Spoilers in the Age of Being Very Online

Exploring The Last of Us and the disappearance of my original thoughts

Major spoilers for The Last of Us’ second episode of the latest season ahead.

On Tuesday, not even 48 hours after HBO released the latest episode of The Last of Us, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story with the headline “No. 1 on the Call Sheet: Bella Ramsey Takes Charge of ‘The Last of Us’.” The subhead: “The HBO star on becoming the sole lead of 'The Last of Us,' saying goodbye to working with Pedro Pascal, shutting out online trolls and trying to save the world — one plastic bottle at a time. (Spoilers for last Sunday’s second episode.)” … well, yeah. I would say that’s a major spoiler, and I would also say a spoiler alert doesn’t count when it comes after the spoiler.

If you have somehow managed to stay off the internet¹ the last week or simply don’t care about zombie culture (a community I respect, and am usually a member of after years of resisting The Walking Dead), the episode that aired last Sunday, just two episodes into the show’s second season, was its most important yet. It was beautiful and cinematic, consisting of an epic battle that made it feel like a season finale minus the worst part of a typical season finale, which is that you’re going to have to wait a year (or in the case of HBO, many years) to know what happens next. But it was the last few minutes of the episode that solidified that we’re in a new era of The Last of Us: a disturbing scene in which Abby (Kaitlyn Dever, who I will watch in anything) brutally murders Joel (Pascal) after beating him with a golf club to the point that he’s unrecognizable while Ellie (Ramsey) begs for his life. I made the mistake of watching this show before bed — the same mistake I made watching the first episode of the latest season of Black Mirror, IYKYK — and spent the entire next day with Joel’s black and blue, puffy face in my mind’s eye.

Happier times, when all they were worried about was human extinction

Unfortunately, I knew it was coming. Although I’m not sure I can complain. Is a spoiler really a spoiler if the plot has been around for five years?² The video game in which this season of the show was based on, The Last of Us: Part II, was released in June 2020. Anything I know about this, I have essentially learned against my will. Gaming is so far from being for me, mostly because I don’t want to work for a story. If I’m not getting paid to strain my brain and fidget around on those little remotes, I would rather be reading/watching/listening to something passively (I say as I am most certainly straining my brain to write this newsletter I famously am not paid for). But despite myself, I knew of Joel’s fate long before last week’s episode aired, when I found myself accidentally reading about his murder on a Reddit thread after I finished watching the first season, searching around for who fans thought would be cast in the second.

So that’s my own fault. Being on Reddit has really never done me any good unless I’m looking for an efficient way to clean my blender and some random guy in Idaho figured it out eight years ago or I have a pain in my chest that I need a stranger to tell me is probably not a heart attack. But there are dozens of ways that The Hollywood Reporter piece could have made its way to you before you caught up on last week’s episode: Instagram or X (the story is pinned to the top of both pages), TikTok or YouTube (the article was accompanied with a video interview), even LinkedIn. You could have come across it on Substack (sorry), another email newsletter or the little Google’s “Discover” section on Chrome that is way too tapped into what we will click. And in an instant, you would have known from the headline alone that one of the main characters had just left the show — and given the tone of the show and that there are few humans left on earth/nowhere for him to go, you’d probably have been able to guess that he died.

If this doesn’t secure Kaitlyn Denver an Emmy win after already being snubbed for Unbelievable and Dopesick, the Television Academy will be hearing from my lawyers

Spoilers are nothing new. And in an age when anyone with access to the internet can have an audience of some sort, they’ve become even more of a view into how everyone else is already exploring and examining media faster than you are. But this latest discourse around Joel’s death is making me question whether being very online enhances or hurts the TV watching experience. It’s a thought I have every time I’m a day late to White Lotus and miss a Substack live chat about whether HBO went too far letting one brother wank off another, for instance, or when a Yellowjackets meme gave me a little too much insight into an episode I’d yet to see. Sometimes I really miss the good old days when I would get antsy at the dinner table, watching 8:00 pm approach as I geared up for the new episode of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars or The Secret Life of the American Teenager. If I had to miss the episode, I would record it, and I could ask the three or four friends who I usually reviewed the latest episode with at school to hold off their discussion for one more day. There was no opportunity to be spoiled by The Hollywood Reporter or another news outlet: I never read those online and by the time I picked them up in line at the grocery store or airport, I had long since seen whatever they were “spoiling.” My biggest risk was probably someone’s Facebook status. That feels like a different world now.

