HBO's The Last of Us

There has been a lot of hype over HBO's The Last of Us.

My take on episode 1.  First half great, 2nd half boring.

Mild spoilers ahead...

They did what I feared... they skipped the middle.

They start out with the introduction of the plague.  This is the $#!^ I find fascinating.  I want them to spend episodes... NAY!  A SEASON!... getting into the nuts and bolts of the infection.  How does it work, why is it spreading, how is science fighting it, and how is society dealing with it?  What happens as social and economic systems start to break down? There is so much story there.

But, like so many movies and series before it, we get quickly moved past all that and land in a future where folks are despondently walking about a landscape that nature is slowly recapturing.  Walking Dead skipped past all the good stuff too... and gave us season after season of folks wandering about running into worse and worse marauders and scavengers.  

I do hope this is not where the show is going... but the first episode for me had a great build-up and then a big let-down.

Man Finds Former Self Embarassing

I am in season 5 of True Blood... and I am starting to mourn that it will end in two more seasons. I wrote earlier a few weeks ago on Facebook about how much I have been enjoying it... and my perplexion as to why I didn't enjoy this when it first came out in 2008.

It occurred to me the other night.

It's so gay.

By 2008, my conservative faith of 30 years had swung pretty liberal... but I still had a lot of hang-ups. Decades of conditioning do not turn on a dime. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that I loved and supported the gay community. I probably would have taken umbrage if anyone had suggested otherwise.

However, looking back, I can recognize that gay representation made me uncomfortable. I could view thousands of heterosexual kisses on screen... but two men kissing once would have made me feel that an "agenda" was being "pushed." Do what you want in your own bedroom, but keep it out of the public sphere... after all, will someone think of the children??

Your previous self can be so... embarrassing. Folks don't like to reflect on it (I don't). It took me til Season 5 to put 2 and 2 together as to my initial distaste for the show.

We cringe... so we don't want to remember. We clean up our histories, we gloss over our scriptures, and we don't tell our children about family issues.

I hope MLK was right about the moral arc of the universe. I hope we really are getting better.