As Joel and Ellie, you first encounter Bill, a solitary, bitter, angry human being, after navigating his network of booby-traps set up across town. In keeping with the video game’s relentless tone, Bill and Frank’s story is significantly grimmer in the source material. What transpires is a defining episode of the adaptation, following Bill and Frank from their first meeting through their last day on Earth, when the two make the decision to go out peacefully on their own terms. The episode shifts its attention to the two residents of Lincoln, jumping back in time to sketch out the love story between a doomsday prepper (Bill, played by Nick Offerman) and an artist (Frank, played by Murray Bartlett), who meet shortly after the outbreak. Then we break off from Joel and Ellie’s narrative. It’s home to Bill and Frank, survivors who maintain a line of communication with the smugglers through a radio signal playing decade-specific music hits, as heard in the first episode. The opening minutes suggest a slower pace as the duo make their way on foot across Massachusetts after a brief pit stop at a long-abandoned gas station, Joel heeds Tess’s directive to take Ellie to the town of Lincoln. The hour begins somewhere outside Boston, as Joel and Ellie (Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey) collect themselves following their harrowing escape from the Massachusetts State House and the loss of Tess. But in “Long Long Time,” showrunner and episode writer Craig Mazin stretches the adaptation beyond its original bounds and introduces a motif that elevates the adaptation beyond its source material. The series has injected new energy into what’s been a mostly faithful adaptation of the video game so far, primarily leaning on shrewd but gentle expansions to open up the world and narrative: a 1968 talk-show interview predicting the end of humankind via fungus, an Indonesian lab flashback documenting the origins of said infection. In its third episode, “Long Long Time,” HBO’s The Last of Us radically switches up its pitch. Showrunner and episode writer Craig Mazin was looking for a song about “a long-term ache - the sadness of somebody saying, ‘I wish, but oh, well, I shall be forever alone‘“ for the key scene in “Long Long Time.”
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