Quote Originally Posted by Mal View Post
Very much agree with this, and really appreciate that aspect of the show. I've described it to others as post-post-apocalyptic, since it's set two decades after the initial event instead of right afterwards when everything is chaos. I love how they've explored several different flavors of "this is how humans might end up living" - [spoiler, I guess] we've got a military led, faintly fascistic feeling world in the Boston of the first couple episodes, isolation with no society at all with Bill and Frank, guerilla warlord stuff in Kansas City, a commune in Jackson, a religious cult in Colorado. I don't know the video game, but I suspect it's the game's structuring that led to this. Since each level in a video game is supposed to include new and different challenges for a player to size up and overcome, it was probably natural for the designers to try and make each stage of the journey a totally different navigation task. It would have been boring to just have Joel and Ellie go from one FEDRA-controlled city to another.

Anyway, I like that it's not asking the question of "What would happen if society collapsed?" and then focusing on the angles of the immediate aftermath and how survivors find one another, like most other shows/films of the genre. It's more interested in "If society collapsed would/could it ever be constructed again?" I'd love to see a season set another 20-30 years down the road when Joel's gone and perhaps Ellie's in a key position somewhere. I guess eventually you'd have to decide on one dominant social structure (or extinction), which could make it less interesting. But in the meantime there's still a lot to play with. Does anyone even want to recreate human society circa 2003? In another generation, will anyone even remember what it was like and how it was structured?
Well put.