The third installment of The Last of Us it moved but also divided the audience: despite the enormous success already achieved by the new HBO series (which you can see on Sky Atlantic and Now TV), which has already been renewed for a second season, many users have showered the third episode with negative reviews.
The reason? Too many changes from the video gameespecially regarding one of the most iconic characters of the played version, Billwhich in the serial version is played by Nick Offerman. In the game, Bill is a solid guy who shields his feelings for his partner Frank (who kills himself in the video game after having left him a very harsh letter) and who, above all, is constantly subject to teasing by Ellie, with whom he forms an involuntary comic duo that lightens the tension of the game a little.
In the series Bill is always a tough guy, lonely and withdrawn, but the difference that has angered fans of the video game of The Last of Us is that to her history with Frank (Murray Bartlett) is given much more space, even going so far as to monopolize the episode. The epilogue, with the suicide of both lovers after Frank’s decision to call it quits due to his illness, is downright heartbreaking and epic at the same time. However, it deprived fans of the Sky and Now series of the experience of seeing Bill and Ellie interact: they would have been moments that we would hardly have forgotten.
In the series, Frank is shown to be quite old and in a wheelchair, with obvious difficulty moving his hands, insomnia, stiff muscles, slow movement and, above all, tremors. Craig Mazinauthor of The Last of Usduring the podcast dedicated to the series did not confirm any of the hypotheses of the fans saying
“We didn’t necessarily want to explain it to the public. Frank may be suffering from multiple sclerosis or early ALShowever of a degenerative neuromuscular disorder”.
Other fan guesses talk about Parkinson’s disease and some even of AIDS. There’s no way to confirm and, anyway, it’s not that important: Frank’s role in the serial adaptation of The Last of Us it’s more important than that.
The third episode is particularly significant precisely because, as pointed out by Frank, there is no way to cure people who are suffering in a collapsing society. Let’s think about what it must mean to develop a pathology like these (it is estimated that in the USA alone more than one million people suffer from multiple sclerosis and at least 30,000 from ALS) in a world that is struggling against an insidious threat such as that of Cordyceps. Sick people do not have the slightest possibility of treatment and often not even assistance.
The episode of The Last of Us it shows us an exception to this cruel new normal: a person who loves and cares to the end for another, even honoring their last wish and having them die with dignity. How can you not love the Bill and Frank from the series, even if they are so different from the video game?