In This Episode
On this episode of X-Ray Vision, Jason Concepcion and Rosie Knight pet a giraffe! In the Airlock (1:12), they dive deep (deeep) into the season one finale of HBO’s The Last of Us, recapping and discussing Marlene’s poor choices, and manipulative leadership. Then in Nerd Out (44:50) Jason and Rosie discuss a listener theory about possibilities for The Last of Us Part 3 game, if one gets made. (Warning this Nerd Out does contain spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2.)
Note: Imprecise timestamps are an unfortunate side effect of a new ads system. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.
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Nerd Out Submission Instructions!
Send a short pitch and 2-3 minute voice memo recording to xray@crooked.com that answers the following questions: 1) How did you get into/discover your ‘Nerd Out?’ (2) Why should we get into it too? (3) What’s coming soon in this world that we can look forward to or where can we find it? If you’re sending a theory, feel free to send only a summary of your theory (no audio needed) for Jason and Rosie to react to on air.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jason Concepcion In order to support our show, we need the help of some great advertisers. And we want to make sure those advertisers are the ones that you actually care about. But we need to learn a little bit more about you to make that possible. So we are asking humbly for you to go to podsurvey.com/Xray and take a quick anonymous survey that will help us get to know you better. That way we can bring on advertisers you won’t want to skip. Once you’ve completed the quick survey, you can enter for a chance to win $100 Amazon gift card. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that’s podsurvey.com/Xray. Podsurvery.com/Xray. Thank you for your help. Warning This podcast contains spoilers for the season one finale of The Last of Us on HBO, plus some spoilers for The Last of Us, Part Two, the video game, in our Nerd Out section. Be war. Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion.
Rosie Knight And I’m Rosie Knight.
Jason Concepcion Welcome to X-ray Vision, the Crooked Media podcast, where we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies, comics and pop culture.
Rosie Knight On this episode in The Airlock, we will be digging deep into The Last of Us.
Jason Concepcion That’s right.
Rosie Knight Season one finale.
Jason Concepcion Let’s go.
Rosie Knight A.k.a. complaining about Marlene and all of her bad choices.
Jason Concepcion Oh.
Rosie Knight Spoiler alert.
Jason Concepcion Oh Marlene. Oh.
Rosie Knight So many bad choices. In Nerd Out we’re going to have a theory on the possible Last of Us Part three Video game. I love how much I lost Ice coverage is inspiring people to think about what could come next in the story.
Jason Concepcion Yes. And of course, if you want to jump around, check out the timestamps in the show notes coming up The Airlock. Stepping out of The Airlock and into the hospital. Run by the Fireflies.
Rosie Knight Badly run, badly run.
Poorly run by the Fireflies for the season one finale of The Last of Us on HBO Max. Let’s get started. We open years ago. We see a pregnant woman fleeing through the woods from an infected. You hear the growls of the infected. This is Anna, Ellie’s mother. She runs into a farmhouse. In the distance, we see the skyline of a city. I didn’t ID it. Do we know what the city?
Rosie Knight I don’t think so. She just. She’s running through the forest. They really horror up. And then she’s obviously trying to get to some kind of safe house.
Jason Concepcion Yes. Ellie’s mother, Anna, is expecting that someone is going to meet her there.
Rosie Knight Yeah, she’s calling.
Jason Concepcion I’m here. I’m here. No one is there. She’s all alone. She flees upstairs, closes the door.
Rosie Knight And she’s like, in labor at this point, by the way. She is in labor. Running from the infected is, like, really scary stuff.
Jason Concepcion It is a dire existential situation. She takes out her knife. It is the Pearl handled switchblade that Ellie carries. And she waits. She sits with her back against the wall, breathing hard, as Rosie mentioned, she’s in labor and the infected person, a desperate fight ensues with Ellie’s mom finally stabbing the infected in the brain.
Rosie Knight Classic Ellie move. Knife, Shiv.
Jason Concepcion Killing it. Anna hears a cry. She looks down and she realizes that she gave birth in the middle of this fight. And she also sees that there’s a bite on her leg. She cuts the cord as quick as she can to keep the the infection from spreading from her to the baby. And then she lifts Ellie up to her face. Ellie is wailing strong, fierce cries of of being alive. And and Anna says, You fucking tell them, Ellie. Oh, you’re so tough. Later on that night, three figures approach. One of them is Marlene. So this is the Fireflies. They find the house locked. They go inside, they find Anna upstairs with the newborn child in her arms. She’s got a knife pressed against her.
Rosie Knight Real bad ass. You can see where Ellie gets it from. Like genetically bad ass.
Jason Concepcion She’s like that at the mall. At the hint that she might be losing control. She’s ready to end it right there. And her wound is already showing signs of infection. And Marlene is just kind of broken by the sight of this. Anna says it’s not your fault. We pause here. Looking at the history of Marlene in the season and the amount of just mind boggling clown show decisions that Marlene will make over the course of this episode. I kind of wonder if it’s not her fault.
Rosie Knight It kinda is. I’m sorry.
Jason Concepcion Did Marlene cause this to happen? I’m starting to think, maybe.
Rosie Knight Look, if Marlene and other Fireflies, even just Marlene and the two other people who show up, if they’d have been there, that would have been less likely that that one infected would have gotten through. Maybe if they’d gotten there early and not been delayed, they could have safeguarded the house before a pregnant woman showed up. So actually, I think it is Marlene’s fault. One of the many things this episode is absolutely Marlene’s fault.
Jason Concepcion We can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to put it on Marlene.
Rosie Knight She’s at least a tiny bit to blame.
Jason Concepcion I’m I’m willing to put it on her. Marlene glances at the umbilical cord, and Anna says immediately, I cut it before I was bit before.
Rosie Knight Before. It’s a lie.
Jason Concepcion It’s a lie.
Rosie Knight But she does it just because I’m sure she feels like she knows Marlene well enough to know that Marlene might just shoot a baby in the head.
Jason Concepcion Now. It’s a devastating lie, one of several devastating lies that we’ll see in the course of this episode, because you you wonder if, if Anna had told the truth, maybe there would have been a way to kind of reverse engineer this immunity and figure out what happened. Now you raised a good you raised a good possibility before we started recording that, surely the Fireflies would have taken this in the most horrific way. Yeah.
Rosie Knight I think the truth is, like, I love your point because it is absolutely heartbreaking because this is 14 years ago. So there is a chance that we would be living in a world where Joel and Ellie never have to meet where the infection is over, where there is a cure. Now, if you think about the reality of what we’ve seen of FEDRA, of the absolute clown shows behavior of the Fireflies and the fascism of FEDRA. Realistically, if they found out, as this episode seems to come from a very famous, very beloved last of fan theory, that the reason Ellie is immune is because her mother got bitten just before she was born. They would surely have just been putting pregnant people into hospitals and purposefully infecting them and trying to do this in a really horrific way. I don’t see a version where it is done well, but there is also, like you said, if one sensible, sane, non terrible person knew this information, there is a totally different timeline that we could be living in.