For the shows that drop once a week, part of the fun is joining in the discourse online, watching how everyone else is dissecting each interaction between Mark S. and Helly R. on Severance or making fun of Tom Sandoval on Traitors. For the full season drops like You, I’m partly speeding through so I can appreciate the Joe Goldberg jokes on TikTok before they feel out of date. Understanding how everyone else is consuming the same stories as me adds a layer and a lot of fun to the viewing experience. I love saying “I thought it made sense dramaturgically” to my very offline fiancé who probably doesn’t know who Jeremy Strong is every time I get locked out of the apartment or insist once again on being a passenger princess.

But being so online has also chipped away at my ability to analyze television shows on my own. My opinions on characters have been warped by how strangers online project themselves onto those characters, my criticism/praise of a storyline is quickly softened when I see a post about why it was actually really good/bad. Would I be that strong of a Conrad girl when watching The Summer I Turned Pretty if not for Instagram shoveling “Bonrad” content down my throat? Would I have disliked Tell Me Lies’ main character Lucy Albright so much if I wasn’t told over and over that she was making bad decisions? I’m honestly not sure. It’s taken me years to admit that I think maybe we were collectively giving “Long, Long Time” — the The Last of Us episode starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as lovers trying to survive the end of the world — a little too much praise. It was romantic with excellent acting and some much-needed levity, but I’m not sure it advanced the show or was really the on-screen gay love story we needed. And even now, I may only be brave enough to say that after hearing Hunter Harris has the same opinion. Society’s general divergence from critical thinking and media literacy is doing far greater harm than simply spoiling my television viewing experience, but the fact that I spent more time understanding the nuances of relationships and good versus evil when watching The Vampire Diaries in ninth grade than I am watching basically anything at age 30 is saying something.

Did they teach me how to think critically? Maybe!

Sometimes spoilers are just spoilers, and though they’re a pain in the ass, they don’t take away from your ability to digest the story on your own. I saw Drop starring Meghann Fahy in theaters Friday night and had to admit that much of the plot had been spoiled for me from watching the trailer. (FYI this was an excellent B-grade thriller that I would recommend. Though that’s coming from someone who is a defender of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, so do with that what you will.) But I hadn’t been inundated with external content about this movie because, unfortunately to its detriment, so few people seem to be talking about it — I caught the only showing of the day in the AMC’s tiniest theater. Before I listened to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast the next morning about the movie, the only external opinions I had of it were from the two friends I saw it with, and really, those are the types of opinions I actually care about. It’s way more fun to discuss the shows you love with people you know and who know you, who can understand why a piece of TV show, book or film moved you or left you wanting more. It’s fun to hear why someone did or didn’t like a movie when I already know their taste, humor and thought processes. That’s part of the reason it’s so fun for Rachel and I to see each other dissect a medium we love, and why we’re so grateful you all stick around for the ride.

This is part of the reason I’ve been trying my best to be a tiny bit more offline lately, though that feels rich to say after just spending half an hour watching clips of Penn Badgley on all the talk shows (you’re welcome). I no longer have Instagram on my phone³. I deleted the TikTok app⁴. I even got rid of Chrome on my phone since I’m addicted to that aforementioned Discover section that feeds me exclusively updates on things like what’s happening on the set of Euphoria or who in the One Tree Hill cast is still talking — things I really don’t feel the need to know unless it’s just a click away. I’m considering using the Assistive Access setting on my phone that creates a simplified interface with only the apps you really need after seeing my friend toy around with the feature last weekend, but who knows if I’ll ever be that brave. At the very least, limiting my screen time will keep spoilers for the rest of this season of The Last of Us slightly at bay. That’s something I care about, since I don’t actually know what happens next in the video games.

I redownload the Chrome app just to show how you can’t make this stuff up

While I wasn’t surprised to see Joel die, I was still shocked by the timing. I didn’t realize that he died at the beginning of the video game; I thought we were going to have the full season with him, and I really wish we would have. The Last of Us is a show about zombies and the end of the world and disease and destruction. It’s yet another example of how, no matter how scary the monsters are, they will never be as scary as what humans will do to one another in the face of loss, heartbreak and the need for revenge. But it’s also about how we can heal one another, as evidenced by the love formed between Joel and his surrogate daughter Ellie. As much as I’m excited to see what comes of Abby’s character and Ramsey’s transition to sole lead of the show, I’m worried the show has expunged itself of what made it so powerful in the first place. It’s a fear I’ve seen a lot of people online have, too. I couldn’t tell you who.

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B Plot

What’s one spoiler you really wish you could have avoided?

