Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for both the video game and TV adaptation of “The Last of Us.”
In 2020, while I was stuck in my home self-quarantining from COVID-19, I thought it would be fitting to download and play through the entire “The Last of Us” series.
Never in my life had I seen a series of games do what those two did so well. They told a better story and had better written characters than most media I’ve experienced. These past few years, I’ve been awaiting news on what developer Naughty Dog would bring to us next from this franchise.
When it was announced the next installment would be a TV adaptation of the first game, I’ll admit I was skeptical and disappointed at first. I wasn’t convinced the game needed to be retold in live action, or that they could capture lighting in a bottle twice with telling such a perfect story.
After watching the first two episodes, my reservations faded a little — the acting and writing proved to still be as good as ever — but I still wasn’t convinced this story needed to be retold this way.
But when episode three came out last Sunday, I was proven wrong. This show isn’t just presenting the story in a new light. In some ways, it’s shown it’s making it even better.
In 2013’s “The Last of Us,” there’s a segment of the game where the characters Joel and Ellie are making their way through an abandoned town to find a man that owes Joel a favor. That man is Bill, a schizophrenic hermit who has tripwired the streets and alleyways to keep out humans infected with a contagious and lethal fungus.
In their conversations, Bill reveals that his friend Frank left him on his own in the town and ran away –– and it’s heavily hinted that they were in a romantic relationship. Later, you find Frank’s corpse in an abandoned house, learning that he hanged himself to prevent becoming infected by the fungus after being bitten by a human host.
Nearby is a suicide note in which Frank expresses how he grew to hate Bill, which Bill crumples up and throws away out of frustration. Bill then provides Joel and Ellie with a car and sends them on their way.
It’s a good segment that has some well-written dialogue between the characters and some tense action sequences, complete with an effective and thematic reminder of the brutality that everyday life consists of in the game’s post-apocalyptic setting.
When I started the third episode, this was the story I thought I was getting. However, if you’ve seen the episode that features Bill and Frank, you’d know it instead pulls off something much more remarkable. In this version of the show, Joel and Ellie never even meet Bill. Rather than give us a mostly action-focused chapter in this story, we’re instead presented with one of the most profoundly beautiful love stories I’ve ever seen on television.
It doesn’t even last for the whole episode. In just 45 minutes, we’re shown the entirety of Bill and Frank’s relationship –– from when they first meet until they eventually pass away, and all of it is handled beautifully. Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett both give performances that are equal parts raw, heartwarming and devastating. You buy every moment of their love, and every line they deliver feels genuine.
None of it is rushed either; their love progresses in a way that feels very natural and real. When they have an argument or are in a dangerous situation, you feel that discomfort and that worry with them. Even though we’ve only known these characters for less than an hour, you can’t help but care for them.
This is why the show’s biggest change it makes with their story — their fates — is what impressed me the most. This time around, there’s no breakup that ends in tragedy, and they actually stick together until the very end. It changes the entire thematic
In their older years, Frank becomes terminally ill. After a long time living with that illness, he eventually decides it’s time to end his life before he’s unable to live it happily. So we see Bill give Frank one final day together: They see the whole town one last time, get married and share one last meal together.
At the end of the meal, Frank drinks a poisoned glass of wine. Afterward, however, Bill tells Frank he actually poisoned the whole bottle so they could end their lives together and never live another day without each other. They then both lay down to rest for the last time, and the flashback ends. With an ending as poignant and touching as that, is it any wonder that I was left a teary-eyed mess?
That was the moment this show finally won me over completely. It didn’t just retell the story or shuffle some details around to slightly change the pacing for TV. It fully rewrote this side story to be even better than it was in the original: a feat I never expected it to achieve.
It’s succeeded in getting people all over the internet talking about it, and it completely deserves all of the praise it’s been receiving. It takes time away from all the bleak violence we’ve been subjected to up to that point to give us a reminder that even in the darkest circumstances, love and hope can persevere and even thrive.
Hopefully, it will be remembered as a landmark moment for representation and storytelling in episodic dramas –– a masterpiece that leaves a lasting influence on shows to come in the future. “The Last of Us” episode three will likely go down as my single favorite piece of TV I’ve seen all year, and I know that I’m going to be thinking about it for a long, long time.
