Spoilers for the third episode of The Last of Us and the 2013 game are ahead. So far, Craig Mazin, the co-creator and showrunner of the HBO adaption of Naughty Dog’s video game The Last of Us, has stayed true to the games with some deviations. Long Long Time, the third episode of The Last of Us, showed Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) in a way that was more in-depth and intimate than what was in the game. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mazin and co-creator of the game Neil Druckmann spoke about these changes.
The game followed Joel and Ellie, respectively played by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, in the two video games, meeting Bill, played by W. Earl Brown, for a car on their travels. In the show, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) plan to drop her off with Bill and Frank to take her off his hands. Much of these changes in The Last of Us episode came from the subtle story untold in the game between Bill and Frank, leading to a story told without as much action.
“But a lot of that section is about gameplay — we gotta get here, we gotta get there,” Mazin said. “He reflected the worst possible outcome for Joel, which is to close himself off from people entirely. There was somebody Bill could have loved. He chose not to and now that guy’s dead and he’s gonna be along for the rest of his life.”
The Last of Us episode of Bill and Frank saw drastic changes
In the game, Joel did not know Frank. Bill mentioned him, and later, the characters found his body, which hung from the ceiling of a house as he had to commit suicide after being bitten by the infected. The subtext was there to tell the players that Bill was gay and that he had feelings for Frank. The Last of Us episode of Bill gave a deeper look at this survivalist, reclusive man letting himself be vulnerable by letting someone into his life, who he falls in love with.
Mazin wanted to explore this untold story, but also wanted to tell a story of characters that differed from everything else we had been seeing at this point and everything shown moving forward. In the first two episodes, “we’ve just seen people who are scared, who are in a dangerous place,” and “being hurt or being killed.” This led to exploring “two kinds of love.” We saw Frank being a nurturing, more emotionally open man, versus Bill, a pragmatic survivalist. We see how they express their love in various ways, from Frank getting Bill to socialize with Tess (Anna Torv) and Joel to Bill taking care of Frank with delicious-looking dinners and nice bottles of wine.
The Last of Us third episode, which looked into Bill and Frank’s relationship, was a moving twist to the source material. It is the biggest deviation from the game, signaling what could be seen moving forward. We will see how it plays out as new episodes release on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET.