I’m basically the same age and can’t say I really know it.
My older sister might have had the album though, not sure.
The trolls are at it again. Ep 4 hasn’t even been released yet and trolls are rating it low on IMDb, just like they did with ep 3 last week. I really dislike those kinds of people. In other news, Pedro Pascal hosts Saturday Night Live this week. 
I’m 44 and I know who Linda Ronstadt is, though I did not recognize that song.
A Linda Ronstadt songbook seemed odd to me since she wasn’t a songwriter, but Googling around I’ve learned today that packaging piano music by performer was/is a common practice.
It seems to me it should be trivially easy to block or delete reviews posted before the episode is even out. Are these sites even trying to keep their scoring systems clean?
I am also 44 and have heard her name, but know only this about her:
- She was in the 1983 Pirates of Penzance movie, which is the version I grew up with.
- She dated George Lucas. I’m not sure if this is just gossip, but I had always heard she was one of the people George dated after his divorce in the early 80’s.
So…let’s say I don’t know much about her.
In California we remember her as the “First Girlfriend” when she was dating Jerry Brown during his first term as governor.
Same here. 55 and I know who Linda Ronstadt is and many of her songs but, for whatever reason, I did not remember that song.
That was the first thing I remembered , my mother having songbooks like that to play the piano with in the 70s-early 80s. She had a lot of popular, easy listening kind of music books and while she didn’t have that exact one, it did bring up that memory of what was inside our piano bench. 50 years old- knew the song and who Linda Ronstadt was due 100% to my parents listening to her.
It’s the internet. Clicks are clicks. They’d rather solicit a counter-campaign to drive up traffic even more.
Another data point: I am fifty and know at least a half dozen Linda Ronstadt songs off the top of my head but didn’t know that particular one. Surprised they didn’t use my favorite song of her’s: the mega hit “Mr. Plow”
IMDB does some reweighting of the scores to down-weight “suspicious” ratings, but it’s not sufficient.
While watching 1-3 the past two days and never having played the game my first thought was “Wow, this is really hitting a lot of the same notes as Children of Men even having a similar plot and similar characters.” Humanity ending event throwing the world into chaos. From the government crackdown, anti-government groups, mysterious group that may/maynot exist that is going to cure us after unwilling hero guy decides to transport young ‘the cure’ female through hostile territory after being convinced by female friend who soon dies after.
Did a google search and someone asked the game creator about that and he said it was not a coincidence. Children of Men is one of his favorite movies and he borrowed heavily from it.
While it is fun to talk about I cannot see a Linda Ronstadt song being the thing that is immersion breaking in this show. The song seems very reasonable given its use.
He was quite impressive through the whole episode, actually. Even when’d lose character he was hilarious. Usually the weakest part of the show, I really liked the last skit with Ego Nwodim trying to cut her steak.
An interview with a toxicologist who has a pending book about killer fungi. The good news: fungi probably won’t turn us into zombies. They’ll just kill us outright.
What does the show get right?
I really loved the talk show scene in the ’60s where the doctor brought up climate change and an increase in the probability of fungal pandemics—that’s pretty accurate.
As the climate warms, and as normal temperature goes up … fungi are very evolvable. If you’ve ever touched a puffball or whatever, and seen all the spores come out, there’s millions of them. Each one an opportunity for a little mutation.
Episode 4 seemed the most “game-like” of all the episodes so far. At least, while watching it, it evoked memories from playing the game. While maybe my least favorite of the four currently out I still liked it a lot. “Least favorite” being relative. Still loving the show and I liked episode 4.
Agree that it was the weakest. The action was passable. The plot of it did seem very side-questy. I didn’t get the emotional oomph from Ellie’s violence and Joel’s reaction that I think they were going for, but the chemistry between them was great overall and I laughed out loud multiple times.
Wife and I got a late start on the show and just dove in this weekend and caught up last night. Not much to add to the discussion that hasn’t already been covered.
Quick notes:
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The Linda Ronstadt thing stood out to me. I’m about a decade younger than Joel so it’s probably generational. It’d be an exaggeration to say it was immersion breaking, but I definitely got distracted mid-episode trying to determine what the song was and if it was supposed to be significant or not. When something cultural is used and re-used as a plot device, I think it’s a mistake if it’s not something really well understood by current watchers, even if the choice fits the characters in story. Linda Ronstadt hasn’t been relevant for a long time and there seems to be no chance of there being a Stanger Things-esque resurgence. Just my 2 cents.
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I think the pattern of trolls brigading review sites is harder to manage than you might think. Simply blocking reviews pre-show airing would have some negative tradeoffs. First, a significant number of people get access to pre-screeners. It used to just be prominent critics, but with influencers, bloggers and podcasters that audience has exploded. Except in rare cases, “early” reviews are just as likely to be valid as they are trolls. Second, shows release at different times globally. I don’t know how isolated the troll issue is to the US, but the website would need to make some fairly complicated choices about how to restrict each show and whether to apply some geographic filters. It’s a complex problem and most solutions would both block valid reviews as collateral damage and also might be easy to defeat with a VPN. Lastly, and probably controversially, there isn’t anything inherently invalid about those “troll” reviews. They could be toxic and usually based on bigotry, but the negative opinions are just that, opinions. We can’t really police which criticisms are valid and invalid, even if we want to. I’m sure plenty of low quality movies and TV have been artificially boosted by having popular subject matter too.
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For some reason I never made the connection to Children of Men in the run up to this show. Great context.
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I’m finding Ellie to be a little bit annoying. Upthread any folks have bemoaned the trope of characters acting stupid in these types of shows and I agree that this one is better than most, but Ellie is kind of the exception. I know she’s a (sort of) kid and kids can be stupid and willful, but the habit of her pretty much doing the opposite of what Joel says every time is starting to become a problem for me. I found the character of Leia in Obi Wan Kenobi insufferable, hoping this show keeps it under control.
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Between this and The Mandalorian, Pedro is really cornering the market on Lone Wolf characters with Cubs in tow. This show will wrap up pretty much right as Mando S3 is launching so it’s gonna be a lot of Pedro to start 2023. Fortunately, I really like him.
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Episode 3 was a great watch; it was a nice break from the somewhat repetitive nature of every zombie story combined with every quest story.
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Melanie Lynskey is a bit of a strange choice as the leader of a band of murderous rebels. I find it a little hard to believe that as society is falling apart that the patriarchy is going to die away. And Rose from Two and a Half Men being the heavy is tough to wrap my head around.
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Joel being dumb enough to drive through a barricaded city and getting lost is an example of characters acting too stupid to survive.
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It was mentioned up thread, but this version of the US seems to believe that suburban sprawl and exurbs are not a thing. Bill and Frank’s little town would have to be at least 50 miles outside the city to be even close to as isolated, probably more. Kansas City here seems to transition directly from wide open spaces into metropolitan the instant that you went under that underpass. Any real highway passing through a major city in the US is going to have on and off ramps every 1 mile or so, often less, so bypassing that blocked overpass should have been trivially easy. Even smarter would have been to simply go off road and cross the intersecting road at grade, it wasn’t a chasm.