re: 'The Last of Us' Episode 3 Gamers Thread: Spoilers!! Complaints, Part 2 talk allowed

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I wasn’t a huge fan of the backstory of the relationship

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If you're going to do an episode on two people, shouldn't they live past that single episode? I mean, it's not five seasons into Walking Dead where you delve into someone's past that you've seen for multiple episodes (if not for two or three seasons.)

TWD and FTWD both got kinda soft in the last three seasons, but the characters already had us invested, so we paid attention when there were weird one-off jags that didn't seem to fit with the overall story arc. That's not where we are with TLOU. I may come back to it after the season closes if they develop a coherent story that is interesting, but to see the actors do this stuff is painful.

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(Multiple paraquote) In the game, he was gay.

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Not true. It's hinted at, sure. That's it.

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The show was always going to have to expand on the backstory of characters at some point.

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Fine. Dive into Ellie and give us some reasons why she is so caustic (perhaps how her parents/siblings(?) were lost). Or go into Joel's life just after the death of his daughter and how he goes medieval on the infected - and perhaps even a few of the not-so-infected. Heck they could even dedicate some interesting dystopian time on the government's response and motivations.

Any of those kind of backstory details progress the story and move it along, even though it's events that occurred in the past. Bill was a small, though interesting, part of the journey. Frank was already dead. Their relationship, whatever that might have been, had nothing to do with the story. What a waste of nice opportunity to fill in some intriguing world building.