This week yes: Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, writers of the adaptation of ‘The Last of Us’ that HBO is carrying out have given a swerve regarding what we saw in the video game. A decision that many will see as a gratuitous provocation due to the explicit terrain to which it leads some issues that were between the lines in the game, but which in the end turns out to be very successful. controversial or not the appearance of Bill and Frank and the flashbacks that explain their history have become one of the best moments of the series.
In our first steps with the series, we stated our main fear: that the series would follow in the footsteps of the games with such fidelity that, on the one hand, it would lose the surprise factor. But above all, and on the other hand, to forget that games and movies/series establish their relationships with the player/spectator in a different way, and that is why fictions should not be told using the same tools. Luckily, we were wrong, and the HBO series knows how to use its own methods.
In the video game, one of the first stops Joel and Ellie make on their journey is to meet a survivalist, Bill, who lives in a city surrounded and full of traps. Talking with him, they discover that she had “a partner”, from whom she ended up separating. This fellow, Frank, got fed up with Bill’s rules and prejudices, stole some of his supplies, and ran away. Soon after, he was bitten by a clicker and, determined not to become a monster, he committed suicide. Bill, Joel and Ellie will find his body later.
Note: Episode spoilers from this point on.
Things change in the third episode of the series: Bill (Nick Offerman) rescues Frank (Murray Bartlett) from one of his traps and after a strong initial distrust, they end up starting an intimate relationship, isolated although with occasional encounters with Tess and Joel. with whom they become friends. Not only will this relationship go much better than in the video game, but Bill and Frank will grow old together, resist poachers, and when Frank is too weak to survive cancer, they will commit suicide at the same time. Joel and Ellie find them dead at Bill’s house, along with a note for Joel.
And what does this change matter?
In an interview with Druckmann and Bazin, the creators of the series explained why they had decided to take this twist on Bill and Frank’s relationship, beyond the fact that they wanted to tell a positive story in the apocalyptic setting. The secret is in the note that Bill knows Joel will end up reading: he tells him to take care of Tess, advice that he obviously couldn’t know would be late. But he also in the note he communicates to Joel that both have something in common, and that is that they will never find their place in that world in ruins, except for their function: protect those who matter to them.
In other words, this note serves to give Joel’s character a purpose, and turn his close relationship with death so far (we’ve seen him lose a loved one literally in every episode) into something that will help him move on, this time with Ellie as “mission”. It is a question that in the game we can feel as “ours” since we are controlling Joel and we feel as our own the mission to save the young woman. In the series you have to state it differently, and the parallelism between Bill and Joel through the note is very successful.
This pair of flashbacks also serves as a declaration of intent: the audacity to place two characters at the center of the episode, leaving Ellie and Joel as mere spectators, beyond even making their love relationship explicit (a detail that will only annoy one guy). viewers that HBO, Mazin and Druckmann may risk losing), is a show of force. The creators show that they are not tied to the original video game, and that if it makes more sense to make a character dead here who was alive there, there is no reason to justify it too much.
And of course, all this without monsters. Barring a stupendous and fleeting encounter between Ellie and a clicker buried under some rubble, HBO continues to reinforce the idea that zombies are the least interesting part of zombie series, turning them into an invisible but constant threat. Finally, it is also clear in this proposal that in the face of the omnipresence of monsters in the game, there are other ways as stimulating as that of portraying the world of ‘The Last of Us’.
