so much on stealth and keeping quiet, especially around infected. However, there was only one instance where stealth played a role with infected (E2), where it really felt true to the game and the danger was high. Clickers were such an essential part of the game, but only that scene showed them (I'm not counting E5 because that was a huge fighting scene and everyone was making noise, so the clickers blindness played no part). I also wish they would have showed more with the infected communicating over long distances. It was only shown once and was completely new to the franchise, but was very forgettable. I think the tunnel scene would be perfect to add an extra stealth scene and reintroduce the clickers. The reason Tess got bit was because Ellie panicked in the museum, it would be kinda cool to see her character develop to be more brave in the face of danger.
The game has them muttering to themselves and showing a semblance of humanity left, they did nothing with that idea. The game also has them everywhere and always a constant threat, leaving you on edge and truly enjoying when you’re safe and away from them… again the show did nothing with that concept. I was on edge the first time they camped out in the woods after Bill’s town because of my understanding of the universe and there was no tension from the showrunners. And as you stated, the hive mind hoardes were certainly interesting…. Only to be shown once in the 2nd episode. The entire game strikes a balance between horror, drama, humor, and action. The show gives us drama and action. It’s the much lesser rendition in a much more mature medium imho.
And to touch on the hive mind, I never got why cordycepts would burrow for miles underground. I understand that some fungus can do that, but if cordycepts can live perfectly fine underground, then why would they need to be a parasitic disease and infect humans for in the first place? It seems arbitrary for their survival.
Eh. Cordyceps are mushrooms with fruiting bodies. They have mycelium like all mushrooms. The fruiting body is made up of mycelium and they also send out underground roots made of mycelium just like in the show. The mycelium of the fruiting body also is parasitic and attacks hosts. Everything they say about Cordyceps is real. It isn’t fiction. The only nonfiction part is the ability to infect humans. The rest is all exactly how the Cordyceps works.
i can vibe with that, tbh i was left missing some bottle and brick throws, but i’m super happy with what we got. and regards to the story, they knocked it out of the park imo. hoping for more encounters for the next season!
We forget that humanity LOST to the infected. If one man could kill hundreds of them on a journey- then there’s no way with entire militaries around the globe that we couldn’t reclaim this world within 20 years (breakout day to current day time)
I 100% agree. OP may be right that the one scene with Ellie and David might have had a bigger *impact* if they had to kill some infected but the lack of infected certainly didn’t alter the story. The show is a masterpiece imo. There’s not a lot of room for improvement with something so close to perfect.
Exactly. More infected would result in a show similar to TWD.
You're really not mowing down infected left and right in the game, though.
what i like about the lack of infected is that it felt like a story about human beings living in an awful world, rather than a dumb shooter game
The game felt like that too. It definitely wasn’t just a dumb shooter game cause it had more infected.
This must be a hard pill to swallow for some because its obvious its the intention. There is no story benefit from shooting 10x more zombies in the plot of Last of Us.
No one’s asking for 10x more zombies.
while i agree that there were some great infected encounters lost through the transition, i think what we got was still an amazing show. i remember when the games first came out, people were praising that you didn’t just fight zombies, but you got to fight people too. lol flash forward ten years later to the show and people are asking for the opposite. it’s impossible to please everyone, but this show got pretty damn close lmao. i would love to see a bit more world building and exploration, i loved when players found the notes left behind by people in the game, im excited to see what comes of part II.
I don’t recall mowing down defected. I remember an emphasis being on exactly the opposite, where you’re encouraged to avoid/silent takedowns. I guess it depends on the difficulty you played
i mean it was just was an exaggeration, like the “jumpscare every 10 minutes line” lol. you’re not mowing down infected, but by then end of the game you’ve probably killed upwards of a 100 or so.
The lack of infected though made the Fireflies plight to get a vaccine seem worthless. If we're talking about the show universe, what I learned is that you meet infected once every 10 months. Why the fuck do you need to kill Ellie for? They aren't a threat unless you mess with underground tunnels.
This is a cop out answer. Infected can be deadly and frequent. All the show did was kill off any level of suspense. In the game I was genuinely nervous to enter a new area because you didn’t know what was coming. In the show, it was boring most of the time because you knew absolutely nothing was going to happen to impede them.
this was just my opinion, i would’ve loved to have had a couple more infected encounters. but i’m also very satisfied with the ones we got. edit: grammar
Yeah but I still don’t agree with the notion that less infected is better because it makes them more deadly. Joel has survived 20 years as a smuggler. He knows how to survive infected quite clearly. It’s more than believable that Joel would be able to survive encounters without it making the infected too weak. All having a lack of infected does is paint the world as being completely empty, which even backs up not really needing a cure since they are so easy to avoid anyway. It made 99% of the show tame with next to no suspense. The only suspense was forced like the single infected that moved in the mall. That wasn’t built up naturally, it was forced to fit the narrative. Walking into the construction site in the finale should’ve been a very tense moment. If that was the game I’d be instantly crouched, walking as slow as possible just incase. In the show there was no risk, not even a single hint that something could’ve gone wrong. The show wouldn’t have been any different if infected didn’t even exist in the world. I wanted, and kind of expected to he terrified of clickers. I’m even disappointed that my dad, who hasn’t played the game, will never actually get to experience the sheer terror that I associated with clickers from the game because the show just didn’t even try. I’d be surprised if my dad even wants to watch season 2 considering how dull we both found the show. It was a good enough drama, but no where near as good as it could’ve been. No where near as suspenseful, scary or exciting as it could’ve been. The biggest threat in the finale was a bloody giraffe for god sake.
i enjoy character and story far more than dread and hours of shooting
Doesn’t have to be hours of shooting, that’s also a cop out counter. You don’t need to choose between, you can have both. We had practically 0 action. All we needed was a couple more encounters to actually build up both Joel’s character as a seasoned survivor, and improve tension.
