This is just a tiny note, and in a way I've already made it. But I just want to hold a lantern up to the specific way that THE LAST OF US 106 does its time jump, because I think it's relatively unique.
After telling us it's three months later, we get that scene I wrote about yesterday in the cabin, followed by Ellie and Joel getting jumped and then taken to Tommy. And in the midst of all that we get beats that signal change in our characters. Joel's—he gets all shaky and seems to be having some kind of panic attacks—is not dissimilar from how you might seem time jumps handled in other shows like this. You meet the characters and now someone has a scar on their face or their arm is bandaged. The characters' bodies become the canvas on which to "paint" change.
But in the case of Ellie, we get something much more unusual: a change in her behavior. Right away in the cabin scene we see her holding a gun, she doesn't listen to Joel and she's got little respect for these people, either. Marlon calls her "the little psychopath," which isn't exactly true to her behavior in that moment, but over the course of the episode, yeah, she seems more feral than before.
And what's really great and unusual is that it isn't commented on. This isn't some mystery that the show is going to have to explain. It's just what the time out here has done to her. And it's just for us to observe.
I think a lot of the time when writers do time leap moments, they don't consider changes in the mental state of the characters. But it's a great technique: without a single word of comment, it underlines just how much time really has passed.
