![]() For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity-”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”-but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. ![]() Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response-tossing her in the hole multiple times-hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.Ĭut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. ![]() When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and definitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. This is-and I don’t mean this as an insult at all-a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a brick-throwing contest and race to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms.
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