While better than last week’s episode, this week’s episode of The Last of Us continues to be uneven due to the writing and rearrangement of the narrative relative to the source material.

The most glaring this week is just how quickly the second day in Seattle goes by. After a brief scene where Dina is triangulating WLF radio signals on a map in the theatre, and a subsequent stroll through the city, the show cuts to nighttime, concluding the second day already. I keep trying to separate game from show, but when so many changes start happening and compounding, it becomes harder to not notice these problems.

But skipping over and reimagining the narrative isn’t the only thing that’s different about this adaptation. As mentioned, Ellie continues to be very happy-go-lucky on this little road trip of revenge, so much so that when she finally does catch up to Nora by the end of the episode, it was hard to buy into her rage. I understand that this adaptation is portraying Ellie as burying her hatred deep down and that she’s putting on a mask of sorts for Dina’s sake, but when my takeaway is that Dina is more motivated for this mission than Ellie, there’s a problem with the writing. I haven’t really felt her anguish and torment this season until her confrontation with Nora, which made the scene feel less impactful than the source material.

Likewise, Nora exposits the justification for killing Joel to Ellie, and it was a strange move as both Ellie and us, the audience, are already privy to that information, so why waste time repeating it? Do the writers not trust us to remember key plot points that they feel the need to spoon-feed to us? It’s a stark contrast to watching season two of Andor at the same time, for instance, which has some of the tightest writing I’ve seen in some time (don’t worry, that review is coming).

Because certain events are taking place out of order, certain payoffs (or lack thereof) are landing flat. Case in point, when Ellie, Dina, and Jesse (who came to the rescue), find themselves in a forest at night, only to stumble upon the Scars. Because the show introduced us to them earlier in the season, there was zero tension in this scene. We know who the Scars are and that they’re responsible for the evisceration of WLF soldiers, so when it happens again, there’s no “oh I see” moment. In the game, this is where we meet the Scars for the first time and we’re left totally in the dark about this new threat and the sense of unknown and fear really becomes palpable, especially considering they communicate via whistles, leaving us in the metaphorical dark about their intent. ? But now that they’re established in the show already, the suspense of that scene is completely absent. I mentioned that other scenes down the line may suffer due to these narrative changes, and this scene is evidence to me that some things, no matter how small, are affected by shuffling the narrative around, making me nervous for the end of the story.

The episode teases us with a hopeful sight by the end, with Joel returning via a flashback, which will more than likely take up the whole of the next episode. That leaves one episode left this season to conclude the three-day arc of Seattle, putting Ellie on a sprint towards that conclusion. I’m assuming the expensive sets and effects forced HBO to reduce the episode count this year, but I do think seven episodes is far too little time to tell this story properly. It’ll be nice to spend more time with Joel next week, and this week was still an improvement over last week’s, but the writing continues the trend of rushing towards the end while leaving no room for interpretation or nuance in the character’s state of being.