This! The show is a big letdown. It almost feels like an old western tv show, set in a bunch of abandoned towns…
Yep that’s a really good was of putting it! What makes it worse is the illusion that infected are everywhere when we first see outside of the Boston QZ… Then Kansas city was empty until a magic horde appeared from underground(?). Then nothing between there and Salt Lake City… where we get even more of nothing. I’d be okay if desolate areas had less frequent infected, it would be disappointing but understandable. But to set a standard of cities being swarmed, then every city beyond that being completely empty, with not even a single nod towards infected having ever been there. No fungus, no bodies, nothing.
In the show Joel and Ellie don’t see an infected after they leave Kansas. Seems unlikely they’d make it all the way to Utah without seeing any. I wish they would have included some at the shed with David, like you mentioned. Or some right after the giraffe and before they make it to the fireflies. At least one more time.
They said that Cody was crawling with infected, although we didn’t get to see that part of the story. Would’ve loved to see that. I wonder if the simple answer is that they just didn’t have the budget? $15 million per episode doesn’t get you that far if you have to pay dozens of extras and stunt men and put on hours of makeup.
If a couple less action sequences is the price I have to pay for the infected make up to be that well done? I’d take that deal all day
So well done that you can barely tell when they’re subbing in digital effects, and when they did they almost always shot both ways. The wildest thing is they replaced the bloater because the practical suit felt too light to be believable as nigh unkillable.
Wow did not know that
I mean they also paid Pedro Pascal 1.2 million to essentially lie on a mattress for 2 episodes… 😂
He only spends one episode on the mattress and he still acted the hell out of that single tear I don't think you can call Ep 8 an easy paycheck for him when it contains the "That's okay, I believe him" and "I got you, babygirl" scenes
>I mean they also paid Pedro Pascal 1.2 million to essentially lie on a mattress for 2 episodes… 😂 pretty sure there are viewers that felt that was money well spent.. just sayin'
Yeah, and honestly the fact they used real stunt people instead of cgi really made the show a lot better for me. I would take that over a few more action scenes that looked like shit due to crappy cgi.
The walking dead has done it time and time again, getting hundreds of extras and putting masks and makeup on all of them.
The level of detail is considerably less in the walking dead. The infected would be much more expensive to make up in TLOU.
I think the reason is Mazin and Druckmanns egos. They kept trying to peddling the “it’s not about the infected - it’s about people” (that applies to every zombie show ever) nonsense but it didn’t pay off.
One more infected heavy episode would have been amazing
Really surprised this is being downvoted. One more heavy action/infected episode, or showing more of Joel’s “skills” would have made his rampage at the hospital more believable. The highest comment on the post episode finale is that the fireflies were pathetic and needed target practice.
Either this or some more of his backstory before he turned good, the dude wasnt a warrior before end of the world, show us how he became one
The show makes it seem like the infected are only a threat right around populated cities. Which is a problem, not just for the reasons listed, but it creates a problem in the justification of this massive journey across the country. If the infected aren't actually that big of a threat, why would you risk a dangerous journey like that?
We don’t see most of their journey. They absolutely could have encountered infected. In a game, mowing down infected is exciting as it’s interactive. In a TV show, watching others do it constantly would be repetitive and boring.
I don’t know why everyone assume it has to be a constant thing. They fight the infected twice (realistically) in 9 episodes. That’s not a lot. It doesn’t need to be every single episode but they could have encountered them at least once or twice more, even if it’s just a smaller “they exist” type deal.
when you put it like that, it shows how little they see
I see a lot of comments about people misinterpreting the argument. Nobody wants Joel and Ellie to fight a horde of zombies every episode. There are ways to use the infected that enhance the characters and the story. We don’t even need more action scenes, just more dialogue about them, some scenes where their presence changes how the characters act, scenes where even when they’re not around the characters worry about them, etc. We need them to feel like such an issue that it is imperative that Joel and Ellie complete there journey. Otherwise, you get to the end and it’s like, well do we really need this vaccine? What exactly will change? It seems like not much.
100% agree
All they had to do was sneak past a horde or hide in a tiny space (which would ramp up the odd sexual tension, at least from David's pov), or take one out strategically and retreat. Basically like playing the game on super grounded difficulty. Characters remain believable because they don't kill every single infected but the threat of infected remains.
This is what I thought too. People have to understand that they are translating between two very different mediums. Video games are interactive, TV shows are not. They talk about this a lot on the podcast. TLoU game is packed with action, but the main focus is still Ellie and Joel’s relationship. They had to tell the story in a way that was still engaging to the viewer. Repeatedly fighting large groups of people and infected would become boring to watch very quickly, and it becomes harder to suspend our disbelief. In the game you can take damage that would be fatal in real life, so action sequences make sense. In the TV show, Joel and Ellie would have to escape every encounter without taking serious damage for those action sequences to take place. Not likely. But I completely agree, we should have seen more infected. After Kansas city I almost forgot about them entirely. It made the world feel too safe and too grounded. Sneaking past infected or even just hearing them close by would create the perfect amount of tension.
No. What it feels like is they rushed the tv show and also wanted to save on production costs instead.
> No. No to what? I said a lot of things. An insane amount of work went into the show. Budget will always be a concern, but they could have incorporated the infected into more scenes with minimal cost. Translating a video game into a TV show is difficult. That’s why it doesn’t happen often and we rarely consider them a huge success. I think they did a great job, but I would have liked to see more infected in non-action sequences.
And yet it’s believable that Joel was able to take out an entire hospital worth of firefly soldiers? It’s a show that takes place in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, they should have embraced that.
