‘The Last of Us’ and HBO completely change the original story of the Bill and Frank video game

🚨The following article contains spoilers for ‘The Last of Us’ 1×03 🚨

Neither eighties piano songs, nor recipes paired with wine, nor wild strawberries… HBO has completely revolutionized the original plot of ‘The Last of Us’ with the romance of Bill and Frank starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett (for know more about them: Where have you seen Bill and Frank before, the couple from the spectacular 1×03 of ‘The Last of Us’?). If chapter 3 of the series has moved us with an honest and stark love story who finds in “it is not about surviving, but about living” the most accurate metaphor of the original history of the video game, in this Bill is an unsympathetic, rude and violent survivor who helps Joel and Ellie find a car to travel to their next destination after leaving Boston and who, despite his tough and vehement facade, it is impossible not to like, becoming one of the most emblematic icons and characters from Naughty Dog’s masterpiece. But he does it without Frank…

Bill’s character in the ‘The Last of Us’ video game is far from the sweetness and humanity that pervades a role, the one played masterfully by Nick Offerman in the series, much more understanding and empathetic. What HBO does is reinterpret and exploit Bill’s “hidden side” in the video game, his homosexuality (the one that Naughty Dog maintained as a sort of plot twist)to build a story where Neil Druckman and Craig Mazin have “changed the rules of the game to offer us a story full of hope that explores the connections between fear, isolation, the need to create a community, vulnerability, love and the desire for human warmth”, as our analysis of the third episode of the series indicates: Why is ‘The Last of Us’ 1×03 the best episode of the year? The changes introduced by HBO in the original plot have aroused some controversy among some of the most categorical and acolytes of the video game, who do not share this radical revision of the story. But, what are the differences between the series and the video game of ‘The Last of Us’ in the story of Bill and Frank? We analyze them…

Frank, from partner to “reason for being”

While, in the middle of a post-apocalyptic landscape devoid of humanity, where society seems stripped of values ​​and affections, the HBO series delves into a love story that germinates (and ages) over the years. in a precious plea for the sincere union between two men, a plea for which it is better to die accompanied than to live the rest of your days isolatedthe ‘The Last of Us’ video game gives us a fast-paced action episode in which Joel and Ellie visit Bill after leaving Boston to get a vehicle and supplies. It is a passage that has nothing to do with what we see in the series, where Bill does not share his life with Frank and where he survives isolated from the rest of humanity, in a city that, as in the HBO adaptation, has made his own and mined traps, protecting it with fences and barricades. But no trace of his culinary skills or his virtuosity at his piano. Neither of the flashbacks in which we see Tess again, of the intimacy that oozes the 1×03 of the series or of the sexual impulses. Bill eIt’s a kind of post-pandemic Rambo, a contact of Joel who lives by and for the most visceral and savage survival, controlling the hordes of infected and clickers that live with him on the outskirts of his city.

But, what about Frank? In the video game they refer to him as Bill’s “partner” and we understand (at first) that he is another of the collaborators who, like Joel and Tess, help him exchange supplies and merchandise. During the time the player spends traversing Bill’s town hitting and shooting Infected and Clickers, the video game does not make any allusion to the moments shared with Frank that we do see in the third episode of the series. Nor how they met. But it does leave us clues that something else could have happened between the two…

Until, finally, the surprise comes: Frank’s character also commits suicide in the video game, but he does it for a very different reason than the disease that consumes actor Murray Bartlett in the HBO series: he takes his own life by hanging from a rope after being bitten by an infected and it is Bill himself who finds him hanged inside an abandoned house and discovers that he had stolen the battery from the car that he was going to lend to Joel and Ellie. “Fucking asshole,” he sentences him. The Frank’s presence in the video game is therefore practically anecdotal and in it we discover a letter that he writes to his partner where he dedicates some words that are far from the “you were my reason for being” that Bill dedicates to him in the series before he dies: “I want you to know that I hated you to death. I’ve had enough of this shitty city and your imposing attitude. I wanted something more from life and you could never give it to me (…) If I try to leave this city, I will die. Which is still better than spending another day with you.”

In addition, the sexual orientation of the character of Bill played by Nick Offerman is not so explicit in the video game, but we discover it through these letters and, above all, from a subtle and veiled reference when Ellie discovers a gay magazine that Bill kept at his house.

Bill doesn’t die in the video game

In fact, Bill helps start the car in which Joel and Ellie escape the city… No, the character played by Nick Offerman does not die in the video game or commit suicide along with Frank. He remains in that chaotic dwelling that he himself has built in order to continue surviving in it. “Get out of my city” are the last words that Bill addresses to Joel and, except for some later reference, we never hear from him again throughout the game.

Bill’s city is full of infected in the video game

The place where 1×03 of ‘The Last of Us’ takes place looks practically deserted and the fences, traps and mechanisms devised by Bill keep assault attempts by infected and looters at bay. Nevertheless, very far from that kind of romantic redoubt in which the characters of Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett grow old togetherBill’s town in the video game is a minefield surrounded by barricades and turned into a nest of clickers and infected that Bill himself uses as a defense mechanism and that have even invaded the basketball court of a high school that hides the first fan the player faces.