Jason Concepcion So Anna asks Marlene to take Ellie to Boston and make sure she’s safe and Marlene’s like, I can’t do that. Anna is is is really pleading with her. She holds up the knife. She says, I want you to give her this. She puts in the swaddling. She’s got Ellie swaddled in a jacket and she puts it in the swaddling. Her name is Ellie. Marlene’s like, I can’t. Marlene is crying. She and Anna have apparently known each other for their whole lives. They say they’re very good friends. Anna asks Marlene to again do this, do what needs to be done. Take the baby. Kill me before I turn Marlise. Like I can’t kill you. I can’t do it. And it begs. And then finally, Marlene’s like, okay. And she takes the baby, hands it off to one of her followers, and then she walks in, steals herself, walks in and kills Anna.
Rosie Knight Also want to say she specifically says to her follower, please cover the baby’s ears before she shoots the baby’s mom. But he does not cover the ears. The baby is just chilling. I’m surprised that Ellie can even hear.
Jason Concepcion The Fireflies are morons.
Rosie Knight Just the worst.
Jason Concepcion Maybe.
Rosie Knight Just so, so, so.
Jason Concepcion I don’t know. Maybe if you weren’t recruiting children.
Rosie Knight Might help.
Jason Concepcion It might help, but these are. But yeah, the Fireflies. The incompetence of their families cannot be overstated. We cut to Ellie were in the present. She’s sitting in the back of a truck. She’s lost in thought. You know, a lot of things have happened to bring our our friends to this place. And it seems they’re close to the end. And all of that is weighing on her. Joel comes over with some stuff. He’s looted, some Chef Boyardee a Boggle set. But Ellie is just in that funk.
Rosie Knight Yeah, He’s trying to bring back, like, the fun. He’s making the Chef Boyardee jokes. He’s found games. He doesn’t really know what happened with David, but he can tell that something’s changed because Ellie is not the kind of annoying, talkative, energetic person that she was. Now there’s this weight to her, and it’s obviously weighing on him and he’s trying to bring back those laughs, bring back that kind of energy that she had. It’s this really interesting inversion of that personality.
Jason Concepcion It’s really Joel in dad mode at this point. You know, this is what you would do with a kid who’s kind of like a teenager and.
Rosie Knight Want to play a game? You want your favorite food?
Jason Concepcion What’s going on?
Rosie Knight Mm hmm.
Jason Concepcion Joel says that he saw a guitar in the RV that was smashed, and he says it got me thinking maybe I should find one. I haven’t played in forever. And of course, game players will know that this is a big part of Joel’s character and a big thing that he hands off to Ellie. He wants to teach her how to play, but she is like barely listening and she’s like, Yeah, that’ll be great. And then very kind of like, you know, not present way.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion And as they move forward toward their goal, you know, they come to an obstacle. And Joel’s like, Well, here’s a couple of options we could use, and Ellie immediately knows what they’re going to do. And we see that they have this shorthand now. They’ve really come so far together as they move through rec building. Joel boosts Ellie up through a hole. She drops a ladder down, but as the ladder comes down, she’s distracted by something she runs off. Joel is panicked. He doesn’t know what happened. And then when we get up there with Joel, we realize that Ellie has found a giraffe, A wild giraffe escaped and survived from, you know, from the zoo. Joel shows Ellie how to feed it. And it’s this really beautiful, magical moment.
Rosie Knight I never thought I was really interested to see if they would be able to translate the wonder of this moment from the game to the show. But they do. And it’s all Bella to have Ellie go from this disconnected, disassociated, live.
Jason Concepcion Really like tactical, real giraffe.
Rosie Knight No way.
Jason Concepcion Yeah, real giraffe.
Rosie Knight Oh, my God.
Jason Concepcion Actual giraffe.
Rosie Knight That’s unbelievable. Yeah, I love it. Doesn’t surprise me. I mean the bloater was practical. If you can do that, you can find a giraffe. But like Bella, the way that they kind of just bubble with this kind of effervescent, like laughter, like this is the best thing they’ve ever seen in their life is such a twist from seeing Ellie in that state where she doesn’t even want to talk to Joel. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to be involved. And that’s breaking Joel’s heart. He’s trying so hard to connect to that. But then in that moment, he gets it and she’s just laughing. And this is obviously, like, the best thing that’s ever happened.
Jason Concepcion You see it play on his face to smile that he has. And I. And. I think it’s might be the only time post-apocalypse that you get Joel to smile, like a real smile. And it’s amazing. And then it wanders off and he’s like, Where’s it going? Yeah, the little kid. And it’s gone over to it’s hers.
Rosie Knight Yeah. And we see them in the distance.
Jason Concepcion Joel and Ellie watch them kind of feeding and hanging out together. And. And then they have this little talk. Jules Like, is that everything you hope for? Kind of talking around what’s going on, and at least, like, you know, it’s got its ups and downs. Joel is is getting ready to try and broach the possibility with Ellie that, hey, I know there’s a lot of hopes hanging on this, you know, finding this doctor and hopefully saving the world. But, you know, be prepared for the possibility that it might not work. I mean, there are so many things have not right and way out here.
Rosie Knight I love this moment so much because it’s like this and the moment where he asked me to take her. Those are those two big moments where everything could go in a totally different direction. And in this moment, he’s just I just wanted them so badly to go back to Jackson. And I’m like, Just do it. You don’t need to go there. Just go and live your life. Like, listen to Joel, do something for yourselves. But this is been a hard journey. It’s time.
Jason Concepcion He finally raises the thing that we’ve been like, wanting him to do where he’s like, Hey, we just call it off. We just go back to Tommy’s and live life. And Ellie says that they can’t. Quote. After all we’ve been through, everything I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing. And she appreciates she appreciates that Joel wants to protect her and that he’s and she acknowledges that he’s done a really great job of that. But they have to go through with this. And she says, when we’re done, we’ll go wherever you want. I’ll follow you anywhere you go. But there’s no half way with this. We have to finish what we started.
Rosie Knight And there’s a great little throwback in that moment where she’s like the sheep ranch, the moon, wherever you want to go. And you get another one of those smiles from Joel, like he’s already picturing that life in his head. And they do such a great job. In this opening sequence with the two of them of setting up exactly where Joel’s mind is and what is important to him. And it just makes everything else so much more easy to understand as we get into this kind of brutal finale.
Jason Concepcion X-ray vision will be back.
Speaker 5 <AD>.