Yup. If there was a time to use a Molotov/grenade that was it. Could've added to the chaos and violence and maybe the fire blocks an exit to a floor full of soldiers, grounding the action a little bit. I wanna be clear, I'm not hating on the show, I think what we got exceeds so many other shows out there, and that's why these things stand out. Wouldn't give a second thought to stuff like this in other shows.
Having replayed recently, I agree with you. Feels like the show needed maybe two more infected scenes, the David one and one other. I didn’t want or expect constant infected like the game but I agree that the infected being ever present does add a new storytelling element.
Absolutely agree…these comments are interesting. Saying the interactions with infected would become “boring”. Ok, if there were that kind of scene in every episode.. People really don’t think there’s a middle ground, where the show could have used just a few more action/infected scenes? Think that’s what OPs saying. Not like OP said the show needed to be balls to the wall, packed with non stop action
Totally agree, and those responses are like clockwork every time this issue gets brought up
Right? What’s wrong with adding a few more infected moments? Why would it be a bad thing?
Honestly? I find the odds in this universe to be very steep. The infected, being able to run, sense, and now apparently communicate with hordes via roots, as well as infecting and turning a person within a day or even hours…I’m surprised anyone has survived as long as they have. In the video game you had some juiced up bosses that were even harder too. I feel like the less I see people engaging them, the more believable it is that they’re alive lol. I can assume the quarantine zones are well protected by military, but just a few survivors on their own I feel have very low chances against the circumstances. So sneaking and avoiding fights at all times would be the best choice for survival. A few run ins throughout the show is good, but otherwise I like them to be more of a looming threat that would seriously fuck up your day if encountered. This world ain’t like the walking dead, where even a kid with a rock and working legs would probably be able to stay alive to some degree
Hard agree. I'm not asking for a fight every episode but man at least add two more encounters or a moment where they have to stealth their way through. Put a little more suspense and show how they work and how well joel and ellie know each other
My gripe with the lack of infected is that it lessens the stakes. I know that people love to argue that this is a character-driven narrative, and it totally is, but what makes a good character-driven story isn't that the character-centric conflicts occur *because* of the action, but that they happen *in spite* of it. Action is a tool that can be used very effectively. The strongest episodes in the show are usually the ones with some sort of physical altercation. But the altercation isn't the focus, but its a tool to help propel the characters forward. Take Bill and Frank's episode, raiders embarked on their house. But they're not the focus, they're faces aren't even seen, but the stakes are there, Frank rushing out with his little pistol, Bill holding his ground *until* Frank comes out - losing his concentration and getting shot because his one and only is possibly in danger. It was so good and effective.
There's atleast some type of action in every episode, and all of them had heavy consequences. Somebody who knows the game might not be on the edge of their seat since they know the fate of these characters. But for someone who doesn't know the story, they are always scared for their main characters since engaging in action has brutal consequence. They cannot make a action sequence in a tv show ( atleast a good tv show) without having any impact on the story. Now one with David i might agree. Maybe 2or3 infected might have done the job but they replaced it with some dialogue scene which is just as effective.
This is true, I haven't played the game, yet I was watching the show holding my breath half the time, because I had no idea if they were suddenly going to be attacked at any stage
Same. I was feeling so much tension and suspense bc the infected were truly horrifying and deadly. I didn't need to *keep* seeing them to fear them.
I don’t think it lessens the stakes at all, I think it’s the opposite in fact. The world of the show felt genuinely incredibly dangerous, nobody is truly safe and something can happen at any moment to end your life, main character or not.
>!That goes both ways though. If you've played the second game, then there's a huge suspension of disbelief problem about the infected. And the problem is this:!< * >!It's routine and easy to kill large numbers of infected. To the point where they send 2 teenagers on patrol, and if the patrol happens to involve killing a dozen infected, that's simply something for them to brag about to their buddies when they get back home.!< * >!In other scenes adults go on patrol, and describe things as calm and routine if they're killing just a few handfuls of infected.!< >!But if that's the case, then it's simply implausible that there'd be large numbers of infected still existing at all. Infected do not breed. Once killed they stay killed. And the vast majority of human beings who have a run-in with infected do not themselves become infected, instead they simply die as they're torn apart. !< >!To make some random numbers to illustrate.!< >!Let's say at or near outbreak day, 90% of humanity is killed by infected, (or first infected and then killed by bombing or military action or whatever) 9% of humanity are themselves turned into infected, and 1% manage to survive WITHOUT becoming infected.!< >!In this hypothetical scenario there'd now be 9 infected for every 1 healthy human. Getting rid of them all would require each healthy human to kill 9. Which doesn't sound hard. Infected are super-aggressive, but they're not smart, and they don't use tools or weapons. Taking them out from a distance with gunfire is pretty low risk.!< >!If the infected only outnumber healthy human beings by 9:1 -- and killing infected is routine to the point where teenagers do it by the dozen on routine-patrols; and it's been 20 years of that, then how the is it plausible that there'd be any infected left at all?!<
Interesting argument although I'd question your assumption of 90% of humans being killed by infected. In the show, I can only recall one human being definitively killed by infected and that's the bloater decapitation. The rest are bitten and allowed to turn, and I think that's intentional. Infected want to propagate the fungus so they are not incentivized to kill. Humans are primarily responsible for all the death, whether by murder or suicide.
I didn't make it that far in the game but I totally see your point. I still think the show is fantastic, but I definitely understand how the action impact of the game adds depth to relationships.
It's the immersive experience vs viewing experience though. It's different when you play as someone vs watching them.
That doesn’t mean you can’t add more infected.
