The Last of Us Episode 3 Review: Love in the Times of Cordyceps and the Myth of the “Video-Game Curse”

When it was announced that HBO was producing an adaptation of the beloved apocalyptic single-player game The Last of Us, the term “video-game curse” was thrown around quite a lot. Loyal superfans and ambivalent subscribers alike invoked a popular notion that few, if any, video-game adaptations—whether for television or film—have ever met the colossal expectations that come with such an undertaking, or worse, have avoided insulting their revered source material. Add that to the tremors of online backlash to the announcement that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay — who, god forbid, didn’t look like exact physical embodiments of their digital counterparts — had been cast as the leads, Joel and Ellie, and you had a significant cadre of viewers pronouncing the project dead-before-arrival. 

I don’t put much stock in the notion that there is some intrinsic quality to video-game properties that make them essentially incompatible with filmic narrative formats. I don’t think video-game adaptations are doomed to fail, but that’s not because I was shown the light by recently successful series like Arcane or The Witcher (I haven’t seen either, I’m sorry.) Rather, I attribute video-game adaptations’ unfortunate reputation to studios’ and streaming platforms’ misunderstanding of what made the prospect of such adaptations compelling in the first place: a cinematic reimagining of the immersive worlds and eccentric characters video games have to offer. Sure, there are large contingents of die-hard game loyalists who deem anything short of a one-to-one compilation of cutscenes unworthy. But I suspect that, underneath the cacophony of hype and vitriolic speculation, for some there is also a quiet sense of excited vindication at their favorite game being deemed worthy of potential endorsement by a wider audience, and of expansion into arguably more regarded narrative formats (the misguided designation of video games as a “lower” art form is a whole other conversation). I feel that some of the inevitable gatekeeping and controversy that spring up following an announcement of a high profile video-game adaptation are merely natural, if paradoxical, side effects of this excitement — defensive mechanisms against the prospect of one’s deeply-held fandom being tainted or offended by a mishandled project catered not to them, but to a lucrative audience of “casuals.” 

These fears are not without merit. Recent crops of video-game adaptations have largely been critical failures and seem soullessly manufactured by studios to squeeze quick profits out of recognizable IP. Many of these projects fall somewhere on the polar ends of a slippery spectrum of faithfulness to their source material. On one end, you have those that boil a game’s characters, action, and story beats down to their lowest-common-denominator elements, showing little regard for the themes, designs and concepts that make it interesting and instead sacrificing them at the altar of supposed “profitability.” On the other end, you have those that, either out of cowardice or laziness, insist on cloning a game’s surface-level aesthetic and narrative elements, indulging in cheap fan service and obvious exercises in the semantics of pissing off as little video-game evangelicals as possible. These latter projects seek to capture a game’s lightning in a bottle while neglecting the stylistic, thematic, and mechanical complexities that made its gameplay so electric — and subsequently fail to create their own spark or justify their very existence. It begs the question: at what point does risk-averse “faithfulness” become a hindrance to good storytelling—and filmmaking overall? 

I think, from what I have seen so far, the showrunners behind The Last of Us have given serious thought to this question. In the “Inside the Episode” segment for Episode 3, co-writer (and the game’s co-creative director) Neil Druckmann more or less confronts it head-on when recalling the philosophy that informed their decision-making under the pervasive dilemma of ‘when to deviate, when to stay faithful’: “If it’s kinda the same or worse, we stay where the game is. If it’s better, we deviate.” Although this is a relatively simple strategy, it gives me hope that Druckmann and co-writer Craig Mazin (creator of Chernobyl and co-host of The Scriptnotes Podcast, which I listen to regularly) aim to split the difference between reckless liberty and spineless fidelity in their adaptation, thus opening up doors for this story to fully embody and adapt to the endless possibilities its new creative medium has to offer. 

Their most recent entry, Episode 3: Long, Long Time, which marks the show’s boldest deviation from the game thus far, gives me more reason to be hopeful by not only offering a compelling take on one of the game’s early storylines, but also delivering a formally ambitious hour-and-a-half of television that transcends its source material. The episode begins shortly after Episode 2 left off, with Joel and Ellie recovering after narrowly escaping a hoard of Infected at the Massachusetts State House. They are en-route to find Bill, a supposed ally, at the dying request of Tess, whose explosive sacrifice in the previous episode’s final minutes bought enough time for Joel and Ellie to escape. On the way, they encounter a mass grave of those purged during a barbaric government-sanctioned extermination campaign to control populations during the initial evacuation. While these opening minutes continue to set the groundwork for Joel and Ellie’s arc, they are, ultimately, a prologue to the episode’s central narrative. Upon Joel and Ellie’s discovery, a clever match cut pulls the rug out from under us, and we are suddenly transported 20 years in the past to bear witness to the frenzied evacuation. This is where the episode truly begins. 