Mallika: Rachel is going to make fun of me for bringing up this show again but I cannot express how much I wish I had seen the season three finale of The OC without knowing what was coming (spoilers, obviously, ahead). To be fair, I was in fourth grade when it aired — not exactly an appropriate age to see Mischa Barton’s dead body get carried away from a burning car as “Hallelujah” plays in the background. But the show’s creators thought the death of “it girl” Marisa Cooper was just what the show needed to revive itself, and maybe if I had witnessed it as intended, I could have enjoyed the show’s final season just a little more. I learned of her death years later, but plenty of people who were watching back in 2005 had it spoiled too. Barton herself spoiled her character’s demise just before the episode aired, it seems like at least in part because she wasn’t happy to be written off the show. We love a petty queen.

Rachel: Back in 2016, when I was 20 years old, working in Nashville for the summer before my junior year of college, my friends and I decided to do something we had no business doing. We booked a trip to New Orleans. This was a weekend I will never forget for many reasons. We passed from one unhinged moment to another in rapid succession, from getting our fake IDs thrown at us across a bar on Bourbon Street, to a drag queen feeding us vials of lime green mystery shots on the sidewalk, to my friend getting a third degree burn on her foot from dropping a hot slice of PIZZA on it, to a very drunk man with a clump of sunscreen stuck to the top of his lip giving us a graveyard tour in the 102 degree heat that eventually devolved into him just showing us houses in the Garden District which he claimed to belong to various celebrities from Sandra Bullock to John Goodman. But perhaps the most regrettable moment of the trip was when I had the misfortune of chatting with a group of frat guys from the University of Alabama in the French Quarter and the subject of Orange is the New Black came up, specifically the shocking, devastating death of Poussey Washington. The problem? I hadn’t finished the season yet! This poor boy… I’m pretty sure my friends were somewhere in the corner making out with his friends, but all he got from me was a mouthful of rage. I don’t think I’ve ever been more mad at a stranger in my life and I live in New York City! Anyway, RIP Poussey, and RIP my fake ID… and sorry to that man… I guess…

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C Plot

Netflix just dropped its trailer for Sirens, an upcoming series staring Meghann Fahy (from Drop of course but also The White Lotus, AND The Bold Type for real fans), Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon), Julianne More (!), Kevin Bacon, Glenn Howerton and Bill Camp. It looks like Fahy’s character is trying to get her sister out of the cult-like grip of a rich family. Two of our favorite Hollywood redheads, culty vibes, a strange sexual undertone between two nutsy women and Kyra Sedgwick’s husband? There is no question that we will be locked into this one come May.

Lots of bad things happening in the world, but a bright spot is the well-deserved shit being flung at transphobe JK Rowling by all our faves. Irish Princess Nicola Coughlin weighed in on Rowling’s egregious post celebrating a recent court ruling in the UK saying trans women were not covered under equality legislation. Coughlin wrote on an Instagram story, “Keep your new Harry Potter lads, wouldn’t touch it with a 10ft pole.” Trans-advocate and Broadchurch babe David Tennant was a little more diplomatic, saying that he wished Rowling “no ill will” but suggested we as a society “just let people be.” And Pedro Pascal minced no words, calling Rowling a “heinous loser,” as if we didn’t already love him enough. And yes, maybe those words were better used against someone evil like Rowling and not a-mostly innocent man like Jake Gyllenhaal… perhaps subscriber “john, ” who seemingly created a Substack account and subscribed to us solely so he could comment “stfu” under that essay (a dedication to haterdom we must applaud), had some valid points…

Let’s all decide to collectively ignore Rowling and focus on the fact that Rupert Grint (who we will hereby only be referring to as the star of Servant) has welcomed his second child! You may think his Instagram announcement is a brand deal with a onesie company but it’s actually just a thank you to the doctor who delivered the baby. Congrats, Rupert and another fav, Georgia Groome!

Adam Brody guest starred in his wife Leighton Meester’s new show Good Cop/Bad Cop as a “human doctor.” We need a human doctor because seeing this man in that cowboy getup made our hearts stop.

Thank you to The Today Show for asking Sarah Michelle Gellar what we’ve been wondering since we heard Buffy was getting a reboot: “Will you be slaying?” She says yes, but also that they’re going to wait until the show is “100% ready” — and to us, that sounds like we’re looking at a Euphoria-like timeline. We need her slaying NOW!

1. _{Or at least my side of the internet… sometimes people talk about how their internet is full of things like that pasta-feta bake and Theo Von and it makes me question whether I’m actually online at all.}

2. _{A question we also must ask ourselves about the people getting mad over Wicked part II spoilers. Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth didn’t change Broadway (for good, if you will) in 2003 just for everyone to act shocked that you-know-who is the scarecrow.}

3. I just check it like once an hour on my laptop while I work.

4. I redownload it when I need a treat.