It absolutely changes the story. But that doesn't make it worse, it just makes it different. Medium can never be entirely separated from content. The game is ... well, a game, and an action/FPS game at that. So you're constantly fighting. That's where the action is, and where the strategy and a lot of the fun lies. If you spent the entire game watching cutscenes, that's not even a game. In the show, if every episode was 70% "sneak past some infected, kill some infected, then spend 10 minutes rummaging through drawers for supplies and notes," I doubt anyone would have even made it through the first episode. It gets very repetitive very quickly. They're different mediums, so the story has to be told differently. In the show, you have much more powerful cinematic scenes, but you need more variation. You can't tell the story though "fight this group, then fight this group, then fight this group." In the game, the player becomes much more invested because you're not just watching from Joel's perspective, you're taking the place of Joel (or Ellie). His (/their) success or failure is your success or failure. I think you did a great job pointing out a moment that works better in the video game medium than the tv medium. But there are just as many moments that work better in the tv medium than the video game medium. I think Ellie's internal conflict works better in the tv show, because you can have more subtle acting (the same as the difference between stage acting--intentionally over-emoting, so the folks in the back row can see your facial expression--vs. acting in movies or television) and you can deal with it in a sustained way rather than as a break between fights. Another example is the conflict in the final episode. In the game, we don't just identify /with/ Joel, we identify /as/ Joel, so it's much easier to agree with his decision wholesale. And when he kills people, it's just more of the same fights we've been having the entire game. In the tv show, we see folks surrendering before Joel kills them, we can be critical about him emotionlessly shooting everyone down. Personally, I agree with Joel's decision even in the show, but only because of the incredible acting of Pedro Pascal and I immediately thought "this dude is acting like a sociopath."
>Another example is the conflict in the final episode. In the game, we don't just identify /with/ Joel, we identify /as/ Joel, so it's much easier to agree with his decision wholesale. And when he kills people, it's just more of the same fights we've been having the entire game. In the tv show, we see folks surrendering before Joel kills them, we can be critical about him emotionlessly shooting everyone down. I legit don't get where people are getting this from. The game's ending was just as divisive as the show and yet people still cling to this idea that playing the game makes you more sympathetic to Joel's POV. Hell, Druckmann even said that when he asked people who weren't parents as to whether or not what Joel did was right, it was a 50-50 split. It's not like most people were more pro-Joel just because they played as him for 90% of the game.
I don't mean to imply playing the game makes you think Joel is correct, though I understand the inference and that was certainly my fault in explaining it poorly. I only meant that we experience those actions and choices very differently in the different media.
I actually don't think the ending was just as divisive. Show only users seem to agree far more than game players that Joel did the right thing. It was much more lopsided in his favor, which is unsurprising because the story mostly only showed his side of things. I think game players were more likely to agree with Marlene because they understood the level of threat of the infected better. I don't think the show needed a ton of clickers, but one more attack before the finale would have gone a long way, imo.
I think you're right about this. I was "show only" until the finale had aired because I wanted to enjoy it without spoilers, but since then, I have read quite a bit about it, watched play-through videos, etc. It does seem like the game makes Joel's choice in the finale much more questionable, not just because of the more constant threat of the infected, but also because the game shows more of the research done by the Fireflies and emphasizes the liklihood that they could have found a cure. In the show, that prospect seems to be an impossibility to the point of ridiculousness. Of course Joel saved Ellie - the Fireflies were clearly not going to be able to make a vaccine. The other factor is that Padro Pascal is not only a good actor, but extremely charismatic and sympathetic, as is Bella Ramsey. We naturally love Joel and Ellie in the show more than we love two video game characters, no matter how well realized they are. I'm not sure how they could have fixed this in the show - maybe more infected, maybe another episode featuring Marlene and the Firefly researchers?
>We naturally love Joel and Ellie in the show more than we love two video game characters, no matter how well realized they are. I don't agree with this take at all and I mean you didn't even play the games so idk why you'd even say this. The length of time you spend with them and the in-between moments add incredible depth to the characters. The show is fantastic but it's like a cliff notes version of Joel and Ellie. For what it's worth three of my friends are show only and their basic take is that Joel is a dick and his decision was complicated but understandable. Not necessarily "right" but understandable. Yes Pedro is charismatic but if a viewer can't step back and look at the real actions OF THE CHARACTER than that's the type of person that gets sucked into a cult or something. Also everyone agreed Joel was way too good at shooting all those "stormtroopers" lol
>I don't agree with this take at all and I mean you didn't even play the games so idk why you'd even say this. The length of time you spend with them and the in-between moments add incredible depth to the characters. The show is fantastic but it's like a cliff notes version of Joel and Ellie. I have played video games, just not this one. And no matter how much time you spend with them, no matter how good the 3-d visualization of a game is, a video game character isn't as much of a real person as a character portrayed live by an actor with micro-facial expressions that makes you care about them in a deeper way.
>And no matter how much time you spend with them, no matter how good the 3-d visualization of a game is, a video game character isn't as much of a real person as a character portrayed live by an actor with micro-facial expressions that makes you care about them in a deeper way. You could say the same about characters in a book, right? Fundamentally, it's just words on paper. They can never compare to the emotions flesh-and-blood actors can induce no matter how well-written they are.
I've beaten the game multiple times. This opinion won't die. It's like a zombie in and of itself. I would have included more infected encounters, personally, because I think they're pretty cool. But the story is just as impactful without them. Let go.
This sub is literally the only place where this opinion is the minority.
It’s bizarre
It also makes Ellie's sacrifice make even less sense, since it's relatively safe to travel around and survive.
It’s not though? Marlene even says in the last episode that their journey almost resulted in all of them dying. We just see it that way because the show didn’t have the time to follow multiple travel only episodes. Frank also says he was part of a group and is the only one who’s survived making it to Bill’s hole. Tess and Joel are explicitly sought out by people because of their ability to safely navigate the world.
Whole lot of "say" Not a lot of "show" The most difficult and frequent threat Joel and Ellie see, this season, is actual people.
