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“Toward the end of the achingly poignant, much-discussed third episode of “The Last of Us,” HBO’s new zombie dystopia series, there’s an earnest ode to traditional masculinity. Bill, a taciturn survivalist, leaves a letter for the show’s hero, Joel, to open after his death. In it, Bill writes of his longtime love, Frank, “I saved him. Then I protected him. That’s why men like you and me are here. We have a job to do.”
It was the coda to a deeply moving, and also deeply conservative, story line. (Stop reading now if you want to avoid spoilers.) Nick Offerman, familiar to many as the gruff libertarian from “Parks and Recreation,” plays Bill, a prepper who thrives when doomsday actually arrives. After a fungal pandemic tears through civilization, Bill knows better than to let agents of the state — or as he calls them, the New World Order — drag him off to quarantine.
Waiting out the roundup in his weapons-filled basement bunker, Bill eventually emerges into a completely evacuated neighborhood. He raids the hardware store and the liquor store, fires up his generator, and enjoys a life of comfortable autarky while the rest of the world implodes. His isolated existence is rocked when Frank, played by the delightful Murray Bartlett, falls into a trap outside his compound and persuades Bill to give him a meal. A gourmet who knows how to deglaze a pan, Bill astonishes Frank with a lunch of rabbit, vegetables and Beaujolais. Soon, recognizing that Bill is gay, though totally inexperienced, Frank kisses him, which leads to a love story of more than 15 years.
That relationship has been the focus of much of the writing about the episode, which expands on what is apparently a minor plot point in the beloved video game that the series is based on. Many viewers thrilled to see a gay couple more-or-less happily growing old together. Homophobic trolls did not; tens of thousands of them have “review bombed” the episode, driving down its ratings on sites like Metacritic and IMDb by giving it one star. “Did ‘The Last of Us’ Just Go ‘Woke’?” asked a Forbes headline.”