Why did The Last of Us change Bill and Frank’s story, and what does it mean for the series?

The latest episode of The Last of Us, “Long Long Time,” focuses on Bill and Frank, an unlikely pair of men who find lasting love amidst the zombie apocalypse. The episode is full of achingly romantic moments. There’s the scene where Bill and Frank first make an emotional connection at Bill’s piano. Bill, a hardened survivalist, plays the Linda Ronstadt song “Long Long Time,” and we see walls of hurt and anger he’d spent years erecting fall away. A man who hid his true self from the world finally reveals it to someone else, maybe for the first time ever. That sparks a love that lasts decades.

There’s the scene years later, when Frank reveals that he’s successfully grown a crop of strawberries. The pair giggle kids as they taste something they never thought they’d taste again, so overcome with joy they almost make love right on top of their freshly grown miracle.

And of course there’s the end, when Frank — sick with a disease that would have been hard to live with even before society collapsed — asks Bill to help him die. Bill decides to go with him, not out of despair but out of love. For Bill, life had meaning because Frank was in it. Frank was worth living and dying for.

It’s a double suicide. It’s unbearably romantic. It left me a mess. It’s probably the most moving love story I’ve ever seen on TV.

Let’s get the homophobic responses out of the way quickly

It is also a moving gay love story, which means it may be controversial within the bigot community. Overall, response to the episode has been extremely positive: it was fantastic, so I imagine it may be hard even for homophobes to decry it too much, although there’s been some of that. Before it became clear that fans en masse loved the episode, we got some dicey takes on our Twitter feed. “Trash episode almost put me to sleep,” opines someone named Alpha Male. “I speak for everyone when I say nobody cares about their backstory.” One scholar simply comments, “Sucked a**hole,” while another liked the episode but queried, “Why did I have to see graphic bearded gay sex tho?”

But I don’t think we need to dwell on the obviously knock-brained responses. If you’re put off by gay characters on TV in 2023, you have a journey ahead of you and I hope it goes well; lemme know when you’re a bit further along. I’m more interested in looking at how the episode changes the source material: Naughty Dog’s 2013 video game The Last of Us, and what it means for the longer story with Joel and Ellie.

How is Frank and Bill’s story different in The Last of Us game?

The bird’s eye view of the story is the same: Bill is a doomsday prepper who lives in the Boston suburb of Lincoln, Massachusetts. He’s outfitted the town with traps to ward off the zombie menace, and lived there for years with his partner Frank.

But we don’t ever actually meet Frank in the game…at least, not when he’s alive. Joel, Ellie and Bill stumble on Frank’s corpse as they wander the town. We learn from a note that Frank hanged himself after becoming infected, the better to keep himself from turning into a zombie. In that same note, Frank tells Bill from beyond the grave that he “hated your guts.” In this version of the story, Frank was stifled by Bill’s insistence at survival at all costs. Frank wanted more out of life. He wanted color. He wanted spice. So he left Bill and tried to set out for the Boston QZ, and died along the way.

The last time we see Bill in the game, he’s alive but alone. This gay love story ends in tragedy. On the show, it ends in victory. Yes, Bill and Murray die, but they die on their terms after decades of happy life together, married and in each other’s arms.

In the game, it’s not even 100% clear that Bill and Frank are gay at all, although there are plentiful hints, including some gay porn mags Ellie later finds in the back of Bill’s car. By contrast, “Long Long Time” is out and proud. As our commenter friend from earlier put it, it gave us “bearded gay sex.”

The original ending for Bill and Frank also plays into a long-standing tradition in movies, TV, and books where stories about gay characters end in tragedy, whether that means death, heartbreak, or both. That tradition continues today, even on HBO; look no further than the ham-handed way Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon handled the death of Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, a gay character introduced early in the same episode where he’s brutally beaten to death while his lover looks on.

10 Years is a long, long time

So what accounts for the change between the first version of The Last of Us and this one? To start, it helps to remember that 2013 was a long time ago. That was two years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, and creators working in pretty much all mediums — be it TV, movies, or video games — were more hesitant to tell earnest, vulnerable stories about queer people, particularly in a high-profile game like The Last of Us, which cost a ton of money to develop and was destined to come under a lot of scrutiny. Silly Twitter takes notwithstanding, there’s a lot more breathing room to talk openly about this stuff 10 years later.

The Last of Us showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann were also purposely pushing back against the media narrative where the lives of queer people must end badly. Druckmann says as much to Entertainment Weekly. “We have a lot of examples of dark outcomes of these loving relationships, and it was really smart to have a positive outcome just as a counterpoint.” In HBO’s official The Last of Us podcast, Mazin says he purposefully had Bill say, “This isn’t the tragic suicide at the end of the play.” This is a happy ending.

And this is commendable. Media could use more examples of queer people living happy lives, particularly when their stories are told this well. Mazin and Druckmann also deserve credit for telling this story about two middle-aged people who grow old; in a medium obsessed with youth, that almost feels more subversive than anything else.

The one potential issue what it does to the rest of the show, because as compelling as Frank and Bill’s story was, The Last of Us isn’t about Frank and Bill; it’s about Joel and Ellie, and changing Frank and Bill’s story could affect what theirs means.

What does changing Bill’s story mean for Joel on The Last of Us?

In both versions of The Last of Us, Joel is in danger of shutting down emotionally. He loses his daughter at the start of the story and loses his lover Tess partway through. This is a man afraid of opening his heart to anyone new. He doesn’t want to be hurt again.

But closing himself off to hurt also means closing himself off to joy, and is that a life worth living? That’s the question Bill has to deal with, and depending on whether we’re talking about the game or the show, he finds two different answers: in the game, Bill stays closed off. He focuses on survival above all else, driving Frank away. In this scenario, Bill is an example of what Joel could become if he doesn’t change his ways: alone, despairing, empty.

In the show, Bill is aspirational; his life is what Joel could have if he allows himself to get close to someone again, even though it means risking hurt.

I wrote this article hoping to answer the question of whether this change was good or bad. Does Bill’s story work better as a warning or a goal? Now that we’re at the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really make a difference. In either case, what happened to Bill will hang over Joel for the rest of the season, until he too has to decide whether to cut himself off from the world and survive, or embrace it and live. (Don’t worry, no spoilers.) It’s a narrative and thematic counterweight to Joel’s story, even if it’s on a different side of the scale.

Also, giving Bill and Frank a happy ending resulted in the single best episode of TV I’ve seen in a long time, as well as a rare example of a feel-good gay love story done to perfection by everyone involved. So yeah, this was the better choice; seems obvious now that I think about it.

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