The Last of Us Season 2 needs to make more deviations from the source material
Spoilers for HBO’s The Last of Us Season 1 and the 2013 video game.
It was unexpectedly one of my favourite television moments of the year: a 75-minute exploration of a queer relationship developing throughout a 20-year zombie pandemic.
The Last of Us’ third episode “Long, Long Time” was a story that brought the show a lot of praise, due to its standout performances, beautiful writing, but most importantly – its willingness to deviate from the source material it was adapted from.
For the three people who haven’t seen the show yet; The Last of Us (based on the 2013 video game) is set two decades after a mass fungal infection has transformed a majority of the world population into zombie-like creatures. But it’s really about the relationships of the characters, and how people have adapted to living this new life, centred mainly around Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they travel west across the United States.
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Long, Long Time
Episode 3, titled “Long, Long Time”, was the perfect example of this, taking us away from Joel and Ellie’s story to focus on Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). Bill and Frank meet as strangers a few years into the apocalypse, and the episode depicts their relationship develop over the course of many more years.
Long, Long Time is an episode about love, which is something that co-creator Neil Druckmann has cited as the main theme of The Last of Us. Whether that love is familial, romantic, platonic, or something else entirely – it doesn’t matter. Love is something we all experience and cherish, and a theme vital to explore in a universe where everything is out to kill. This rings especially true for queer love.
This is what made Bill and Frank’s relationship on screen so powerful. It was a depiction of love that felt so eerily close to what queer people experience in the real world. And even moreso, it took me by surprise considering that’s not how it was portrayed in the video game.
Credit: HBO
In the video game, we meet Bill and he’s alone. Frank is gone. The queerness is still present, but it’s a lot more subtextual. We don’t see their relationship play out like in the show, because it was originally built around gameplay and developing Joel and Ellie further, rather than focusing on Bill. In the end, Long, Long Time showcases the power of the adaptation. When you don’t have to worry about sandwiching narrative with action gameplay sections, it allows you more time to flesh out those characters.
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We’re treated to more of this throughout the first half of the season. Two episodes later, we see the backstory to Henry and Sam, two characters from the game who also didn’t receive as much development as the show gave them. The need to include lengthy gameplay sequences between each cutscene works well for a video game, where you can develop these characters through narrative design as you control the characters. But for TV, it’s clear that slowing things down and deviating slightly from the source material is the best way to achieve a stronger effect.
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