Jason Concepcion And we’re back. They find an old Army hospital. This is one of the first kind of camps, one of the first kind of responses that the government threw up in the wake of outbreak. And Joel reveals that he had been in one of these on day two after Sarah had passed. It was for the wound on his head, which he had previously kind of framed as like a shootout. I got in a shoot out with a guy and he missed. And I missed. But then he admits it was self-inflicted. He had tried to kill himself. He said that he wasn’t scared. He wanted to do it. He didn’t see any point in going forward. But at the last second, he flinched. He doesn’t have any idea why. And ellie says, you know, basically, I’m glad that you didn’t do that.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion And she says.
Rosie Knight She’s freaked out, too. It’s like a really great moment where she kind of realizes the humanity of this, like, Terminator esque character who’s been kind of following her through this. She’s like, I’m glad that didn’t work out. But she’s still kind of dealing with the fact that he just admitted to, like, trying to kill himself and kind of this great trauma that he’s been holding.
Jason Concepcion And then there’s that wonderful moment where she says, Well, so time heals all wounds, I guess. And Joel looks at Ellie, and this is probably the most vulnerable thing he’s ever done. He says it wasn’t time that did it. It was you.
Rosie Knight And he’s barely able to not cry. Like it’s in his throat. He’s. Pedro is so good and.
Jason Concepcion So good.
Rosie Knight I mean, is actually a crime that he’s most famous for playing someone whose face you never see when he’s such a face actor. There is like so much good face acting in this episode.
Jason Concepcion So they move on. And at Joel’s suggestion, Ellie breaks out the pun book and we start going through the puns. And as they’re doing this, they don’t notice that a firefly has come up behind them and throws a stun grenade at their feet and they are knocked out and taken captive. You know, and this is like really a small note in the litany of like criticisms that we’re going to aim at the Fireflies for being a moronic revolutionary organization, not up to the task that they have set out before the anime are returning democracy to the United States and the overthrow of federal. They’re bad at it. They’ve been trying to do it for 20 years. They’ve been failing. Just fucking go up and say, Hands up like you’ve got a gun. Why are you wasting material? Yeah, Why you throwing a grenade at people?
Rosie Knight Not that. Yeah. But spoiler alert, Marlene is in the hospital. They literally. Have placed all their hope on one child. A white girl with brown hair in a checked shirt who is traveling alone with a man. Yeah. Like you’re telling me that they had don’t have rounds every day being like. I wonder if they got here. I wonder if they got that and instead of just getting a lead.
Jason Concepcion So thank you for for for raising this again, because Joel wakes up later in a hospital bed and Marlene is there and she was like, Hey, woops. Patrol didn’t know who you were. Let me stop. Marlene, Why aren’t you? Is this is not the whole reason. You said.
Rosie Knight The only people who are meant to go to the hospital.
Jason Concepcion Why aren’t you having a meeting every fucking day That’s like, Hey.
Rosie Knight Have you seen them?
Jason Concepcion We’re looking for a girl and a guy traveling alone. She’s 14. He’s 56.
Rosie Knight Someone could do a drawing.
Jason Concepcion Here’s what they look like. If you see that, stop them. Also, wouldn’t you have someone like on a horse in a car going out in the surrounding like 20 miles? Isn’t this why they are there? Like, this is the only reason.
Jason Concepcion They’re the only reason that there’s anybody here associated with you guys that doesn’t know who you’re looking for? Marlene, what the fuck?
Rosie Knight Also as well, like, let’s be real if you’re talking, we’re about to get into the details of how they think they can make this vaccine. Yet I’ll tell you, a spoiler includes the brain. You know what? The brain is very delicate. You know what’s not good for the brain? Stun, stun grenades.
Jason Concepcion Great point.
Rosie Knight Concussions, which has already has so many of.
Jason Concepcion I mean, this is like CTE on two legs over here. Like what’s going on?
Rosie Knight And they’re like, let’s just add another one. It’s going to be fine.
Jason Concepcion Great point.
Rosie Knight She’s going she’s she’s going into surgery. It’ll be okay. We’ll fix it. No. So just terrible choice.
Jason Concepcion Joel’s coming out of, you know, his concussion and he’s like, Where’s Ellie? Great question. Marlene dodges it by saying, Man, really amazing that you made it out here alone.
Rosie Knight We lose half the people we came with.
Jason Concepcion We had, like, a whole fucking army with me and like, we barely made it through the year. We lost guys left and right. You know, we got here with the ragtag group because we just got torn apart on the way. And you are so good and so competent, such a fucking killer that you got through and there’s not a scratch out. Really, really amazing. You are really, really incredibly capable. And. And she goes, How did you do it? And Joel’s like, Well, you know, Ellie.
Rosie Knight He’s like, It was all Ellie.
Jason Concepcion It was all Ellie, Really. And then she says, You know, you’re the one person I didn’t want to be in debt to you, but I owe you. And then Joel again is like, Where’s Elli e at? And then Marlene’s says well, she’s being prepped for surgery, and you know. What surgery? Well, our doctor, she explains, believes that Cordyceps has grown with her since birth, and it’s essentially inoculating her against infection, which is why she’s immune. And so the plan is remove this special strain of cordyceps and then grow it and then use that to vaccinate others. And Joel is kind of still confused about why this rush suddenly.
Rosie Knight Seems wierd. Like we’re not going to, we’re just going to be in it for a while.
Jason Concepcion And then he notes, Hey, wait. Cordyceps grows inside the brain and he starts to realize, Wait, this means you’re going to cut into her brain. She’s not going to survive this. And then he he’s like, Get someone else. And Marlene says, There is no one else. And then as if this makes it better, she says, Hey, don’t worry, she’s not afraid. We didn’t tell her. There won’t be any fear. What?
Rosie Knight You just let you just send her to her deathbed, right? So there’s so much to break down that is just absolutely ridiculous.
Jason Concepcion Let’s start with the fact what a hypocritical stance this is for a person who’s ostensibly fighting to bring back democracy to the United States. And and you’re building that entire mission on lying to someone. And putting them on into a surgery that will 100% killing you, kill them, and you’re not letting them know that that’s what’s going to happen.
Rosie Knight You’re not letting them know what’s going on. And also, like just on that note, yeah, there is a version. I truly believe there’s a version where you don’t, you know, kidnap them and separate them and you have a conversation in a room with Joel,with Ellie, and you explain the situation and maybe there’s a conversation. Oh, well, you know what I don’t like we should wait a bit. Maybe did it. Why is there so much rush?
Jason Concepcion Yeah, why are we rushing to do this?
Rosie Knight What’s going on? Also you’re going to kill the one person who is immune.
Jason Concepcion Thank you. This is this is the other thing that is like, wait, what? You got one example.
Rosie Knight Just take some blood tests.
