I think there’s something so deeply and intimately and morbidly true about The Last of Us’s primary thesis which is that humanity’s fatal flaw, in that very Shakespearian way, is that we are destined to care too much about one another so much so that we discard the collective entirely. like we have such a capacity to love the human race and humanity as a whole, to grow our communities and govern cities how we know best and foster such connection with the masses which we are part of, but it’s overtaken by our capacity to love even just a single other person. like one human can come into your life that creates such an intrinsic and passionate love in you— or maybe two people or a family’s worth or any small number— and you suddenly would burn entire villages down just to keep them safe.
joel doesn’t blink twice murdering to find ellie. he doesn’t look back when he decides to do what he does at the hospital later on. he has no remorse about any of it it, because this one girl has grown to mean more to him than any possible greater good could ever mean. and it’s reciprocal. ellie would— and does— do anything she can to help him, save him, protect him, and, eventually, to avenge him. because that’s what you do when you love someone. not when you love people. when you love someone.
and it’s selfish, in a way??? because we love these people and would do so much for them because they mean more to us than other strangers do. it’s exactly like an iteration of the trolley problem, actually. one track has your daughter on it and one track has fifty people. don’t even try telling me you wouldn’t go onto track B if it meant saving your daughter and her puppy dog eyes from the whimpering and pain and fear. The Last of Us says yes, you would. I would. we all would. and like yeah that is our greatest weakness, that we have such a unique ability to love a handful of people so deeply that our compassion towards community and strangers and the bigger collective starts to slip from view. but goddamn what a fucking great fatal flaw it is to have. we are all going to die and the world will burn because we loved another person too much.
glass onion was amazing and I wouldn’t change anything about it. BUT I do think it would have been hilarious if there was a post credit scene with all of them getting covid, because of course miles’ gun vax thing doesn’t work.
at long last!!! my piece for the @merthurzine that i had so much fun doing at the end of last year even though i hurt my own feelings with it. i highly encourage taking a look at the other pieces of this project as they trickle in !!
Mockumentary set in medieval England with no explanation as to why or how a camera crew is there
A lot of people have mentioned monty python and the holy grail on this post which is accurate but I was envisioning more of a the office/what we do in the shadows type sitcom complete with talking heads and will-they-or-won’t-theys and with the technology that allows the mockumentary genre to exist going completely unquestioned by the entire cast despise it not occurring anywhere else in the otherwise realistically portrayed setting
…hang on, I think there’s a workable premise here.
The camera crew is a team of time-traveling scientists, studying an isolated village. They don’t bother trying to blend in with the locals much, because they know the village will be wiped out by plague in a few years and no trace of their expedition survives in the historical record. The villagers think they’re wealthy-but-eccentric travelers from a distant land, and they’ve bought off the local lord, a minor knight who doesn’t pay much attention to his serfs anyway.
The scientists are jaded. They’ve all been on multiple expeditions to doomed communities, and they’ve learned not to get too attached to their subjects. Part of the mockumentary format includes their video diaries, internal squabbles, and personality conflicts. The rest is interviews with the locals, footage of the crew tagging along with them in their daily lives, and the various experiments members of the crew are running.
(Most of their research is innocuous: water and soil samples, collecting plant and animal specimens to restore future biodiversity, measuring linguistic drift. All their planned human-subject research had to pass an ethics review board.)
(That said, sometimes opportunities for impromptu data collection arise. And sometimes you get bored and want to know what would happen if you projected a 40-foot holographic cow on the road outside the village.)
(The time travel science ethics review board has very clear rules about starting cults: no matter how funny you think it would be, don’t.)
The tone of the show is pitch-black comedy, at least to start with. The crew is burned out and cynical, the villagers are poor and underfed and overworked. Nobody’s doing their best work, or even trying to, really. This is a team that couldn’t get better, sexier, more exciting assignments, and a village full of people whose idea of a better future is a harvest that fails less than last year’s.
But over the course of, say, three seasons — not quite as long as it’s going to take for the plague to arrive — the research team does something they’re really not supposed to do. They get invested. They start to care, a little. They give the villagers a tiny bit of help, here and there — and they’re shocked to see just how much the villagers manage to do with that help.
But the villagers are still doomed, even if they’re clever and curious and likable. Even if a few of them are smart enough to figure out that the research crew aren’t just weird rich foreigners. Even if letting them all die is starting to feel like a waste, or even a crime.
There’s nothing they can do about it. History is very clear about the village’s fate, and they can’t change history.
