Ellie and Dina break into a record store and Ellie sings Dina an A-Ha song and you literally watch Dina fall in love with Ellie as the song is being played (I mean, I think she was already in love with her; so maybe this is more of any last vestiges of her ability to deny it being swept away by the tide). They’re on a Rambo adventure to Evil Seattle where everything is fucked up and Ellie wants to kill the woman who killed Joel, and Dina’s unswerving support of that mission is Cute Actually but is also kind of going to get them both killed, right? And as part of this mission they end up in serious, serious danger in a subway tunnel full of Infected (read: zombies) and they’re going to have a rough time getting out of there, and then at the moment of truth Ellie, who is Infection-proof, sticks her whole god damn arm in an Infected’s mouth so that the monster doesn’t bite Dina, with whom Ellie is (of course) also deeply, powerfully in love. This kind of freaks Dina out because now she has to Do The Right Thing and shoot the person she’s in love with before that person turns into an Infected and kills her, except whuff, that’s hard, so she’s kind of shaky on the trigger as she’s preparing to blow Ellie’s brains out and Ellie negotiates with her and tells Dina her big dark secret which is that she’s Infection-proof, and when that turns out to be true, and she doesn’t have to blow Ellie’s brains out and the whole imagined future of the two of them just staying together and loving one another turns out to still be possible, Dina tells Ellie her big dark secret which is that she’s pregnant with whatisname’s baby (Kevin??) and also that she’s in love with Ellie. Except she doesn’t tell her that latter part, she doesn’t need to, because she flings herself into Ellie’s arms instead and gives her an all-timer of a kiss and then they have sex on the floor and then they wake up and they talk about it. And Ellie says: “holy shit: I’m gonna be a dad.“
This reminds me of an episode last season where Ellie went to the mall with a girl she had a crush on, named Riley, and they had a very cute first date indeed, right up until the moment Ellie had to shoot Riley in the head because Riley got Infected. It was my favourite episode of season one of The Last of Us (yes, above the Nick Offerman one) although “Seattle: Day One” is now my favourite episode of the series overall, and these two episodes have at least one thing in common, and what I am here begging for is for them to not go on to have two.
I have not played The Last of Us games — I knew this season’s Big Spoiler ahead of time, but only because of what a big to-do was made of it in games journalism back in ’19 — so I really have no idea where any of this is going. And even based on the one episode since my favourite episode of The Last of Us (so far) aired, I can see pretty clearly that the girls are not going to get away with it. Ellie is going full-boat evil and is making choices that, even were she to turn around right now and do what she should have done as soon as the words “I’m gonna be a dad!” were out of her mouth, and taken Dina back to Jackson and just lived as happily as they could for as long as they could, would still stain that happiness with the other thing forever. And Dina supports Ellie and her objectives completely, for reasons that I suppose are very good and thoroughly reinforce the themes of the show and I understand themes and writing and all of that, okay?
But I am here nonetheless begging to the trope gods, the gods of story, Craig Mazin, whoever: just this once, can the girls please, please please just get away with it?
Tariffs in Toyland, Too: Thirty Dolls
Look, I wasn’t planning to circle back on this, but Nazi Orange made it my responsibility to respond to the premise that any of us were getting thirty fucking dolls for Christmas. My sister never got thirty dolls for Christmas, and she was more indulged than most.
I have been italicizing a lot lately. Grumble grumble.
Meanwhile, over on the Yakface site, a post about a single Star Wars item being cancelled due to tariff-related cost overruns de-evolved (Trump voters rolled in to tell everyone that tariffs are Good Actually) and de-evolved (DOGE wannabes laid into ad hominem attacks using their new, favourite r-word) and de-evolved (the transphobes arrived!!) until I made a judicial decision to stop collecting toys altogether. WHAT THE FUCK DO TRANSPHOBES HAVE TO DO WITH ACTION FIGURES ANYWAY?! Aren’t they all busy making life awful for everyone? They collect toys in their spare time?!
Anyhoo. Unrelated to that, or the tariffs, or Andor ending, or anything else… I found my white whale in Star Wars action figure collecting, namely the Uncle Gundy figure from the Droids toy line from 1985, in the most recent stock drop at 4th Moon Toys, last Friday. One of those moments where I actually couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so long have I fetishized finding this one particular figure of this one particular guy from (I think?) like one episode of a cartoon I watched forty years ago.
Why Gundy? I dunno. I liked the name. I liked it so much it kind of just stuck in my head for all these decades, long past any memory of what the character was actually like on that show (I’ve watched Droids only once since I was a kid, and I still couldn’t tell you what Uncle Gundy sounds like), and when I went and wrote a Star Wars spec script during the pandemic called Droids: A Star Wars Story, which wasn’t based on the Droids TV show in any real way other than that there were droids in it, I threw a guy called Uncle Gundy in there, and I think that’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Back to the top: Look, I’ve declared formal ends to my collecting career before. I’m not doing that here. I’m sure I’ll continue to nibble at the declining supply of 3 3/4″ Star Wars figures for the rest of my natural life.
But the weird confluence of Andor ending and Gundy turning up and this whole hobby turning into (yet another) cesspool of Star Wars fanbro shitheads has me in a stronger iteration of, not just my “touch grass” phase, but also my peaceable love of the fact that all things end, and that moving on to the next thing is one of the nicest things about life, and that it remains so until our lives, too, end. I’ve got Gundy staring at me on my shelf, right in the middle, as I write my writings, and he’s as good an end to anything as anything else ever was.
And/or (Andor!) the miscellany
Andor will have ended by the time you read this. My heart is heavy. Andor Special Edition #3 is posted, for paying customers. Here’s a slice:
There will still be people who believe that the Empire in Star Wars cannot be America; it cannot be Israel; it cannot be anything but Nazi Germany or, at need, Russia (and hilariously enough, there are neo-Nazis who refuse to believe it’s even that). You tell them that George Lucas himself said that the rebels were emblematic of the Viet Cong to America’s Evil Empire in the original Star Wars; they will tell you that you are wrong. You show them the clip of him saying it out loud to Jim Cameron: they will tell you HE was wrong. The circular logic is self-fulfilling, desperate, brittle. The good guys are whoever “we” are. The bad guys are whoever “they” are. That those positions on the board could have been marked out by any intention other than virtue is a thought too complicated for any of their cowardly, grasping minds.
So yeah, I’m really having the time of my life in there. Edition #4 this Sunday. I’m gonna circle around to Rogue One and Star Wars next week and then I’m leaving town.
- Meantime, speaking of toys, here’s Baylan and Shin. (Giant Green Space Hand)
- An oral history of the Millennials’ internet. I am these people, but I am not of these people. (The Ringer)
- I’m pretty whatever on the new Buffy series, but seeing Skeleton Crew‘s Ryan Kiera Armstrong get called was a delight. (Vulture)
- This is how you tell this story: What Tom Holland’s lip-sync teaches us about stormwater management (written by, I shit you not, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District)
- There’s a lot of good stuff in this interview with Adam Becker but my favourite is “Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy.” (Ars Technica)
- Did you know I always remove the stupid tracking links from everything I post on here? That’s just a service I provide to You, The Reader. (Ghost then goes ahead and adds its own tracking links, which fucks things up sometimes, and I can’t do anything about it. But at least it’s not Substack!)