I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that the way they structured that episode was actually very much like the way stories were told in the game through gameplay - you'd get snapshots over time, usually through notes or letters, that told a story about the lives of people Joel and Ellie would never meet and were generally long dead. Because the perspective of the game was always locked on the protagonists it was basically the only way to expand the player's perspective of the world. They did it visually here, not in writing (despite the nod at the end with Bill leaving a note) but there are some real parallels in how Bill and Frank's story was presented to us... I think that's part of why this works so well.
How to completely depart from the source material, yet remain faithful to it... Kudos.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|