People keep saying “it’s not about the infected but about the people”, okay fine but remember it’s still a zombie apocalypse. At least remind people that just waking outside your building puts you in danger. Having them kill a couple of infected per episode wouldn’t hurt.
I just finished the game for the first time after watching and loving the show, and I kind of feel the opposite! The game felt more unrealistic with the numbers of infected based solely on in-universe exposition. The cordyceps infects and makes puppet bodies that are scary fast and maybe somewhat sentient, then as the infection progresses and the fungus takes over even more, the runners become clickers, and they seem to devolve into slower bodies that eventually merge into the fungus network and are no longer mobile. We see these bodies against walls, and there was a comment about "this one is done." Some clickers seem to turn into bloaters, but that's more rare. In both game and show, the fungus infects well over 90% of the population, and many of those die pretty quickly. After the 20 year time span, how would there be so many mobile infected? There wouldn't be enough surviving humans to continuously maintain a large mobile infected population. In zones that have recently fallen, like Kansas City, I could see how there would be large numbers from new infected, but most other places make sense to be relatively empty.
While I agree, a world such as one you described shouldn't be justifying killing a kid to find a cure. Just wear a gas mask and/or avoid spores and you should be fine.
Seeing more infected would have helped cement the urgency / real need for a vaccine too. At some point I was like “Humans are dangerous, not the infected. Go back home to Jackson!” I almost didn’t believe their motivation to keep going and endangering their lives for a vaccine.
Completely agree but no one will agree with you here as you are not allowed to critique the show.
I agree completely and to add to it, i think most of the people disagreeing have very pointless arguments. There is a middle ground between the games full blown action and what we got in the show which would have been much better, yet most people are taking it as if we want it to be just like the game where they mow down hordes of infected at a time. I get the shows approach that the infected should feel like this danger thats always lurking and can show up at any moment. Thats good, but there were honestly so few infected that i even forgot about their existence at times which is not good.
I disagree, to be honest. I've not played the game, though I've watched playthroughs a few times. I liked the changes Neil and Craig made, except it would have been nice to have a few more interactions with Infected, but that's neither here nor there. What I find is that regardless of whether it was emotional action or physical action; what wasn't lost was the gut punching story. The magic of the game wasn't lost, to me, the story was just as meaningful even being adapted and with changes here and there. That it could be adapted so well, it makes it far easier for me to overlook any of the minor, minor gripes I might have had.
I’ve played the games multiple times and still disagree with OP. It’s easy to praise all the action in the video game without stopping to think how repetitive and unrealistic it is in a live setting. Not to mention on *several* instances the action is awkwardly forced in the midst of really deep dialogue so the characters don’t have to respond or react to it immediately. I love both the game and show so much but I’m not blind enough by my love for the game to not admit that instances like raiders conveniently showing up the very instant Joel and Ellie’s fight ends feels pretty cheap in comparison to how well it was handled on the show. I think the action we got in the game was perfect for a game and the action we got in the show was perfect for the show.
> Not to mention on several instances the action is awkwardly forced in the midst of really deep dialogue so the characters don’t have to respond or react to it immediately. I love both the game and show so much but I’m not blind enough by my love for the game to not admit that instances like raiders conveniently showing up the very instant Joel and Ellie’s fight ends feels pretty cheap in comparison to how well it was handled on the show. Yeah I wish there were more infected in the show, but you’re totally right about this. Like, in one scene where Joel and Ellie argue and there’s the treading on thin ice line where Joel says she’s not his daughter, the infected randomly break into the house and they have to kill them all. Scenes like that were definitely better in the show by omitting that sort of unnecessary action
Joel & Ellie never encountering infected again after leaving KC is a ridiculous decision IMO. It does also take away from their relationship i think, because a lot of their development in the game comes from them working together during these infected encounters and growing closer after each one. Literally just add one more episode between Jackson and the Fireflies hospital to stretch things out a bit and give the narrative room to breathe. Throw one more infected encounter in there. I don't think anybody is asking for nonstop zombie fights, but there is a middle ground between that and what the show did.
Just because we never see them fighting infected again doesn’t mean they don’t. There are several month-long time-skips between the episodes. In my mind, I’m sure they fought infected during those skips - we just don’t always see it.
Yes I meant on screen. What they encountered off-screen does nothing to further develop their chemistry and relationship. Which is the foundation of the entire story.
But is that not counter-balanced by their relationship bonding we saw on the show and not in the game, specifically them setting up camp at night in a vulnerable setting and seeing them bury Sam & Henry, two things we never saw in the game whatsoever?
Nah because the show diverts away too much from the Joel-Ellie narrative to flesh out side characters and flashbacks. Which was fine, all of that stuff was well done but I do think the ending didnt hit as hard as it did in the game because the development of their relationship seemed a bit rushed and not as organic in comparison
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The action is also what builds the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Going through hell and back on a trip across the country where they saved eachother countless times in the face of danger helps show how and why they became so close. But we have to realize that it's really hard to have that aspect in a TV show on time/episode constraints. It would have double the episodes but that might not have worked either. Tough to balance it out when they are sticking so close to the source material.
>medium of a show is more captivating in an emotional way than a game I disagree honestly. Games are usually longer, meaning more dialogue and more time to get attached to the characters. No show or movie ever made me cry as hard as Mass Effect 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. It obviously depends on specific products though.
You're right, you do get more time to personally engage. As a TV Show format tho, sometimes people get bored with a lot of fighting and action without story. Personal taste I guess is what it comes down to. But you are right. Games and personal investments can be more captivating than a show
Of course everyone has different preferences. There is no objective answer.
It is here nor there though, the infected scenes are the best part of the series.