Druckmann and Mazin have made clear their willingness to experiment with the show’s narrative structure. In the cold open for Episode 1, epidemiologists in the 1980s eerily ponder the calamitous implications of a fungal outbreak while on-air for a Dick Cavett-esque talk show. Episode 2 opens on a mycologist in Jakarta, Indonesia who, upon inspecting patient-zero of the mysterious fungus, grimly advises that the city be bombed to slow the outbreak that would eventually come to pass. These digressive vignettes, which, on the surface, have little to do with the main protagonists, could be seen as unnecessarily expository, or, in the former’s case, too on-the-nose with the allusions to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these sequences were among my favorites of the first two episodes — which otherwise take a pretty by-the-books approach to adapting the game’s opening levels — not only because they tease a sort of narrative ambition that seems lost on most video-game adaptations, but also because they give a concerted effort to add texture to the world we are being asked to invest ourselves in, and root it in the one in which we actually live. 

Episode 3 has its sights aimed higher. By the time we are introduced to Nick Offerman’s Bill, a paranoid survivalist with flavors of a certain brand of hyper-individualist, conspiratorial libertarianism that seems increasingly en-vogue in today’s political discourse, it becomes abundantly clear that this flashback will be more than a digressive vignette — it will be the meat of the episode. Bill watches the evacuation over security footage from his basement-turned-doomsday-bunker, ready to stand his ground against the “new world order jackboots” above the surface. He seems to be in his element, relishing the realization of his doomsday fantasies. But, after a delightful montage of Bill looting a Home Depot, rigging booby traps, and generally turning his quiet suburban cul-de-sac into an impenetrable fortress, the arrival of a stranded stranger named Frank throws a wrench into this survivalist’s wet dream. 

I’ll refrain from giving a detailed synopsis of what happens next. By now, the subsequent love story between the two men has made the rounds of online discussion and solidified itself in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m more interested in exploring what made it work so well, why it resonated with so many people (myself included), and how it can be seen as a case study in successfully adapting video-game properties. 

I’d be remiss not to start with the performances given by Offerman and Murray Bartlett (who I have more recently been put on to by his hilarious turn as the hotel manager Armond in season one of The White Lotus). These two are electric. Offerman as Bill — a character that, at face-value, bears resemblance to the Ron Swanson-esque roles for which the actor is regularly cast — is all the more compelling due to his will to rise above his trademark machismo and access a certain vulnerability absent from many of his prior roles. It feels as if Offerman approached this role with something to prove — and ended up turning in a career-best performance. Bartlett as Frank takes a fringe character from the game and animates him with such care and authenticity that he becomes the episode’s beating heart. The pair’s undeniable chemistry is, arguably, what makes the entire episode tick. Bill and Frank’s loving devotion to each other, the many forms it takes, and the ways in which it transforms them both individually are embodied so beautifully by Offerman and Bartlett that, by the episode’s final shot, I had all but suspended any critical analysis and fully resigned myself to its emotional devastation. 

At the episode’s core is a love story, and all love stories have some degree of latent sentiment (as if that’s necessarily a bad thing). Some have criticized the episode for indulging in cheap sentimentality, but I maintain that Bill and Frank’s love story is a lot more thematically complex than they are giving it credit for. Their story, which is both removed from and molded by its apocalyptic context, sees a defiant persistence of desire and companionship in a world gone awry — an ardent reminder of what these characters are fighting for beyond basic survival. In Bill’s case, it brings a level of humanity to the antisocial conservative archetype he embodies, suggesting a universal desire for company, and to be loved, under the surface of any man’s veneer of invulnerability. Bill’s near-possessive commitment to protecting Frank and the oasis they built together is likewise complicated by Frank’s outgoing desire for community and ultimate yearning for death when his health deteriorates. In a way, it is Frank who ends up protecting Bill by saving him from a lonely life defined by resentment, mistrust, and insecurity — and giving him true purpose. The two men live and die on their own terms, finding joy and taking back the dignity that the tragic world they live in, and the one that existed before it, sought to destroy (here, I am referring to their de facto marriage at the end of the episode, which would have been illegal at the time of the outbreak circa 2003). Not to mention a refreshing depiction of queer love, Bill and Frank’s story brings dimensions of tenderness, sensuality, and sincerity heretofore unseen in video-game adaptations. 

