‘The Last Of Us’ Somehow Changes The Game For The Better With A Beautiful Episode

I have been hearing about The Last of Us episode 3 for weeks now, as it’s been one of the early preview episodes that most critics were raving about well ahead of time. I knew it was a Bill-focused episode, and while I was certainly curious to see Nick “Ron Swanson” Offerman take on the role, I was somewhat confused about how a “Bill” episode would be this highly praised, given the events of the game.

Well, here we are. And now I know. We all know.

Some are calling it one of the best episodes of TV they’ve ever seen. Others are calling for instant Guest Actor Emmys for Offerman and Murray Bartlett. Me? I’m mostly amazed how they did something so wildly different from the game, including changing the entire fate of a main character, and managed to create something so beautiful and necessary in the process.

It’s hard to overstate just how altered this all was from the game. There, the Bill segment is about learning to make traps and hearing his tragic backstory about how Frank got tired of his constricting ways, and died after leaving him. I remember it being a somewhat big deal that Bill was presented as gay in 2013 when The Last of Us came out, as back then you could probably count the number of confirmed gay characters in video games on one hand.

Here, ten years later, Bill’s story has been transformed into a beautiful, heartwarming epic. The story of two lost men who find each other after the world ends and build a life together that spans nearly twenty years. On the post-show podcast, Neil Druckmann comments on the change in two ways. First, you could never have had a segment like in this in a video game, where you need constantly-inserted action and do not have time for 80 minute love stories that resemble the opening of Pixar’s Up, and hit just as hard. Second, Druckmann talks about how he’s hesitant to changing the fate of characters from the game. There Bill lived, here he died, but because it’s in service of this larger narrative about protecting someone you love, and what turns out to be a much happier ending for the character. So the change was worth the cost of altering the source material.

And it’s better! It’s unequivocally better than the game. This is not an insult to the game or yet another “video games are inferior mediums to TV and movies” argument, but it is an argument for the ability of a good adaptation of a game to actually change and elevate the source material in a way that benefits both. It was special for game-players, long familiar with Bill’s story, to watch things unfold this way onscreen. And for non-players, it was still just a brilliantly acted, beautifully-told story.

From here, however, things are about to get much darker. Unless there are more changes made to give more characters rosier endings than the game, we are in for a lot of tragedy and loss, both in terms of Ellie’s past, which will be explored this season, and the future of Joel and Ellie’s relationship, which will be explored next season, now that the show has been renewed for season 2.

What’s undeniable is that what Mazin, Druckmann and the cast have done with this adaptation is nothing short of incredible. They took a game that felt like it didn’t need to be adapted at all, as it was already about as cinematic as a video game could get, and turned it into something somehow even better, with major source material changes so good, even game die-hards can’t fault them for it. A deeply impressive achievement, and there’s nothing I look forward to more each week now.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.