As is the fashion, The Last of Us was entitled to its review bombing at the release of episode 3.
It has already been three weeks since the series The Last of Us began streaming via Amazon Prime Video in France. Fans of the franchise were therefore able to discover the third episode of the HBO production this Monday, January 30. As we discussed in our recap, this episode 3 is centered around a duo of endearing characters, whose tragic end did not leave us indifferent. However, this chapter was not unanimous and received many homophobic comments.
In the episode “Long Long Time”, we follow the lives of Bill and Frank, two men living in an oasis in the midst of chaos. Only problem – for some – these two people of the same sex love each other, and live their life as a couple until their last breath. Following the broadcast of the episode, the latter therefore reaped many praises, but also a lot of negative opinions, linked to the clearly displayed homosexuality of the characters.
On the IMDb site, we can now see that 28% of ratings are only one star out of 10while the vast majority (53.3%) are 10 out of 10. Extremely negative ratings alone account for the opinions of 35,000 people which dropped the series average to 7.9 out of 10.
Among the comments, we can read these: “vsis just bait to win a prize by putting gay romance right in front of us”; “aa forced gay love story, out of nowhere…. It was just a hint in the game”; “an useless filler episode after only two episodes where we show the (very long) story of two very secondary random characters who won’t make any difference to the rest of the series” or “eyet another example of the small minority of homosexuals who wield their influence in Hollywood to impose their agenda on the world.”
Is episode 3 faithful to the game?
If this episode is debated, it is above all because certain mentalities take time to change but also because it is the first time that the screenwriters have decided to voluntarily move away from the basic material. In the first game The Last of Us, Frank is already dead, so we don’t see his relationship with Bill, who is still alive. In addition, nothing explicitly indicates that the two characters were in a relationship, but some clues still point in this direction.
They both consider themselves “partners”, that they lived in the same house for years, that at least one of them consumed homosexual magazines and that they parted badly terms. No tragic death à la Romeo and Juliet, but all the same a rather emotional passage during the discovery of Frank’s body.
The series is therefore not so far from what was implied in the game. The producers simply decided to give a (magnificent) parenthesis to the story of Ellie and Joel by depicting a happy couple, out of time and with “normal” worries in all this mess. A choice that we can only encourage as its realization overwhelmed us with emotions.