I hesitated to even acknowledge the predictable reactionary response to the episode’s depiction of gay characters from embarrassingly close-minded and media-illiterate viewers such as Ben Shapiro, but the pathetic attempt to justify it with bad-faith appeals to narrative or thematic consistency and fidelity to the game seems to have tricked some. Anyone who played the game and has even a marginal ability to read context clues can testify to the episode’s basis in the game’s canon. I won’t be the first to point out that, in the game, Bill is gay. Perhaps this fact flew over homophobic players’ heads, or maybe they merely found it to be a permissible blip in the gameplay. Whatever the case, bigots be damned, the show did it better. 

Still, it would be disingenuous of me to conflate all reservations with the episode’s narrative diversion from the game with reactionary dog-whistles. Some seem to be genuinely confused with the choice to dedicate nearly an entire episode to a self-contained story centering on two side characters. Others—mostly those pesky game loyalists I mentioned earlier—are frustrated that their favorite gameplay moments with Bill and Joel were cut in favor of this retelling. While I am tempted to extol the wonders of non-linear storytelling, I also understand that some viewers might simply be unfamiliar with such narrative experimentation in television. I also suspect that it must be a lot easier to give up on a show that dashes one’s expectations then expects them to wait an entire week to find out if it was justified — especially in the age of binge-centric streaming. The simple fact of the matter is that this is a sprawling story with lore spread across two best-selling video games, and with such rich source material come endless possibilities and limitations for adaptation. Though they are central protagonists, Joel and Ellie are beholden to the world they inhabit — one worth exploring in greater detail with all the formal possibilities offered by the episodic television format. This is what the show is doing, and I think it’s better for it. It’s also worth mentioning that the game itself was no stranger to digressive flashback levels (e.g. Ellie and Riley in the mall), which largely succeeded in adding depth and dimension to the game’s core conflict while staying thematically consistent with it.

I feel similarly about Bill and Frank’s story. Narratively, its divergence from Joel and Ellie’s subjectivity and disruption of the opening minutes’ temporal linearity gives the episode a chance to make the 20 years that have passed since the outbreak feel tangible. Through Bill and Frank, we not only watch two people meet, fall in love, and die all within the timespan separating the first and second acts of Episode 1, but we also see a younger Joel, our main protagonist, through the eyes of Bill. It's a simple shift in perspective, but it deepens Joel’s character — and his relationship with Tess — in a way that expository dialogue can not. And that is where Bill and Frank tie in thematically with Joel and Ellie. Bill’s story, in a way, runs parallel and opposite to Joel’s. At their cores, Bill and Joel share an essential devotion to protecting those they love; and, while Bill more or less succeeded until Frank succumbed to forces out of his control, Joel failed to protect his daughter Sarah, and will ultimately fail to protect Tess. These are failures Joel has yet to rectify within himself, as his reaction to the letter left to him by Bill makes abundantly clear. Bill got his happy ending, going out on his own terms in the arms of the one he loves, while the ending to Joel’s story has yet to be written. For those who played the game, Bill’s decision to choose loving mercy over possessive attachment alludes to the impossible choice Joel will have to make at the season’s end. 

Episode 3 stands as an example of a video-game adaptation that refuses to be a prisoner of its source material. Druckmann and Mazin evidently understand that, in order to do the game justice, it is necessary to expand upon its immense potential and optimize the story to its new medium. As the response from minority contingents of homophobic review-bombers and smug video-game purists have made clear, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t when it comes to video-game adaptations. These people are impossible to please, so why not make a risky swing for the fences and focus, above all, on telling a compelling story? The episode’s widespread acclaim and 12% increase in already record-breaking viewership suggest that the gamble paid off. That not only bodes well for the rest of the show, which has already been renewed for a second season by HBO, but for the future of video-game adaptations overall. 

I’ve written far too much, and Episode 4 is out. I’m going to watch that now. Thanks for reading!