We’re back for another review of HBO’s The Last of Us! After escaping the ruins of Boston, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) set out to meet Joel’s smuggling contact Bill in hopes of procuring a car for their journey west. But this episode is really about the decades-long relationship between Bill and his partner Frank.
“Long, Long Time” took some big swings and is sure to inspire a ton of discourse. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get right into it. As always, there will be SPOILERS for the episode below.
The Last of Us Episode 3 review: “Long, Long Time”
So far, HBO’s The Last of Us has hewn surprisingly close to the 2013 video game on which it’s based, but if there’s one thing that “Long, Long Time” really drives home, it’s that the show isn’t afraid to make big changes. Whether the changes in “Long, Long Time” were worthwhile is a question that I’m sure will be hotly debated. After taking some time to digest it, I think there were ways “Long, Long Time” succeeded and ways it stumbled.
We spend the first 15 minutes of the episode with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who are hiking through the wilds of Massachusetts. (No cold open this week, which I missed a bit.) Following Tess’ (Anna Torv) last wishes, Joel hopes to bring Ellie to their friends Bill and Frank, believing they might be able to figure out where to take her next.
This entire opening section had my rapt attention. The wide wilderness shots are gorgeous, the music from Gustavo Santaolalla (who also scored the game) and David Fleming is entrancing, and the development between Joel and Ellie is captivating. This is the episode where the two first start to bond, burying the hatchet over Tess’ death and scavenging for supplies together.
The sequence where they enter an abandoned Cumberland Farms (slightly weird product placement, but okay) was a highlight, especially when Ellie climbed under the floorboards and came face-to-face with a partially buried Stalker (an infected halfway to becoming a Clicker). The Last of Us has been doing a really incredible job with its fungal zombie prosthetic effects. This scene also hints at Ellie’s capacity for violence as she cuts open the Stalker, seemingly just to see what will happen.
Joel also gives us our first real explanation of how the cordyceps outbreak happened. There is no definitive story, but humanity’s best guess is that the cordyceps spread through baking ingredients like flour and pancake mix (which Joel hesitates while saying, since it makes him think of his daughter Sarah and her final pancake breakfast). From there it spread rapidly, and humanity collapsed in one day as the virulent fungus took over. This is something the game never really explained. It’s a solid bit of lore that continues to set The Last of Us apart from your average zombie show.
The show continues in that vein as Joel and Ellie discover a mass grave and Joel explains how, a week after Outbreak Day (September 23, 2003), the military evacuated people to the Quarantine Zones. And if there wasn’t room in the QZ, then people were murdered by the score to keep them from becoming infected. Brutal.
September 30, 2003: “Not today, you new world order jackboot f**ks”
We then flash bak to that very day and meet Bill (Nick Offerman), a survivalist who gives the pre-FEDRA military the slip when they were rounding people up to send them to the Quarantine Zone. Bill is a surly, isolated man we understand may actually have welcomed the apocalypse. Fewer people around.
Bill’s introduction is easily one of the funnest things that’s happened on the show so far. The minute the military leaves, he sets out into the abandoned town of Lincoln, Massachusetts to loot all the (useful) stores, round up supplies, fix the power grid, and generally have the time of his life. And of course, he stocked up on wine, because this apocalypse could go on for awhile.
Bill cooks himself a gourmet dinner and sits down to watch surveillance footage of infected running into traps he’s set up around his property, chuckling to himself about how good life is. I loved this scene. It also clues us into the fact that this was going to be a radically different version of Bill from the video game, where he’s a foulmouthed, slightly crazy survivor. The idea of that Bill being a gourmet chef is hilarious.
From here on out, “Long, Long Time” moves firmly away from the 2013 video game and forges its own path.
Finding love amidst the zombie apocalypse
Including Bill’s Outbreak Day shopping spree, the middle 45 minutes of “Long, Long Time” are dedicated entirely to the epic love story of Bill and Frank (played by The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett). The versions of Bill and Frank we meet here are very different from the game; it almost feels like watching an alternate universe. That works pretty well, although it might take a rewatch or two for fans of the game to reorient themselves.
After being caught in one of Bill’s traps, Frank talks his way into dinner, then to a private piano solo from Bill (another thing that made me laugh out loud as I tried to imagine the game character doing this), and eventually into bed. The romance between Bill and Frank is played beautiful, with special nods given to the acting from Offerman and Bartlett as well as the cinematography. The strawberry scene was particularly beautiful.
This section underlines one of the biggest themes on the show: that love can cause people to persevere in the most extreme of circumstances, as well as make tragic choices. It also feels unique, like a standalone story within the bigger serialized narrative of the show. It’s hard to imagine another episode feeling as singular as this.