Jason Concepcion Just one. Can we, like, ramp up to the thing that will kill her like, later? Looks like. What about a blood test? What about.
Rosie Knight CT scan of the brain?
Jason Concepcion Is there a fungus in her blood that we can grow? Like. Like, like.
Rosie Knight That’s a really good point.
Jason Concepcion Yeah, Like, why are we jumping to, well, let’s just fucking drill open her head and kill her.
Rosie Knight Also as well, the most interesting thing. So this is a big swing in the game. They basically say like, Oh, that. We think the Cordycepts mutated is very science, like super science, just like you accept it. Here, there’s this really detailed, interesting version of why Ellie’s immune. I mean, the cordyceps essentially sends out a signal telling other cordyceps that Ellie has cordycepts.
Jason Concepcion So you don’t need to infect this one.
Rosie Knight You don’t need to infect it because she’s already infected.
Jason Concepcion Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rosie Knight So you have a doctor who can theorize that he has some serious science, but you can’t just do a blood test like, oh, you know, you have needles. Because we see her in the operating room. She’s hooked up to, like anesthesia or whatever. This is some messed up business, and Marlene is absolutely fucking this up on just so many levels. First of all, by doing it. Second of all, by telling Joel. What were you thinking?
Jason Concepcion Let’s let’s go. Let’s, let’s let’s start with there. Joel obviously becomes irate.
Rosie Knight He does not take it well.
Jason Concepcion Marlene is then like, Hey, listen, I was there when she was born Joel. I promised her mother that I would save the child. So I understand. I’m the only one who understands it. She’s trying, you know, trying to say, like, I understand the weight of this choice. It means a lot to me emotionally. Very, very cold comfort. Also, like you did, promise to save the child.
Rosie Knight Now you’re killing her.
Jason Concepcion Now you’re killing her. And also you lied to her about it. Kind of a wierd way
Rosie Knight Also as well. I’ve got a very interesting point.
Jason Concepcion Weird way to honor the promise.
Rosie Knight Yeah. Feeling like you don’t really care about that because I have to say, I wonder why the doctor would have any idea they had been with Ellie since birth. Sounds like someone who was there when she was born must have told him that. Sounds like this was always your plan. And you were actually more interested, as we said, in Ellie, as a cure. And that’s why you’re protecting her, then? Because you care about in the game. It’s because she has this connection to Anna.
Jason Concepcion Yeah.
Rosie Knight And she wants to protect her. She won’t let her join the Fireflies. She wants her in the orphanage. Here, we know that Marlene has always suspected, clearly, that Ellie could be immune.
Jason Concepcion This version of Marlene is much more interested, as in Ellie as a vehicle to power, to bring the Fireflies to power, saying, Hey, look what we have. We have a cure.
Rosie Knight Yeah, that’s a great point.
Jason Concepcion Run the country. And I think and it’s a it’s a subtle shift, but I think a significant one from the game because you’re right. Like in the game, there’s a much more emotional drive and and she really believes in what she’s doing here. I think she’s just like, fuck it. Like, this is how we win.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion Marlene. And Joel is like, Well, well, Marley. And then says, I have no other choice than to do this. Joel says, I do, which is clearly, you know what that means. And then Marlene is like, Well, we’re not gonna let you do that. I’m going to order these two guys right over here.
Rosie Knight Two random guys.
Jason Concepcion Hey, take take Joel out to the highway, then give him his backpack and this knife. And if he tries anything, shoot him. Let me stop here. You just got done telling us, Marlene, about, like, how you’re fucking infinite clown car of Fireflies got torn up crossing the country, and Joel managed to go.
Rosie Knight There’s like ten of you left.
Jason Concepcion Right. Yeah, there’s like, none of you mean. And let me also remind you that in episode one, your entire Boston like headquarters got torn apart during a deal for a dead battery.
Rosie Knight A car battery.
Jason Concepcion You guys are bad at this. Joel is very good at this. And you’re going to send two guys with him and not be like, Hey, by the way, tie his hands together or something?.
Rosie Knight By the way this guy is insane.
Jason Concepcion Knock him out.
Rosie Knight Like a world famous murderer to the point.
Jason Concepcion Throw another stun grenade at him and drag him out to the highway or just shoot him because like.
Rosie Knight Why did they ever let him wake up? It’s not. If you’re going to go the terrible route that they going, go the whole hog. If you want to kill Ellie, kill Joel.
Jason Concepcion Spoiler alert, Joel tries something.
Rosie Knight Shocking.
Jason Concepcion Enter Joel Wick. He then proceeds to go on a murder spree, a brutal murder spree, killing everyone in the building, probably 20 people.
Rosie Knight At least.
Jason Concepcion Because he runs out of ammo twice.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion And ends up like, you know, he runs out of ammo with, like, a Ruger, some like Ruger Mini 14 and an assault M-4 assault rifle. And then he ends up with, like a pistol. So he used and he started to stab a guy because he runs out of ammo. He just, like, kills everybody there. They can’t shoot him. He’s in the hallway. Three people shooting.
Rosie Knight Star Wars like Stormtrooper aim at this point. Pew Pew. It’s not happenning.
Jason Concepcion Grazed. Joel just rips through them again The Fireflies you guys like.
Rosie Knight Bad.
Jason Concepcion You were brought here to guard this very, very important surgical procedure from any attack. This is the thing that’s going to save the world, guys. And and we’ve brought the one threat that could really, like, upend this mission here. Necessarily so, because we need to separate him from Ellie and then nobody is ready for this. You hear a gunshot and everybody was like is that a gunshot?
Rosie Knight But I better go out and look.
Jason Concepcion I’m like, let me go.
Rosie Knight Not a single person goes to the surgery. Like to the actual room.
Jason Concepcion Shouldn’t you be like walling off the surgery from this. Like one guy hears the gunshot and he’s like, let me go investigate in front of, like a window and not end and not realize that somebody could shoot me through it. It’s like, guys, all of you. Morons.
Rosie Knight How did they get this bad for 20 years?
Jason Concepcion No wonder you never managed to, like, beat FEDRA, who also sucks.
Rosie Knight FEDRA sucks. You know what I’ll say? You know who successfully did it? Kathleen. She also sucked, but she did it. Marlene did not do it. Marlene did nothing apart from.Make many terrible mistakes. I will say, as humorous as this all is because Marlene’s ridiculous and the Fireflies are terrible. What I will say is I was very impressed once again because something we’ve said for out this is like the way that they show violence is very different from the game. The game is very much like you are killing people, they are disposable. You’re killing three or four or 500 people before you get here, soldiers, infected, a lot of people, Cordycepts, whatever. But here they even though you’re essentially showing someone go on a rampage to a hospital, which is pretty horrific and like relevant and scary.
Jason Concepcion The echoes to the real world were really.
