The problem making it all the way to KC isn't so much that they didn't have infected to deal with, but that they pretend that the roads would be clear to drive down. According to Joel everything fell apart within the course of a few days. He mentioned this to Ellie in one of the episodes. So you would have tons of mini-disaster areas like the one Joel and Tommy were trying to escape from. They had a traffic jam and needed to drive off road to get around it. This same experience would be repeated everywhere.

You'd have natural obstacles as well, trees and debris in the road, not to mention the breakdown in the pavement after 20 years. That's one area that TWD has them beat in the early seasons. It was so difficult to get from place to place. In the Season 3 episode where Morgan reappeared, Rick, Michonne and Carl had obstacles to face just returning to their hometown and got stuck at one point too.

It would take weeks to get from Boston to KC if the world fell apart in a matter of days.

It feels like being cheated in a sense too. I remember watching Fear and was so disappointed when they jumped from the outbreak to the point where everything had fallen.

I would've liked to have seen Joel and Ellie struggle on their way, run into some sketchy people, maybe others that need help. Give a feel for the world and how some on the fringes are living in it. They could've expanded a bit on Tess, and then also had Joel and Ellie interact with Bill and Frank, then have their suicide after they left.

The problem is that they wanted to cram the entire first game into one season, which not only isn't smart due to having so much ground to cover, but in a second season it leaves you off at a very bad start point for the series.

The endpoint should have been reaching Tommy and dealing with all the stuff he had going on with the bandits. You can have the debate of meeting up with the fireflies, Joel's indecision there, and then the final scene is them embarking for Colorado.

 

I can see wanting to fit the game into one season, but they didn't give themselves enough episodes to do it in. Or they should've had longer run times like the premiere. Stranger Things did this in their most recent season. They had 9 episodes but most of them were the length of small films. There has to be some balance between TWD just dragging things on and beating a dead horse to moving too quickly through the story.

If I hadn't played the game, or we hadn't had the more detailed Episode 3 story, then I would probably be looking at the pacing differently.

 

Thought that episode 6 was Bella's best performance so far. She had a range of emotions to display and she did a great job. Some people are not happy that we're getting a weaker version of the game Joel in the series, but that part really doesn't bother me. Things change in adaptations and Joel isn't going to show any of this side to Ellie. We mostly get it in his conversation with Tommy, who you would expect him to open up with. So I think you can consider this a deeper dive.

The world building though hasn't worked for me. I didn't like the KC group, and something just doesn't click with the Wyoming one at this point, and even those two random people they ran into before getting to Joel's brother. That scene felt off.

I really like Gabriel Luna's portrayal of Tommy though, and wish we could've seen more of him.

The individual acting performances are really carrying the show. I think Pedro and Bella have been close to perfect. And the Henry/Sam and Bill/Frank stories were delivered incredibly well by those actors.