[Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Last of Us episode 3, “Long Long Time.”] “Once upon a time, I had someone I cared about. He was a partner. Someone I had to take care of,” complains Bill the smuggler and scavenger (voiced by W. Earl Brown). The last of us match. “And in this world, that kind of shit is good for one thing: getting you killed.” sunday episode from HBO The last of us – titled “Long Long Time” after Linda Ronstadt’s 1970 song – take a turn in the video game’s “Bill’s Town”, a mission that sends the player into a high school infested with the Infected to recover a truck battery in the booby-trapped ghost town of Lincoln, Massachusetts.
A post-outbreak flashback to 2007 introduces self-sufficient survivor Bill (Nick Offerman), the only Lincolnian who has transformed the city into a fortified compound about 10 miles north of Boston QZ. In 2010, three years after one of Bill’s traps ensnared weary traveler Frank (Murray Bartlett), Bill and Frank are a couple whose social circle has grown to include Boston bootleggers Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Pedro Pascal). Anna Torv).
Time passes, and in the present 2023, elderly Bill and Frank have spent 16 lonely years together. Terminally ill, Frank tells Bill how he wants to spend his last day: they will pick out suits, get married, and share a final dinner. Later, Bill will mix Frank’s many medicines in a glass of wine so that she can die peacefully in the arms of her husband. But Bill, who doesn’t want to live without Frank, reveals that he too drank the deadly concoction. “I am old, I am satisfied,” he tells him, “and you They were my purpose.”
In the end, Bill and Frank die as they lived: together, each having only the other. (It’s “incredibly romantic,” notes Frank.) Unlike the game’s hinted at romantic relationship, there is no ambiguity about Bill and Frank in the HBO version, who receive a much happier ending than their video game counterparts. spoilers: The video game reveals that a bitten Frank died by suicide avoid succumbing to Cordyceps infectionleaving a note: “I want you to know that I hated you to death… I guess you were right. Trying to leave this town will kill me. Even better than spending another day with you.”
“Long Long Time” ends with Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) arriving in Lincoln, only to find that the town’s population has gone from two to zero. Ellie reads aloud the letter that Bill left for Joel, telling him to help himself with his supplies and weapons cache to “keep tess safe.”
“For the people who played the game and loved it, this is almost brand new,” said showrunner and series co-creator Craig Mazin, who wrote Episode 3. los angeles times. “The story of Bill and Frank and the letter Bill leaves behind [in the show] is a big part of why Joel decides he’s going to keep going. [on this journey] with Ellie… Their relationship ultimately becomes sort of a skeleton key to unlock this whole show, as far as I’m concerned.”
The last of us Co-creator Neil Druckmann credits co-director Bruce Straley for the game’s version of Bill, whose solitary existence begs the question, “What are you surviving for at that moment?”
Videogame Bill is “a person who had genuine feelings for another human being in that world, and he’s having a reaction to that.” [relationship ending]”That reaction is playing out in Joel and Ellie’s relationship.” While Bill warned that having a partner is only good for “getting yourself killed,” TV Bill is the opposite: having a partner is the only reason for Live.
Mazin explained that Bill and Frank’s intimate love story was a way of expressing to Joel, and to 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 peaceful passing comes just one episode later Joel lost Tess on his crucial mission to bring Ellie to a Firefly lab.
“I think in a show like this, where the world around our characters is constantly putting pressure on them… there’s a tendency for endings to be tragic, violent, abrupt and too soon,” Mazin said. “And I thought it was important to show how a relationship can last and then end in a natural way. Because death is perfectly natural.”
new episodes of The last of us premieres on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max. follow for more The last of us in comic.
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