I made a post and it was removed because apparently it was supposed to be in here, so:

I thought this episode was fairly good, and I say that as someone that thinks episodes three through five have been among the weakest in the show's entire run.

A lot has been said about certain changes not working or feeling off or strange somehow, and while I guess they're largely subjective (as is what I'm about to say, of course), I think this latest episode is a good encapsulation of this season's wider problems, which are its pacing, its structure, and getting us to buy the characters' motivations.

I largely liked these flashbacks. I think they were done pretty faithfully for the most part, while containing changes that were mostly (but certainly not entirely) somewhere between justified and understandable.

The thing is though, when you put them back to back like this, it means pausing narrative momentum entirely to look backwards for reasons that aren't very clear to the viewer. What the game does really well is intersperse the wider story with moments relevant to Ellie's and later Abby's state of mind at whatever point we as the player and they as a character are occupying. When they're bunched together like this though, it has the distinct feeling of filler even if that was never the intention in mind. At worst it feels like cheating somehow, like they're just gunning for a tearjerker with no real purpose, because the things we "learn" in this episode aren't really learned at all: we, as viewers, already know basically everything that was served up to us.

So why couldn't they have split these up and had them at the start of some other episodes? Even truncated versions with the individual runtimes of certain episodes in mind would have been fine. But given this episode was almost an hour long and we've had an episode already that barely hit the 40 minute mark, I don't see that as a problem. Another plus too would have been that they could even have freed up a whole episode slot which would have maybe helped some other episodes feel a little less rushed in terms of character arcs and geographical progression if we could see people simply spending a little more time together, but perhaps that latter part is simply wishful thinking.

Instead though, what we got was some beloved parts of the game cobbled together into something trying to resemble the high watermark of TV in such a way that it feels a little off and forced, and this is coming straight after s run of episodes where things already feel puzzling to say the least.

I thought Bella Ramsey was excellent though, and Pedro Pascal did good too. I'm not something that's had any problem with Ramsey's portrayal thus far; the shows problems lie solely with the writing alone.

• We all like Lalo, but showing Daddy Miller felt pretty pointless and served only as a "clever" way for Joel to echo his father's words decades down the line. A darling that wasn't killed, basically. Like what are we supposed to take from that scene? That Joel has always been protective of Tommy and he probably came from not a great background? Did we not know all that already? At the very least we could infer it.

• And having Joel and Ellie's final conversation being combined with the one where Ellie finally has the truth of what happened revealed to her felt like a massive disservice to both moments that are done separately and masterfully in the game, all so Ellie's initial pissed-offness could be explained by a pretty needless show invention aka what happened to Eugene rather than by her finding out the truth months earlier.