Rosie Knight Really.
Jason Concepcion Unsettling.
Rosie Knight They do this really interesting thing where they don’t give it that John Wick sound, that the action movie sound. They they soften all the sound and they have this slow music. And they had they said afterwards it was it’s Joel disassociating.
Jason Concepcion Yeah.
Rosie Knight And every time he kills someone, you see their dead body on the ground.
Jason Concepcion You see the face of that one guy.
Rosie Knight You see them.
Jason Concepcion Yeah.
Rosie Knight It’s really horrific. You see them fall. And and so even in this ridiculous situation where at this point, like everyone is watching, the show is actually backing Joel, which is unbelievable for what you see.
Jason Concepcion We’ll talk about that in a bit.
Rosie Knight But like, I do think they still manage to be responsible in the way that they showed it, even though it is like in the context of the show that you’re just like, What the hell were you doing?
Jason Concepcion So Joel fights his way to the surgical theater again. There’s no guards in front of the door. There’s nobody there. No barricases.
Rosie Knight They were dead.
Jason Concepcion They’re all dead. They, I guess, ran willy nilly around the building and got killed
Rosie Knight Why didn’t they just chain the door from the inside?
Jason Concepcion Again. Who’s training the Fireflies, who are probably like, you know, indoctrinated as 12 year olds and then having a gun and.
Rosie Knight We’ve seen it. Happened to Riley.
Jason Concepcion Clearly. So Joel gets there. It’s a surgeon and two nurses, the surgeon. Just idiotically tries to resist. Joel just kills and then tells the nurses like unhook Ellie from the machines. They do. And those are the only two people that he spares. Perhaps fatefully as we head into season two.
Rosie Knight Very fatefully.
Jason Concepcion More on that in a bit and then he picks up Ellie, carries her down to the parking garage where there’s a van ready to go. He sees it as he’s walking towards it. Head clown in charge, Marlene, comes up behind Joel and, like, doesn’t just cap him right away in the head. Yeah, just cap him right now. Nope. Then decides to have a monologue. You can’t keep her safe forever. Okay? She’s got a gun on Joel, and then she tells him, you know, perhaps accurately. Hey, Ellie. Whether she’s killed by infected or she’s killed by raiders, something bad will happen to her because, quote, We live in a broken world that you could have saved. And then Joel says, you know, really dead on the mark here, maybe, but it isn’t for you to decide. Or you so would. So what would she decide? Marlene says, And Marlene says she thinks Ellie would want to go through with it. And she sees on Joel’s face that he knows that Ellie would want to go through it.
Rosie Knight Probably, yeah.
Jason Concepcion Now let’s stop here again, Marlene. I think this would carry a lot more weight if you would.
Rosie Knight Asked her.
Jason Concepcion Asked her. You literally could have asked her.
Rosie Knight You also, like Marlene lies a lot. Yeah. Why didn’t you just lie to Joel and say you did ask her?
Jason Concepcion Yeah.
Rosie Knight I mean, you should have asked her on a moral level. But again, this is the. This is the Mandalorian. Like, do you really need to go to the mines? Marlene, just say Ellie said she wanted to do it. That would actually hold a little bit of weight with Joel. Joel wait for her wake up, then you can ask her. She already told me. No, None of it’s happenning and sorry, Marlene, it’s time to go.
Jason Concepcion And so now Marlene says it’s not too late. Even now. Even after all you’ve done killing 20 of my people.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion Plus the doctor. We can see. We can still find a way. And Joel looks down at Ellie, asleep in his arms. And we smash cut to the van. They’re out. Ellie wakes up in the backseat. Joel’s like, It’s all right. You’re with me. Ellie doesn’t understand why she’s there, why she’s in a surgical gown, why she’s drugged. Joel tells Ellie that the Fireflies were running some tests on you, and then Raiders attacked. And guess what? I barely got you out. And also, it turns out there’s a whole more people like you. People who are immune, dozens of them. And the doctors had worked with them, but they couldn’t make any of it. No. So they stop looking for a cure, and that’s it. And we’re driving home now. And then we flashback and we see that Joel shot Marlene. And then as she’s begging for her life, he finishes her off knowing probably, Listen, if Marlene is going to live the Fireflies.
Rosie Knight They’re going to come looking for you.
Jason Concepcion Ellie takes all of this in. Joel tells her, like, I’m taking us home. He means Jackson. And clearly even in her drugged, you know, concussed state understands that this doesn’t kind of add up. She turns away from.
Rosie Knight Yeah, she gives him the teenage back. She’s like, I’m going to sleep late. I can’t deal with this.
Jason Concepcion And they drive through the night and eventually end up about 5 hours away from Jackson when the car breaks down and they hype the rest of the way and end up on a ridge overlooking Jackson and with inside of it. Now, Joel Hitch talks about Sarah, how much he used to love hiking and talking about the differences between the two. Sarah is more girly, not no offense, Ellie, And now he’s like, Don’t I get it?
Rosie Knight No, no.
Jason Concepcion She was taller, but she would have liked you because you’re you’re you’re very funny. And I bet she would have liked her back. Ellie says. Yeah. And then finally overlooking Jackson, Ellie tells Joel about Riley’s like, you know, back in KC, you asked me about the first time I killed someone, and she says, you know about Riley, that she got infected, and they waited it out until she lost her mind. And then finally, to spare her, Ellie killed her, and she mentions Tess and Sarah and all these other bodies that she eats there are on her conscience. And Joel’s like, No, no, no, don’t worry. That’s not on you. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we hoped. And he goes on, you know, talking about, like, hope and how you have to keep going when all seems lost. And then finally, the thing that’s on Ellie’s mind comes to the surface. Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true. And Joel says, I swear. And Ellie, like, looks hard at Joel’s face for any trace of a lie. I think she knows.
Rosie Knight I think she knows. I think she doesn’t want to see it. She’s just.
Jason Concepcion I think it’s like when, you know, a parent is lying to you, but you’re just like, let’s move forward.
Rosie Knight Also, what can you do in that moment? Like, yeah, Ellie is incredibly smart in some ways. Like she we’ve seen I do dumb stuff, but like, she’s very smart in like, in emotional intelligence. And in that moment, I just so felt like every single possibility is going through her head. Like, what do you do if you if, as you suspect, this guy just killed everyone and damned the world and he did it, like to protect you. What other option do you really have then to go with him.
Jason Concepcion Other than to mover forward.
Rosie Knight And you know he will go and he will do anything to keep you alive. So it’s a certain amount of safety and security. What can you do? And also, she obviously loves him in her own way. There is like a really sad, fucked up bond there that came from something good and turned into something terrible. There’s just so much in this last moment. Oh, so good.
