Just realized they formed a thread for the series last month. Didn't notice it until now.

The David story really deserved a full two episodes. It all felt too rushed, and I thought leaving out the fight scene where Ellie and David team up, took out some of his motivation in becoming fixated on her.

Now that show is almost over, some of the other creative decisions they made early on loom larger as we rush to the finish line.

While the Bill and Frank episode was well written, if you take that one out, it does nothing to impact Joel and Ellie's story. It was wasted time. Then we had Episode 4, which was short, but with a focus on the KC group that was unnecessary. Even the Ellie centered episode with Riley I thought should've been told in flashbacks, while Ellie did stuff to try and get supplies and help for Joel.

The finale is only 43 minutes long. I'm really perplexed about why they focused on some irrelevant things this season when they only had 9 episodes.

 

I might've mentioned this before here, but I think the course the second game took is easier to portray in a TV series if they play their cards right. A game is more immersive when you play as Joel and Ellie.

From what I've read my main issue with the second game is not the big early event that happens, but another character basically ends the story broken. Keeping it vague for spoilers if anyone happens along and finds this.

The bigger thing for me, is that if you want to take a message that violence, revenge etc is bad, then you should have a game where your choices can take you the other way. That I think would be brilliant, if with other playthroughs you could have different outcomes, like in the Witcher 3.

Druckman makes you kill everything in sight and then says, this is bad. Well, maybe I wouldn't have killed a particular person but the game gives me no choice but to do it to advance. So those are the reasons I wouldn't want to play it, but I agree it could be done well in a series.

I think the only bad episode this season was # 4. The problem is that they don't all really flow or interconnect that well. Episode 3 is probably the best written of them all, but it's stands on its own and isn't a part of Joel and Ellie's journey in this series, but they spent over one hour on it for some reason.

So, I wouldn't be as critical of the pacing if they weren't taking too much time on inconsequential things. It's a creative choice problem that then impacts the pacing.

The Walking Dead drove me crazy with the bottle episodes, but that was largely because they were trying to fill out a (too long) 16 episode season. Here when there is story to tell and expand upon, it's a bit more egregious.

It aggravates me because the set design, cinematography and most of the acting (minus the cringe KC group) is excellent.

The pacing of House of the Dragon bothered me a little bit, but not to this extent. The one thing that irritated me there was that we didn't get more background on Rhaenyra/Harwin and Daemon/Laena. They were introduced and killed off in the same episode. That was the worst point of the season for me. But I give them more space in it all because all of those time skips aren't easy to navigate. The Last of Us though is a linear story that they made into a zigzag at points, when it wasn't needed.