20 years later

It was a beautiful episode, but that's not Bill. You never meet Frank in the game, and Frank in the show was done extremely well, but Nick Offerman wasn't Bill from the video game. That's a whole new character they made, the other showrunner Mazin or whatever said in the behind the episode, at least implied that it was his decision to change it to that story. I wanted the badass Bill who cuts infected's heads off with a machete, who you race through a booby trapped town and school to find that car battery, that's not what was presented here, and I disagree with Druckmann and will say it wasn't better. IMO it was a Last of Us Part II type of desecration of a amazing character. Different, beautiful, but not better given the story, and it wasted the character of Bill. That was a beautiful gay couple in the middle of the apocalypse with a somber end, but I don't see how you quantify changing an entire character's story and say it's better. Small deviations like Tess and the clickers makes more sense, this doesn't. Just my opinion. If you presented that story as the backstory to Bill, but then gave us badass Bill after Frank's death, then that makes sense. Bill in the game wasn't willing to give his life if Frank wasn't in it, that wasn't Bill. It ticks me off as well because if that's the story they'll go with in the game, it eliminates Bill returning and becomes canon, even though in the game Bill is still alive and he isn't in the second game. But if you adapt a third part story, from a third part video game, it'd be hard to justify Bill not existing in the game and killing him. Any continuity with the show ended on that episode, the got the first two mostly right, but that episode was nothing like the game except for a few lines. This would be like to me if in the Uncharted movie that was recently released they killed off Mark Wahlberg and said it was better... but Sully doesn't die in the game and is an integral part to the story's progression, here in the show, Bill just becomes a house with alot of gear and a shower for Joel and Ellie. The fact that Ellie and Bill don't even get to have interactions with each other is a pretty glaring misstep. I know everyone online says this episode was great, which it was, but it wasn't the Last of Us. I'm glad we get back on track next week hopefully.

It was so much better in the show because Bill and Frank and the town are what Joel and Ellie and fighting for. The houses, the stores and the garden are a glimpse into what normalcy was. That's why Ellie was so wide-eyed and curious because she's never seen anything normal.

The most important part in the show is the letter. Bill's words give Joel purpose and the ability to open up to Ellie, little by little obviously. He's no longer to just dragging a kid along to a drop off point. Her journey is now his journey.

The game was just a stop in an awful town and let's be honest Bill isn't really a great person either. Honestly running around trying to find car parts in the TV show would have been a huge waste of time.

A little unnerving that the government was committing genocide and making mass graves for those that they couldn’t fit into the trains. All the people that thought they were being taken care of - KILLED - like they were nothing. No stone head, just killed and thrown into a pile in the ditch. At one point during the argument between bill and frank, frank points out that he is a nutcase that thought the government were run by nazis, and stops himself and admits that they eventually were.

The game establishing early that Ellie is pretty much not on speaking terms with Joel after finding out about what he did to the Fireflies only to kill him off, and THEN try to walk it back to Ellie telling Joel she'd eventually like to try to forgive him in a flashback to their final conversation together literal hours of game time later was just too little, too late. I don't give a shit about the cyclical revenge narrative between Ellie and Abbie when it comes at the cost of making Joel and Ellie's story end in a satisfying way. At least if that conversation happens first in the show and then he gets killed off the way he did it will be much more emotionally impactful.