Then, suddenly, we flash forward to the modern day of 2023. Frank is wheelchair-bound and gravely ill, and Bill is old and frail. Frank is so sick that he's unable to feed himself or indulge in his pleasantries of painting. One morning, Frank decides he wants go die by his own choice, with Bill's assistance. Offerman as Bill flashes back the saddest face any man can possibly have, and Frank is heartbroken.

But however revolutionary their deaths might be for the universe of "The Last of Us," they still fall into well-worn gay death tropes. It seems that Bill is older than Frank, but Frank succumbs to an unspecified illness and ends up infirm, which ultimately prompts his suicide. If you grew up queer in the 80s and 90s, the image of one gay man pushing another in a wheelchair might look fiercely familiar from the early days of the AIDS crisis and the storytelling that came out of it. Many cis gay men of my generation believed this kind of death was inevitable, that they would die tended to by a lover or they would be the widower left behind. Bill rebels against this trope by dying alongside Frank, but as I watched (and cried) as Bill wheeled Frank around their house and handed him his pills, I thought of how many times I had seen this scene in other movies and television. I wondered why the show's creators chose to have Frank sicken to lead to Bill and Frank's deaths when one or both of their ages could have been the inciting factor.

"Fudge," I remember saying, only I didn't say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a "clicker," the game lore's name for a medium-difficulty enemy. These "infected"--it's classier not to call them zombies, and this is a classy zombie-combat game, one with a story--had become misshapen thanks to a cordyceps brain infection, which devoured mankind almost overnight. The clicker was ghastlier than others, because it had lived long enough for the infection to fully engulf its formerly human face, fungal fibers enrobing it, teeth jutting out like barbs. An older infected is a more resilient one.