The series of The Last of Us is better than the source material in the third episode. The story of Bill and Frank is poetry that breaks your hearts with painful beauty.
Warning! The text contains spoilers for episode 3 and the game.
I have never agreed to an interview faster than when I received the offer to speak with Peter Hoar. He is the director of the third episode of The Last of Us. For me, this episode is one of the best I have ever seen in a series.
This episode tells its own story and distances itself from its source, furthering it. It is dedicated to Bill and Frank, two characters in the game who play a relatively small role there. Here, the series even takes the step of largely ignoring the main characters to tell us something that the game could not. The episode confirms something that fans of the games have speculated about for over 10 years.
Bill loves Frank.
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Love created from nothing
We only know Frank as a corpse hanging from the ceiling in the game. Ellie finds a farewell letter in which Frank hurls insults at Bill.
In the game, we need Bill to get to a running car. Bill is a bitter, cynical man who would be labeled a “Prepper.” These are people who intentionally prepare for a catastrophe and make it their life’s work. Bill is a tinkerer and has developed elaborate systems to keep strangers and infected people at bay. Joel is one of the few exceptions of people he trusts. At least a little.
As a player, I only find out that Bill is gay after I say goodbye to him and continue my journey with his car.
What I loved about my episode from the moment I read the script: I knew Bill. I knew who he is and what role he plays in the game. But his story is only understood in retrospective. You only understand it when Joel and Ellie drive away and Ellie finds the stack of [gay] porn under the seat. Our story elaborates on just that.
Peter Hoar
That Frank and Bill were in a relationship is strongly hinted at in the game. The question for all these years was:
Was Frank’s hatred for Bill really so great that it led to the horrible letter, or did he try to protect Bill’s feelings and thus formulated the letter so harshly?
The series finds an answer that makes the story of the two so much better than in the game. Bill and Frank feel a deep love for each other that almost makes one forget that humanity is disintegrating around them. Everything feels so real around the two of them. Anyone who lives or has lived in a relationship can relate to the small moments of the two characters: the first sex, their arguments, how love slowly finds its way into Bill’s heart.
I believe Nick Offerman as Bill and Murray Bartlett as Frank everything. Every loving glance, the exasperated eye roll, the fear of losing his love.
To achieve this level of authenticity, the right actors are needed. Nick Offerman is perfect for the role of Bill in many ways. Peter Hoar names him as one of the decisive factors why Bill and Frank’s relationship feels so real to us.
I don’t know if Nick ever played a romantic character. He was a bit nervous to take this step. So there were times when Murray [the actor for Frank] really had to show Nick how to approach such a role. Lying in bed right next to Murray Bartlett, which is a great opportunity by the way, Nick naturally said beforehand: I have never done anything like this before.
Some of that genuine nervousness made it authentically into the series. And Murray was so gentle and kind in that. We also created the right atmosphere for the two. We had the set, this huge city built just for us. A lot of what we shot was just two people. Two people in a tiny space talking to each other.
Peter Hoar
Nick Offerman is mainly known for his role as Ron Swanson in “Parks & Recreation – The Parks Department.” There he plays a very masculine man who loves wood and meat and avoids close contact with other people like the plague.
Bill would not identify as gay
For several years now, there has been a discussion about whether gay roles should not only be played by gay actors. Offerman himself is heterosexual and married to actress Megan Mullally.
We thought long and hard about how Bill would identify. I believe Bill would not identify as gay. He is in a world where he has not allowed all these things. If you want to label him, Bill might as well have been asexual his entire life until that moment.
He feels love and it feels right. It just happens to him with Frank. It is a beautiful story about finding the true love of your life, regardless of who they are and where they come from. With this perspective, Nick is perfect.
Peter Hoar
That’s what makes the episode so strong. In the end, it doesn’t matter who eats strawberries together for the first time in 20 years in the sunset. Does it matter who cares for the love of their life in old age and illness? It is not important who decides to greet death as a friend and leave with that love.
In the end, what matters is that two people loved each other in a devastated world. This is how the episode captures the core essence of The Last of Us. It has always been about love and how it thrives in the apocalypse.
The thing with the window at the end…
When the camera glides through Frank and Bill’s bedroom at the end and holds on the window, melancholy grips me so tightly. I instantly think I recognize the window from the game’s title screen, and if you have the same feeling, you are absolutely right.
There was a point where Craig [the co-writer] wanted every episode to have the motif [of the window]. He imagined something like clicking on the window on HBO Max like in the game, and then the episode starts.
But we thought that our story is so different that it would have felt strange to start with the window. We then suggested doing it the way we did, and he loved it. It is so beautiful to bring the story back to Bill and Frank with the picture on the wall and the flowers that Frank would have placed there.
Peter Hoar
I don’t know how you feel. But I’ve decided that this is now the canon. The next time I play the first part of the game again and the familiar window greets me, I will think of Bill and Frank.
And I will think of love in a shattered world.
The interview was conducted via Zoom in the form of a roundtable with several journalists from around the world. The quotes from Peter Hoar were partially shortened for better understanding.
