Hey, we heard you have an emotional bond with these characters from season 2? Let us kill them off in a cheap and badly written 2 minute flashback so we can shoehorn the main character into being this season's sidekick.

EPISODE 3 UPDATE:
Well, the new episode is not quite as bad as the first two, I have to admit. Telltale learned from some of their mistakes: the choices you get to make in this episode don't concern trusting Clementine (because in those an overwhelming majority favored Clem), the character development is a little more fleshed out, and nobody important dies in a flashback... oh wait, that one is just because there's NO ONE LEFT! I also have to admit that David turned out to be a more complex character than I initially thought. He's actually interesting to watch.

However, it's not all rainbows and butterflies. Telltale had 3 months to make this episode, and I'm fairly sure they didn't actually start working on it the second after they released the first two, so probably more. It's a lot of time for such a short episode (it's a little under 2 hours). But the episode still came out flawed in a lot of ways:

• Animations are pretty bad: you may laugh at Mass Effect: Andromeda, but facial animators at Telltale seem to think that people move their lips when they're humming.
  
• Most of the supporting characters are still cardboard cutouts. Like Tripp is a meaningless, bland walking facepalm factory. Seriously, it's been several years since the apocalypse, nobody who thinks picking fights with armed angry people while unarmed and outnumbered is a good idea should have made it this far.
  
• Story has improved, but the actual writing is still unimpressive. Characters repeat themselves, break into monologues and simply speak like actors in a bad play. Dialogues have no flow, they just feel like bits of text glued together.
  
• Because the episode is so short, some characters get pretty much no screen time. Eleanore appears for like three minutes total, Gabe gets only a few lines (most of which is him failing to understand what's going on). There's a new character introduced in this episode (Ava), and everything we know about her so far is that she's really into frowning.

To sum it up, the ship is not on fire anymore, but it's still sinking.

EPISODES 4 & 5 UPDATE:
You can really see that some work went into the finale, with the branching endings depending on both your choices as Javier and Clementine in the flashbacks. I liked the endings (especially the one I got where both my a-hole brother and his dumb kid got killed off and I got the chick).

There are a few scenes in the last two episodes that are actually good. Like the one where you take on a large group of zombies on your way to David's crashed car. Then again, there is the fight scene in episode 4 after the failed execution that's just confusing and utterly unrealistic.

Character development started getting better, but then fell right back to the tired archetypes. David is a typical short-fused self-serving jerk. Gabe is a typical angsty teenager. Joan is a typical backstabbing evil leader. There is no depth in any of them. And since the last 2 episodes are mostly action (-ish), we don't get to see any more than that.

In episode 4 we get another flashback to Clementine's time with Kenny or Jane. Well guess what Telltale, TOO LATE! You've already killed them off, and no amount of flashbacks is going to change that!

It feels like there is less and less actual gameplay in each episode. In the beginning of episode 5 there's a flashback where Javi's and David's father asks you to fetch his wallet from the counter. This is an "interactive" moment. You get to point your mouse at the wallet and click it. There is literally NOTHING ELSE you can do in that scene. Why even bother asking me to do that?

Some decisions about who gets to live and who doesn't don't make much sense. At the end of episode 4 you get to choose between having Tripp or Ava killed. Regardless of your choice, the one who didn't die gets killed in the final episode in a random walker accident. The change in your relationship with these characters after episode 4 barely gets any mention. However, there's Conrad - a guy who more than 85% of players killed back in episode 2. And he is dragged through all of the remaining episodes if you decided to let him live, with a possibility to die in almost every one of them. This character means pretty much nothing to the plot. In fact, he is more meaningful dead than he is alive.

There are also small bugs (at least once I've seen a person walking around in a cutscene who was already dead by then), occasionally unconvincing voice acting, awkwardly mashed together scenes, etc. Basically, first season, and to a lesser extent - second season, felt like stories that were crafted with love. I cared about the characters, I wanted them to be ok, I wanted a happy ending. In season 3 I just wanted an ending, preferably sooner rather than later. It felt rushed and soulless. At this point I am not going to wait for season 4.