That said, there were times that Bill and Frank’s story drags a bit compared to everything else we’ve seen in the series so far. The love also felt just a little too neat to me; they don’t have worries if the one argument we see them have is over mowing their lawn and fixing up some of the shops. It made Bill and Frank’s situation feel almost jarringly safe in a way that this world never did in the video game.
There ARE friends to be had, Bill!
Of course, that safety is an illusion to some extent. Eventually we learn how Bill and Frank met Joel and Tess (featuring another welcome appearance by Anna Torv), and after that they’re attacked by raiders. Both of those scenes are high points.
But the real danger isn’t from raiders, but old age and disease. Following the raider attack where Bill is wounded, the show pulls a fast one by skipping ahead 10 years to reveal that it’s now Frank who’s in bad shape, with Bill as his caretaker. This final segment felt like it dragged the most to me, but it was worth it to get to the final dinner scene where it’s revealed that, rather than follow Frank’s wishes to help him commit suicide, Bill has poisoned the both of them so they can die together.
Despite any qualms I may have had with this episode, there’s no denying how powerful these final moments are for Bill and Frank. The music and cinematography, again, are wonderful. The shot of the trap were Bill first fell in and met Frank during the pre-dinner montage is a nice touch. And Bill serves the same meal as the day they met. It really is amazing how much the episode makes you feel like you’ve gone on this life-long journey with these characters over the course of just 75 minutes.
The aftermath
If the episode had just ended with Bill and Frank’s deaths, I probably would have been annoyed because of how far the focus wandered rom Joel and Ellie. But it totally nails the denoucement by bringing things back around to the main duo, who show up to Bill and Frank’s house after their deaths. And despite the deviations from the game, the slow revelation for Joel that Bill and Frank are both dead might actually be even more impactful. We won’t get into spoilers, but that long shot on Pedro Pascal’s face while Ellie reads Bill’s letter about protecting those you love is some heavy foreshadowing for Joel’s future.
“Long, Long Time” is a beautiful episode that’s basically a short film about Bill and Frank’s relationship, but it also slows down the momentum the show had built up and takes the focus away from Joel and Ellie. It was a bold choice for them to do it this way, and I think ultimately a good one even if I did miss some particular moments from the game, like Joel dangling upside down from one of Bill’s traps while Ellie frantically tries to cut him down as infected come swarming toward them.
After showering and gearing up, the pair take off in a truck from Bill’s garage while “Long, Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt plays on the tapedeck. It’s the very same song that Bill and Frank sang to one another during their first meeting. The episode ends with a slow zoom out that shows their open bedroom window, which Bill said in his suicide note was left open so their dead bodies didn’t stink up the house. Fare thee well, Bill and Frank.
The Last of Bullet Points
- There’s a cute bit in the Cumberland Farms where Ellie runs over to an arcade machine and excitedly recalls how her friend loved this game. That’s a bit from the The Last of Us video game, except they actually put Mortal Kombat in the show instead of the MK knockoff from the game (The Turning). Keep this little scene in the back of your mind; it will likely be relevant to Ellie’s backstory later on in the season.
- When the scene shifts from the mass grave to the flashback, the fabric on two of the corpses matches the fabric of a woman and her child who are being loaded into the military trucks. So all of the people from Bill’s town were the ones who in that mass grave.
- Frank says that he left the Baltimore QZ after it fell to infected. So that’s one more QZ off the map.
- There were quite a few bits of product placement in this episode, from Cumberland Farms to Home Depot to Arby’s to Chevy. On the one hand, it helped make this world feel like a post-apocalyptic version of our world. On the other, it distracted me enough that I’m writing about it. Did HBO need extra funding for this episode or something?
- Despite that, I did crack up when Frank calls out Bill’s metaphor by saying, “Arby’s didn’t have free lunch, it was a restaurant.”
- Frank subtly reveals some familiarity with suicidal ideation during the scene where he and Bill have a spat and he threatens to run through one of Bill’s explosive tripwires if they can’t start living their lives a bit more fully. This is a really powerful touch that foreshadows his ultimate choice.
- That said, it’s also definitely a choice by the show as well. There’s nothing in the game that really hints at Frank being suicidal; he hangs himself after being bitten so he won’t turn into one of the infected.
- After asking for a gun all episode, Ellie finally finds Frank’s in the house and takes it. I’d expect that to come up sooner rather than later.
- Ellie doesn’t know what seatbelts are and is fascinated by being in a car. This is so charming and a crucial part of her character.
- The episode’s final shot of the window is a nice little nod to the main menu of the video game, which has a very similar image.
Verdict
“Long, Long Time” is sure to go down as one of the most interesting and possibly divisive episodes of The Last of Us season 1. It explores an unlikely love story in a moving way, at the cost of slowing the overall pace of the series. Whether you loved it or were profoundly confused by it will probably depend on your relationship with the video game, but overall it did a very solid job of telling the story it set out to tell.
Episode Grade: A-
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