Jason Concepcion Yeah. She says okay. And we cut and it’s the exact ending in the game. X-ray vision will be back.
Speaker 5 <AD>.
Jason Concepcion And we’re back. Let’s talk about that choice, because I think one of the things we were talking about before we started recording, is how interesting it is that it’s so much easier to back Joel in in the TV version of this because of mainly the Fireflies incompetence, but also because of what a. You know what a generous and protective and empathic figure Joe becomes over the course of this journey and a wonderful performance by Pedro Pascal. And also because, you know, in the video game. It’s much easier to suspend your disbelief about all the stuff I’m talking about. You know, there’s much less detailed is much less kind of story to lay in. And it’s much easier to buy in a video game context that this is the one doctor who can do it, who really can see super science.
Rosie Knight Yeah. Yeah. Super science. Would they sacrifice a girl?
Jason Concepcion Yeah.
Rosie Knight Also as well in the game, by the point like Joel in the game is brutal and you feel it and the stuff with Eli is more like his goodness shining through the cracks of this kind of horrible brutality. Whereas in the show, it we’ve all we’ve rarely seen that. Joel And it’s more been like, we know he existed because of what other people tell us. So they’re building more empathy, more connection between him and Ellie. And like, especially in this finale, the opening. They really show you like, all he wants is for her to be happy, whether it’s a funny food, the giraffe, You feel so much more love that in the game. It’s kind of hard to overstate how shocking it feels when you realize that the hero’s journey you’ve been on is actually turning into something completely twisted and becomes this idea of like the one of like the good of the many over the good of the few, or in this case, the one. And that moral weight is so much heavier. I feel like here it feels a lot more like dodgy, like exploitive science. And I think I mean, I’ve been kind of blown away to see how people in our discourse, especially who’d never played the game, they’re just all on Joel’s side.
Jason Concepcion I think it’s much I think. that’s a great choice.
Rosie Knight I think that it’s more of a conversation in the game I feel like that is one of the overarching conversation points is like that choice. Whereas in the show you’re kind of just like it’s bleak. But he was probably right.
Jason Concepcion I think in the game you can say flat out Joel was a bad guy.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion Like because first of all.
Rosie Knight A bad guy who did something that you can understand through his eyes and his lens.
Jason Concepcion But. But still, like, the worst.
Rosie Knight The ramifications are bad.
Jason Concepcion Yeah. Made the worse choice, you know, because again, you’re playing a video game. What is the goal of many videos, like the goal of saving the world? When you’re playing a video game, it seems absolutely what is normal. That is.
Rosie Knight A hero’s journey is what we expect. We know where he’s going. And what he has to do.
Jason Concepcion In a video game, you are the character, the agency, the characters, agencies, your agency. You make the choices.
Rosie Knight You are complicit in everything they do.
Jason Concepcion And so part of the real shock of the ending of the game version of The Last of Us is that you are expecting, as in many video games, that you will be given the choice and then that choice is taken from you. That’s Joel’s journey in the final act.
Rosie Knight And not only that, you have to be a part of that.
Jason Concepcion You have to do it. But Joel made the decision to do him. And so part of it is that real, real shock of, oh my God, like my my choice has been taken from me in a medium that is all about the player making the decisions here in the show. It’s absolutely reasonable to say, wait a second, we’re getting Ellie out of here. Why the rush? Why are we putting the one example of immunity under under the knife into a procedure that will kill her? Why are we lying.
Rosie Knight If you also believe, if you believe in it so much and you think you’ve got, you can say that it’s definitely going to work, why wouldn’t you tell her? Why is it a rush? Why didn’t you just spend a couple? Oh, you guys have been traveling for a couple of weeks. We want to make sure you’re healthy. You’ve eaten food, you’re ready for the surgery like you’re hydrated. Little things. It’s. It seems very sus in a way that in the game, the whole world of the game is so bleak and so last minute and so rushed and so close to the edge.
Jason Concepcion And then you start adding up the litany of incompetence by the, by the Fireflies, you know, from from the very first episode when they all got killed during the dead battery deal. And the fact that like she, Marlene had to have Joel take Ellie across country because like, she didn’t all her people were fucking dead.
Rosie Knight They didn’t know how to do it. Like, you let some random smuggler.
Jason Concepcion That’s your best idea.
Rosie Knight That’s your best option. This guy, who is literally like your cargo.
Jason Concepcion And then.You get to the,then you get to the hospital, all the things you have seen.
Rosie Knight By the way, you didn’t tell him why she was going across country again, another lie.
Jason Concepcion And then you get to the hospital, all the things we’ve seen, you get to the doctor. Now, this is a little bit of a side point, but the doctor looked to be, let’s call them 35, 30 ish. That means that doctor got his medical degree at post-Apocalypse University Medical School. Like, do you trust this Firefly doctor, who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing?
Rosie Knight Exactly. And also like, we don’t really know what the state of the medical care is. Like another thing that I’ve seen a lot of people talking about that I’ve seen really great convos about, especially in our discord, is like people have brain surgery all the time, like in in real life, they have brain surgery, they survive. You can have keyhole surgery, you can have brain surgery where they actually cut your brain. There is no conversation here about what kind of surgery it is. They just have my guy with a scalpel about to chop open Ellie’s brain. Like he’s Dr. Frankenstein. Let’s have a conversation.
Jason Concepcion Yeah. Dr. Firefly is just like I got a hammer and a chisel. I don’t know. We go.
Rosie Knight Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a lobotomy and then just take what I need out is like, No, that’s not going to work.
Jason Concepcion And so when you look at what a joke, really a joke of a revolutionary organization of Fireflies are, I think it absolutely makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Get her out of there and we can try again. Like if she wants to try and save the world, let’s do it in a much less impactful way. Again, blood test. Let’s try and grow specimens.
Rosie Knight Let’s give her a choice. And then I’m sure I feel like the Ellie that we know, the way they’ve seeded her choices, her conversations, the things that she has said and shown, if she was given a choice and it was like you have to live in the hospital for six months, we’re taking your blood every day. We’re doing all these different tests we’re going to and maybe the eventual outcome is you have to give you a life to do this, but we want to make sure it’s going to work because you’re the last hope. You know, maybe we can see if other people’s blood similar to yours. Maybe there’s different kinds of immunities. Let her live until she’s like 20.
Jason Concepcion You let her live a fucking natural life. And then we try, you know, we try it as a senior citizen.
Rosie Knight That was the other thing was like, how hard would it have been to just have a conversation between her, Joel, Marlene and whoever and be like, So this is what we need to do. What is the way that we can do this that actually works, that doesn’t end with Joel killing us all, which is, to be honest, to every single person who was watching. An obvious choice. Marlene, you should have known that, like, this is like Wolverine, like you.
Jason Concepcion You think Joel is going to quit?