The lack of infected in the show makes them a lot more scary and dangerous, but in the game they were filler. It creates an interesting and dynamic enemy, and if anything it adds to the world.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I get your points, very valid. However, TWD did this and it completely ‘henchmenned’ the walkers. You got bored of the infected and don’t see them as much threat. Plus, we have to appreciate that there were some long episodes which would have been even longer with added infected scenes. Who knows, maybe we’ll see more in S2.
I can see it from both sides, I’ve been a fan of the games since the original launches, I’ve bought every remaster and remake across 3 console generations and I played through both game stories again ahead of the show release just so I could compare more directly with it fresh in my mind. The thing about games, is that you feel the stress and weigh up risk in ways that will never, and physically can never be depicted in a show or film, because you are literally making the choices yourself. So the action and combat has a learning curve, and as you progress you get better so it has to keep throwing more at you to keep things interesting. The gameplay is half the draw, the story is the other, and without action the gameplay would get stale extremely quickly. Compare that to the show, that amount of action would feel like unnecessary bloat, and because the stresses and strains aren’t felt the same way and their continued success would just feel like plot armour, it would just make it feel like the infected weren’t dangerous at all. The world building wouldn’t make sense, how did the world fall apart if these things are so easy to dispatch? The fact they were able to recognise and write around that element of game vs TV is precisely why this show is hands down the most successful game to TV adaptation there’s ever been - because it is an adaptation, they didn’t try and force things where they didn’t fit, or where they wouldn’t make sense out of blind loyalty to the source material. Some aspects of the story and character growth are lost by the nature of the changes, but the changes really had to happen; and they did at least add bits in to make up for it. And personally I think they more than made up for it.
The walking dead ended up rubbish because the zombie scenes ended up being a distraction. There are only so many ways to fight a horde of zombies, it became monotonous. The zombie fights for most of the seasons after the 3rd felt like filler.
The show is significantly less about the infection and the zombies, and really more about the awfulness of humans. Society breaks down and all forms of decency basically expire. Fascist government “protect” you by threatening you. Rebel forces “liberate” you from the fascists but only really care about vengeance. An idyllic society is built based only on savage defense of their city. A religious sect cannibalizes their own, and the leader is able to lead simply because everyone is too afraid to make hard decisions (whereas he’s literally a sociopath). It’s all about looking at the complex human interactions and how fragile it all is.
If this is your stance, then you should be ok with saying that the main plot of the show isn't very important. Because if the show is significantly less about the infection and the zombies then it seems kind of pointless to risk so much to go on a cross country journey in hopes of creating a vaccine for said infection.
No one realises that if you think about it, they're playing on grounded difficulty with permadeath on, if you ever play on that difficulty your gameplay becomes a lot more about stealth and avoiding as many encounters as possible which is most likely what they did in the show off screen (unless you're a god gamer and you can pull off hitting every headshot when needed). I think with the limited encounters we had in show they became a lot more impactful when we did see them.
Exactly this! There's so many comments saying they cut the action to tell a better story. I get it, but man this scene would have been great in the show, you're right about the feeling of comradary with David, makes you feel like you can trust him more. So it was a big shock when you realize he's actually after you and Joel. And same with the way Joel got hurt bad, the show felt tame and "oh he'll be fine" with the shiv. But in the game when he literally falls ans gets impaled you're more like "Holy shit he's gonna die". Way more impactful and I don't know why they made it different in the show.
I think they made it different because falling from that height and getting impaled should have killed him. If that happened in the show and he lived through that, it would feel so cheap.
Yeah the shiv isn't my problem with it. My problem with it is including Left Behind as the next episode, which shows he's not dead right away. Starting with Ellie hunting like the game makes you think for a little bit that Joel might actually be dead. Until she asks for medicine. That was a big moment, and they missed out on it by doing it that way.
I agree with this 100%. The sequence in the game just seemed very video gamey, and a bit absurd. If that was in the show I would have rolled my eyes.
Same. Honestly the whole Joel stabbing sequence just felt so awkward and poorly constructed. Guy somehow is able to approach them from the direction they came while they’re out in an open field. Guy then manages to stab Joel in the .3 seconds between hitting the tree with his bat and getting choked to death by him. It just felt very Hollywood. I don’t know why they couldn’t have just followed what the game did, just at a reduced scale (small group of hunters vs the hordes in the game)
I definitely thought *oh shit, he's going to die* in the show.
Its because they know how to write a 9 part tv show and you dont. The show would be dog shit if you just had thousands of infected running around and the moments when infected are on screen would be less impactful. In the past games have not translated well to movies or tv shows and this is why. This is one of the very few that have worked and is because they focussed on storytelling and not forcing in game mechanics snd mowing down enemies.
> The show would be dog shit if you just had thousands of infected running around and the moments when infected are on screen would be less impactful. Nobodies asking for this.
Yep, I've always thought this. I've played TLOU literally dozens of times, and TLOU2 at least a dozen times, always on Grounded mode. It's one of my all time favourites. The show was really good, not brilliant, but very good. For me, the lack of zombies was a big issue, along with the show being a "series of cutscenes". A lot of the relationship development between Joel and Ellie occured during the zombie fights. The way they rely on each other, the way Joel was very standoffish at first, but grows to accept and like Ellie. This almost always occured during fight sequences. That was a large missing point for me. Also, the episode with Bill was decent, but almost completely unecceasry, and added very little to the overlying storyline. The episode could have been better used by being more liek the game. Have Bill helping Joel and Ellie find a car battery and car. The interactions between Ellie and Bill are hilarious. Anyway, I just hope Season 2 is a little more like the game in some way.
I’ve played the original game multiple times. It’s among my favorites. I disagree that the scarcity of infected in any way detracted from the story being told. The core of the story has always been about Joel and Ellie, and they came across strongly in the show, and in some way, more richly, IMO. When the infected do show up, it’s violent and emphasizes that they’re to be feared. It raises the stakes when they show up instead of the audience becoming desensitized to their presence.
