>This is such a weird criticism.

>When the power went out while at the hardware store, he went to the "New Bedford Plant" Natural Gas Plant and turned the gas back on assuming the reserves would last him in a town for for 1. He drives at the gates of the plant at full speed and cuts through the rest with bolt cutters.

Why would the gas even be off? And those plants don't just run themselves for 10 years with no issues, the supply would have dried up and there's no electricity for any of the mechanical functions that supply gas to work. They specifically zoomed in on him lighting the gas stove with a match, but he turned the electricity back on with the generator. He's conserving electricity to not use the electric pilot (its 2003, not 1886) but happy to keep everything else running 24/7/365 off the generator?

They literally live in that house for a decade as if all public works infrastructure didn't totally collapse and is working like normal simply because he flipped a switch at a plant miles away and poured whatever was left in a gas station into three oil drums. Hot showers, running water, gas, electricity, etc. It's total nonsense, none of that actually works that way and is a huge, frequent, and valid criticism of pretty much every piece of post-apocalyptic survivor media. The truck wouldn't have worked either in the last scene, the engine would have immediately seized when Joel tried to start it with decade old bad gas in the tank.

Does it make it "literally unwatchable" or any such nonsense? No, of course not, but that doesn't make it invalid criticism either.

>It depends on how long the generator lasts. But also Joel has been there many times, and might know how to refill it as part of his whole Handyman Builder thing. They've probably traded for fuel before.

A generator that size, powering a house that big, and an electric fence that's always on surrounding the whole town?

Even with minimal usage in the house, that's going to be burning 10+ gallons of gas an hour. Those three 100 gallon drums he filled up at the beginning of the episode would have lasted... about a day. Your average gas station like the one he took the gas from sells about 4000 gallons a day and is usually refilled daily or every other day. So assuming the gas station had a full reserve, he'd have been out of gas to run the generator in a little over two weeks on a generous estimate.

Ten years running that 24/7? Even putting aside the fact that after six months it's all moot and there's no more unspoiled fuel to scavenge or trade for, ten years is nonsense.

As for when Joel and Ellie showed up, unless the generator was topped off right before they died and it hasn't been more than 48 hours... there would be no electricity for any of it. If you'd like to say the generator was hard-line natural gas powered, we return to point 1 where that's just as equally nonsense.

And we know Joel and Ellie didn't fill it up and turn it on because the fence was powered when they entered the compound and they went directly to the house on camera, it's right next to the gate while the generator is out back. They'd have no reason to turn the generator on first if they didn't know Bill and Frank were dead and the fence was still working, so that doesn't add up.

>"I was never afraid before you showed up." He was afraid and made mistakes.

Running out into the road to stand under a street light and shoot at things you cant see is not "i'm afraid and made a mistake," it completely undermines his entire characterization. It's more nonsense.

>Also at no point is he shown to be a great hunter. He see him raising chickens and farming. His signature dish appears to be rabbit, and he's shown to be a trapper. None of that translates to shooting ability. It would then be notable that nowhere do we see a shooting range, or anywhere he can practice.

I'm not going to sit here and argue the semantics of whether or not trapping is a discipline of hunting. The man is literally a doomsday prepper with Don't Tread On Me banners hanging in his secret bunker next to his absurd collection of firearms.

We're not seriously going to sit here and pick apart an assumption that he doesn't know how to fire a gun, or that you don't stand in the open like a jackass when executing guerilla tactics against raiders, right?

But yeah, we clearly all just "obviously didn't watch the episode" or "don't get it" or whatever.

Suspension of disbelief is a real thing.

They could've written in a unicorn that pisses refined gasoline and it would've made more sense than spending the whole time portraying "realistic survival techniques from a doomsday prepper" that don't add up at all.

It's the same problem people had in Game of Thrones in the last seasons where time didn't make any sense. A crow flies halfway across the continent and Dany comes to their rescue on dragonback overnight? If you're going to set up rules for your made up fantasy universe, you still need to follow those rules or it doesn't work.