Rosie Knight You mean you’re going to take Rogue away and then Wolverine is just going to be like, Nah, That’s fine. Like it’s not going to happen. You’re going to all die. Biserka.
Jason Concepcion Now, Joel’s lie, I think, still lands with a tremendous punch at the end.
Rosie Knight That’s that, I think is the big hardcore twist that they switch out here. It’s not the choice because the choice it feels more organic is the lie and the double lie.
Jason Concepcion I think you after all that’s happened, I think just from a from a personal safety sense, the Fireflies are not done as an organization. They’re still they’re going to wonder what happened.
Rosie Knight Someone’s going to go to the hospital.
Jason Concepcion You left two people alive like they’re they’re going to come looking for her. You have to tell her. You have to level with her. Like, okay, if you want to lie about the O all the other the.
Rosie Knight Raiders.
Jason Concepcion You know, but all the other like people that are immune and still survived. You at least have to say they were going to kill you.
Rosie Knight So I stopped them.
Jason Concepcion So I stopped them. And how do you think like you have to level with her about that part and you have to tell her about Marlene and you to tell her all of that.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion Because I think it’s just it’s her life. It’s her. It’s her future. It’s her safety. She has to know this.
Rosie Knight Yeah. I also think it.
Jason Concepcion And I get why he lied, though, I get it.
Rosie Knight Look, there’s many reasons, but the truth is, like, I think that the. The real deepest mistake Joe made is he underestimates Ellie again. Like Marlene underestimated Ellie and didn’t give her agency. Joel is taking away all of Ellie’s agency, but he’s also underestimating her. Ellie, Ellie shot somebody to save Joel’s life. Ellie has killed Riley out of, you know, a sacrifice, a way to, you know, save her in whatever way Ellie could. Like, Ellie is not immune to the realities of this world. Ellie’s not going to be happy that you went on a murderous rampage. And as she said, she has these kind of deaths on her conscience. But I think that’s like a in this world and the things that they’ve been through and the things they seen, that’s a like you have a big blowout argument. You’re angry for a few days. You sleep in different rooms in Jackson, and then you make up. Like that’s just that’s just the harsh nature of this world. This is going to come back to bite him like so fucking badly, especially because he didn’t just lie when he was leaving, which I think if he’d have told her the truth here, he could have been like, I was freaked out. I didn’t want to scare you. Just woken up. Now I need to tell you.
Jason Concepcion I killed 20 people.
Rosie Knight Just killed 20 people. I was feeling some way.
Jason Concepcion The adrenaline is still coursing through my veins.
Rosie Knight But, you know like, instead he swears to her to her face and just lets the lie continue. And that’s obviously going to be simmering under that relationship until, you know, season two. And I think the most interesting thing is going to be. Well, this show is deeply expanded on a lot of the stuff that we never got to see in the in the game. And I wonder if that when we see these seasons that are going to come afterwards, they’re going to add that part to is there going to be interim time? Is this going to be like an expansion of that time? The seven year jump that we got when the game came out? I’ll be very interested to see how they handle that, because I feel like this lie is going to end up being like the original sin for Joe. From everything that comes. It’s not even the killing at this point. Like we know the killing. The killing is going to have a ramification. But I feel like between him and Ellie, it’s going to be that lie.
Jason Concepcion I mean, the killing was honestly justified. I think, you know, in the in the.
Rosie Knight In the context of the TV show.
Jason Concepcion The moral logic of this of this story on this show, in this context, I think it was right. Final thoughts on the season? I think it was heartbreaking. Like it it really got me seeing how Anna’s life ended. Mm hmm. Passing that lineage on to Ellie, who, by the way, like. Not to not to make this another point about how Marlene sucks, but it’s like Marlene, promise I’ll keep her safe. And then it’s What did you do? You put her in a fucking FEDRA orphanage and never had contact with her.
Rosie Knight And not even that. Like, why is Marlene just never like, you’re about to put this girl under to kill her. You know, you could have just turned around and like, I know your mom, she was, like, a real badass. I was there when she died. Like she really fought for you, but she, like she when Ellie that was the thing that kind of blew my mind. And I think sets up this version of Marlene to have this more sinister bent, which is the first in episode two or episode one when Ellie and her are talking and Ellie’s like, Oh, are you my mom? And she’s like, No. But she also doesn’t say, I knew your mom.
Jason Concepcion She doesn’t say anything, she could have said anything.
Rosie Knight She could have said anything. And and I think that that, again, plays into these like problems that these choice, these tiny choices that seem small that end up having these huge kind of life ending ramifications. I love that. I loved seeing Ashley Johnson come back, the original Ellie actor to play Ellie’s mom.
Jason Concepcion It was so eerie too, to have.
Rosie Knight They did a really good job.
Jason Concepcion To have the voice of Ellie from the game talking to Baby Ellie.
Rosie Knight Yeah.
Jason Concepcion In the show. It was wonderful. .
Rosie Knight The opening was really that opening was so horror movie in a way. A lot of the show hasn’t been. That has been one of the big things that surprised me that I enjoy. I love horror, I love horror TV. I don’t think we have enough of it, but I think they made the right choice to make this more of a drama with a kind of it’s kind of this post-apocalyptic drama with a tinge of horror around the edges that sometimes explodes. And I think that was the right choice.
Jason Concepcion I agree. Build on the characters because the relationship between them is why this whole thing works. Yeah, it’s a wonderful, heartbreaking, really moving season of TV. I can’t wait for season two.
Rosie Knight Episode three, still, I say best if not one of the best episodes of TV that we’ll get this year, and I can’t wait to see it on every list. I can’t wait to see it break into award shows because that shit is so good.
Jason Concepcion Up next, Nerd Out.
Rosie Knight Warning this Nerd Out contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part two game. And more than likely, that means that it contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season two on HBO. That is not out yet, but they’re going to make it. In today’s Nerd Out where you tell us what you love away or you share a theory that you’re passionate about, which you’ve been doing more and more often, and we love to hear it, Harrison shares a thought and a dream for a potential Last of Us Part three. Inspired by our nut out from Rob a few episodes back, which I love because this is now like we are programing The Last of Us Part three story. Like it’s happening here and everyone’s ideas are incredible.
Jason Concepcion So Harrison’s opinion and I’m going to summarize, is essentially that part three of The Last of Us video game, the third game, is going to delve into Ellie as a leader. You know, the game has explored the kind of like broken organizational structures of FEDRA and also the Fireflies. Harrison’s idea is what if Ellie, in a in a very hero’s journey kind of move, becomes that pivotal figure that rallies people to find a cure and to try and forge a better world. And living up to that ideal contained in the Firefly motto, When you’re lost in darkness, look for the light. And Harrison, you know as kind of a supporting details, points to various moments throughout The Last of Us the show that point to Ellie as a leader.
