[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us, Season 1 Episode 3, “Long, Long Time.”]
After two episodes of watching Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) try to push through some very stressful situations, The Last of Us Episode 3 offered viewers a bit of a respite.
In “Long, Long Time” we meet Bill (Nick Offerman), a “survivalist” (his word) who was more than prepared for the crashing-down of the world in 2003, but wasn’t prepared to fall in love with Frank (Murray Bartlett), a survivor who stumbles across Bill’s bunker a few years into the apocalypse, and ends up never leaving. Together, the two of them build a home together at the end of the world, eventually choosing to die together, content in their choices. “This isn’t the tragic suicide at the end of the play. I’m old. I’m satisfied. And you were my purpose,” Bill tells Frank on their last night together.
“It was an opportunity to just explore theme and the passage of time,” series co-creator Craig Mazin tells Consequence in a roundtable interview. “And to do it with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, who are incredible. Our director Peter Hoar [It’s a Sin, Doctor Who] does this gorgeous job.”
Mazin says that the decision to explore Bill and Frank’s story with the series’ third episode came as a result of multiple factors. “You kind of have to have this weird, almost music-like sense of rhythm if you’re building a series,” he says. “And one of the things that I felt pretty strongly was, ‘Look, we’ve got this insane first episode where the world falls apart and there’s tragedy. And then we meet Joel with Ellie and they begin this adventure. And the second episode is incredibly tense and features danger and clickers and tragedy. We need a breath.'”
Thus, Mazin leaned on his love of the original game: “One of the things that I remember from the game was that Bill was safe, and I love that concept, that he had built this oasis of safety. And there was an allusion to his relationship with Frank, and I just started thinking that there was an opportunity there, that there was an opportunity to first of all help people understand how the passage of time functioned between the outbreak to now. But also to really dig into the point of the show, which is the nature of love, two very different kinds of love, and how those two kinds of love need each other.”