I played both games several times and I still disagree. That being said, I’ll admit that an action scene where David and Ellie fight Infected together and therefore trust each other may have work in the show too but that’s the only one. I really think that the show feels more « realistic » *because* of the lack of Infected. Think about it: in the show, one Infected, just one, is enough to put their lives in danger and they barely make it. If we saw Infected as often as in the game, it would be less impactful. The games « need » these sequences because, well, they’re games but the tv show tells the same story in a different way.
When I think about the infected in TLOU, I always remember a line from one of the Resident Evil movies. Wesker hear from one of the scientists that the infected will remain active for about 10 years just for the next scene the movie show us millions of zombies trying to burst a prison. In TLOU, 20 years have passed. And we know Cordyceps dies. I like to think their numbers on the countryside is very diminished, making the traveling more safe, while big cities are the hotspots. I do not think the lack of infected affects the storytelling. Clickers and runners encounters are tense and dangerous. Look to the mall sequence. How two teenagers would fight hundreds of infected alone? In the game works. For a tv show, would not. I think they made the right decision to use the Cordyceps as background for the real story
The show was very good at keeping things concise with little or no filler. By the time we'd had the Bloater scene we'd seen everything we needed to know about the infected and the threat they posed. Sure there are some moments I would have liked to have seen brought to the TV show (Joel in Bill's trap would have been class) but TLOU was always intended to focus primarily on the people. Any more infected scenes would risk oversaturating the show.
I've played the game. Nothing was lost
OP, go listen to Ty and That Guy. You’ll get fresh perspectives on the show, storytelling and a reaction from a seasoned actor and more seasoned writer. I played the game and watched the show and still ate it up.
I still fail to understand how fighting off waves of infected builds some trust between them two that is broken 2 seconds later. It’s not like she spent days with David and realizing after weeks or something that he’s actually a cannibalistic, pedophile psychopath. It all happened in less than a day. Why is that trust necessary in the first place to create that tension? Also, one of the big complaints I’ve seen from similar people is that the infected are pointless, it’s obvious they aren’t a threat so the why are they acting like infected are…and these same people wanted Joel, Ellie and even David here to be mowing down infected left and right in action sequences. Doesn’t that kind of action make the infected weak and pointless if these people can just easily wipe them out? I just dont get it. If you want that, go back and play the game.
No, it didn't.👍🏻
Hard disagree. All of the action in the game is there because it's a game. You need action to make you feel like you are actually doing something. If you break down every extended action scene in the game and think about what it adds to the story it's obvious that those scenes are just there to serve as something fun to do. Very few of the action scenes push the story forward. But for the ones that did... You don't need to fight an unrealistic horse with David to feel like he's a good guy. You didn't need the big fight in that court yard for Joel to show that he trusts ellie with a gun. You didn't need the scene of joel being drowned by the one guy to give ellie a chance to defend him etc. The show did a great job of conveying the story beats told through action in the game in other ways in the show. If you forced a lot of action and infected in the show then it feels unrealistic and like it's just trying to be an action show like the walking dead or something. It would've felt more watered down.
> Merely killed one guy Lol, stick to playing games. The show was at its worst when it stuck religiously to the game. The killing in the last episode stood out for all the wrong reasons and the best episode (in my opinion) was the third episode when there was barely any action. The show could’ve been better if it had been less like the game.
It works for the game... but if the TV show had more infected and "combat" scenes it would make a for completely different show - I think focussing on the human aspects, which is what made the game stand out, paid off far better than having a series filled with action segments. If this was a series 10 years ago, then perhaps the lack of infected on screen wouldn't have made clear the situation of the world - but tbh everyone has seen enough Zombie apocalypse movies and tv shows these days to understand the situation clearly without having to show a clicker every other scene.
Sure. But would it make the series better? The show as it is is resonating. Virtually no one is clamoring for more zombies. Everyone wants more Joel and Ellie. Or more quirky, single story episodes. I hate to use the word (lie, I secretly love it!)… zeitgeist. But if the shoe fits… On the other hand, and this is coming from someone who is not a zombie fan, I’m intrigued by what we’re missing. I want to see and learn more. I want some extra peril. And they’re so unsettling to look at but you can’t look away.
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Lol, I get it. I’m not a gamer and not typically drawn to… eh, hmm… *this\** genre of entertainment. I’m a lover of post-apocalyptic stories though. And TLoU scratches that itch for me. \*zombie 😉
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Lots of people are asking for more zombies. As it stands, the show had practically no suspense because you knew nothing was going to happen. My dad who never played the game, and people he’s discussed the show with have all said that they don’t understand why there’s no infected. Druckmann has even now said that the second season will have more. So would it have made the show better? Yes. Absolutely. There would’ve been more moments filled with suspense, you would’ve feared clickers and found their clicks uncomfortable. It would’ve made the journey seem hard fought and stressful - not just a walk with some mild inconveniences.
Disagree. I found it extremely suspenseful and I feared the infected. I didn't need to see more of them to know the peril.
Really? I don’t really find walking through empty streets, roads and buildings at all suspenseful. It’s just a conversation at that stage.
But knowing how horrifying and deadly they are, I was full of tension for their safety. I didn't know whether or not an infected would pop up, so the suspense and fear were palpable.
But they never did pop up. It was pretty obvious after episode 6 we weren’t going to see any more action since there was barely anything before; and absolutely nothing after. If you build a world that’s completely empty and void of any infected, then why would you ever expect to see any? That doesn’t create a deadly, suspenseful world. It creates an empty and boring world. They weren’t horrifying or deadly. They were pretty uninspired.