Rosie Knight Mm hmm.
Jason Concepcion You know, I don’t think it’s great that, you know, one of the main data points is David’s. David saying, oh, you’re so hair is wearing a leader. I don’t know how much we can trust that, but. But I do think that there is something to Lee as. As a real fierce fighting figure who, because of the fact that she is immune, if that was ever to become known, you know, in a kind of like Neo in the Matrix way.
Rosie Knight It’s very Chosen One.
Jason Concepcion Would get would just add a level of mystique to her that you would imagine would become almost messianic. Like I could imagine.
Rosie Knight Mm hmm.
Jason Concepcion If. If it becomes publicly known that Elie is immune, like people just wanting to reach out and just like.
Rosie Knight Exactly.
Jason Concepcion So I could see this happening.
Rosie Knight I, I really like this take because so much of The Last of Us, the show and us playing the game and and if you play Part Two, this is also the same is very bleak. Part Two even more so it’s like one of the most depressing video games, like fulfilling and satisfying, but incredibly bleak.
Jason Concepcion It is very, very bleak.
Rosie Knight Just like, I mean, so depressing.
Jason Concepcion People say it as a critic. People call it a criticism. It’s not a criticism. The game is is intentionally.
Rosie Knight Yeah. It’s not a mistake. Like this is on purpose.
Jason Concepcion And absolutely objectively very, very bleak and not nihilistic in the sense that there’s no no.
Rosie Knight It’s not nihilist gaming.
Jason Concepcion Value, but it is bleak.
Rosie Knight I like something Harrison said. It’s like he sees The Last of Us Part two the game as basically like Empire Strikes Back, it’s like your character’s at the lowest point. And then like if you look at the trilogy format, that means your third one could have hope. It could present something different. I would love to see Ellie get to go on a hero’s journey of his own that is like not defined by violence or or somebody trying to use or exploit horror or revenge or all those themes that we’ve seen. I think that could be really cool. There’s definitely, as you saying it, there’s definitely like a hunger. You could see a Hunger Games Mockingjay style, like she is this radical revolutionary leader who’s also a symbol. Also, look, Eliie is smart. When we see Ellie in Part Two, you’re talking about an adult. When you see her in Part Three, she’s going to be.
Jason Concepcion She’s going to be grizzled and hardened adult.
Rosie Knight So when you see I mean, imagine if Ali was publicly immune. Imagine if the reason she felt safe to do that is because she had a hospital and labs that were just constantly synthesizing her blood or trying to find a cure via her blood. There’s all different ideas and ways. If she finds out the way that she was, you know, made immune. Just want to say she has Blade’s origin. But can we just say that she’s a they walk. I’m like, this is literally blades origin So I love that. But yeah I think this is really cool. I don’t think it would need to be some great straying away from the game because you could still have those moments of bleakness you still have infected, but you can add a more hopeful mission for Ellie and one that kind of issues like the darkness and violence of her past. I love this idea and love.
Jason Concepcion I love it too.
Rosie Knight That it was inspired by another Nerd Out. That’s really cool.
Jason Concepcion I think when you’re thinking about like, where would this story go, I would love to see a way that Abby and Ellie could work together, even if there are obviously there are things between them would never be okay.
Rosie Knight No.
Jason Concepcion But I think it would be fascinating to watch it if it could work.
Rosie Knight I also think that’s like a, to me, that is like a fan. You are going to have fans just like watching. There’s going to be fans who hate it. There’s going to be fans who love it. But that is, I’m sure, the nature of a million fan fix about this already. But I love this idea that for the greater good, these two people who are torn about apart by this horrific situation and who are enemies could come together as like reluctant allies to work together. I think that is so interesting.
Jason Concepcion Thanks, Harrison. If you have theories or passions you want to share, hit us up at xray@crooked.com. Instructions, as always, are in the show. Well, that’s it for us, Rosie. And that’s it for The Last of Us, season one.
Rosie Knight Oh my goodness. Congrats to us for finishing The Last of Us. Congrats to you, if you’re listening for finishing.
Jason Concepcion Anything to plug?
Rosie Knight You can find me @RosieMarx at Instagram and Letterbox’d. I wrote about every single episode of The Last of Us, including the final episodes I wrote a couple of pieces, They’re all at IGN. I wrote some cool pieces about Polygon, about the new Luther movie, which is absolutely bananas. And also I just plug to say, Go and watch Scream because it’s really good. I enjoyed it very much. Scream Six. We will be talking about it more.
Jason Concepcion Catch the next episode on Friday, March 17th for episode three of The Mandalorian. Remember, we’re bringing you two episodes a week. That’s every Wednesday and Friday on the podcast platform of your choice. Check us out.
Rosie Knight And if you want to see us as well as hear us, subscribe on YouTube where you can now watch full episodes of us here in the studio. And also sometimes that’s on zoom.
Jason Concepcion Also follow us on @XRVPod on Twitter. And there’s our Discord, where you can meet up with lots of friendly people who also listen to the show. It’s a great place to hang out and meet other people, and we’re hanging out there. Come see us. Five star ratings. Five star reviews. We got have them.
Rosie Knight Five. Five. Five. Five
Jason Concepcion You got to give them to us. Here’s one from JeffN43. It’s a shame that we can’t rate this higher than five stars. My vision has been x ray. Thank you. JeffN43. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Man X-ray vision is a Crooked Media production. The show is produced by Chris Lord and Saul Rubin. The show is executive produced by myself and Sandy Girard. Our editing and sound design is by Vasilis Fotopoulos. Delon Villanueva and Matt DeGroot Provide video Production support. Alex Reliford handles social Media. Thank you Brian Vasquez for our theme music. See you next time.
Hey Mike, it’s Christoff from Mureen. I want to talk about the Fireflies today. Mike I’ve been to Firefly supporter for 20 years. Ever since the fall, I’ve been really a fan of what they’re doing. You know, I got the Firefly shirt, I got the sticker, I got the stencil. But I think if you look at it fairly, Mike, and it’s taken a long time for me to open my eyes to this, if you really look at it. Mike, the one thing that they can do is is spray paint that symbol all over the place. That’s the only thing they do good, Mike. They fail at everything. They can overthrow FEDRA. All they’ve done is ruin cruises across the country. And then Marlene, when she had it in the bag, she fumbled the bagm Mike. I’m not going to go into it. I’m not going to belabor the point. Mike But she ruined it. Okay Mike. Bad plan all around. She’s bad at organizing. The Fireflies were not prepared for what they had to do. And not only that, but, you know, I. I am sad to say I supported them. When they indoctrinate kids, they put guns in kids hands and they don’t train them up and have them ready to do what they gotta do. Mike, take my answer off the air. Thank you.
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