After seeing "Long, Long Time" many have dubbed it the best episode of the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us, and many are still coming to terms with how it all played out. In the latest episode, we are introduced to Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) who are the pair our heroes from the Boston QZ are out to locate. The relationship, which varied from the game, covered how they met and the many love-filled years that followed, ultimately cumulating in their decision to pass away peacefully together.
While speaking on HBO’s The Last of Us podcast, show creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann explained Bill’s decision to honor his partner, Frank’s decision to die by suicide and to join him in doing so. “My feeling is that, somewhere around the middle of the day when Bill decided, 'All right, I'm going to go along with this plan. I will go to the boutique. I'll put on what he wanted me to wear. We'll get married,'” Mazin explains at what point Bill makes up his mind. "'We'll do all that stuff. I'll make him dinner.' Somewhere in there, once he decided, 'All right. I'm going to do this.' Then he very quickly decided, 'And then this is what I'm also going to do because there's no fucking way.'"
He then further explains what informed the scene, highlighting a play by Mark Crowley. “This is a tricky one because there's a line that Bill says here that I lifted almost directly from the playwright Mark Crowley who wrote The Boys in the Band, which is this wonderful play from the '60s about gay men navigating their lives and their relationships,” Mazin says.
“One of them in that play says to the other, 'This isn't that tragic suicide at the end of the play.' Not all gay men have to die at the end of the play, because there is a tradition of essentially equating homosexuality with tragedy, and that a gay man couldn't possibly just age and be happy and live long. It was important for me to have Bill literally say that's not what this is.”
Druckmann focused his ideas on what was left for Bill to live if he decided to stay on – which wouldn't have been much to be fair. “What I love about all that, besides how beautiful and moving it is when you watch it, is that in a way Bill is very, very lucky that the person he loves the most is going out at the end of his own life. Bill doesn't have a lot left either,” he explains.
“So the choice is relatively easier. But it kind of reflects outwards, or it pulses outwards to say, what happens when you lose someone you love so much and there is a lot of life left in front of you. Because that's kind of what we saw happening at the beginning of the story with Joel. And that's the thing that Joel is doing his best to avoid ever living again. And slowly but surely what the universe is saying, we're coming back to that moment in time.”
"Long, Long Time"'s departure from the original game script is one that was rightly welcomed given that it offered more of a backstory to the pair, while at the same time adding much-needed light to a bleak world. It stays with Druckmann’s comments on deviating from the games when it serves the story better, and this was certainly better.
The Last of Us airs on HBO and HBO Max at 9 PM ET every Sunday. Watch the full podcast below: