[Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us episode 3, “Long Long Time.”] “Once upon a time, I had somebody that I cared about. It was a partner. Somebody I had to look after,” scavenger and smuggler Bill (voiced by W. Earl Brown) grumbles in The Last of Us recreation. “And in this world, that sort of sh*t’s good for one thing: getting you killed.” Sunday’s episode of HBO’s The Last of Us — titled “Long Long Time” after the 1970 Linda Ronstadt tune — places a twist on the online game’s “Bill’s Town,” a mission sending the participant into an Infected-swarmed highschool to retrieve a truck battery within the booby trap-rigged ghost city of Lincoln, Massachusetts.
A flashback to post-outbreak 2007 introduces self-sufficient survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman), Lincoln’s lone inhabitant who has reworked the city right into a fortified compound some 10 miles north of the Boston QZ. In 2010 — three years after one of Bill’s traps catch weary traveler Frank (Murray Bartlett) — Bill and Frank are a pair whose social circle has grown solely to incorporate Boston smugglers Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Anna Torv).
Time passes, and in present-day 2023, the aged Bill and Frank have spent 16 reclusive years collectively. Suffering from a terminal sickness, Frank tells Bill how he needs to spend his final day: they will select fits, get married, and share a remaining dinner. Then Bill will combine Frank’s many medicines right into a glass of wine so he can peacefully go away in his husband’s arms. But Bill, not desirous to dwell with out Frank, reveals he additionally drank the deadly concoction. “I’m old, I’m satisfied,” he tells him, “and you were my purpose.”
In the top, Bill and Frank die as they lived: collectively, every having solely the opposite. (It’s “incredibly romantic,” notes Frank.) Unlike the sport’s hinted-at romantic relationship, there is not any ambiguity about Bill and Frank within the HBO model, who obtain a a lot happier ending than their online game counterparts. Spoilers: The online game reveals a bitten Frank died by suicide to stop succumbing to the Cordyceps an infection, forsaking a observe: “I want you to know I hated your guts … I guess you were right. Trying to leave this town will kill me. Still better than spending another day with you.”
“Long Long Time” ends with Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) reaching Lincoln, solely to search out the city’s inhabitants has gone from two to zero. Ellie reads aloud the letter Bill left behind for Joel, telling him to assist himself to his provides and cache of weapons to “keep Tess safe.”
“For people who played the game and loved the game, this is pretty much all entirely new,” showrunner and sequence co-creator Craig Mazin, who wrote episode 3, instructed The Los Angeles Times. “The story of Bill and Frank and the letter that Bill leaves behind [in the show] is such a huge part of why Joel decides he’s going to keep going [on this journey] with Ellie … Their relationship ultimately becomes kind of the skeleton key to unlock all of this show, as far as I’m concerned.”
The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann credit co-director Bruce Straley with the sport’s model of Bill, whose lonely existence raises the query of: “What are you surviving for at that point?”
Video recreation Bill is “a person who had genuine feelings for another human being in that world, and is having a reaction to that [relationship ending],” mentioned Straley. “That reaction is being projected onto Joel and Ellie’s relationship.” While that Bill warned that having a associate is just good for “getting you killed,” TV Bill is the inverse: having a associate is the one motive to dwell.
Mazin defined that Bill and Frank’s intimate love story was a technique to categorical to Joel — and the viewer — that “there is a way for people to achieve a kind of peace and happiness and love in this world.” Bill and Frank’s peaceable passing comes only one episode after Joel misplaced Tess on their essential mission to get Ellie to a Firefly lab.
“I think in a show like this, where the world around our characters is constantly pressuring them … there is the tendency for endings to be tragic and violent and abrupt and too soon,” Mazin mentioned. “And I thought it was important to show how a relationship could endure, and then conclude in a natural way. Because death is a perfectly natural thing to do.”
New episodes of The Last of Us premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max. Follow for extra The Last of Us on ComicBook.
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