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ffxivthrowaway03 t1_j6o8zxv wrote

Reply to comment by AFatz in I don't get the love for The Last of Us episode 3 by [deleted]

I would argue that if you need an hour long segue that completely departs from the source material to prop up why the letter is important, then the letter wasn't important in the first place.

They could have done the same thing in half the time, and put better framing around the letter in the current timeline to make it just as important without watching Bill and Frank eat strawberries in the garden or have awkward sex.

We knew Joel respected Bill from literally two minutes of the whole hour long flashback, when they talked to each other directly. That could have easily been done a hundred other ways without the extended flashback.

I think the biggest condemning factor here is that yes, you could argue that the super long flashback did X and Y and Z, but the game also did all of those things for all of those characters without an hour long flashback about Bill & Frank's domestic life. When taking that into account it's hard not to frame the whole thing as "filler."

Was it bad? Aside from a handful of blatant plot holes that really stretch suspension of disbelief, no, it was not bad. The acting was solid and the characters were at least passingly interesting if romance is your thing. But it 100% felt like they just copy/pasted any random Lifetime Original movie into the middle of an episode of The Last Of Us. It was jarringly out of place and would have done better on it's own as a spinoff movie or something.

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nomorepartiezz t1_j6oecmc wrote

it wasn’t necessary to see the whole thing, but i dont really think it detracts from it either. its nice to see the show flesh the world out more. we didnt need to see sara’s entire day before the outbreak or the whole cold open from episode 2 either (i realize those take up less time but you get the idea)

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ffxivthrowaway03 t1_j6oyj8d wrote

I think the fact that it did take up so much time is explicitly why it detracts from it.

For the majority of the hour we totally lost the plot and were watching something else. Maybe if they actually inserted some apocalypse into that hour it would have detracted less, but if you photoshopped the fence out of the background maybe five minutes of the whole thing still would have had anything to do with the setting and events of the show at large.

As someone else in another thread had said, you could've swapped the setting to a cabin in the remote woods instead of the fungus apocalypse and literally nothing else would have had to been changed about the whole flashback. It's like the whole apocalypse never happened for the entire flashback, it barely impacted them at all, and the one time it directly did (the raiders) they used it as a fake out two seconds later and surprise! Bill is totally fine from that gut shot while Frank is now dying of a terminal illness and they lived happily ever after.

Like there's a compelling love story being told here, but it sure as shit didn't have a thing to do with "The Last Of Us." beyond cribbing the setting and vague ideas of a couple minor characters then doing literally nothing relevant with either.

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