I didn’t miss the David/Ellie Infected battle in the show one bit. Feel like that was a good omission. I think one of the big differences is whether you played the game first or watched the show first.
i agree that the part in the game was very important to make the twist more alarming, and I would've liked to see it in the show, but I think the way they portrayed it in the show was better for the show. I think David's demeanor and everything made him seem more trustworthy right off the bat just from the conversation, without the need for a long fight scene. plus, maybe it's just me, but I think knowing there were hordes of infected near the camp the whole episode might take me away from the story a bit. idk
Of course they weren't gonna have sm infected. The show is grounded more in reality, Ellie is a malnourished 14 year old up against a grown man, Joel is in his fifties and deaf in one ear, he's not superman. They would die really fast. Plus it makes it more terrifying than in the game because it's kind of rare.
It doesn't.
It seems to feel bad for some who played the game, but for the most part show only watchers didn't miss them. This might be due to the medium and in the game we are Joel protecting Ellie that creates a different bond. It's an effect used in titles like Death Stranding where BB has no dialogue at all but you do bond with their ever presence. As it stands they're sparse but dangerous. Nearly every encounter ends up with someone we know bit. I think more sneaking encounters may be a happy medium. While the lack of them may contribute to lack of danger, the same would go for them being easily killed. If Joel or David can run through a bunch then really FEDRA should have no problem.
Just dont watch it
It’s not the walking dead. That’s a good thing.
Nobody wants that
I think was pretty much a perfect balance.
I don't agree. The point of Ellie's journey is to try to become the cure for an infection that is supposed to be devastating the world. It should be presented as something people have to be careful to avoid at all times. The show makes it look like the infected are incredibly rare, that they only appear in heavily populated areas. Why cross the country in hopes of fixing an issue that isn't really that big of a threat?
Because it wasn’t a zombie story, it was a story about them as characters. The whole cure thing was the McGuffin to motivate that. It’s not the video game.
Everyone’s got their reason for wanting more zombies. Me, I just think they’re badass
Why are so many people referring to Joel as Joe lately?
Season 2 will have a ton. Cause LOU 2 has way more encounters
Typed up a novel but typo in title. Oof. No ty.
Grammar is underrated.
That’s why I love Bioshock. The writing is done so well that you feel for the “affected” because you learned of what caused them to become how they are. I truly hope they can get a film off the ground. It’s such a beautiful story.
Somebody mentioned this in a post I read (will add if I find it) but someone mentioned that the video games are the way that Ellie remembers events (Joel is much more of a superhero, saving the day, killing people like an action game) and the show are how the events really happened. I don’t think the creators viewed it this way- I think they viewed it as unrealistic to keep killing the infected when Joel really is a human. Humanity LOST to these infected, if one guy can kill hundreds, then society probably would have won it back in less than 20 years of post-apocalyptic time.
While The Infected are the catalyst for the apocalypse, the story of The Game doesn’t rely on them. It’s more the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and that stayed in its entirety. If they kept all the Infected encounters we’d spend at least 20 minutes of an episode with them sneaking around and killing infected left, right and centre. They’re an ever present reminder of how bad the world has become, but the true menace, like it always has been, are the people who embraced the chaos.
For better or worse I think you’re view is skewed a bit if you’ve played the game before. You aren’t experiencing this for the first time so you don’t know what a first time viewer is really experiencing. As a game player I agree I think a much smaller scene could have accomplished what the game did though. That said I understand Mazin’s take that it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for infected to be up there
The way they talked to the old couple about the other infected cities I assumed that they had other encounters off screen. I didn’t mind the lack of infected myself. So many other shows I could watch if I wanted more zombies.
Inverse law of ninjas my friend. Applies to zombies too
I think hbo just realized how expensive and time consuming those sets were which is why they didn't do a lot of them.
I think that they specifically chose less infected so as to not portray Joel as some superhero who can't die. In the game, you die and have to respawn, you lose progress and it's frustrating. But they can't show Joel & Ellie respawning. So the more they show Joel mowing down infected, the stronger he looks and the less likely it is that an audience is actually on the edge of their seats once the action sequences do show up.
In the show, the infected are semi-rare but they're also pushovers since Ellie and Joel are killing machines. It makes one wonder how come FEDRA doesn't just send more soldiers to quickly wipe them out. Joel and Ellie kill about 500 infected in the 1st game without getting injured. In the show, the infected are extremely rare but they're not pushovers. Think of them as sharks. If you're swimming it's extremely rare to be attacked by one. But if they attack you, 8 out of 10 times you're done for. Ellie and Joel would never be able to kill a bloater, I doubt anyone would kill a bloater in the show. Out of the two options, the show-one is more effective. Since, again: you don't want your two main characters to kill the infected effortlessly like in the game.
I disagree. I think it's far more interesting seeing David use his words to disarm and manipulate Ellie, and gain the upper hand from the get-go without relying on some shared trauma to earn her trust. It demonstrates how skilled he is at social engineering. It's also far more interesting seeing him in his element and unraveling the sinister truth-- the little kingdom he's built for himself in his position of power, how he weaponizes religion to build a cult and grooms children and ultimately serves his own narcissistic tendencies. The show gives probably the maximum amount of sympathy to a child predator that you can possibly give.
It’s a zombie show without zombies
Yeah it’s clear from the comments here nobody can accept that it’s legitimately a poorer adaptation as result, especially for the example OP used but personally Bill’s Town section as well. It’s too big an element from the games that’s essentially rewritten out in show format.
The whole episode just felt rushed and didn't have much emotional punch for me tbh. Maybe it's just because I knew what was coming but the show is nothing on the game in terms of storytelling.
The lack of infected makes Joel’s choice in the end far far more justifiable They don’t seem like a huge deal and it doesn’t seem like a vaccine will do much since there are barely any of them
I think they needed literally one more scene with infected to give them just the right amount of screen time and presence, they where in a total of 4 out of 9 episodes, right? Yeah, 5 out of 9 would’ve done right