In Episode Three, “The Intercept,” a French journalist advances the hypothesis there was suspicious and problematic cargo aboard the plane, and the U.S. military had no choice but to take out the plane to stop that sensitive cargo from reaching China, either by missile strike or mid-air collision.
lol I have heard some dumb shit about MH370 in my time but this might take the biscuit. I see they’re giving Jeff Wise another outing as well.
Theories that the Inmarsat data was tampered with (which are Jeff Wise’s stock in trade) make no sense because if the plane was ever tracked on radar or spotted visually or anything, the spoofed satellite data wouldn’t work as a distraction and would be unmasked immediately. And if the plane isn’t tracked by any other means, then you’re proposing that the hijackers concocted an insanely complicated and esoteric method to provide a false trail for something that would have successfully avoided detection anyway.
“Takes the cake” is in use here too, but can be used to mean something is exceptional in any sense, good or bad. “Takes the biscuit” is only ever something egregiously bad. Never actually consciously realised they are two versions of the same idiom before.
I thought it was a good ending to the season. By the end of this episode we know that Joel basically needs Ellie to avoid spiraling into suicidal despair. It makes perfect sense that he would like to her, to protect her and to protect himself.
They did the stupid trope where the villain tells the hero their plan so it can be foiled. Did the fireflies really think Joel was just going to be cool with Ellie dying? If she is so important, they should have killed Joel’ or at the least, they should have waited to tell him of their plans until after she was dead.
Two possibilities, one is that they’re actually kind of stupid and badly resourced so they just fucked up. Another is that the last time Marlene saw Joel he was a depressed and ruthless mercenary with no purpose. Arguably she wasn’t expecting him to really give a shit about anything buy his paycheck and thought a few words would be enough to make him forget all about Ellie. If she was talking to Episode 1 Joel then arguably she wouldn’t be wrong about that.
Overall I give season 1 a solid B. Episode 3 was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and I’d imagine most of the show would have seemed a lot more novel if I hadn’t played the game. Pedro and Bella crushed their performances. But there were some weird directorial choices. I thought they were going to do an interesting deep dive into the Kansas City group seemingly setting up some back story but nope, killed them off pretty indiscriminately. The infected hive mind set up in episode 1 I thought was an interesting wrinkle, instead of the spore clouds that were more of a game mechanic, but then they never go back to it the entire season. Some of the deviations I assume were done due to budget constraints, like omitting the infected hoard/flood in SLC, and I don’t think that was a huge omission. But they could’ve added some intensity to Joel’s final battle with the fireflies, instead of just a squadron slaughtering montage. I expected to see more of the sneaking around trying not to make a sound dodging of infected/enemies that was prevalent in the video game. Again, we get some of that in episode 1 but then never go back to it, and I think would’ve added some sense of danger to the finale, which felt very rushed. I’m looking forward to season 2.
Also, I think the Ellie birth scene ending with Marlene as a newborn was new, correct? Yet somehow she goes from custody of a firefly leader (or whatever Marlene was at the time) to ending up in FEDRA boot camp?
To elaborate a little, I thought they kicked up the video game feel of things way too much. They put the characters in these impossible situations and then had them effortlessly roll natural twenty after natural twenty. Contrast it with something not based on a video game, but with video game themes like Edge of Tomorrow. There we see the character have to reload a hundred times to beat the level. Here it’s like Tom Cruise steps on the beach the first try and murders all the aliens effortlessly.
And the extreme, casual violence was just a bit much for me, and the plot was ridiculous.
MH370 thing: I just arrived at the part where they start giving credence to conspiracy theories. It sucks you in by appearing to be a pretty sober retelling of the events for quite a while. I hoped it would eventually return to reality, but I guess not.
RE: TLOU, imo it was fine. I think there are some interesting topics touched on with Joel and Ellie that didn’t get explored enough because there were “missions” to fulfill. I cried like a baby at the end of Station Eleven, this didn’t have 1/10th of the emotional impact for me.
Yep, that’s totally fair criticism. In the moment, it didn’t really take me out of the show though. My instinctive read on the Fireflies as presented is that they’re some combo of dumb, fanatic, under-resourced, and disorganized. We’re kind of trained by pop culture to identify the Noble Rebels as heroes, but in the show the Fireflies come across as at least somewhat misguided and definitely incompetent. These are the people that posted an untrained teenager in Riley in the mall, with predictable consequences.
Anyway, the things that I personally found to be more disruptive to my viewing experiences were:
The episode pace is just too fast. There’s definitely at least two episodes of material in there about the emotional fallout from the last episode PLUS some daddy-daughter bonding time in SLC PLUS being captured by the Fireflies PLUS the whole drama about Ellie literally being sentenced to death in a terrible Sophie’s Choice is crammed into like 15 minutes of time, including a Joel rampage to save her. The whole show had been paced very briskly, largely to it’s benefit IMO, but this one just felt like a wild careening race to check off 5 boxes to get to the end of the season.
It kind of came out of nowhere that Marlene is in SLC. The whole point of the season is that the Fireflies need Joel to get Ellie across the country to SLC, but then when he arrives she’s already there? They tried to handwave this away with a quick throwaway line about how hard it was to get Marlene to SLC but it really undermines the whole set up of the show for me. If Ellie was really that mission critical to the Fireflies, then they would have been better off sending her to SLC with Marlene and 5 armed guards, not put her in desperate danger with one protector. Again, we’re back to “are the Fireflies really that stupid”? I’m starting to think that the Fireflies are the last remnants of the Democratic party, after 98% of them died trying to negotiate with cordyceps.
