10 Things You Somehow Missed In The Last Of Us
6. Ellie's Pistol
While the stellar quality of HBO's show likely cushioned the blow, fans hoping for the live action debut of some of the game's more memorable weapons were largely disappointed.
While Joel does carry his signature scoped rifle, the spiked bats, nail bombs and flamethrowers of Naughty Dog's original were amongst the more beloved gaming elements left by the cutting board.
As such, fans likely did a double take when Nick Offerman's Bill pulled out a small and strangely familiar looking pistol to repel raiders from his property in the third episode. The Beretta Model 70 used by Bill is exactly the same gun that Ellie uses in The Last of Us: Part I, although the manner in which she attains the weapon differs between the show and the game.
Naughty Dog's take sees Joel gift the gun to Ellie after she proves herself in a brutal fight in Pittsburgh, while HBO's iteration sees Ellie discover the gun in Bill and Frank's property, setting up the sequence where she saves Joel in the following episode. It's easy to see the reasoning behind this narrative choice - HBO's version plays much better on TV than a teenager massacring a large group of hardened pandemic survivors with a rifle.
Ironically, HBO were actually more loyal to the game's canon than the game itself, as the PlayStation 5 remake replaced Ellie's signature weapon with a Walther P5. Is nothing sacred?