EDITORS NOTE: This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of The Last of Us.
The Last of Us may have concluded its first season in style following its initial nine-episode run on HBO, but it will remain with viewers for a long time thanks to the thoughtfulness and care taken with adapting the story of the revered Naughty Dog video game.
A key component of this was down to the showrunners—one of whom, helpfully, created the game itself—treating the story respectfully and building side characters into fully fledged humans with whom we could empathize and care for. It's easy to have Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey be well-rounded characters on screen because they are in every episode. But the ability to add depth to the show via others is what made the show as special as anything else, and a critical example of that came in the third episode of the season which took a massive detour from the main narrative.
"Long, Long Time" was a feature-length episode, spanning nearly two decades, which barely included the show's main characters. It told the love story of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), two survivors who lived together in peaceful harmony, working together in a world that had collapsed. It seemed to be a standalone story on first viewing, an off-shoot of the main narrative threads, but now Neil Druckmann has divulged the episode's narrative importance while chatting on the official The Last of Us Podcast.
The Last of Us Episode 3 Sets Joel's Decision in the Finale
Druckmann stated that the thematic through line is laid down for the audience to see when he tells Frank, who by this stage of the story is terminally ill with some form of motor neuron disease, that he cannot live without him because Frank is "his purpose." This theme reappears in the season finale when Joel sacrifices humanity's best chance at a cure for the Cordyceps virus by choosing to save Ellie from death instead.
"The notion that there is no such thing as life without you, that I don’t understand what life would be without you, that it’s a pointless life without you, is set up in Episode 3. If Bill doesn’t go through this life with Frank, he’s not gonna write that letter and leave the letter behind. And the letter is not going to say to Joel… “This is why we’re here; we are here to protect the person we love, and God help any m*********ers that get in our way.” All roads lead to this moment, and so maybe the least filler-y thing we did across this entire season was the Bill and Frank story; it’s the skeleton key for everything that happens."
Joel's decision to save Ellie comes back to the simplicity of Bill and Frank, and the way they both discovered each other, and learned to love each other. However, the consequences of Joel's choice upon the wider world will now remain to be seen.