I have never cried that fucking hard over a show in years.
I fully FULLY support the divergence of this episode, it was a phenomenal example of adapting source material in a way that feels like “oh yeah this is what actually happened they just didn’t have time in the game for all of this holy shit”.
They expanded on the frankly easy to ignore implications of the game and showed us that life can still be even in the midst of fear and uncertainty and apathy and FUCKING EVERYTHING, they showed us goodness and survival out of love because THAT is what The Last Of Us is about.
Death is horrific and sudden and will rob you blind with nothing to salvage; but it isn’t always that. Death is also kind, even forgiving. “Satisfying”, in the words of Bill. Frank wasn’t brutalized this time around, Bill wasn’t left alone to his prior demons. We got to see a side of this universe that hasn’t been portrayed thus far and it wasn’t twenty years of violent tragedy.
It was twenty years of two men enduring and surviving together in a world that had gone to shit, but they still took the leap and held hands while they fell. Everything else, the journey to the bottom, came after and it came painlessly.