Right?
ooh ooh okay. the cold open for every episode (the equivalent to B99’s morning meeting cold opens) is the expedition leader going over a video message from her future self. like just a day or two in the future. usually it’s nothing big, just letting her know about any events in the village that they should try to get recordings of, and warning her about any new bullshit her underlings are going to try to get away with.
in theory she would also get warned away from any actions that could negatively impact the timeline, but this is an extremely low-stakes, low-prestige assignment. everyone with actual career prospects is fighting tooth and nail for the sexy assignments, like pre- volcano Pompeii or Yellowstone. nothing her team can do here really matters, so she never gets warned about anything major.
until sweeps week, probably.
some fun running gags:
the scientists always say decades without specifying the century, leading to constant misunderstandings
“hey it could be worse, we could have been stuck in the 20s”
“what are you talking about? the 1920s are a dream assignment compared to this!”
“oh lol no I meant the 2020s, my bad”
“you know what I miss? live music. when I was stationed in the 90s I got to go to so many concerts”
“no shit? oh man did you get to see Nirvana live, that would rule”
“no but I did see The Magic Flute in Vienna! with Mozart conducting!”
additional running gag: the show starts when the team has already been on site for a while, so most of the villagers are already pretty blasé about seeing future technology. BUT there is one villager who just. always loses her shit, every time. without fail. just full on “BACK, foul creature!!!! WHAT is this FIENDISH SORCERY you wield????” while her neighbors are like “okay calm your tits Maud, they do this every tuesday and it’s fine”
running gag that i am unashamedly stealing from star trek: constant references to events and cultural figures from future history (ie the period between now and when the scientists come from). also it’s never clear, based on the scientists’ offhand references to their childhoods and home lives, whether their future society is a blissful utopia or a very weird dystopia.
running gag with eventual payoff: there are two small and very grubby village children who like to follow the crew around. they never speak. we get lots of reaction shots of the two of them staring blankly at whatever nonsense just happened.
after at least two years of this, a member of the crew is trying to fix a piece of equipment and having no success. the two small children wander into frame (as they often do) and the scientist ignores them (as he usually does)
only this time, the smaller and grubbier child wordlessly pulls a tool out of the scientist’s toolbox and hands it to the larger and slightly less grubby child, who fixes the problem and hands the tool back to the (now dumbfounded) scientist. they walk away, still silent. now it’s the scientist’s turn to stare blankly into the camera.
for maximum comedy the expedition head should be verging on Michael Scott levels of obliviousness. just floating along in a bubble of reassurance from her future self that there’s nothing to worry about.
the cold open is like “good news! the supply drop will go smoothly, no hiccups” and then in the episode we see that their supplies from the future, which were supposed to be teleported to an uninhabited clearing in the woods, landed in the village square in front of the church. on a sunday. and the villagers opened the crates and walked off with a bunch of future tech that the crew now has to hunt down and reclaim.
and they tell their boss none of this, so when she goes to record her message for her past self at the end of the episode she can be like “good news! 😌” and carry on living her life with the serene confidence of someone who believes in horoscopes and also gets to write her own horoscopes, because her staff makes sure she never knows about their constant fuckups and eleventh-hour saves.
yeah yeah yeah mortifying ordeal of being known and all that but sometimes a friend mentions something about you that you didn’t think was noticeable and it feels like your heart is being cradled in their hands
honest to god can’t stop thinking about this song about jeff bezos by philip labes (link takes you to his spotify). it’s such a good example of politically driven folk music.
Lyrics:
Jeff found a genie in a bottle Who said, “I can give you anything you ask” “You can have your wishes three And a million more for free It’s unlimited, just set me to the task.”
Well, Jeff thought a while, Said, “I want houses, "I want boats, I want fancy modern art, I want tickets to the Met, I want my own private jet, And a rocket into space just for a start.”
Well, the genie waved her arms and made it happen His every wish bolted from the blue And folks all over town grew enamored, gathered ‘round To admire the man whose wishes had come true
They said, “Let’s hear it for the man who has everything! By good fortune he’s been set so far apart.” “Yeah, let’s hear it for Jeff who has everything! 'Cause his wishes are only at the start.”
Well, Jeff heard their shouts and he grew worried He said, “Everybody’s getting in my way.” The genie smiled as before, “You’ve got a million wishes more. You can even give a bunch of them away.”
Well, Jeff got confused and sorta quiet 'Til he finally said, “I have just one wish more.” “I am satisfied, so I wish that you would die So you cannot grant wishes anymore.”
Well, the genie’s eyes got big and sad and shiny 'Til she finally said, “Your wish is my command.” And with an effervescent sigh, she disappeared before his eyes And no wishes were ever granted there again
So, let’s hear it for the man who has everything! By good fortune he has set so far apart Yeah, let’s hear it for Jeff, who’s got everything! Every single fucking thing except a heart
