There are different types of humor. Dry sarcastic humor would work when you've traveled on horseback to another state to kill a bunch of people who killed your loved one.
Waltzing around and going "tadaa" for turning on the lights isn't the type of comedy that goes with that setting.
I'm glad you brought up that scene. I've seen a lot of people bring it up and there's got to be this disconnect.
I think some in the audience think, don't turn on the lights you'll give yourself away, but there's no point in time that we see that the lights being on is visible from the outside during the day.
It's similar to critiques I've seen about them talking "too loudly" on the street or talking to each other in front of the stalker.
People are taking genre tropes and applying it to this media in a way that doesn't apply.
They're talking loudly enough so that the audience can hear them. They're not going to whisper through the tv show. That's not good tv. The stalker has already seen them, it's not a clicker, talking in front of it changes nothing.
Back to the lights, in the game there is lighting in the theater that is pretty inexplicable. At no point do we discuss the nature of these lights. It's just there. In the show the theater is appropriately dark when they arrive and they don't want to film all the scenes in the theater in darkness. Hence the lights.
They've addressed this in previous scenes and maybe thought they had established this enough with audiences, but audiences have short memories.
I've also seen people continue to complain that they're not able to see scenes, cheap TVs and badly calibrated TVs. You want to film naturally dark scenes, but a lot of the audience responds poorly to it, so you kind of have to pick and choose.
Everything is a balance when you're making a show like this. Moments of levity are meant to ease from the violence and grotesque visuals on display for much of the show and it keeps some people from getting overwhelmed and checking out. For others, it might be off-putting. But where I find issue is that the criticism never seems consistent.
You have a 19 year old girl in love with her best friend making a joke and its the end of the world. I have my own criticisms of the show and the second season, but I just don't feel like this one lands true. I think they've done a good enough job balancing Ellie and Dina's relationship and which is more important to her that relationship, Dina's life, or Ellie's revenge. You also see Ellie's attitude towards her revenge ratcheting up as it becomes a reality.
